Don R. Lewis is obsessed with film. Having written for the newly relaunched Film Threat for over 8 years and now a contributing editor, he is also a filmmaker in his own right. His short documentary films STRINGERS and DRAG KING have played numerous film festivals and garnered a few awards and the feature film he Co-Produced, THE VIOLENT KIND, recently premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Don holds a Masters Degree in Cinema Studies from San Francisco State and resides in Northern California with his wife, daughter and dog named Igby.

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Tall, sandy haired, mustachioed actor from Texas born Justus McQueen in 1927, L.Q. adopted the name of the character he portrayed in his first film, Battle Cry (1955). Jones, with his craggy, gaunt looks, first appeared in minor character roles in plenty of WWII films including The Young Lions (1958), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Hell Is for Heroes (1962), and Battle of the Coral Sea (1959). In 1962 he team up with maverick director Sam Peckinpah for the first of Jones’ five appearances in his films: Ride the High Country (1962); Major Dundee (1965) with Charlton Heston; The Wild Bunch (1969); The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970); and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973).

Jones then directed the cult post-apocalyptic film A Boy and His Dog (1975) starring a young Don Johnson. This won LQ a Hugo Award from America’s science fiction writers.

Working in television, Jones had recurring characters on such western programs as Cheyenne (1955), Gunsmoke (1955), Laramie, Two Faces West (1960-1961), and 25 times on The Virginian (1962) as ranch hand Andy Belden.

He turned in an interesting performance as a seemingly good ol’ boy Nevada cowboy who was actually a powerful behind-the-scenes player in state politics who leaned on Robert De Niro’s Las Vegas mob gambler in Martin Scorsese’s violent and powerful Casino (1995). Followed up by roles in The Edge (1997), The Mask of Zorro (1998), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006).

A San Francisco based director, Rob Nilsson and co-director John Hanson won the Camera d’Or at Cannes for NORTHERN LIGHTS and Nilsson won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for HEAT AND SUNLIGHT. He is the first American film director to have won both awards. He is also the creator of the Direct Action style of digital filmmaking taught in the Tenderloin yGroup Actor’s Ensemble, San Francisco and featured in workshops conducted around the world. Nilsson is a pioneer in the techniques of video to film transfer which led to today’s digital revolution. In 1985 SIGNAL 7 was the first small format video feature to be blown up to film and distributed around the world.

CHALK, his first feature with the Tenderloin Action Group (now the Tenderloin yGroup) a San Francisco inner city acting workshop, was featured in the Locarno and Toronto film festivals and played in theatres around the country in 2000. It was voted one of the top films of the year by the Village Voice. Production on the 9 @ Night film series with the Tenderloin yGroup was completed in 2007 it included STROKE (2000), SINGING (2000), SCHEME C6 (2001), ATTITUDE (2003), NOISE (2003) and NEED (2004), PAN (2006), USED (2007), and GO TOGETHER (2007).

Nilsson has traveled the world collaborating with local organizations to create digital feature films using his Direct Action Cinema methodology. Films telling indigenous stories have been made in Japan, WINTER ORANGES (2000); in South Africa, FRANK (2003); in Jordan, SAMT (2004); during a residency at the UC, Berkeley, SECURITY (2005), in Kansas City with the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee, OPENING (2006).

Recent awards include the Ted M. Larson Award for “outstanding contributions to the film industry” from the Fargo International Film Festival, the Indie Pioneer Award from the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee, a Filmmaker of the Year award from the Silver Lake Film Festival, Los Angeles and the Milley Award from the city of Mill Valley for achievement in the Arts. His book of poetry, FROM A REFUGEE OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA was released in September 2007 and is available at Authorhouse.com.

PRESQUE ISLE, a narrative feature co- produced by the San Francisco School of Digital Filmmaking and Citizen Cinema was screened at KC FilmFest in 2009. Rob’s latest film, Imbued, from a story by Kansas Citian, Denny Dey, and featuring Stacey Keach will screen at this year’s KC FilmFest.

Meaghan Brander holds a degree in Film Studies from Canada’s Queen’s University. She has worked at the Toronto International Film Festival Groups for three years, most recently as a Programming Assistant at Film Circuit, TIFFG’s division devoted to promoting Canadian cinema across Canada and abroad. In this capacity, she has had the opportunity to coordinate screenings of some of Canada’s best and most popular films at festivals and other venues as far-reaching as Iceland and Mumbai.

She has also been long immersed in the world of short films and short film programming. Her first film, I Got Sweet, screened at various short film festivals across Canada, and won several awards. Since she began her employment at TIFFG, she has been programming short films in over 200 markets, travelling as far north as Dawson City, Yukon to view short films at film festivals across the country. She also served on the programming committee of Canadian Short Film Showcase, a TIFFG initiative, for the past two years.

