A couple of weeks ago I got an email from M, asking me if I wanted to be part of Frameline's Generations Project. This project brings together youth (max age 23) and elders (min age 55) to learn how to make digital movies. She said they were short on elders. So I applied and I got in. This was my second weekend.
The first weekend was a potluck and a sort of get to know you session. There are a lot more elders in this group than youth. Nearly no one has any experience making films, though there are a couple of photographers (varying degrees of seriousness), a theater director, a part-time film critic for local Chinese newspapers, a couple of art students, a sound designer, a retired carpenter, and others whose work or ex-work I didn't catch.
There will be three groups of four or four groups of three making films that will be five minutes long. Unlike earlier years, the groups won't get to segregate by age. The themes for the films, the content is supposed to arise from the discussions the group has, not from any films that people have been dying to make, but have never (before now) had the chance.
I'm excited and worried.
I'm excited because I love learning new things and because this is making me think about how films are put together. Just this week we got this handout on cameras, about angles and movement and framing and how different shots have different effects. It's all about the visual conventions that enable storytelling. It's the stuff that signals and underlines and that we barely pay attention to most of the time (unless it's a really bad movie).
I'm worried because it's clearer than ever that film-making is a team effort. At this point, we're still all these individuals who are interested in making films and we're all lgbtqi, but that's about all that holds us together. The abundance of elders is a problem too because, in my experience, people don't necessarily get better about sharing as they get older. Already there's a tendency to talk over the less assertive. So I'm worried about us being able to make functional teams to make something special out of this incredible opportunity.
