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Screenwriting

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Topic: screenwriting

Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

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Beyond Words

Shhh: the use of silence in film

Even in the Bay Area, the quiet weeks of January remind us of the gifts of winter: a stillness, pause, and time of secret, subterranean growth. Similarly, silence and stillness can amplify the hidden dramatic qualities of your story on film. You can use them to capture your audience and draw them closer, anticipating something yet unseen. They can solicit a deeper focus on a character’s internal state. Silence can also establish a quality of place or an emotional tone.

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First-person

Indie Toolkit writers rewind/fast-forward on the year/decade in film

The decade in screenwriting: Looking back over the past several years—to 2006, for example, when four of the American Film Institute’s top 10 films of the year were comedies, as opposed to just one each in 2008 and 2009—a number of prominent 2009 films took on serious topical subjects, from war to racism to financial insolvency. An ever-expanding number of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror vehicles offered near fatal adrenaline rushes and perhaps a needed relief from everyday troubles. But an especially notable trend in the stories told on film in the past year was toward the dark, lonely, inside story.

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In progress: Amanda Micheli (left), Jeff Zimbalist (center) and Richard Levien (right, photo by Pat Mazzera) received SFFS/KRF Filmmaking grants in 2009 and are busy building their new social-issue feature films.

In Production

Rainin winners prime new wave of social-issue dramas

For the great majority of the public, documentaries are still educational films while narrative features are “the movies.” It’s the rare fiction feature film that handles social justice themes without condescension and oversimplification. The San Francisco Film Society/Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking Grants were created to support the local development of lively and intelligent social-issue narrative films, with the hope of strengthening the San Francisco filmmaking community—and bringing more forward-thinking films by talented makers into general release. The grants, which run 2009-13, will be awarded in the spring and fall of each year and the total amount disbursed over these five years will be more than $3 million. The inaugural class for the $35,000 grants consists of Amanda Micheli and Jeff Zimbalist, Fall 2009, Richard Levien, Spring 2009. Here’s the scoop on their projects.

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Beyond Words

Carmen Madden on watching people, writing characters

Writer-director Carmen Madden, whose highly accomplished first feature, Everyday Black Man, won the Best Feature Film award at the Peachtree Village International Film Festival in Atlanta in September, and is now on the festival circuit, calls screenwriters “the first builders of the set” —of that unique world of their story. Her screenplays reflect just how intimately she comes to see and know that world and the characters that inhabit it.

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Beyond Words

Carmen Madden on watching people, writing characters

Writer-director Carmen Madden, whose highly accomplished first feature, Everyday Black Man, won the Best Feature Film award at the Peachtree Village International Film Festival in Atlanta in September, and is now on the festival circuit, calls screenwriters “the first builders of the set” —of that unique world of their story. Her screenplays reflect just how intimately she comes to see and know that world and the characters that inhabit it.

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Wild times: Writer Dave Eggers and director Spike Jonze collaborated on bringing Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" to life. (Photo by Matt Nettheim, courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

Platform

Dave Eggers, Spike Jonze and the making of 'Wild Things'

Where the Wild Things Are is directed by Spike Jonze from a screenplay by Jonze and Bay Area-based writer Dave Eggers, based on the classic 1963 picture book by Maurice Sendak. The original story concerns an unruly boy who runs rampant through his house dressed in a wolf suit and is banished to his room without his supper. Alone and disgruntled, he sails to the land of the Wild Things, a ragtag band of hulking, unpredictable monsters. Max conquers them “by staring into their yellow eyes without blinking once," and he is made “the King of all Wild Things," dancing with the monsters in a “wild rumpus”. However, he soon finds himself lonely and homesick, and he returns home to his bedroom, where he finds his supper waiting for him, still hot.

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