Читать книгу Mobile Filmmaking. 100 steps to making a movie with your smartphone - Maxim Mussel - Страница 3

Holding workshops is a vital part of what I do to promote the idea of mobile filmmaking. I almost always begin with a story about my early days as an artist. Over 35 years ago, as a teenager, I was lucky enough to find myself in a unique place: an amateur film center for youth. We had everything that proper film students would have: scene studies, elocution classes, installing the lighting, writing scripts, screenings, and discussions. At the end of the program, we were to take exams and shoot a final project. My first film, as you may well guess, told the story of unrequited adolescent love.

Then I went to a tech school and spent a lot of years doing advertising and branding. A few years ago, I realised that I had hit the ceiling at my job and that I needed something greater. I again felt that I wanted to get absorbed in my art, to create art projects of my own. The creative drive I acquired as a young person was enough to get me back to making films. But the times were different now, and I went back to school and started reading smart books and taking classes from famous film directors. In the end, I managed to make a few documentary and feature films. And I felt an extremely deep disappointment in the production part of the process. I was only interested in making art and not in wasting a great deal of effort on negotiation, technological issues, getting other people to approve my actions, and simply periods of pointless waiting. I had very little time left for creating a work of art as such. I was losing heart, but I was not eager to give up on my dream. Luckily, a way out presented itself shortly as I once tried shooting a film with my smartphone, and then everything clicked into place!

Mobile filmmaking gave me a unique opportunity to be free and independent, to do everything by myself, from writing a script to promoting a complete work. Today I want to help you, my readers, to walk for the first time along an exciting and eventful path from a creative concept to its realisation in art.

Maxim Mussel

As a screenwriter, I know only too well how difficult the path from script to film is. Too many people correct and approve the script, and often there’s nothing left of the author’s design, or, even more often, you write a script according to someone else’s idea or someone else’s rules. Stories that don’t get realised prompt a sense of disillusionment with the profession, with oneself, and with the world. Mobile film for me is what gives me support, what lets me feel free to try out some ideas of my own that do not fit an industrial format. It’s very interesting to put yourself into the shoes of a cameraman, director, and editor. It helps you get away from your routine and make something surprising, and it helps develop creativity and ingenuity.

Olga Kononova