We opened our reading group with a discussion of the film Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa. The film addressed themes of loss of humanity, faith, and gender relationships; we began with the basic question of why the characters in Rashomon told the stories and lies that they told, and why people tell stories…
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Today, in contrast to our usual practice of screening complete films during our meetings, we thought it might be useful to see how filmmakers deal with problems as they come up during the course of production and editing. We invited Rob Moss and Charlie Musser to class in order to…
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Our guest speaker, Adam B. Ellick from the New York Times, arrived in class at 7pm. We screened several of his videos, including Tuning Out the Taliban and On Thin Ice. His discussion with us was divided into three basic parts: picking the story and characters; working in the field; and post-production. Once…
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Valarie opened this week’s meeting by conveying the notes of encouragement we had received in the last week from the Yale Law School administration, and their general excitement – and high expectations – for the films we are generating. Thanksgiving break represents a critical time for our films, and an…
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We were extraordinarily lucky today to take part in a conversation with three amazing guests. Our distinguished set of panelists included Robert Post, dean of Yale Law School; Gordon Edelstein, artistic director at Long Wharf Theater (and director of The Train Driver); and Daniel Larlham, a lecturer in Yale’s Theater…
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Rebecca opened today’s meeting with a discussion of our newly prepared call sheet – which lists, among other details, sunrise/sunset times for filming that will enable us to time our shoots within an hour of sunset. We have also developed production guidelines: a list of reminders and basic principles that…
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We were lucky to have another fantastic guest speaker this week. Emily Bazelon, who writes for Slate and the New York Times, answered a number of our questions about ethics in filmmaking and journalism. Her first piece of advice was to “choose an identity for this project and to be our…
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Today, our course began with a conversation with the national security team, which is looking into the kind of profiling that takes place at mosques. A member of this group noted her initial outreach to film subjects and described the group’s pre-interview research with coordinators and imams at mosques; some…
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Today, guest speaker Sharat Raju, director of the film Divided We Fall, offered a discussion of narrative structure and storytelling. The basic structure of any narrative, according to Sharat, goes as follows: there’s a person, this is what the person was up against, this is what happened, and this is the…
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Experts Wanted: Using Expert Testimony To Empiricize Anecdotes
At this week’s meeting, we somehow managed to attract two more fascinating guest speakers to our Visual Law Practicum. The first was Dave Saldana, who has been a producer, journalism professor, First Amendment lawyer, and communications director. Joe Friedman, who has acted as a director of photography at various points…
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