When you're a little kid, one of the topics they have you read about is pirates. I feel like I had pirate books (shoutout Terry Deary, Horrible Histories changed my life), pirate costumes, Legos, and birthday parties.

Then, as you get older, piracy just becomes something you knew a ton about as a kid. Or that happens on the high seas around the Horn of Africa.

But in film and TV, pirates come in all shapes and sizes. We even see them in new video games, like Assassin's Creed.

Pirates are sort of back in a big way for adults, and I am glad all that knowledge I had as a kid is finally paying off.

Today, I want to dig into my favorite pirate movies and talk about what makes them so special and watchable.

Let's dive in.

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

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• Director: Gore Verbinski
• Screenwriters: Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio

The Takeaway: Character dynamic is everything.

Okay, I really can't fathom a list of pirate movies that doesn't have this at number one. When this came out, the gals in my high school went like three times a week. They were in love with all the men who were handsome swashbucklers.

By the way, the guys went too, into the action and Kiera Knightley.

This felt like a movie and then a franchise that had something for everyone. It was so much fun and so entertaining. Depp has never been better.

Before 2003, Hollywood considered pirate movies box-office poison, ad after, people wanted to make these kinds of movies, at least for a while.

Verbinski crafted masterclasses in set-piece choreography. I mean, study this film, and you will learn so much. From the dockside duel to the moonlight skeleton reveal—proving that clarity of motion keeps high-concept action engaging.

2. Captain Blood (1935)

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• Director: Michael Curtiz
• Screenwriter: Casey Robinson

The Takeaway: The birth of the cinematic swashbuckler.

From the ultra-modern to the easy-back machine, Pirates have been cultural icons for quite sme time. This movie hails from Michael Curtiz, the director behind Casablanca.

You might be able to call this movie the first swashbuckler. At least, in cinema history.

It was in this movie that he launched Errol Flynn into superstardom.

If you nail a pair of shoes, you'll become famous. And this film kind of sets up all the pirate tropes we know and love, too. It had the handsome guy at its center and lots of swordplay. I love how much charisma Flynn has on the screen, too.

3. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)

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• Director: Peter Weir
• Screenwriters: Peter Weir & John Collee

The Takeaway: Realism breeds immersion.

We tend to think of pirate movies as these big ideas that have kind of magic and jokes and other wondrous thoughts. But this film takes all that and grounds it in a reality that gives us a taste of history.

I wish they made ten of them. There were so many more books in the series.

Now, I think some people might come at me for technicalities here. Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe) is a Royal Navy Captain rather than a classic buccaneer. But Master and Commander stands as the gold standard for maritime cinema.

And we have him taking over boats and fighting enemies; I think that's enough. I mean, he actually does plunder them!

For writers and directors, it’s a brilliant study in how character friction inside a closed, isolated setting can drive tension just as effectively as cannon fire.

4. The Princess Bride (1987)

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• Director: Rob Reiner
• Screenwriter: William Goldman

The Takeaway: Subvert genre tropes by mastering them first.

This is the kind of movie you put on when it's raining outside, or it's Friday night, and no one in your family can pick. It has something for everyone, including the person who is obsessed wth pirates.

The great Rob Reiner directed William Goldman’s wonderful adaptation of his own book. You get these fairy-tale conventions, which open us up to a kingdom where it feels like anything can happen.

5. Treasure Planet (2002)

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• Directors: Ron Clements & John Musker
• Screenwriters: Ron Clements, John Musker, Rob Edwards

The Takeaway: Worldbuilding through genre mashups.

This is such a good way to take IP like Treasure Island and completely update it for the 21st Century. It just takes all the major characters and beats and puts them into space. The look and feel of the movie rely on traditional hand-drawn animation with CGI environments, mixing old and new into something that felt groundbreaking at the time.

It didn't make a ton of money, but it got us some space pirates, and that's all that matters.

6. Captain Phillips (2013)

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• Director: Paul Greengrass
• Screenwriter: Billy Ray

The Takeaway: Tension through realism and modern stakes.

Based on a true story! Modern pirates are still around, and they're still attacking boats. This movie is about Somali piracy, and it's shot by Paul Greengrass in his signature style, which makes us feel like we're really there with them the whole time.

It's all handheld, tight, and claustrophobic, and then you have the open sea, and help is so far away.

Barkhad Abdi’s terrifyingly grounded performance opposite Tom Hanks is like the most naturalistic performance I have ever seen. It's so wild to see him hold his own here, and it makes Hanks's fear and emotion all the better.

This is not a swashbuckler but almost like a war movie.

7. The Crimson Pirate (1952)

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• Director: Robert Siodmak
• Screenwriter: Roland Kibbee

The Takeaway: Lean into physicality and spectacle.

Again, another dip back into the pirate movies of the Golden Age of Hollywood. We get this classic starring Burt Lancaster, who did all his own stunts with his former circus acrobat skills.

This is one of those movies that just makes you smile when you see how ambitious they were back in the day, and how they had no CGI and just had design set pieces around the actual ability of the people they had on screen.

It's a kinetic movie with a lot of comedy and some sneaky good cinematography.

Summing It All Up

These movies are a wide array of how we see pirates in movies, and prove that they never really go out of style, as long as you have an interesting twist or way to work them into your narrative.

It also shows just how many filmmaking lessons you can take from every one of them.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Well, this is pretty cool and possibly a nice option to consider for the forgetful filmmaker. And, let’s face it, we’ve all been that guy leaving gear behind on sets before. While you’d like to think that’s more often memory cards or XLR cables, it does happen with cameras every once in a while, and it can be devastating, to say the least.

A new, clever smart battery solution aims to solve this, though with the TagBatt from FALCAM. This smart camera battery can both power your camera, as batteries usually do, as well as allow you to keep track of it with Apple Find My support.

Let’s check it out.

FALCAM TagBatt

Designed to simply help you keep your camera easier to locate, the FALCAM TagBatt does this while also providing high-capacity power as well as seamless compatibility with most native chargers and devices. The goal is to power and keep track of your compatible cameras with this 2600mAh capacity battery.

What’s most unique about this offering is that, for its trackability, it allows you to keep track and trace your camera’s whereabouts using Apple Find My, one of the better and more sophisticated tracking apps in existence.

If you leave the set without the battery, you can set it up so your iPhone will receive alerts automatically. The battery itself can also be configured to emit sound alerts when searching around a space.

Price and Availability

Overall, this is a clever solution that could be a nice option for the particularly forgetful-minded filmmaker looking to make sure they’re never in the embarrassing situation of losing a camera behind again.

The TagBatt is available in both Canon LP-E6 and Sony NP-FZ100 options, which you can check out the full specs and purchase options for below.

• 2600mAh Capacity NP-FZ100 Battery
• Apple Find My Tracking Support
• USB-C Charging Input
• Multiple Safety Protections

Falcam TagBatt Direct-Charge NP-FZ100 Battery (2600mAh)

Power and keep track of your compatible Sony camera with this TagBatt Direct-Charge NP-FZ100 Battery from Falcam. The battery features a 2600mAh capacity and integrated Apple Find My tracking support to keep you informed of where your equipment is if left behind. If you leave the set without your battery, your iPhone will receive alerts automatically.

