2020-02-18 13:52
I’ve been playing fantasy baseball for over ten years and I’ve learned quite a bit from this geeky pastime. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot of valuable lessons and skills… Read More
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Robert Bruce Carter | Chicago Filmmaker & Writer Blog
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The homepage for Robert Bruce Carter. See recent work, writing, and get updates.
2020-01-05 19:42
Let me just say, that having seen it last night, that Cats is not a ‘good’ movie. The humor doesn’t work. The costumes are bizarre and often unsettling, sometimes horribly… Read More
2019-12-01 18:48
I.
Since I left Chicago in August, I’ve been living a somewhat nomadic life. I don’t have any long-term commitments and I have a remote job that I can do from anywhere with an… Read More
2019-11-28 15:28
Epistemic status: These are UNTESTED and speculative assertions on my beliefs about how people choose what to watch, as I think through marketing my first feature film. Thoughtful feedback i… Read More
2019-11-27 16:52
Epistemic status: These are UNTESTED and speculative assertions on my beliefs about how people choose what to watch, as I think through marketing my first feature film. Thoughtful feedback i… Read More
2019-11-26 16:35
Most low-budget film producers, we typically reserve about $100 for marketing. In other words, whatever, if anything, is left over at the end.
It struck me the other day that a Hollywood… Read More
2019-11-26 16:19
I’ve been researching the life of Catalina de Erauso, the lieutenant nun. She lived most of her life dressed as (and passing for) a man. One thing in the story that has always bewilder… Read More
2019-10-08 20:39
What if the result of deepfakes is the opposite of what everyone expects? Like because it will be so easy to fake a video of someone, anyone can deny that any video is real.
Like there&r&hell…Read More
2019-10-06 08:54
I went to the El Caserio Museo Igartubeiti yesterday in Gipuzcoa, Spain, as I traverse the Basque Country in Spain and France doing some exploratory research for a screenplay.
In much of… Read More
2019-10-03 09:24
The quote in my post on witch hunts yesterday mentioned another persecuted group in medieval Europe, the Cagots, a group of people that everyone decided to just hate for basically no reason:… Read More
2019-10-02 08:57
From 1609 to 1612, there was a big witch hunt in the Basque Country. Hundreds if not thousands of women were burned to death for the crime of being a witch.
You could denounce your neighb… Read More
2019-09-01 13:31
Epistemic status: This is an attempt to write down what I think I know and understand about suspense — it’s a bit of a work in progress and I’ll update it as I think about… Read More
2019-08-31 14:05
If you can create a deepfake of basically any actor, couldn’t you cast a film this way?
Instead of bringing actors in to read sides in an audition room, you could film a prototype… Read More
2019-08-04 16:25
Ten years ago, I was traveling around Argentina, working online as a freelancer. I had a great time traveling and thought I might live like a nomad for a year or two, but after a few months… Read More
2019-07-21 17:39
From gwern’s 2018 news:
I don’t know how many blue-collar workers they will put out of work—even if software is solved, the robotic hardware is still expensive! But fact… Read More
2019-07-21 17:21
A story is like a map.
A map is not the territory and a story is not exactly what happened.
A map erases certain features to bring others into relief.
A story is condensed.
Be… Read More
2019-07-15 21:41
Please enjoy this freewheeling interview in which I use Talk to Transformer to interview GPT-2 on its thoughts on the Golden Age of Television. Later in the interview, we turn to The Wire an… Read More
2019-07-07 16:35
I like Sidney Lumet’s breakdown:
In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. Melodrama makes the story line its highest p… Read More
2019-06-29 16:06
I can’t stop laughing at the random stuff created by AI on AI Weirdness. These lists of AI-generated change.org petitions are wild:
Bad ideas/Lost Causes:Dogs are not a thing!! Dog… Read More
2019-06-28 14:28
Ever since reading This is Marketing by Seth Godin, I’ve been thinking a lot about the similarities between marketing and dramatic storytelling.
There’s a flatness to a lot of… Read More
2019-06-27 14:01
That awkward time when someone is physically with you, but mentally they’re checking their phone for their ride share to come.
You can talk to them and it seems like they can hear… Read More
2019-06-23 16:27
To go on an adventure (without personal risk).
To learn about a new culture or country; to see how other people live.
To have something to talk about with your friends.
To challeng… Read More
2019-06-23 15:49
I love this definition of the big four genres, by Sidney Lumet in Making Movies:
In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters. Me… Read More
2019-06-21 18:24
I loved Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean, a book about two friends hunting a Greenland Shark in northern Norway.
