Tom Abrams Directing Workshop
The Workshop is finally done and it was a great experience. 3 days of pure creative space where it was all about ideas and film making. The purpose of the workshop was to explore ways to identify and bring out the underlying or subtextual meaning of their story by focusing on mise-en-scene ("things in the scene"). The workshop was conducted by Tom Abrams and it turned out to be an awesome experience mainly because Tom is a wonderful teacher and he had such a relaxed way of going about sharing his knowledge and bringing out the best in all participants. One of the things that struck me in the workshop was that film making in general is about perseverance. There were film makers in the workshop who had been developing their projects for close to five years and it is only now that it is coming to some kind of fruition.The workshop was really beneficial as it explored how we could add sub-text and meaning to scenes without beating the audiences to death with the obvious, by doing simple things. There were about 22 film makers in the room and it was great sharing the creative space with everyone. The difference between a selected participant and an observer was that the selected participants put some scenes from the script up for workshop - they were projects that were in the advanced stage of development or fairly further in their writing stage. While the participants had some projects in development but not to the point where they were ready to be workshopped. Other than that it was all the same and it was a great platform to discuss ideas. There were so many points in the workshop where a simple sentence from someone would trigger off a thought process about my own film and I would quickly note it down before I lost the chain of thought. This workshop couldn't have come at a better time - I picked up so much from the workshop that I am going to try and implement in the next draft of 'REJECTED'.
Overall I am just about recovering from the workshop period but still feeling really elated because of all the ideas and creativity bouncing around in the ether. I'll sign off for now.
Till later,
Amit
Labels: Directing