The reason Comic-Con isn't as huge anymore is that Disney basically decided it was done paying San Diego and sharing headlines with other studios.

So, while they still play nice, they focus all their energy on D23, their own festival that they charge Disney fanatics to attend, where they just market their movies and TV shows and charge a premium for park access.

And they do it in Anaheim, right at their HQ.

It's maybe one of the most ingenious inventions of all movie and TV marketing in the modern era. People flock to this, and Disney becomes the star, going viral again and again.

Plus, fans get casting, trailers, concept art, release dates, and a summary of updates coming to Walt Disney World.

Let's dive in.

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Film & Television Slate

Disney is still the king of film and TV studios. They have the most important and valuable franchises in Star Wars and Marvel, and they're constantly looking for new ways to expand their universes.

Not to mention their work with Pixar and Disney Animation, which run thins aorundfail ily films.

Well, they're also in the middle of a reboot of both Star Wars and Marvel franchises, so the next 18 months are really important in getting new viewers who buy into the vision.

This is the plan to turn these ideas into reality.

Marvel Studios & Live-Action Feature Slate

• Avengers: Doomsday
  • Cast & Footage: Robert Downey Jr. took the stage alongside Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell to debut a brand-new special look trailer. The trailer highlights Doctor Doom's tragic backstory, his confrontation with Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), stopping Thor's (Chris Hemsworth) Stormbreaker attack with two fingers, and unleashing an army of Sentinels.
  • Release Date: Theatrical release on December 18, 2026.
• Untitled X-Men Film
  • Cast Lineup: The core cast posed together at D23, featuring Sadie Sink (Jean Grey), Kit Connor (Cyclops), Samara Weaving (Emma Frost), Inde Navarrette (Rogue), Maya Boyd (Storm), Christopher Abbott (Prof. X), and Adam Driver (Mr. Sinister / Nathaniel Milbury).
  • Release Date: TBD.
  • This was the talk of D23. People were abuzz about the casting, and over the new young look at one of the most recognized superhero teams.
• The Mandalorian & Grogu
  • Announcement: Disney confirmed the feature film will arrive on Disney+ on September 2.
  • While it wasn't a box office smash hit, this could mean good viewer retention, and having the movie next to the show will draw viewers to both.
• VisionQuest (Disney+ Series)
  • Cast & Footage: Features Paul Bettany returning as Vision alongside James Spader reprising his role as Ultron. A first-look teaser trailer debuted for attendees.
  • Release Date: October 14, 2026.
  • This expands the Marvel universe into its next phase.
• Tangled (Live-Action)
  • Cast: Teagan Croft (Rapunzel), Milo Manheim (Flynn Rider), and Kathryn Hahn (Mother Gothel).
  • Release Date: Theatrical release on March 31, 2028.
  • While Moana didn't work, it has been way longer since Tangled, so there is palpable nostalgia.
• Oswald (Disney+ Series)
  • Details: Hybrid live-action/animation series centered on Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, directed by Jon Favreau.
  • Release Date: February 17, 2027.
  • Family movies usually do well.
• Percy Jackson & The Olympians (Season 3)
• Footage: First teaser trailer debuted.
• Release Date: November 20, 2026.
• This show did gangbusters for the streamer, so bringing it back was a no-brainer.

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Pixar & Disney Animated Feature Slate

I mentioned this at the top, but Pixar is just a massive cash cow for Disney. They have the whole kids-and-family market, and, along with Disney Animation, they release movies that feel like guaranteed hits.

We don't know many details about these movies, but I'll fill in where I can.

• Ghost Market (Pixar)
  • Details: First teaser unveiled for Pixar's original film, exploring a hidden, magical world where ghosts barter and trade.
  • Release Date: Early 2028.
• The Incredibles 3 (Pixar)
  • Details: Official concept art was revealed showing new hero suits and villain silhouettes.
  • Release Date: TBD.
  • I love the first two movies, so big cape to fill, but this is a marquee title.
• Viva — Life is a Party / Coco 2 (Pixar)
  • Details: First concept art debuted showing an older Miguel celebrating in Mexico.
  • Release Date: 2029 in theaters.
• Gatto
  • Details: A brand-new concept image was released for this animated feature.
  • Release Date: 2027 in cinemas.
• The Simpsons Movie (Sequel)
  • Details: The first official teaser poster for the new theatrical Simpsons film was revealed.
  • Release Date: September 2027.
  • The popular show comes back for another movie that expands to adults, too.
• The Bluey Movie
  • Details: Debut teaser trailer shown.
  • Release Date: August 6, 2027.
  • If you have a kid, you'll be at this movie.
• Frozen 3
  • Details: Kristen Bell, Idina Menzel, and Josh Gad took the stage to perform all-new original songs written for the film.
  • Release Date: November 24, 2027.
  • Guaranteed to make a billion.
• Ice Age: Boiling Point
  • Details: A new clip debuted introducing "Jurassic Scrat."
  • Release Date: February 5, 2027.
  • Can you bring this back for a whole new generation for kids?
• Lilo & Stitch 2
• Details: Production starts in Hawaii with Chris Sanders returning to direct.
• Release Date: May 26, 2028.
• The last live-action Lilo did over a billion; can an animated one follow it as well?

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Walt Disney World Parks Updates

While film and TV dominated the showcase, Disney Experiences announced several major additions coming to Walt Disney World.

So if you're planning a vacation, look out for these things, too.

• Magic Kingdom:
  • Villains Land (~2030): Headlined by a Maleficent Coaster running through a dark briar patch and a Mirror Realm Dark Ride hosted by the Magic Mirror.
  • Piston Peak National Park (2029): Features Cars Ridge Run Rally with off-road suspension vehicles, plus Miss Fritter's Daredevil Spin-Along.
  • Carousel of Progress (Spring 2027): Updating the final scene to a 1980s setting, starring Bryan Cranston (Father) and Jamie Lee Curtis (Mother).
• Disney’s Animal Kingdom (2027):
  • Tropical Americas: Includes Indiana Jones and the Myth of the Jade Serpent (featuring a Harrison Ford animatronic), Antonio’s Fiesta de Encanto boat ride with original voice cast, and El Carrusel de los Animalitos.
  • Expedition Everest: Full mechanical restoration underway to return the Yeti animatronic to dynamic motion.
• Disney’s Hollywood Studios (2027/2028):
  • Monstropolis: Featuring the suspended Doors Coaster, Glob Theater, and Harryhausen's Restaurant, with new music by Randy Newman.
• EPCOT:
  • Major storyline updates for Spaceship Earth and a revamp of Journey Into Imagination, bringing back Dreamfinder alongside Figment.

