first day response

My name is Ian Kelley and I am a Film Studies major at UNCW. Some of my favorite filmmakers include Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and George Lucas, just to name a few. Like them, I aspire to become a director of mainly narrative films in the future, but also wouldn't mind directing documentaries or experimental films. I like a lot of different types of genres in film like action, horror, comedy, sci-fi and drama. I'm typically very shy about the films that I make because I consider myself a perfectionist and want to do everything right, and sometimes worry about the response the film may get when shown to my professors.

I really enjoyed reading Maya Deren's passage about amateur and professional filmmaking. It really speaks to me in that all the time I have watched movies before I was even in the FST program, there was a difference between amateur or independent films and professional films. From what I could understand about the article is that amateur filmmaking seems a lot more fun than filmmaking within the studio system. Amateur filmmaking is supposed to be freedom both artistically and professionally. It seems that artistically and professionally, amateur filmmaking gives filmmakers a chance to film the movie the way they want to film it, as opposed  to major studios who would expect filmmakers to shoot a film the way the studios would want it. Overall, the main goal of amateur filmmaking is to tell whatever kind of story you want to tell and have fun with it as you go along.

It was a little hard to understand Brakhage's article at first, but from what I could gather is that it is mainly guidelines that teach you different techniques on how to make experimental films. This seems fair sense it takes a lot of techniques to make avant garde films considering that avant garde is another term for art film. This means that experimental films should be created like art and treated like art.