Fans of home movies and moving image archives may want to check out the guidelines for this short film competition, sponsored by the Association of Moving Image Archivists: PRESERVING THE WORLD’S MOVING IMAGE HERITAGE — AMIA Short Film Competition. As the competition website explains, the challenge is to create a film or video that conveys the importance
of preserving the world’s moving image heritage.

The entry deadline is August 15th, so start shooting!

As part of the panel, I’ll share clips of For Memories’ Sake and also tips and tricks for finding and using archival home movie footage in independent films.

Panel Description: Super 8 is the OG of guerilla filmmaking. Find out how you can make this beautiful, classic film gauge work in an HD world. From finding a camera to choosing film stock, scanning and encoding options, inclusive workflows, tips that make the difference and more. These aren’t your grandpa’s home movies…

Panelists:

Philip Vigeant – Pro8mm
Adam Garner – Trigger Studios
Branden Lower – A Bryan Photo
Ashley Maynor – Preservation Project Films

Add it to your SXSW schedule here!

Home Movie Day is important because our lives, our recollections, and our truth is recorded in home movies. One day, what the heck, c’mon! -Steve Martin

Sadly, I won’t be hosting a Southwest Virginia Home Movie Day this year.  Instead, I’m focusing on distribution efforts for my upcoming film about my grandmother’s home movie collection, For Memories’ Sake.

There are many ways, however, to participate in this year’s International HMD activities, both in person and on the web. Check out the many other locations for Home Movie Day 2009, this year’s revised and updated film transfer guide, and Home Movie Day’s Facebook page.

Small format and Super-8 enthusiasts may also be interested in a post I wrote recently for Self-Reliant Film on Super-8 Resources.

Please join me, filmmaker John Petitt, and photographer JJ. Tizou for a special screening of four films along the theme of “Photographic Memory,” curated by Scribe Video Center’s Producer’s Forum at the Ibrahim Theater in Philadelphia.

I’ll also be offering a “master class” workshop the day before on caring for family archives. More information about that can be found here. 

Descriptions of the films and event information is below:

The Ibrahim Theater at International House

3701 Chestnut Street

Philadelphia, PA, 19104

See map: Google Maps

Sunday, September 20, 2009 – 7:00pm

Tickets: $10 general, $8 students/seniors, $5 Scribe members

How does the act of taking a photograph define a moment in time?

Four documentaries, including a preview of Ashley Maynor’s For Memories’ Sake, explore how the photographs triggers and influences our memories and how image making can be a transformative act in itself.

For Memories’ Sake (US, 2009, work-in-progress, 30 min)
Directed by Ashley Maynor
Angela Singer is a Southern homemaker who has taken an average of a dozen photos a day for the last 35 years, compiling a mysterious and strange archive of over 150,000 photographs of her daily life. Her life and photography hobby is revealed through the lens of her granddaughter, filmmaker Ashley Maynor. Investigating one Southern homemaker’s obsession with the photographic image, the film asks questions about the nature of photography as a form of memory and captures a cross-generational portrait of two Southern women whose lives as image-makers have taken very different paths.

Ulysse (France 1982, 35mm, color, 22 min. French w/ Eng sub)
Directed by Agnes Varda
Agnes Varda, considered the grand mother of the French New Wave, returns to a striking photograph she took in 1954, its subject a naked man on the beach beside a young boy, also naked, and the corpse of a goat. When the subjects, tracked down thirty years later, fail to remember the circumstances surrounding the photo, the film becomes a haunting meditation on the elusive nature of memory as well as a fascinating introduction to Varda’s photography and its influence on her filmmaking.

Looking Back (US, 2008, 6 min)
Directed by Emile Bokaer
presented by Media That Matters
Albert Lewis struggles with addiction and with memories of war. His photography helps him survive in a supportive community of homeless veterans where he eloquently uses his picture taking as a way to look back, but to also gauge his and his fellow veterans’ progress.

The Archivist (US, 2007, 4:46 min)
Directed by John Petitt
Originally made as part of the First Person Festival’s, ‘Object of My Affection’ documentary film competition, The Archivist profiles Philadelphia based photographer J.J. Tiziou and his vast digital photo archive. Tiziou reflects on his relationship with the archive and challenges of organizing and maintaining it.

You can catch a sneak preview of my latest documentary, For Memories’ Sake this Saturday, August 8th, at 1:30 pm at the Nims Theater at the University of New Orleans. The screening is part of a faculty juried showcase at the 2009 University Film and Video Association conference. Please come if you’re attending!

If you can’t make the screening, you can still find out more about the movie by following my posts that have just begun on the blog at Self-Reliant Film, where I recount the making of the movie. More will follow in the coming weeks!

In December, I wrapped up my first semester as part of the Virginia Tech Cinema faculty. Hired just weeks before classes began, I struggled (as I assume most young professors do) to quickly dream up course syllabi, assignments, screening lists, and lecture notes. My goals, both for myself and my students, were ambitious. I strove to:

• challenge students to make great work without the work seeming impossible;
• to build students’ work ethic while encouraging them work ethically;
• to give them tools to develop creative habits rather than relying on strokes of brilliance (As Twyla Tharp has penned, “I’ve come to believe that being creative is as much a routine as it is the lightning bolt of inspiration.”); and
• to allow them to (safely) fail at all of the above.

As part of one of my classes, a new course I dubbed Community Outreach Through Documentary Video, for fifteen weeks my students worked alongside community organizations within the New River Valley. While the in-class focus was on documentary as an art and a form of activism, out-of-class work was service-learning oriented. Students logged an average of 70 hours each making short videos to help their community partners–which included regional beekeepers’ associations, a student-run art gallery, and a local farmers’ market–to better achieve their missions. As a culmination of the course, we worked together to organize a public screening of their work at the Lyric Theatre, our community’s historic, independent movie theater. After some discussion and debate, we decided to call the event Frames Per Second, a name we hoped would simultaneously allude to the medium itself as well as the way their videos ‘framed’ aspects of the community we live in.

The videos my students produced weren’t perfect, and I’m sure my teaching wasn’t either. But that afternoon in the Lyric, as I sat in the dark with over 75 strangers watching the semester’s labor on the big screen, I was reminded why I teach. When the lights came up and the applause began, I felt pride in what I was doing and, more importantly, in what these students were giving back to their community.

As a filmmaker myself, I have often been frustrated when identified as ‘just’ a teacher, rather than an artist in my own right or someone who also makes. What I felt in that moment at the Lyric, though, was not unlike the sensation I get when screening my own work before an audience. In that moment, I was reminded of the simple truth: because I teach, they can make. And in that moment, being ‘just’ a teacher was enough.

Southern Stories is a one night only screening this Sunday, November 9th of two films by Paul Harrill: Quick Feet, Soft Hands and Sundance award-winner Gina, An Actress, Age 29. Paul Harrill will introduce the films and take questions afterwards.

I was the Associate Producer and Production Designer for Quick Feet. You can watch a trailer here.

The screening begins at 5:30pm. Tickets are $5.75 and are available online or at the Grandin Theatre box office before the show. Come out and show your support for independent cinema in the Blue Ridge!