Summing It All Up

There are so many massive things coming to Disney this year. They have a new CEO,s Josh D'Amaro, who assumed the role on March 18, 2026, and it seems like he hasn't slowed the company down; in fact, it looks like they're speeding up plans to keep the dollars rolling in.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

You thought we were living in an AI revolution, huh? Well, you’re absolutely right. We are. But, on top of that, we’re also living in a large format filmmaking revolution that’s arguably a lot more exciting—especially for those who, you know, like to actually shoot digital films and projects the old-fashioned way.

If you are interested in entering this age of large format filmmaking, not only will you need a large format cinema camera like the Fujifilm GFX ETERNA 55, the Blackmagic Design URSA Cine 12K LF, or the Canon EOS C500 Mark II, to name a few, you’ll also need lenses that can handle this format.

And while there are no right or wrong answers here, just personal preferences, we have one lens lineup to check out as demonstrated by this helpful video tutorial below.

Large Format Sensors Need the Right Lenses

Coming to us from the team at B&H Photo Video Pro Audio, this video tutorial covers everything you need to know about the ZEISS Panoptes 65 lineup of cinema lenses and how these lenses could be top options for your large-format cinema cameras.

The video goes quite in-depth, tests the lenses on the Fujifilm GFX ETERNA 55, and shoots in several environments,, including indoor and outdoor settings,, with an eye for how the lenses handle the unique issues that come with each setup.

If you’re curious to follow along, here are the timestamps for the different parts of the video.

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:28 Indoor Video Shoot
• 3:18 Test Footage (Indoors)
• 4:19 Outdoor Video Shoot
• 5:04 A Note on Image Quality
• 7:04 Demo & Test Footage (Outdoors)
• 10:00 Doug's Overall Thoughts

ZEISS Panoptes 65 Lens Lineup

The video, as it mentions, features the ZEISS Panoptes 65 lens lineup and focuses on three top options with the following lenses, which you can find more info about here below:

• ZEISS Panoptes 65 35mm T2.2 Cine Lens
• ZEISS Panoptes 65 40mm T2.2 Cine Lens
• ZEISS Panoptes 65 110mm T2.2 Cine Lens

You can also find more info on our full write-up on the ZEISS Panoptes 65 lens series here.

I’ve been a little too obsessed with The Sound of Music since I was a toddler. And honestly, what’s not to love about a World-War-II set love story with singing nuns and one very handsome widowed Austrian Navy captain struggling with his bratty kids?

Julie Andrews plays Maria in this musical classic. A whimsical novitiate unable to fit in at her convent, she searches for direction in her life, and she accepts a governess job with a wealthy family, where she meets Captain von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) and his seven children. Though they initially butt heads, they of course eventually bring out the best in each other and fall in love. Then the threat of war and fascism spreads across Europe, forcing them to flee.

Let’s strut confidently into the discussion of today’s quote from this film.

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The Scene

Before the love story and before the Nazis and all of that drama, Maria has to leave her convent and make her way to the von Trapp family estate in Salzburg, taking a bus and walking from the station to the estate nervously.

This scene, which serves as the opening of her journey with the von Trapps, is the source of today’s quote.

Maria begins outside the convent, wondering what the future holds for her. She muses in song, “My heart should be wildly rejoicing / Oh, what's the matter with me?” She’s scared, she admits, despite wanting the freedom and adventure now in front of her.

She talks herself forward. “A captain with seven children / What's so fearsome about that?”

She knows she can fill this position, and do it well. She just has to convince the family—and herself. She takes the bus into the countryside, essentially manifesting how she wants to be respected and followed by the children.

Finally, she reaches her stop and exits the bus in a much cheerier mood, singing about having confidence in herself and in things around her.

“All I trust I leave my heart to / All I trust becomes my own! / I have confidence in confidence alone—”

She reaches the impressive estate and looks through the gate. It’s imposing. She says in a small voice, “Oh, help.”

With a burst of energy, she finishes the song and runs up to the door to begin her new life.

What the Song Means

The song serves an essential function within the musical genre. In many musical theater productions, whether on stage or in film, the protagonist almost always gets an early song in which they express their doubts and goals, laying out what the audience should know about them for the rest of the story. It’s usually known as an “I want” song.

You can find it if you look for it. For example, in The Little Mermaid it’s “Part of Your World.” In Wicked it’s “The Wizard and Me.” Usually these characters want adventure (think Hercules and “I Will Go the Distance,” or Dorothy and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”), but in this case Maria is already on her way. She’s on her adventure whether she’s ready or not. So all she has to find is the nerve to keep going.

Here, Maria shares aloud that she’s nervous and scared and uncertain about the direction of her life, but she’s going to take this one step at a time. She lists her fears (a mysterious captain with a daunting number of children), then catches herself and pivots. “I am seeking the courage I lack,” she sings.

The whole song is about facing her fears and choosing to go forward into a new life anyway. The lyrics allow those inner conflicts to be external in a way that makes sense.

Maria does eventually say she’s confident in herself, but she’s also confident in ideas like sunshine and rain, which makes sense for a nun who would rather be up a mountaintop than in church.

But by the end, she repeats that she has “confidence in confidence alone.” It’s the idea of confidence driving her, not anything specific like “I’m confident I will be a good governess.” Her faith is enough to keep her going.

'The Sound of Music' Credit: 20th Century Studios

The Song Exists Because of the Movie

The Sound of Music was a stage show that began in 1959 (with music and lyrics from the famed Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II) before becoming a film in 1965. But “I Have Confidence” was not included in the original production. By 1960, Hammerstein had died, so Rodgers wrote the new song by himself.

Beyond being a necessary “I want” song and character beat, the new musical number is connective tissue between the abbey and the von Trapp villa, which wasn’t needed for a stage show.

So the song was a solution to a uniquely cinematic problem. How could the filmmakers get Maria from the city to the estate in a visual sequence that still revealed character?

The song was incorporated into later stage productions of the show.

Location, Location, Location

Another thing this song allows is expansion from what has been established on the stage show. Obviously, we can’t see a ton of Salzburg inside a black box theater. The song takes Maria from the Abbey to iconic landmarks across the city. She splashes in the Residenz Fountain. She walks under the Domplatz arches.

And there’s an Easter egg in the sequence, too. Per the Rogers & Hammerstein site, the real-life Maria von Trapp can be spotted when Maria is crossing Residenzplatz.

The film also gives the song a ton of motion and variety in blocking. Maria is almost never still. She might slow down with doubt or pause, but she always finds the motivation to move forward, lending the song dynamism that could easily go stale if she were just standing in one place singing all this.

This is just one great example of a character’s internal conflict shown visually in several ways, through motion, through performance, through lyricism.

What are some of your favorite lines from The Sound of Music?

Have you been thinking about the Hacks series finale since it aired a few months ago, or are you mentally stable? I'm not! So I've been watching all those emotional TikTok edits of the characters and thinking through the mastery of that last season since the end of May.

Show creators and writers Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello appeared on the recent episode of Scriptnotes with John August to talk about the craft of writing the show, so you know there's a ton of good advice for writers here, specifically if you want to write comedy or write with a partner or in a writers' room. (They also spend a lot of time talking about reputation in Hollywood, which is interesting in a different way, which then segues into how they thought about their Hacks characters and their reputations.)

