The Future Was Wide Open

As I gear up for my second and final year of film school, I am already fearful of not being able to find a job. In the meantime, I'm trying to stay up on this industry that's changing as quickly as the technology that makes it all possible. 

I just came across a darling six-part short film series that was created by an ad agency to market laptops for Intel and Toshiba. (My anti-consumer stance and desire to get paid to tell visual stories are having a stand off.) 



"The Beauty Inside" featured the company's laptops but it was more than an ad. It starred actors Topher Grace, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Matthew Gray Gubler, and had a social media component with auditions held on Facebook. The episodes vary in length, from 4:45 to 9:38 minutes. 

Last month the series won a Daytime Emmy for "Outstanding New Approach to Original Daytime Program or Series," the first to beat out a televised program. It also garnered three Grand Prix Awards at 2013 Cannes Lions, a prestigious festival that celebrates creative works in the field of advertising and communications.  

This week "House of Cards" was nominated for 14 Emmy Awards, which the Washington Post reported as "a watershed moment for video content," in terms of how awards have been handled in the past. The article mentions that in 1999, it was a big deal when "HBO's "The Sopranos" became the first series not carried on broadcast television to be nominated for best drama." 

But with the ever-consolidating media, I take this as a good sign. New companies, new opportunities for innovation and outlets for creativity. 

 

Horror Movies as Social Commentary: an interview with Lonnie Martin

Women's Studies is an independently-produced horror/satire about feminist ideals gone wrong that Lonnie Martin made in 2010. It was his first feature film.  

Co-produced by and starring his wife Cindy Marie Martin, Women's Studies got a decent amount of press back when the video was released.

But nothing like the amount of hits their website and Youtube pages got a couple of months ago when Jezebel posted the trailer and a barbed blurb, which set off ridiculous internet insult-slinging. They didn't even reach out to him for comment. 

  

Had I not known Lonnie personally, I probably wouldn't have thought twice about it all. Just another white dude making movies with chicks making out.  

However, since befriending Lonnie in a film theory class at American University earlier this year, I already knew him to be a thoughtful feminist and talented storyteller. So I wanted to give him a voice here. We had a long audio interview a couple of weeks ago. Here's the first set: 

In the first part, Lonnie talks about his screenplays leading up to Women's Studies, and introduces his dream project, Maynard Comes Back, a horror anthology. 



In the second part, Lonnie discusses the old school horror of George A. Romero and connects the "torture porn" of Saw to the social anxiety of real life torture uncovered in the Abu Ghraib scandal.    

Wombmates #dc48hfp

The weekend before our final term paper of our first year of graduate school was due, half my film school class procrastinated by signing up for the 48 Hour Film Project, a contest where you make a movie in two days or less. 

Our entry was Wombmates. Though we didn't win, we were nominated for best short. It was a pleasure seeing it on AFI's big screen (twice!) and listening to the other filmmakers & viewers laugh as they watched.  

But also, it one last big team effort before 1/3 of the cohort goes away to Prague for the fall semester. Good work, team. 


Wombmates from Matthew Lucas on Vimeo.

The Delivery

The only Mother's Day gift my mom wants from me is to beget a few little do-gooders. 

That's not happening anytime soon, so I gave her this as a consolation prize. She was not amused. But I was, and this project was an amazing learning/bonding experience for me. 

The Delivery from Matthew Lucas on Vimeo.

Brought to you by the producers of Ray Cyste Beer.

The Anti-Commercial Commercial

This semester is wrapping up, so I'll finally start posting some of the video work I've done thus far in film school.  

For this one, the assignment was to produce a commercial. Being the conscious consumer that I am, of course I had to make a statement. 

It was inspired by a Caps game I caught on TV earlier this spring. All the commercials were for Coors and cars - all white male oriented. The friend I was watching the game with mentioned that the Coors family & company had a dirty past, so I did my research. 

Ray Cyste Beer Commercial from Matthew Lucas on Vimeo.

And while this commercial is a play on all I learned from a single hockey game, my intention is not to call out any specific corporation.

There's plenty of companies that have shoddy business practices, abuse human rights, shun worker's rights, etc. And it's going to take quality policy makers along with talented, thoughtful business people & shareholders to right all that. But that's turning around the Titanic. 

It's easier to change us, the consumer. I believe the most important vote an American makes is not at the ballot box every four years, but how we spend our money on a daily basis. 

Film School is Hard

Film school isn't all rainbows and Tarantino movies. 

I tried to do it his way. Didn't work for me. 

There's a ton of reading, a ton of crappy videos to produce before you get any good, and lots to sacrifice - namely, everything that does not support the goal of getting the most out of school & into the working world in a timely manner. 

Grad school, especially film school, is just like life: it is what you make it. You can do only what's required of you, or you can choose to excel. 

Charts & pictures make learning fun.  

I'd like to do the latter, but this semester my film theory class is 

getting in my way. I've never been much of an academic, and this class totally makes me feel like an idiot. 

Teaching each other: Professor & filmmaker Brigid Maher looks on as (l-r) Michael Nickerson, Michael Jee, Pat Flynn & Lonnie Martin school our film theory class on old Hollywood. 

I don't get it (Soviet montage, this means you) and I don't want to. That is, until we watched Citizen Kane and then I really knew how little I know about anything, and that it was time to pay more attention.

Extra reading and helping other students, especially non-native English speakers, decipher the stuff helps me figure it out more too. It doesn't hurt to have an awesome professor & the best cohort ever.

Another great prof., Maggie Burnette Stogner, did the video for Roads of Arabia, which closes today at the Sackler Gallery. 

Of course I'd prefer education be free. But the price of film school, for me, includes getting to know and work (and suffer) with classmates who are equally obsessed with creating & telling visual stories.  

I love grad school but can't wait to see what's on the other side. 

Before grad school, I had no idea who this dude was. Now I recognize him on the street, yo.