Go Trojans

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Today I'd like to talk about some of my classes in a little more detail.
So far I have had 2 classes in my independent production course and 1 class in my Cinematography course. My indie production course is great because the professor is a seasoned director and producer of several independent features and he's loaded with useful tips on how to cheat the system and work your way into Hollywood. His name is Jeffery Obrow and if you look him up on IMDB.com you can see some of the movies he's made. Now granted this man is not what you might call an artistic genius. His films thus far have mostly been campy horror/thriller flicks of the B genre, but what is inspiring about him is that even though his films have never really pushed the boundries of the creative envelope he was still able to raise millions of dollars to get them made. He reminds me a little of Gene Hackman's character in the movie "Get Shorty". Last night we watched his latest film "They Are Amoung Us" which came out a little while ago on the sci-fi channel. It was hilariously cliched and riddled with plot holes but Jeff raised 1.1 million dollars for it from a bunch of Wall Street investors so he can definitly market himself, and thats half the battle.
The Indie production class is fairly small, there's only about 7 of us plus one T.A. Four of us are international. Theres a guy from Italy named Aldo who carries around all of his belongings in an old blue shpping bag wherever he goes and usually sleeps on the bench outside of class when we have a break. There's Fernando from Brazil, who also happens to be my roommate, a fact we both discovered after we came off the elevator and arrived at the same apartment door. There's Philipe, a nervous little man from Colombia who always rushes into class late and has a habit of asking the most absurdly unimportant questions such as "How much should you budget for socks on a movie shoot?" The rest of the class is American and most are in the Grad program for cinema-television. It looks like its going to be a fantastic class, the entire course culminates in a pitching session in front of an executive of development for Universal Pictures. We have to dress up and present our ideas for a feature film. It's designed to be an excercise for the real thing but you can't help hoping that they'll really want to make a deal with you right there on the spot.
As for the cinematography class, I'll probably be able to tell you more after tonight. So far we've only had one session and it was spent mostly on going over the safty tips on how to use 10,000 Watt lights. We also grouped up into shooting teams but we won't be doing any projects until the weekend. This is a much bigger class, theres about 33 of us, 2 Canadians, a few Indians lots of Americans and a Brit for good measure. This class is being taught by two director's of Photography who have about 35 years of experience between the two of them. The only thing I know so far is that some of our assignments will require us to go out and shoot in locations in and around L.A.
So thats that for today, I have to get going, feel free to post responses or questions to these posts
ta ta for now

Evan

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