» Posts Tagged ‘nyc’
The New York Film Festival is running this week and next, and I was fortunate enough to participate yesterday in the wonderful Emerging Visions program put on by IFP and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. An amazing day of panels with industry veterans, on-stage pitch sessions, and a sit-down meeting with my assigned mentor, Doug Liman (!), concluded with the sponsor, RBC, showing these spots. Though they’re just ads made for TIFF, they speak to the NoFilmSchool ethos perfectly and humorously: More »
Urban historian Steven Duncan and videographer Andrew Wonder journey into the tunnels underneath New York City in the fascinating and aptly-named Undercity, a 30-minute short shot on a Canon 5D in the city’s subway tunnels, sewers, and abandoned subway stations (and on the Williamsburg bridge). Undercity is a highlight of recent DSLR projects, as the small size and low-light capability of these cameras enable this video to be made at all (most of the filming seen here is illegal). The short also includes interviews with the people you might not encounter during a visit to the city: residents of the tunnels themselves. Highly recommended. More »
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart hauled out his Canon 7D (and winter parka) during the blizzard that recently slammed the U.S. East coast to film Idiot with a Tripod, a short film depicting New York City getting blanketed in powder. So named in homage to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent film Man With a Movie Camera, the clip garnered the following praise from Roger Ebert: “this film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject.” Oscar or not, it’s nice to see a clip that’s in no way sophomoric go viral. Check it out: More »
I’m a few days late on this, but as someone who’s been trying to get a low-budget NYC production off the ground for the past six months, this is not a pleasant specter to stare in the face: More »
One of the main arguments for going to film school is to give you time and separation to focus on the medium during your formative years, as opposed to spending much of your youthful energy on a possibly-unrelated day job. And while my job successfully moved me from North Carolina to New York (a necessary step in this site’s “starts a film career in New York” storyline), it didn’t do so for free: although it paid me monetarily, there’s a cost associated with working a job as opposed to going to school… and that cost is time. More »
About a year ago I wrote a lengthy post, as I do, comparing the events of my manic quest to move to New York with the dramatic structure of a screenplay (small defeat, small triumph, large defeat, large triumph!), but the post was boring–even for me, reading about myself. So, I figured I’d try to scale it back and just summarize some of the things that transpired during the tumultuous ride, since moving to New York is at least topical to this site. On the other hand, I’m more than a little tired of writing about topics that are typically written about on blogs such as this (i.e., people writing about themselves), and as such I have about a dozen finished posts sitting in “pending” that I’ll never post, because who cares about what happened on the street today, or what furniture I built in my apartment, or… whatever. Anyway, having stared at this post for too long, trying to figure out why anyone would care to read it, the easiest solution became to just click the “Publish” button staring me in the face, and move on.
So this will likely be the last post about personal life details for a long while, since I successfully moved to NYC and that part of the question is answered. What I will focus on instead is anyone’s guess, although the odds are high that it will be Haribo Gummi Bears.
Last year, before I was where I’m now (really? gee) it was a struggle (a Beautiful Struggle?) just to actually move to New York. Here is some shit that happened:
–While starting my job at MTV in Times Square, I spent 3 hours a day commuting back and forth to Connecticut, every day for a month. Then I found a temporary sublet at Columbia University for three months, figuring I’d line up a permanent place before that ran out. However, after looking at something like 25 apartments in person, filling up a notebook with details on prospective dwelling units, being lied to by three different brokers, losing out on places to other (richer) applicants, and having an illegal lease pushed on me, I still didn’t have a place to inhabit when move-out day arrived. So I packed up my car and started couch-surfing at a friend’s place. I really don’t understand how anyone can have a car in NYC without a garage, as I had to move it 4 times a week for street cleaning. Seems like more trouble than it’s worth.
–Amidst this, I got robbed at the Riverside and 79th courts I’d been playing basketball at–twice. First someone made off with my gym bag–which was incredibly, coincidentally, and accidentally devoid of any valuables other than my cell phone (only because, while moving my car for the aforementioned street cleaning, I’d been unable to find a spot and instead drove down to the courts. After calling and canceling my credit cards, and becoming deeply worried about the fact that my social security card was in my wallet–which I needed in order to swap my NC license for a NY one–I returned to my car and found that I’d left the wallet in it. Also, had the theif(s) decided to hit a button on the key fob, they’d have been able to steal my car, only a block away, which at the time was full of all my worldly posessions). The robbers dropped my bag on the street a block away, and, I suppose frustrated at the lack of valuables, threw one of my shoes in a trash can. The other remained on the sidewalk.
–Then, the following week at the courts, while I watched my bag like a hawk, someone made off with my basketball. Which wasn’t even close to new. Welcome to New York, country boy!
–I wore nothing fancier than a t-shirt, day and night, for 5 straight months. Only on one occasion did I break this streak, when I went to a interview with a potential landlord (after pointing out the illegality of the lease–it was in clear violation of rent-stabilization laws, which were spelled out right in the lease itself–the landlord was no longer interesting in dealing with me. Live and learn).
–While driving my car back to NC after finally finding a suitable studio in the East Village, I was hit by a half-ton truck in D.C., rendering my car’s driver’s-side door useless (but thankfully leaving me unscathed). The accident might have been technically my fault–which I’m fine with, considering D.C.’s DuPont circle has the most asinine traffic pattern I’ve ever seen, considering that any vehicle of lesser height and weight never would have hit me, considering that I shouldn’t have even been there but for the bad directions I’d been given, and considering that I was on my way home to sell my car and would therefore no longer have any car insurance to worry about–but it was literally the last trip I was ever making in my car. And in 10 years of driving and probably 150k or so miles put on various vehicles, I’d never been in an accident while I was at the wheel. It’s like the fatigued movie plot where the grizzled criminal goes in for one last score, only to get popped during his last caper. Except I’m not grizzled.
–After this, I rented a minivan in North Carolina in the early morning, loaded it up with my worldly possessions, drove it up to New York (transit time: 7.5 hours), unloaded all the stuff into my new apartment, returned it to JFK airport, hitched a ride in some old man’s car to the F train in Queens, rode the subway home at 1AM, found my new apartment’s door lock had stopped functioning, and used a credit card to break into my own dwelling (break-in time: 2 seconds). All on a long Tuesday.
But I’m here now (and, having written this almost a year ago… I’ve been here). In terms of the “tries to move to New York and start a film career” storyline of this site, one out of two is in the books. Just think–in terms of energy expended to achieve the first goal, I only expended something like 3409503495 joules.
Meanwhile I’m writing about filmmaking processes over on the blog portion of The West Side, which is my play to “start a film career.” Once that’s also in the books, what will I do with myself? Maybe something more productive than personal blogging.
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