Has anyone ever claimed they knew you and then proceeded to rant and rail on you? --Kinda like the Geiko ad where the Gecko gets approached by a lady who calls him Steve and rails on him...
Ya, I'm sure it's happened to everyone at least once in their life. Me, it sometimes happens when people visit my film site: www.oakesonpictures.com and they browse around. Well every once in a while I get an email from some deranged individual who claims they know who I am and they think my work stinks because the acting is terrible or the editing is terrible or the whatever. What they don't know is I've never spent more than $100 on a film, I get people to work for me for free, and under those situations it is ever more difficult to make a good film and yet on occasion I do it. (more recently).
These odd emails I get are typically rants from individuals and they have no actual grounding other than opinion; and granted, opinions matter when you're trying to persuade someone, but if you trash your own ethos in your argument then your opinion really doesn't matter.
Take for instance when someone (let's say an actor) tells a director (myself) that film acting is all about camera angles and "decent acting". --For starters, that actor must not know very much about acting, or about contradicting themselves: good acting is good acting there isn't a difference between good stage and good film acting.
Doesn't matter how you portray it. Take for instance voice acting: doesn't matter if it's live, recorded radio, or standing in front of a camera. If the voice sounds good people will overlook the fact that they can't see anyone or the person isn't doing anything in front of them. Camera Angles have nothing to do with good film acting just like how you portray good voice acting. Or theater acting where there are no "angles" (there are but that's a complex matter). People used to just use stationary camera angles because they were still in a transitioning mode between using cameras and the theater. Some of these films are alright, I would say (my opinion, but if you're reading this you probably trust my opinion) So point #1: Film acting has nothing to do with the camera.
Second, you can't pose and argument by restating your argument. For instance, you can't say bubbalicious gum is the best gum because it's bubbalicious brand. The same is true with you say: film acting is only good when it's good acting. --you're stating something obvious. however, in the example I posed, I quoted the word "decent". --my definition of the word decent means that you're just getting by.Point #2: I disagree with this arugment because I think good acting is good acting and decent acting, is decent acting.
I'm not going to go much further into this recent letter aside from my 3rd point (and unfortunately you don't get to read this letter, I'm just going to sum it up). The writer (who is an actor) told me that the characters on my website (in the films) were "flat" or "lifeless" and they made an argument that I am a poor director because they didn't have much of a life to them. --I suppose I will have to agree with the author on part of that statement: the characters ARE lifeless on my website.
I have 3 videos on my website for them to pull examples from. Typically you can get away with 3 examples in any argument--3 examples is a lot in most cases. However, most of the proof this individual cited is irrelevant to his argument: 1 of the videos has no audio other than a song played in the background and it is a collection of clips from films I worked on from 2006-2009. There is no life in that video because the emphasis is on the cinematography and the silent acting and mashup that these films create:
The second video is a pilot video for a Web series that I created for my friend who acted as producer and lead actor. As far as I am concerned, this film was merely created to introduce all of the characters and set the tone for the creation of the series. I was asked initially if I wanted to join the project (several months later) to work on the actual series, but I declined because of various reasons I won't go into as well as the fact that comedy isn't my style. The characters are "lifeless" because we didn't have time to really develop them and still keep it in the time limit: ideally, this is only half of an episode because I believe they were going to launch with 2 episodes at the same time (this and one other).
Finally, the 3rd video on my website is a 2 film segment I call the "2010 Portfolio Project". I had 2 reasons for making this film: 1, to train my new crew, and 2, to have something to put online. As I said in one of my other posts, this video was made out of two, 1-page 1-scene scripts that have a beginning middle and end. Again, the characters don't have much of a life: one has a 1000 year life of living in the mud, and the other doesn't live long enough to tell us about theirs. --We purposefully don't have very many details about them because the scene is just a scene. The video fulfills it's purpose: people can watch it and think: that's good editing, that's good coloring (actually it's not, the second video had an issue that I didn't think was worth correcting, so I just printed it the way it was), that's good cinematography, etc. Did I mention these were shot in under 6 hrs?
I'm willing to settle on the fact that the acting in these films is non-existent. So it might not be a good claim for me to say on my website that I value GOOD ACTING when I have very few examples of such. However, my argument is this: just because it's not there doesn't mean it doesn't exist.--I do make sure the acting is good before I accept it. I do make sure the story is told well, even though I might still be learning how to do that effectively.
The main reason I actually put that on there was because my "competition" has ATROCIOUS acting and coloring. (oddly enough, this individual claimed to be part of one of the films that I thought was pretty atrocious on the acting side, but you didn't hear that from me). In reality, they aren't really my competition because we don't compete with one another on anything other than scheduling actors. And I have my own secret pools to obtain actors anyway.
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