We've got a few lessons you can take away, but definitely listen to the whole thing, because it's chock-full of insights on process and joke-writing. Pull up the Hacks pilot to see the writing in action, then dive in.

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Build Story Around a Goal

The early parts of the podcast focus on how they approached the final season thematically, and finding the beats that would support that theme. It's super instructional for anyone looking at breaking a big story and can be applied at any scale, whether you're writing a season of TV or a feature.

Downs reveals that they were always hoping for five seasons (but weren't sure of renewals). They were able to roughly plot arcs for that many chapters. And by Season 5, they knew what the end would be. So how did they get there?

Aniello said, "We knew that we wanted to have [Deborah] strive towards something, but that thing that she would get would then kind of be—it's not a MacGuffin exactly, but it would be something where she realized she thinks that the professional goal is the thing. But then by the very, very end, she realized the goal wasn't the thing. It was the creation. It was the getting there. It was the, as she says in Season 1, the scratch and the claws, the fun part."

In Season 5, a lot of focus is on Deborah's MSG show, which (spoiler alert) doesn't go the way she plans. But once the room decided that would be the season's focus, they had a direction.

Downs added, "So once we had that, then we knew, then it was easier to build episodes around that goal."

This is so simple, but so important. If you find yourself floundering in your writing, stop and consider what the character is working toward. Are they working toward anything? Build your plot around their goal. That will give the rest of your script the structure it needs.

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Break the Beats Together

One of my favorite discussions from the episode is when they explained the logistics of how they write with a partner. Essentially, they know what an episode or scene will look like, so they both write a version of a scene at the same time.

"The way that Paul and I actually write, when it's just the two of us, [we] take the same scene. We had it outlined. We knew what the basic beats were," Aniello said.

"Yeah, we would break the story together," Downs said.

"And then we would each write the same scene."

"At the same time."

"And it would be kind of like, great, we have 12 minutes to write the scene," Aniello said. "So you have to just bang it out and don't get in your head about it."

Granted, getting the beats broken is a pretty big hurdle, but the interesting thing here is that once you have the outline in place, how each person fills in the colors can be totally different and allow for wildly creative approaches. And the time limitation means that you aren't staring at a blank page (or shouldn't be). You just have to get something out, even if it's a vomit draft, so you have something to show your writing partner.

"Time Chess"

Another thing they get from this method is a way to move fast on the parts that might trip you up on any given day.

Finally, out of this partnership approach, you're almost exclusively looking at what works, not what doesn't.

"It's almost like time chess," Downs said, "because if I'm like, 'I don't really have a way in, I bet you'll have a way in. And then I just go. And she didn't have a perfect button. She was like, 'He might have a button for the scene.' So it just made us move through the first draft much quicker."

Aniello added, "And then I would read his, he would read mine, and then we would highlight our favorite parts of the other person's. … And then we would take turns combining them. So oftentimes the things that weren't my highlighted were his highlighted, and vice versa. And sometimes we'd have the same jokes, and sometimes we'd have totally different jokes, and I'd be like, 'Oh, I think that's better.' And it just made us concentrate on just the positives."

Downs said, "It was positive reinforcement only. If there were the same joke in a script, it would either mean it was exactly right because we had this hive-mind moment, or it was not right because it was too 'first thought.' So it was really telling in terms of, it kind of gave us a third draft by the time we combined them."

I love the bit about a joke being "too first thought." If you both come up with something, maybe that's a lightbulb moment… or maybe it's the easy thing, and should be punched up.

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If One Person Fights for a Joke, Leave It In

When writing in partnerships, you won't always agree, and that's okay. But if you come to a point where one person really loves a joke and the other doesn't get it… try it anyway.

In Hacks, this happened with "yum yum in my tum tum," a deadpan line delivered by Ava in an early season. Aniello didn't get it. "It's simply not in my wheelhouse of things I think are funny."

However, the audience did love the joke. It went on to internet memedom.

Downs said, "If one of us really believes in a joke or if it's just one of us gets the joke, just for one, we do have the power to be like, 'But we have to try this,' and then we do. If even one person feels that passionately about it, you will see the reaction online, and it'll be like, people are quoting that thing."

If they're butting heads as writers but one person is passionate, Downs said it's "inarguable. Let it happen."

Try following that advice yourself.

1991 was a huge year for movies, so it makes sense that there are a lot of overlooked titles left on the table. Who could pay attention to every movie coming out in between all-timer titles like The Silence of the Lambs, Beauty and the Beast, Boyz n the Hood, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Home Alone, and Thelma & Louise? We’re only human. We simply don’t have the bandwidth. However, as these movies all celebrate their 35th anniversary, let’s take a look at 10 underappreciated 1991 gems that deserve more attention.

10. Sleeping with the Enemy

This Julia Roberts thriller is the lowest on the list because it was actually a huge hit in 1991, ultimately becoming the seventh highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office that year. However, over time, it has been overshadowed by the other 1990s Julia Roberts classics that came both before (Pretty Woman) and after it (My Best Friend’s Wedding, Runaway Bride, Notting Hill, 2000’s Erin Brockovich).

Regardless of its reputation relative to her overall filmography, Sleeping with the Enemy is a winner, blending small town romance with slasher-thriller tropes in a delicious way that many a Lifetime movie has tried to replicate over the years.

9. The People Under the Stairs

The People Under the Stairs is a Wes Craven classic that deserves to be on the Mount Rushmore of his filmography alongside A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and The Last House on the Left. In addition to boasting trenchant subtext about white landlords abusing tenants of color, the movie is a wild thrill ride that features two exquisitely twisted villain performances from Twin Peaks alumni Wendy Robie and Everett McGill.

8. Poison

Poison, which is the debut feature of Todd Haynes (Carol, May December), interweaves three stories adapted from Jean Genet novels. The gauzy, experimental movie was instrumental in the development of the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s, leading to landmark LGBTQ+ independent films which have ultimately overshadowed it, including The Living End, The Watermelon Woman, The Doom Generation, and Todd Haynes’ own Velvet Goldmine.

7. Body Parts

This 1991 horror movie follows a psychologist who becomes one of three patients to receive transplant limbs from a serial killer, which obviously goes horribly wrong. In addition to boasting a fun genre premise, it unites horror royalty both behind the scenes - in the form of director Eric Red (The Hitcher), co-writer Norman Snider (Dead Ringers), and producer Frank Mancuso, Jr. (the Friday the 13th franchise, April Fool’s Day) - and on-screen, featuring actors including Jeff Fahey (Psycho III) and Brad Dourif (Child’s Play, The Exorcist III).

6. Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah

Although it’s suspiciously missing from most people’s lists of their favorite Godzilla movies, this Heisei-era installment is pure popcorn fun. It’s a grab bag of every possible subgenre, finding inspiration in everything from Back to the Future to World War II dramas (as Godzilla Minus One would do so successfully 32 years later) to the Terminator franchise to Gremlins.

