I've wanted to make a full-length film or video since I was eight years old. Instead, I've made hundreds of sketches and short films and videos over the years. I've written a dozen or so incomplete scripts for features and have a drawer full of scenes that so far have not gelled together into anything I could call a workable screenplay.
I'm tired of looking at these "ideas" for films. It is time to make them. Lest they rot on the vine.
So I've decided to play to my strengths.
Beginning in January of 2007, I propose to start filming these "scenes" and sketches, all the while trying to make them work together as longer film. I am going to work in ten-minute increments. (This was chosen because I plan to post each new segment on YouTube as I finish them, and the limit is ten minutes for each video) I know I can make a decent short film and I hope that these shorts can also combine to form a decent feature.
It's an idea that I've been kicking around since college. I thought about approaching a film this way after seeing David Holzman's Diary in 1996 when I was going to UNO. I was very inspired by that at the time and also the Dogme 95 movement of the late 90s, which seemed to be more about just making a film without the gloss and contrivances of standard filmmaking procedure.
There is no "Vow of Chastity" like Dogme 95, but I do like the challenges created by trying to make a series of films that must work alone as well as being part of a whole, and I am inspired by a paragraph from the Dogme manifesto:
Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde, It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer ... we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!
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