It goes into many… Read More
2019-06-21 17:59
I resolved to see the world with my own eager eyes. So I ran away from home, and in this way made an early acquaintance with the corrugated side of life.I joined a small circus, and soon lea… Read More
2019-06-21 17:47
Roding then took Rilke outside for a tour of the grounds. As they walked, Roding began to tell Rilke about his life, but not in the way one might speak to a journalist on assignment. He unde… Read More
2019-06-21 17:04
I’m moving again and it’s time to go through books that are good enough for me to mark up but not good enough to haul into storage while I figure out where I’m going to lan… Read More
2019-06-21 16:46
No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle… Read More
2019-06-16 14:03
“90% of everything is crap.”
That’s a paraphrase of:
I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science… Read More
2019-06-14 21:55
After posting on deep voicefakes, I saw this (and a few others) on Kottke:
There’s still something uncanny about it, but the technology is obviously very close. I mean, maybe the… Read More
2019-06-14 16:18
I put my short film, WHAM, online: Read More
2019-06-14 16:16
What the fuck:
There’s a company called Dessa that made a software called RealTalk that can learn how to speak in someone’s voice. Apparently it wasn’t that hard to tr… Read More
2019-06-10 17:37
Epistemic status: these thoughts are based on a book that I’m still in the middle of. I’m more trying to work out my thinking than I am trying to tell you what to think or how to… Read More
2019-06-02 17:06
From The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones by Zynep Tufecki:
At its best, GOT was a beast as rare as a friendly dragon in King’s Landing: it was soc… Read More
2019-05-15 20:39
Off Book, a short film I directed (written by Eric Feltes & Mindy Fay Parks), was released last week on Omeleto Read More
2019-04-17 20:45
My friend and producer, Josh Itzkowitz, produced a film called Same Boat, a sci-fi comedy that was guerilla-filmed on a major cruise liner.
It’s very funny.
I think you should g… Read More
2019-04-14 20:33
From Marginal Revolution:
Setbacks are an integral part of a scientific career, yet little is known about whether an early-career setback may augment or hamper an individual’s futur… Read More
2019-04-09 01:45
Just found these comparison videos by Vugar Efendi: Read More
2019-03-30 15:28
EFAP is the (free) film school that keeps giving.
I re-watched their video on the Marvel symphonic universe as I was laying in and playing with temp tracks last month as I get closer and… Read More
2019-03-26 14:20
From Peak California:
For a city to have a thriving arts scene, you need some combination of:1. Families or nightlife, both of which produce demand for reasonably educated workers who wor… Read More
2019-03-25 15:20
Oh man. Amazon is slashing royalties for video makers uploading to Prime Video:
For those that upload either episodic video shows or individual titles through Prime Video Direct, the prog… Read More
2019-03-24 15:10
The Golden Age of Television is back, in movie form Read More
2019-03-23 18:32
More from Lost in the Cosmos:
But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. Wh… Read More
2019-03-22 18:16
The difference between Einstein and Kafka, both sons of middle-class middle-European families, both of whom found life in the ordinary world intolerably dreary:Einstein escaped the world by… Read More
2019-03-20 20:23
noun. role-playing as someone who doesn’t have technology, e.g. intentionally not looking up the answer to a question amongst a group of friends because it’s more fun to try and… Read More
2019-03-19 20:06
Just when you start thinking “I’m really getting a handle on this movie-making thing” there’s another whole field of study and skill to learn.
I’m working on… Read More
2019-03-18 19:35
“There is in New York tonight a black woman molding clay by herself in a little bare room, because there is not a single school of sculpture in New York where she is welcome. Surely th… Read More
2019-03-17 19:40
God I love this short:
The PassageIt’s like when people say “shorts should really be under 15 minutes, unless…”
This is the unless.
The cut back to the g… Read More
2019-03-13 08:35
Blessed without a day job I’ve had hours upon hours to sit with my movie and polish the cut. The days blend together. I think I was sick a few weeks ago. Or was that last week? My birt… Read More
2019-01-22 17:43
From somewhere over the North Atlantic, I’m on my way home to Chicago after a month in Berlin.