Roberta is former Sundance shorts programmer (2002-2006, 5 years), author of the book How Not To Make A Short Film: Secrets From A Sundance Programmer, Senior Consultant at RMM Film Consulting, and an award winning director of 2 shorts: Dani & Alice and Happy Birthday. Roberta provides script and film analysis and festival strategy advice. She has been named one of the top 10 New Exciting Voices in Black Cinema by IndieWire. She lives in Los Angeles with her rescued Min-Pin, Marcello. The best way to reach Roberta is through her website http://www.robertamunroe.com.
]]> http://kcfilmfest.org/2010/visiting-artists/roberta-munroe/feed/ 0 http://kcfilmfest.org/2010/visiting-artists/robert-rosen/ http://kcfilmfest.org/2010/visiting-artists/robert-rosen/#comments Sun, 07 Mar 2010 07:08:30 +0000 KC Jubilee http://kcfilmfest.org/?p=1327

Educator, critic, preservationist and former dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Robert Rosen has spoken at scholarly, public, and professional meetings in more than twenty nations on subjects related to film criticism, media history, and curatorship.

He has published widely in the field of media preservation and has guided the growth of the UCLA Film & Television Archive from a small study collection to the world’s largest university-based holding of original film and television materials. As a preservationist and historian, he has occupied many positions of leadership in the field. These include: Founding Director of the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Film Archives, member of the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress, and Board Member of the Stanford Theater Foundation and the Geffen Playhouse. With Martin Scorsese he was the organizer of the Film foundation on which he currently serves as the founding Chair of the Archivists Council.

Rosen was decorated by the French Government as an Officer of Arts and Letters and was awarded the International Documentary Association’s Career Achievement Award for Scholarship and Preservation. For ten years he was the film critic for KCRW National Public Radio and he is an active member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. He stepped down as dean of the School in July, 2009.

17 year-old Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) sets out to track down her 
father, who put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared.  If 
she fails, Ree and her family will be turned out into the Ozark woods of 
Southern Missouri. 


To find him, Ree confronts the dangerous world of the Dolly family.  With 
the reluctant help of her hard-bitten uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes) and her 
best friend Gail, Ree defies her outlaw clan’s code of silence, hacking 
her way through their lies, evasions, and threats to piece together the 
truth.

Based on the novel by Daniel Woodrell, WINTER’S BONE is directed by Debra 
Granik (DOWN TO THE BONE) and adapted for the screen by Granik and Anne 
Rosellini.  The film stars Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Kevin Breznahan, Dale Dickey, Garret Dillahunt, Sheryl Lee and Tate Taylor.

WINTER’S BONE recently played as an official selection in Dramatic 
Competition at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

The Only Good Indian

The Only Good Indian, the KC FilmFest and Sundance hit directed by Kevin Willmott and starring Wes Studi, will have its Lawrence premiere at Liberty Hall on Friday, Nov. 6th at 7 pm. Tickets are $8.

Liberty Hall
644 Massachusetts
Lawrence, Kansas

Half of the box office will support the Department of Film and Media Studies in its efforts to have more educational opportunities for students.

Truth Blues is an award winning independent short film made by Studio Artist user Mike Snell of Blue Wall Design. The film showcases some really creative ways to incorporate Studio Artist processing into an animated film that go way beyond the normal process the entire video frame in one pass approach that is typically used. I recently spoke to Mike about the making of the film.

“As far as the workflow went– It is a mix of roto-scoped HD video, Photoshopped stills, 3D animated objects and green screened people. The primary tools were Shake, Motion, Final Cut, Color and of course Studio Artist. I tried many, many variations in the Studio Artist Paint Action Sequence (PASeq) Editor to get to the look I was shooting for. That is one of the features I truly love about Studio Artist. You can build up effects and try many variations and then delete, double-up, tweek or add yet another pass all within the PASeq.

I have found that your software has given me a bit of an edge in a market that often kicks out things that look just like the things the guy down the street kicked out. After running each individual element through a Studio Artist PASeq I then composited everything in Motion adding camera moves, depth of field etc.”

Breaking up the individual elements of an animation scene and then processing them individually with Studio Artist prior to compositing the final scene together is an interesting approach that has a really great visual look that is very unique. Mike used Motion for his final compositing of the individual Studio Artist processed animation elements.

A different approach that would have a very unique aesthetic look unlike any other compositing program would be to run multiple passes of alpha matted or green screened source elements through Studio Artist while painting into a master composition movie file. The PASeq would be constructed so that paint strokes would only occur starting from within the matted source elements, but could then spill outside of the original matte boundaries.

You could use a PASeq Content Context action step to do this in Studio Artist version 4, or content layer keyframes in Studio Artist 3.5. Because the individual elements would be individually painted onto the master movie layer you could incorporate smear and mixing effects as the individual processed scene elements were over-painted that you could never get in a conventional compositing program.

Mike also pointed out a killer feature of Studio Artist, which is that it is an environment for creating an endless variety of custom artistic effects. So when you buy Studio Artist you aren’t just getting a set of canned stock effects that everyone in the universe is also using. You’re getting the ability to customize and tweak to your hearts content. Either to modify existing effect presets, or to create amazing new effects no one has every seen before that have your own custom signature or aesthetic look.

I think that Mike achieved this with the overall look and feel of Truth Blues. It definitely looks like Studio Artist, but at the same time he has stamped his own personal vision and artistic aesthetic on that Studio Artist look and made it his own.

Make sure to look for Truth Blues at a film festival near you. You can lean more about Blue Wall Design here.

This article by John Dalton originally appeared at Studio Artist News. For film stills and more information, visit the original article.