5. The Hours and Times

It is downright strange how much Christopher Münch’s The Hours and Times has been forgotten. The movie, which was making the film festival circuit in 1991 (it played at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Berlin International Film Festival, among others), is part of the canon of biopics exploring the legacy of the legendary British Invasion band The Beatles. It provides a window into what might have happened during a vacation that John Lennon (Ian Hart) took with the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein (David Angus), a gay man who had a relationship with Lennon that the musician later told Playboy was “almost a love affair, but not quite.”

4. High Heels

Just like Sleeping with the Enemy, Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, and Poison, Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels suffers more from comparison with other similar features than any failure of its own. Look, it’s hard to be an Almodóvar movie that comes a few years after Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and a few years before All About My Mother.

However, this murderous melodrama about a mother who reunites with her estranged daughter, only to find that she’s dating her ex, is still a compelling romp. It also doesn’t skimp on the hyperstylization that the Spanish filmmaker is known for. In fact, it features his first and only dance sequence set at a prison, which is a must-see.

3. Silent Night, Deadly Night 5: The Toy Maker

This direct-to-video sequel to the controversial 1984 Christmas slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night is a deeply bizarre movie. In addition to blending a Pinocchio allegory with a family drama and a bloody horror movie, it features screen legend Mickey Rooney in a major role. In addition to being a full-on camp classic, The Toy Maker was directed by Martin Kitrosser, who was just one year away from becoming Quentin Tarantino’s go-to script supervisor, going on to work with him on everything from Reservoir Dogs to Pulp Fiction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

2. Vegas in Space

Speaking of camp classics… The drag queen sci-fi comedy Vegas in Space is a handmade labor of love full of puns and visually inventive design. You can draw a direct line between 1968’s Barbarella and this movie, connecting everything from Flash Gordon to The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the process. Without Vegas in Space, you simply don’t get something like the new RuPaul disaster movie parody Stop! That! Train!, and it absolutely deserves wider recognition.

1. Fast Getaway

This Corey Haim action-comedy, in which he plays his criminal father’s (Leo Rossi) getaway driver, was indifferently received in 1991, playing in just a few test markets before being pulled from theaters. This is a huge shame, because it’s a solidly constructed genre movie, providing a sweet family story alongside gonzo stuntwork and a heaping helping of gorgeous location photography that takes its viewers on a tour of some of the most beautiful places across Utah and Colorado.

Fast Getaway also does genre fans a favor by giving a major role to martial arts icon Cynthia Rothrock, who most famously starred opposite Michelle Yeoh in 1985’s Yes, Madam.

So what titles do you consider to be the most overlooked movies of 1991, and did any of them make the list? Sound off in the comments below!

Looking to upgrade your wireless audio recording setups for your film and video productions? Then you've come to the right place. We got one of the options for seamless audio recording for your projects.

For this week's "Deals of the Week" roundup, we have some different options available for the DJI Mic Mini, either as a standalone microphone or as part of a system that gives you everything you need to start recording high-quality audio for your films.

Check out these on-sale options below.

• DJI Mic Mini Clip-On Transmitter with Built-In Microphone: $25
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You can find more filmmaking deals here.

Alec Puro has scored zombie thrillers, sitcoms, animated kids' shows, indie horror, and indie drama. He also founded Viralnoise, a royalty-free music platform for content creators. This month, he adds a Green Day-inspired road comedy to his slate.

Nimrods, out August 14, follows three teenage bandmates who steal a taxi and drive from Kansas City to Los Angeles, convinced they've been booked to open for Green Day on New Year's Eve.

Writer/director Lee Kirk developed the story with Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tré Cool. The band is threaded through every layer of the film, from cameos to a 30-track soundtrack featuring 22 career-spanning Green Day cuts and four unreleased live recordings from a Palladium show captured during the making of the film.

Puro's original score has to live inside that framework (he's also scored Lila McLaughlin's Don't Let Them Out, out the same day, and Joseph Hahn's Linkin Park doc Unshatter, due later this year). We spoke with him via Zoom ahead of the film’s release to talk about his work, and to pull out what you can steal from his experience the next time you're working with a composer of your own.

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You Can Bring Your Composer In Early

Puro said Kirk pulled him into the project long before there was a picture to score to. Kirk and the band had been developing the story for a while, he said, and Puro spent months in conversation with Kirk about what the movie was, what it wanted to feel like, and where music might live in it. He watched a rough cut much later.

Puro said he especially likes collaborating with bands (he came up as the drummer for the rock band Deadsy).

“It's a team sport, which I love.”

A composer can come in at many different points of a production. They might see a script, or they might be delivered a final product. But when a director treats the composer as a creative partner from the front end instead of a vendor plugged in during post, the score you get back might be closer to your vision. The director/composer conversation, started early, changes what music can do for your film.

Know When to Cut the Music

With so much of the Nimrods soundtrack occupied by Green Day needle drops, his job was to work around the songs and hold space for the film's quieter beats.

"The score should be the glue that connects the character arcs and the emotional undertone of the film," he said. In practice, that meant weaving in and out of the Green Day songs and getting out of the way. His job "was to almost be unnoticeable."

He also learned to let go. During the spotting session, he said, he pushed for music in more places than the film wound up needing.

"We did end up pulling a lot of things back and out to have that silence because sometimes that works better than music, especially for an emotional scene. You don't always have to have score letting you know," Puro said.

Filmmakers, more music is not more emotion. Sometimes it's the opposite.

'Nimrods'Credit: Inaugural Entertainment

The Temp Track

Puro doesn't hate temp tracks. He just knows what they do to a project.

First, there's the licensing headache every composer probably knows.

"Usually as a composer, you watch a rough cut, and they temp it with The Beatles or Led Zeppelin or just some crazy music that they're never going to be able to afford to license."

Here, that wasn’t the issue, because Green Day was a collaborator on the film, so they had all the Green Day songs from the start. But generally, temp tracks can be their own obstacle.

"I mean, it's hard for people to temp a movie, and it's usually the wrong songs, but with the right emotion. Where they're trying to say, 'I want it to sound like this,'" he said.

He'll take a project either way, with a temp or without. His preferred mode is without. When he starts writing while the director is still shooting, based on conversations rather than a locked cut with a needle drop, he finds things he might have otherwise missed. He said his best work happens when he has "the freedom to try things and not be under the gun, time-wise; you do find some cool things that you might not have found when you're just in it and hustling."

If you're going to temp your film, be honest with your composer about what you truly love in the temp and what you slapped in as a placeholder.

Learn to Translate Vague Notes

Most directors don't speak music, and Puro said that's fine.

"Somebody could be like, 'I want it to have more reverb.' To a non-musician, that can mean so many different things," he said.

His fix is to steer conversations off technical vocabulary and back onto the story. Talk about scene, character, emotional temperature. Then let the composer translate.