I took the trip in part for family reasons but I extended it to get a better feel fo… Read More
2018-12-30 13:31
This isn’t meant to be an in-depth review of every single feature. I’m going to share some of the things that I love about Highland 2 (just going to call it Highland from here o… Read More
2018-12-18 18:17
I was walking along the street yesterday and it hit me: one day in 5th grade, a guy showed up at our school and started playing a mouth harp over the PA system and everyone bought one and pl… Read More
2018-12-17 05:48
Reposted from today’s newsletter:
It’s December and for most Chicagoans that means turning inward to look deep inside ourselves and ask the age-old question: am I really going… Read More
2018-11-18 04:58
Thanks to capitalist competition, Withoutabox has shuttered. Withoutabox was awful to use (although it had improved in the last couple of years).
I too cheer the success of FilmFreeway. I l… Read More
2018-11-17 18:36
Screenwriting, as a professional fascination, is built on desires for personal approval that can be as fruitless and full of wish-thinking as gambling-addiction. Screenwriting is not filmmak… Read More
2018-11-13 17:33
Another gem I picked up at Austin Film Festival: the crap +1 fallacy.
The fallacy is that you see a bad movie and think that all you have to do to succeed is write something a little better… Read More
2018-11-11 16:50
Step one: identify what seem to be, right now, the most meaningful ways to spend your life. Step two: schedule time for those things. There is no step three. Everything else just has to fit… Read More
2018-11-10 18:23
grants.
i hate grants
i hate writing grant applications.
does anyone enjoy this?
did you like my thing?
are my artistic goals good enough?
do I have a good purpose?
do you like my car… Read More
2018-11-09 15:42
The etymology of the word “passion”:
Middle English, from Old French, from Medieval Latin passiō, passiōn-, sufferings of Jesus or a martyr, from Late Latin… Read More
2018-11-08 04:31
One thing I noticed at AFF was that a LOT of people are writing TV pilots. It seems like every aspiring-to-be-professional writer I met had entered a pilot into the screenwriting contest or… Read More
2018-11-07 16:16
Sometimes I will find myself yelling in my head, in response to some writing advice I read on the internet.
It goes something like this: “you idiots! you don’t need writin… Read More
2018-11-06 10:48
One of the ways in which people speculated (fantasized?) about MoviePass making money was through “big data”.
People seem generally uneasy whenever a company has your little da… Read More
2018-11-05 11:32
As fun as the MoviePass debacle was, it left me in the undesirable position of paying retail price for movies.
There’s a new company that wants to subsidize our movie watching, despit… Read More
2018-11-04 15:44
Last week I finished a freelance gig that started in mid-July. It was an intense gig with long hours and many working weekends. On the weekends where I didn’t have to work, I was on ca… Read More
2018-11-03 08:45
Reminders for myself as I return to daily work (writing):
Work every day. Compound interest. The Daily.
Work with purpose. Deliberate practice.
Work deeply.
Process over results.
Take risks… Read More
2018-11-02 15:44
The consensus from Austin Film Festival (and honestly, anyone working in Hollywood that I’ve ever talked to or heard on a podcast) was that only two matter: if you’re a finalist… Read More
2018-11-01 18:42
I was in Austin last week for the Austin Film Festival. It was a great time. The centerpiece of the festival is the four-day screenwriting conference, which means panels, networking, and par… Read More
2018-09-29 20:09
Content.
I love good content.
I’m a content creator.
This is good content.
Have you watched the show on Netflix? It’s such good content.
It’s hard being a content creator t… Read More
2018-09-29 19:29
I just got the first cut of my feature film this week from the editor in NY.
I still don’t have a title so it’s called Dinner Party. Still untitled. It’s a rough assembly o… Read More
2018-09-01 17:40
I went to Sidewalk last week in Birmingham, Alabama and I meant to post something about it but I’ve been working from 7 7 7 to 11 every night (kinda makes life a drag…). Yeah I… Read More
2018-08-22 17:27
WHAM, a short film that I wrote and directed last summer is premiering this weekend at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, AL. It’s a great festival and I’m really excited… Read More
2018-07-24 18:46
I released this earlier this year and completely forgot to post it here. The Deadline, my first short film, is now available to the public:
The Deadline from Robert Bruce Carter on Vimeo Read More
2018-07-17 21:54
The secret of theft, which is also called “creativity,” is you have to steal a bit from a lot of different places. You can’t go to the same 7/11 every time because they&rsq&hell…Read More
2018-07-11 11:23
Something different about Scotland, something that I really like: if you go to a restaurant and there are no open tables, they sometimes seat you with another group that has an open seat at… Read More
2018-07-10 10:58
My second time up in the Isle of Skye, a northwestern isle, part of the inner Hebrides. It’s incredibly peaceful out here, the air is cool, and I’ve been lucky to get mostly sun… Read More
2018-07-07 09:01
One of the big takeaways from making this first feature film was that everything about budget and production can be questioned. I think that everyone knows this. That you can just say f… Read More
2018-07-06 13:01
My second time here, last time was in 2014.
