Creative Mythology

I just finished Producing, Editing and doing Visual Effects for a new short documentary about how the United States has one of the worst infant mortality rates in the industrialized world, and ways that we can change birth for the better.

Created as part of the current debate on healthcare, Reducing Infant Mortality asks "What are we doing wrong? We're making it more technologically advanced in our country, and we're not doing better and we're actually getting worse."

Spread the word to your legislators, and visit the website to take action and find out more. Here's a link to the iPod/iPhone version of the video.

The film is released through a Creative Commons license.

Now that I'm an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film & Video at Columbia College Chicago, I start teaching classes next week.

I'm teaching Editing 1 and Editing 2, and I couldn't be more excited. I always had such a great time teaching film production at UCLA and I can't wait to get started sharing my love of the filmmaking process with the next generation of filmmakers here in the Windy City.

Everyone that I've met at Columbia so far has been really amazing, and I'm just so humbled to be a part of such a talented and diverse group of people. Both the faculty and the student body at Columbia are really special, and I'm just honored to be a part. I can't wait to meet my students and get started!

After 14 years in Los Angeles, we're hitting the road and moving to Chicago.

I'm really honored that I've been hired as a full-time tenure-track Professor at Columbia College, where I'll be teaching film making. I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to share what I know about film with the next generation. I'm going to keep producing my own work, and working on other people's projects, too.

Adria will continue to act, both in Chicago, as well as in film and television.

And Baby Hart will continue to be totally cute!

It's been an amazing experience living in Los Angeles, and I'm really excited about the next step of the journey.

After having such a great experience teaching "Producing Documentaries" last year, I'm teaching a new course at UCLA Extension that I've designed. We're going to be making making individual short non-fiction films over the course of the term, and I'm really very excited about it.

We're going to be spending a lot of time showing rough cuts and works-in-progress in class, and I'm hopeful that the students that enroll will end up producing some exceptional work. This is a fantastic chance to either make a stand-alone short documentary, or to make a piece that can be used (at least partially) as a promotional tool to raise funds for a feature-length documentary.

I can't wait for the term to begin. The class has open enrollment, so I encourage anyone interested in making documentaries to enroll. I'll be teaching all the fundamentals that go into making feature-length documentaries as well, so this class will be a great immersion into the whole process.

See you on Saturday, April 4th! You can enroll here.

Making the Short Documentary
Create the short nonfiction film you've been dreaming about. Over the course of this workshop, develop, research, produce, direct, and edit a three-to-seven-minute documentary. At the first daylong meeting, participants bring in multiple documentary ideas, which are workshopped into a final concept for the documentary that they intend to make. Over the next several weeks, students shoot interviews and footage. In-class screenings of works-in-progress help students improve their work through instructor and peer feedback. The completed films are screened and discussed during the final class. Instruction focuses on an overview of the documentary process, including documentary form and style, preproduction, shooting, editing, and documentary structure. The course also covers opportunities for distribution and sale of the finished documentary, as well as the use of the short documentary as a promotional tool to help create a full-length version of the film.Prerequisite: Students must have access to a camera and editing equipment, and at least one idea ready for development. This "green" course provides course materials online to minimize paper waste; Internet access required.

UCLA: 2242 School of Public Affairs Bldg.
Saturday, April 4, 10am-5pm
Tuesdays, April 7 - May 26 7pm-10pm
Saturday, May 30 10am-5pm
10 meetings total