Puro said he's gotten wild notes. "I've had people be like, 'I just want it to sound more red.' And you need to know what that translates to. And by talking through it, you can actually get to the core of, ‘Oh, wait, you've sent all these notes, but it's such a simple fix. I know exactly what you want.’"

That kind of translation is the composer's responsibility. "That's your job to translate and bring that vision to life."

So if you're a director without the technical vocabulary, don't fake it. Describe the feeling and let your composer do the translating. Puro would rather hear "red" than a note you don't fully mean or understand.

Spin 10 Plates

Puro's last piece of advice was less about Nimrods and more about being a composer right now. He said the industry demands versatility.

"We have to spin 10, 20 plates at the same time and do all these different projects because you don't know what might lead to what," he said.

With his work spread across horror, comedy, drama, and animation, as well as Viralnoise and his music production company (Gramoscope Music), he has a lot of plates going.

"You can't be too precious in terms of what you think you should be doing or what you think your career should be, I think," he said.

Which reads like advice for filmmakers too.

"Work begets work, and you never know where anything leads."

Nimrods is in theaters August 14, 2026.

Independent filmmaking often means making decisions around time constraints, budget, equipment, and resources. But those decisions also come with important lessons about filmmaking in general and creative solutions that make you better at your craft.

For The Veil Chapter One: Roadkill, the first installment of Brooke Becker and Delaney Sharpe’s new horror anthology series, the filmmakers faced a number of challenges, including a significant electrical setback that cost them 90 minutes of an already tight eight-hour shoot.

Sharpe says, “We learned that resourcefulness isn’t just about solving problems when they arise; it can actually become part of the creative process, forcing you to think differently about how you build tension, environment, and scares.”

In this conversation with No Film School, Becker and Sharpe discuss everything from drawing inspiration from The Haunting of Hill House to navigating challenges on an indie set, including rethinking coverage and shooting setups, incorporating unexpected drone footage, and using practical lighting and post-production techniques to maximize their resources.

Let's dive in.

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NFS: Both, What first sparked the idea for The Veil Chapter One: Roadkill, and what made it the right project to launch Black Ribbon Productions?

Brooke Becker: For this series, I took inspiration from vintage paperback scary story anthologies; the kind I used to get at the Scholastic Book Fair for five dollars and read under the covers at night until I got too scared to sleep. The Veil was developed as an ongoing horror anthology series for YouTube from the beginning, so we wanted to optimize it for the platform by parceling out each story to be a bite-sized watch, leaving you wanting more.

Delaney Sharpe: Brooke and I had been working on pre-production for the first two chapters of The Veil, and at the time, Roadkill was actually slotted to be the second installment. But when Brooke came to me with the script for Chapter Three, I immediately knew we needed to switch the order and put Roadkill first. I think as all three pieces come together, the interweaving connections unfold in a way that will be very satisfying for audiences to uncover.

Credit: Black Ribbon Productions

NFS: Brooke, what did pre-production look like for you as a director on The Veil Chapter One: Roadkill? How did you establish the tone you wanted from the very beginning?

BB: I’m a very visual person, so when I begin to write (and sometimes before I write), I always create a moodboard. Each chapter of The Veil has a distinct color palette and visual tone. One of my favorite tools is ShotDeck, which I use to pull stills for moodboards, cinematography references, and my storyboard. I organize everything in Notion, which makes it easy for me to share with our crew and get feedback from their perspectives. My goal is for everyone on the team to know exactly what we’re getting before we step onto set, and how we’re going to shoot it.

I come to every meeting in preproduction prepared with visuals, questions for our department heads, and ready to receive their technical and creative notes so that we can best collaborate. I never went to film school—my degree is in English—so when I first began producing and directing a few years ago, my years of training and being on set as an actor prepared me for how valuable collaboration and prep is in preproduction. Even if I’m steering the vision, it’s our team who brings it to life, and we’re lucky to have such talented and easy-to-work-with people on our team. The more prepared we are beforehand, the less stressed we’ll be (especially when it’s 2 am and freezing cold), because we have such a solid roadmap.

We knew that we wanted the tone of this show to be grounded but with a lot of room for creativity and world expansion. Roadkill starts us off by establishing our eerie setting in which the veil between this reality and the next wears thin, and our upcoming Chapter Two release, Ophelia, will bring in some more stylized and darkly whimsical elements. Our third chapter… well, you’ll have to wait and see!

NFS: Delaney, since the short unfolds in one continuous scene, what was the biggest challenge of maintaining the character’s emotional intensity throughout the shoot?

DS: For the most part, we actually filmed my coverage all the way through for each take. We’d get set up for the shot, and I would run the scene from top to bottom by myself, without the other characters. Because I was able to go on the full journey each time, I could psych myself up for Lexi’s initial frustration and then progress into the fear and panic. The on-ramp was there every time, so I didn’t have to manufacture each emotional beat in isolation. The challenge really just became reacting to nothing, with sincerity: imagining the voice on the other side of the phone call, the radio popping on, the woman on a bike, etc.

NFS: Brooke, horror is all about creating tension. What filmmaking techniques did you rely on most to build suspense without giving too much away?

BB: We only have a few minutes to tell the story, so I simplified the script as much as possible before we started preproduction (including cutting the character of a passenger for time and budget). We started Roadkill with the shot of the dead rabbit to quickly set the tone and for a little foreshadowing, then moved right into some disarming humor and a simple head-on shot of Lexi to give us a baseline to build on. She drives briefly past a roadside memorial, something we’ve all driven past, which gives the audience a sense of foreboding.

Once the radio pops on for the first time, we cut briefly to a low angle for the first time to begin building suspense. As we continue, the sound design and score from Sarita Gutierrez become more intense, we punch in more on Lexi, and we switch to handheld to provide even more camera movement. We worked with our editor Donnie on pacing in post to make sure that the story was succinct, but didn’t feel rushed.

NFS: Brooke, can you talk about what cameras and lenses you used on The Veil Chapter One: Roadkill?

BB: Our Director of Photography, Steven Busby, shot The Veil on the RED Komodo X and Angenieux EZ Zooms. We discussed utilizing Atlas Mercury Anamorphic lenses, which we used on our previous collaboration Thin Air, a Victorian time-travel horror piece, since they create such a sense of space and isolation. However, we knew we wanted the option to create vertical cuts for platforms since we were intending to distribute through social media, we decided against it for this project.

Brooke Becker and Delaney Sharpe of Black Ribbon Productions Credit: Impact24

NFS: Delaney, you weren't just in front of the camera—you were also involved in the production. Horror filmmakers are often forced to be resourceful; was there a production challenge that ultimately made the project better?

DS: We had a pretty significant technical setback during the filming of Roadkill. There was an electrical issue that resulted in about a 90-minute delay in our shooting schedule, which, on an already tight eight-hour shoot, felt catastrophic. We had to cut some shots and were worried we would find ourselves in the edit with insufficient coverage. Thankfully, after doing as much as we could in our limited window, we wrapped up the day with some quick, not-exactly planned, drone shots to make up for the coverage we’d lost. The drone moments ended up looking incredible and certainly heightened the production value of the project. I don’t think Roadkill would have had the same visual identity without them.

