Archive for the ‘Workshops’ Category

This year I am pleased and honored to be conducting a three-day camera and visual storytelling workshop at PDXFF16. This fun hands-on event will take place from August 31 – September 2 at the Pro Photo Event Center in the city’s NW Pearl District, 1801 NW Northrup Ave, Portland OR 97209.

While the workshop is designed primarily for aspiring camera craftsmen and cinematographers the course is just as applicable to filmmakers of every stripe, including actors and screenwriters, and visual storytellers of all media.

For more information and to register click on the general festival link:[www.portlandfilm.org]  and the event specific link: [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/professional-camera-visual-storytelling-tickets-26573603363]

Scene: London Film School Camera Workshop 2015

This summer I am again in East Africa leading a camera and visual storytelling workshop at the Zanzibar International Film Festival. The hunger for knowledge in this part of the world never ceases to amaze me as my students demonstrate an eagerness to learn and practice the fundamental lessons of good visual storytelling and effective camera operation.

Zanzibar is located off the coast of East Africa  at 6º south latitude. The light at dusk is positively mesmerizing. Here a traditional dhow passes off the coast of Stone Town 8 July 2016.

Despite the technical challenges DSLR cameras dominate the filmmaking landscape in this part of the world.

The opportunity to integrate a range of local color is a great advantage of shooting in Zanzibar.

Lulu. The star of our scenario. In real life she is a popular fashion model.

The emphasis of local cinema is on actors and performance which is as it should be. Technical issues aside it is after all what audiences really care about.

Around the country and world, BlackMagic seems to have no trouble attracting folks to its showcase events, like this one in Burbank last Wednesday.

The winning formula?  Okay, a free lunch certainly helps.

But so does appealing to the burgeoning number of former DSLR shooters and low to mid-range producers looking to move up to more professional gear. The low end of the market has now all but displaced the once dominant mid range corporate and broadcast segments that were Sony and Panasonic’s former bread and butter.

Responding to the Isness of the market BlackMagic is capitalizing on this newest trend in a big way.

While Sony, Panasonic, and other camera makers, struggle mightily for customers’  attention, BlackMagic seems to have no difficulty doing so.

I’m in Abu Dhabi this week continuing my ongoing travels around the globe offering camera workshops and pontificating about one irrelevant thing or another. This morning a major sandstorm blew in from Saudi Arabia and completely enveloped the NYU campus where I’m currently holed up.

The extremely fine sand less than 50 microns in diameter is highly abrasive and can lodge dangerously deep in one’s lungs. It is also damaging to cameras and especially camera lenses, a lesson learned the hard way by many filmmakers and shooters in the region who are drawn inexorably, like I am, to the eerie other world feeling imparted on the landscape.

Emirati children visiting the NYU campus in Abu Dhabi navigate an early morning sandstorm 3 April 2015.

This week I am teaching a camera storytelling workshop at the London Film School.  My students enrolled in the masters program here seem motivated and especially eager to embrace my lessons of life, business, and the camera craft.

For me offering such workshops at schools and universities around the world is a way of giving back.  My mentor, Albert Maysles, who died earlier this month at 88, made it a point every year to spend a few weeks sharing his prodigious expertise with aspiring young filmmakers.

I am grateful  to be able to follow in my mentor’s footsteps.

Vishen Lakhiani, the great entrepreneur and founder of MindValley in Kuala Lumpur, often speaks of the threes pillars of happiness. To find happiness  in our lives, he says, we need to have a wealth of experiences. We need to feel we’re growing each day.  And we need to know we are contributing in some way, somehow, to the betterment of others.

London Film School Camera & Visual Storytelling Workshop with Barry Braverman 20 March 2015

I continue to be amazed and humbled by the young shooters I encounter around the world, and this is especially the case in Asia where I have been conducting camera and lighting workshops, including last week in Manila and Makati City.  I was especially impressed by the enthusiasm of the young shooters at television station GMA7 under the tutelage of Virgilio Muzones, a true mentor and friend to hundreds of young aspiring craftsmen.  My followup public workshop in Makati attracted 300 aspiring filmmakers, from first-year university students to newly minted pros eager to enhance their visual storytelling prowess. I can’t wait to see what the young people do next with their newfound skills! For sure great things are in store for the young shooters of the Philippines!

20 March 2014.
Three hundred eager young shooters and filmmakers attended my public workshop in Makati City Philippines.

My November workshops in Malaysia and the Philippines have again confirmed at least in my mind the intense hunger for education and training in that part of the world. Notwithstanding my few days in the typhoon-devastated areas outside Cebu where the hunger of people is more much literal, my workshops in Kuala Lumpur and Manila were oversubscribed by hundreds of eager participants in each city. In Malaysia those attending were mostly news cameramen looking to expand their visual storytelling skills and career opportunities at their respective stations.

In Manila the Fast Forward event at the city’s immense convention center attracted nearly 350 attendees comprised mostly of independent filmmakers and producers. More workshops in Asia are in the works for early next year! Stay tuned!

Manila Convention Center • 16 November 2013

Some workshop attendees came dressed as an anime character. Go figure.

The Philippines is my 29th country since 2006 to host my camera storytelling workshop.

This week I have been providing basic camera visual storytelling training to staff cameramen at television broadcast facilities in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. Having offered such training numerous times in the past for the commercial production community I was informed in Southeast Asia that the news cameramen are particularly lazy, unmotivated, and lacking in creative energy.

Nothing could be further from the truth!  What I found at the news channels in Malaysia and Singapore were teams of motivated craftsmen eager to express themselves with more cinematic penache. Curiously I discovered the same thing among the producers and writers who also participated in the training.  From every quarter there seemed to a pronounced willingness  to produce more visually compellling work in the news and current affairs genre. What is missing it seems is a clear mission statement from news directors, station management, and labor unions, that it’s worth the effort for a shooter to try hard and produce outstanding work. It’s not a question of money; it’s really a matter of recognition, that the managers who mete out the shooters’ daily assignments will welcome and appreciate the extra effort and higher standard.

News crews in SE Asia are eager, able, and ready, to provide more compelling visual content, if station managers will simply allow them.

We’ve seem this before in 2010 and now again in 2013: a renewed interest in 3D workshops and training.  This week I am finally out of Dhaka and leading back-to-back 3D training sessions in Singapore, at MediaCorps’ educational academy SMA, and at NYU Tisch Asia.

The reason for the surge in interest seems counter-intuitive. The recent success of Life of Pi notwithstanding theatrical 3D has been losing ground and audiences for several years.  The anticipated boom in demand however for non-theatrical 3D programming appears to be the big factor this time with the arrival of a 3D iPad and iPhone in late 2013 or 2014.  There is an imperative for media training institutions across the region to remain relevant and on the cutting edge as they see it appropriate once again to offer 3D training opportunities for their students.

NYU Tisch students practice their 3D skills during a workshop at the university’s Singapore campus 23 Feb 2013.