Blog Salad: Tips from Rocky, Sound Advice, and 6 Horrifying Shorts

It's the Fourth of July, and for some reason I'm at work. Everyone who has a normal job is off today, but I'm pushing buttons for an early news broadcast. I don't know why management insists on making everybody work at the same time they whine about budget constraints, but that's another post for another blog. Here at Film Flap we talk about low budget movie production with occasional big budget reviews. I'm struggling with a topic today, so how about a confabulation of topics! It's another blog salad!

"He looks like a big flag..."
The sweet Julie Gray over at The Rouge Wave recently posted a great piece about rejection and writing. She uses Rocky as an example of tenacity and how you should persist and stop complaining about being rejected by a competition you may have entered (oh, I can relate there). Her post centers around screenwriting, but it's very easy to substitute 'filmmaker' for 'writer' and learn a thing or to. Also read her 'Anti-whining recipe' in the same article. Yo!

Do You Hear What I Hear?
HD for Indies have a great link today amidst several in their Blogwad! smattering of links. One in particular is a great diatribe from audio professionals about what directors can do to make recording sound a more efficient experience. Found at filmsound.org, the post is way too long to wrap up here, go just go there and learn, learn learn! For a great audio primer, I recommend this link, which is an evergreen from Ken Stone.

The Horror, The Horror...
Six On the Lot contestants debuted horror shorts last night, but I missed it. Thanks to the internet, I saw all six shorts online and was pretty disappointed. All were cliche ridden, with no real original ideas. One standout was Sam Friedlander's Anklebiters, which was effectively nasty and gory. The best was probably Mateen Kemet's Profile, which had some reality to ground the horror, making it that much more scary. Unfortunately, even Mateen wimped out, giving us the "it's only a dream" ending, diluting it's power. Oh well, there's always KarmaCritic!

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