NFS: The film takes place in a constantly moving car, shot from the inside and out. Are there any tips you would give to indie filmmakers about shooting a scene like this?

BB: For Roadkill, we put extra emphasis on safety, especially since we had crew filming around a moving car and an actor on a bike in the dark. We rigged both the car and the bike for moving shots, and our main straight-on shot of Delaney was actually filmed stationary while a crew member gently shook the car. Shadows, lights, and extra shake were added in post by our editor/VFX artist Donnie Mathias to blend it seamlessly with our shots where we’re actually moving, then our colorist Ashton Thomas tied it all together.

Our DP Steven adds, “We had a very limited stretch of road to work with, and it would have been difficult to rig a light onto the hood in order to motivate the glow of the headlights to get the look we wanted. We opted to keep the car stationary for that shot, get our headlight glow as key with a couple of Aputure 300xs, and give some soft moonlight from the side and rear of the vehicle with a 1200x.

The profile shot was through the rolled-down passenger window with a Mathews hostess tray. That was a fairly simple rig, and our main concern was keeping the driver and the camera safe, which we were able to do with a safety cable wrapped around the frame of the car door. We were also very fortunate that our scene called for a slow pursuit. If you have the resources, don’t skimp on the equipment that will keep your camera safe!”

Black Ribbon Production's The Veil

NFS: Because you're now running a production company together, did making this short influence the way you think about the kinds of stories Black Ribbon Productions should tell? What other projects are in the pipeline?

BB: Before we started writing anything, we got specific on what we wanted our channel to be, and what stories we wanted to tell in general through our company. We spent about seven months developing the company and our vision before we began filming The Veil. Our team is majority female and nonbinary, and we knew that we wanted our projects to reflect underrepresented voices while remaining focused on storytelling.

DS: I think our time making The Veil helped to solidify some of our M.O.s—the ways we want to go about filming and telling these stories. We were already quite set in the “why” of what we are doing, but production for The Veil refined the “how.” We’ll be taking those lessons into the next chapters of our original anthology, as well as the other projects we produce. We are currently in pre-production for a sci-fi/horror short centering around the dangers of A.I. in healthcare, called “Emergence,” created by Ambar Martinez (The Pitt, 9-1-1) and directed by J. Scott Miller.

Black Ribbon Production's The Veil

NFS: Delaney, what did producing this short teach you about the resourcefulness and problem-solving required to make an effective horror film on a smaller scale?

DS: I think our best ideas can come from navigating limitation. Some of the most creative and inventive work is happening on sets without multi-million dollar budgets, so it was affirming to see what we could achieve with our relatively small team. We learned that resourcefulness isn’t just about solving problems when they arise; it can actually become part of the creative process, forcing you to think differently about how you build tension, environment, and scares. And while chapters two and three are on their way, I’m proud of the complete (and truly scary) story we were able to tell in just two and half minutes.

Black Ribbon Production's The Veil

NFS: Were there any films or filmmakers that inspired the visual language or atmosphere of the short?

BB: For Roadkill, I pulled visual references from The Haunting of Hill House (which has one of the most effective car jump scares I’ve ever seen—IYKYK), Euphoria, and Speak No Evil, among others. I also referenced the episode of The Midnight Club called Road to Nowhere, which takes place largely in a car. I love Mike Flanagan’s ability to create tension, and Tim Burton’s whimsical-yet-creepy, almost otherworldly style. One of my goals as a filmmaker is bringing my own style and personal experiences as a woman into my work, which is something that I didn’t grow up watching, especially in the horror space.

Sometimes, you're not in the mood for rainbows and cotton candy. You need something with a bit more edge, for whatever reason. There are times as a movie viewer (or human being) that you don't feel like sunshine and want comedy with a bite.

Enter the dark comedy. It's a genre I love, and it's also one of the most risky, razor-thin tones to hit as a writer and/or director. The humor still has to hit, but it almost feels like a punch to the gut at the same time, like you aren't sure if you have permission to laugh. The drama behind the bits is often heavy, but the levity gives you just enough room.

And, heck, I'm in the mood for that this week. Here are five of our favorites that walked the line perfectly, and what the filmmakers said about that.

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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Is there an easier example than Dr. Strangelove? The kooky, madcap drama of a world on the brink of nuclear disaster shouldn't work as well as it does, but the fact that every character buys into the high drama and ridiculous reasoning of the story (and that you have Peter Sellers in multiple roles) makes this a blast. Pun intended.

Stanley Kubrick adapted the thriller from Peter George's Red Alert. He realized there was an inherent absurdism in the narrative that couldn't be avoided.

"During the past six years," Kubrick told Terry Southern (via Filmmaker Magazine), "I've read almost every available book on the nuclear situation, including regular issues of Air Force Magazine, Missiles and Rockets, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and so on. What has struck me is their cautious sterility of ideas, the reverence of obsolete national goals, the breeziness of crackpot realism, the paradox of nuclear threatsmanship, the desperately utopian wish fantasies about Soviet intentions, and the terrifying logic of paranoiac fears and suspicions. The present world seems very much like a neurotic paralyzed by incompatible goals."

Kubrick later called the film a "nightmare comedy," per The Hollywood Reporter. If that's not a dark comedy, we don't know what is.

If you're attacking a story, and something isn't quite right, try a different tonal approach.

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Harold and Maude

Another classic. Hal Ashby put a suicidal teen in a relationship with a 79-year-old dying woman who lives on the edge, and somehow it all makes sense. It's a beautiful story about a young man finding purpose in life through his obsession with death.

Ashby died in 1988 and was fairly reclusive. Colin Higgins (the film's screenwriter) developed the story while in UCLA Film School. It unfortunately flopped.

Producer Charles Mulvehill told Variety:

We thought it was a great film. It was really a shock when it was released and nobody cared. Nobody came and nobody cared. The marketing wasn’t terrific. Nobody really knew how to approach the subject. The minute you mentioned an 80-year-old woman and a 20-year-old boy, you could see the eyes glaze over. I was really shocked at the reception that it got. The first review I read was Variety—“It’s as funny as a burning orphanage.” I couldn’t believe it.

If you missed this one, give it a watch. It's a deeply affecting, quirky story. And filmmakers, make the movie you want. You'll find your audience, even if it's years later.

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Heathers

Apparently, teenage death is a theme in black comedies, because in Heathers, the high school comedy is turned on its head. It's John Hughes turned dark, on purpose, written by Daniel Waters and directed by Michael Lehmann.

Veronica Sawyer is the odd girl out in a clique full of, you guessed it, Heathers. She falls in with edgy outsider, and soon they're both committing murders while the rest of their schoolmates grieve in ridiculous, performative ways. Trust me, it's funny.

Waters said (via SBIFF), "The teen films of the time, the John Hughes films, were fun. But there's a whole other wing of the high school they weren't going into—the dark, Stephen King wing that nobody wanted to look at. And I think Heathers was refreshing. It was the first time a lot of people lost their dark humor virginity."