I’m glad I did the touristy stuff like visit the castle last time I was here because I’m completely worn out from filming and I get on… Read More
2018-07-06 12:11
We wrapped a week ago. My first feature film as a writer/director/anything. The working title is Dinner Party Movie and that will definitely be changing.
It’s the most difficult thing… Read More
2018-07-04 12:13
My first time in an airport lounge.
I’ve never been good at working the mileage programs but I finally got a credit card with good mileage points and travel benefits and I can get into… Read More
2018-06-16 16:20
We start filming on Monday. It’s a 10-day production, over the next two weeks, with the weekend off.
This week has been a whirlwind of last-minute prop pick-ups, phone calls, meetings… Read More
2018-06-12 05:29
I watched The Party tonight. No, not the Peter Sellers one, although I love that movie, but a different one made in 2017.
A single-location stageplay film, like the one I’m directing… Read More
2018-06-06 03:25
This morning I went to a cafe to work on the script. The directing part of the script. I read through my old notes on Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies, an excellent book on directing… Read More
2018-06-04 02:36
Another busy couple of weeks as pre-production intensifies on the feature film. Every time I feel like I’m on top of things, new things come up. The schedule, shot lists, finalizing th… Read More
2018-05-20 04:18
Rewriting the script today.
We did a table read on Wednesday. The beginning doesn’t work, the story takes too long to gets moving.
And I’ve been trying to figure out how to handl… Read More
2018-05-15 23:54
Last night we looked at another location. I’m not going to post photos of it because the owners lives there (as opposed to just renting it out on AirBnB). It’s a promising option… Read More
2018-05-14 05:13
Up to Appleton, WI today with the producer and a non-film friend to see about another house.
The movie takes place almost entirely in a single home, so getting the right house is important… Read More
2018-05-13 04:13
Yesterdays travels were long and we returned home at night. No rest though, we had to meet up with a friend to talk about our plan for casting the film (after a jaunt to Costco for a windshi… Read More
2018-05-12 19:54
Drove down to Paxton, IL today to see about a house to make a movie in.
There’s a real joy to this part of making a movie, getting out and meeting people that welcome you into their h… Read More
2018-04-20 18:22
I’m writing a detailed guide for indie producers on how to navigate the SAG process from application to post-production. There’s going to be a lot of great educational content in… Read More
2018-04-17 07:52
I don’t believe there are “rules” to formatting a screenplay. But there are some generally accepted guidelines. They’re easy to learn and don’t require reading… Read More
2018-04-16 08:21
I’ve been listening to Seth Godin’s Akimbo podcast. It’s great, as usual.
Related to filmmaking & writing, I especially enjoyed The Grand Opening and No Such Thing (as… Read More
2018-04-13 14:49
I put together a template for a short film with a budget of $10k. It assumes two days of shooting, which would be anywhere from six to twenty pages, depending on how fast you can move and ho… Read More
2018-04-12 14:55
I started some preliminary casting this week for the feature I’m putting together.
Which has led me to watch a lot of actor reels.
My thought is that actors don’t put enough thou… Read More
2018-04-10 08:13
I’m reading through Pmarca’s guide to career planning on this lazy Sunday back home. Excellent throughout and way too much to quote, but some bits that ring especially clear:
The… Read More
2018-04-09 18:50
From the Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity:
Let’s start with a bang: don’t keep a schedule.
He’s crazy, you say!
I’m totally serious. If you pull it off — a… Read More
2018-04-08 16:17
For the past few years I have been influenced by Lubitsch, whose very special twist of mind fascinates me, the more so since he has been gradually forgotten after having exerted an enormous… Read More
2018-04-07 16:09
Lets say that if one loves cinema as an escape mechanism, well, one escapes ten times more in a Hitchcock film because it’s better narrated. He tells modern stories, stories of ordinar… Read More
2018-04-06 15:51
OK, technically we won for best Illinois short. They had a category for films made in Illinois or Wisconsin. Really nice folks up there Read More
2018-04-06 15:48
Designed by Migs Estrada in Brooklyn. I love it.
Watch the trailer Read More
2018-04-03 09:28
There are three ways I think about casting: fishing, hunting, and foraging.
Fishing
With fishing, you hold an audition, post an audition notice around town and online and see what comes… Read More
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