Need a way to freshen up a genre? Take something that's working and give it a dark twist like the team did here.

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The Lobster

Frankly, any Yorgos Lanthimos movie could land on a list like this, because they're all weird, dark, and somehow affecting at the same time. Characters inhabit his worlds with a unique earnestness as they struggle through situations.

The Lobster was his English-language debut. It's about a world where single people must find a partner—or they risk turning into an animal. It's all very grim, played totally seriously.

The filmmaker spoke to Cinemacy about the story's themes:

What I was interested in is showing the irony of one character who escapes from one system believing that he can be free in a different system. Even the Loners themselves, they’re supposedly free because they’re going against the system but the irony of it is in order to create this other system they have to have their own rules as well. That ends up being very similarly oppressive. I like that irony. I think it poses questions about whether you are ever free to think or feel the way you want.

Sometimes delivery can sell your tone just as much as the story. The deadpan line readings here have persisted through much of Lanthimos' work.

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In Bruges

If you have to name a filmmaker who lives in the dark comedy space, it's Martin McDonagh, whose jokes are so biting and shocking and offensive that you sometimes feel bad for laughing. In Bruges was one of the biggest black comedies of the aughts.

Two hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) have to hide in a quaint Belgian town. What could go wrong? These are two powder-keg guys just waiting to explode.

McDonagh told IndieWire, "I'm interested in the strange skewed attitudes of violent men. You don't cause the death of an innocent, and you can't overcome it if you do: that was Harry's code. The film's characters are immoral, but there's a line you don't cross."

Dark characters don't immediately mean they're unlikeable, even if they're doing terrible things. As you're developing yours, find the "code" they operate within, what makes them human.

It's safe to say that The Godfather trilogy is one of the greatest of all time. It covers the Corleone family from their time in Italy to America and then back to Italy once again. There are whole lives, a lot of death, and it plays out like a tragedy.

All this is wound into three distinct mafia movies.

Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo built the trilogy around the friction between personal loyalty and ruthless capitalism. And each movie takes on a different timeline to show how that stays true the whole time.

There are so many great lines across all the movies that I want to give a little attention to the third film, which gets maligned and unfairly juxtaposed against the other two.

Within, there's a philosophical discussion that I think echoes all the lessons Michael Corleone has learned across the films.

So today, we're going to unpack that Godfather: Part III quote and what it means.

Let's dive in.

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The Scene in Question

The third movie follows the same sort of mold as the other two, opening on a party where we're caught up on all the family drama and then unfolding the fallout.

Like the other iterations, we see the plan to make more money for the family and to expand their empire.

We follow an aging Don Michael Corleone who attempts to legitimize himself and move completely away from the mafia by pouring massive capital into Vatican-controlled real estate, which effectively cleans all his money.

Michael has a meeting with Archbishop Gilday, who reveals that the Church's financial arm has racked up astronomical deficits through corrupt deals and misplaced trust.

And all this happened because he trusted his friend, and he got betrayed.

Now, Archbishop Gilday needs a bailout from Michael Corleone.

Gilday attempts to gloss over the catastrophe with platitudes about faith and life, but Michael cuts through that. In many ways, he's a much smarter mafia boss than the church. And he makes sure they know it and his stance on this going forward.

"Friendship and money. Oil and water."

What The Quote Means

I'm sure you've probably heard that you should never give money to a friend and expect it back. But if you take money from the mafia, you should know they're not your friends.

Sure, this is good advice on the surface, but in the movie, it serves a very distinct purpose. This is Don Corleone telling the church he can bail them out, but he wants something in return:

Majority holdings in a European real estate company.

There's a deep cynicism here, and this work mirrors what Michael's father did to gain control of New York back in the day, too.

And even when people try to stop this, Michael uses the leverage his father taught him to use to get the power and wealth he needs in order to take care of his family and to move his whole company into the legitimate space, leaving the mafia behind forever.

This solidifies the position that family is everything, and that money gives you power.

Summing It All Up

These six words capture the Corleone family and how they take advantage of people. From the first time when they wanted to be friends with the movie producer to the friends who took advantage of Fredo in the second.

Michael knows that money is the most important thing next to family, and that's why he's survived this long, and it drives all these decisions in the final movie, too.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

The world lost an action movie titan when Chuck Norris passed away earlier this year. And while he may be gone, he’s certainly not forgotten. One of the biggest stars of the 80s and 90s “ultimate” era of action movies, Norris was a familiar name alongside other box-office marquee regulars like Arnold, Stallone, Willis, and Van Damme.

Yet, while all of these action stars were larger than life in their own ways, Chuck Norris has a legacy that took on a life of its own and surpassed even the greatest, most impressive, and heroic feats of his peers.

Thanks in part to Conan O’Brien, Walker, Texas Ranger levers and online jokes, many of these throwaway moments from Norris’ filmography became some of the most iconic memes in film history. And today we honor one of the greatest ones of them all from Forest Warrior (1996).

Looking Back at ‘Forest Warrior’ (1996)

Released in 1996 as a direct-to-video title directed by Chuck Norris’ brother Aaron, who actually had a pretty prolific action career in his own right, serving as a stunt performer and director in many of Chuck’s films and television shows over their careers, Forest Warrior might have been the final nail in the coffin in Chuck’s marquee action movie career.

Released the same year as the first episode of Walker, Texas Ranger, Chuck and his crew were about to make the successful transition from action movies to the safe confines of family-drama television, as Walker would go on to be a primetime mainstay on CBS for nearly a decade.

Yet, when filmed, Forest Warrior was always going to be a low-budget, DTV-style project cashing in on Chuck’s star power one more time, even as audiences were beginning to be ready to move on from the over-the-top action style of the 80s and early 90s.

Chuck Norris as Jebediah McKenna

Chuck Norris plays Jebediah McKenna, a frontiersman killed a century ago, who is magically brought back to life to protect the forest he loved. He’s also able to transform into a bear, wolf, or eagle and uses his powers to fight a sinister logging conglomerate.

Also, as you might expect, Chuck’s McKenna character is a master of Native American martial arts and gets to go through his usual mix of action-movie fights and feats.

One scene in particular stands out, though, for its absolute awesomeness: Chuck’s character stops a chainsaw with his bare hands in a manner that, we’re happy to report, is about as cheesy and awesome as anything ever put to film before it.

The Legacy of Silly Action

Still, if you haven’t seen it, you absolutely should watch Forest Warrior if you get a chance because it’s really in these films that it isn’t inhibited by needing to be a major release. Like many of its '80s and '90s action counterparts, particularly the Cannon Films features, it clearly is a film that wasn’t stressed over in terms of story or performance.

But that’s exactly why it was able to give us these iconic moments, which, while funny and fun to rewatch today, honestly weren’t even too egregious at the time. It was fun movie fodder then, and it is now, and it’s proof that movies don’t have to be classics to be enjoyed for decades.

For animation and design studio Good Secrets, finding the visual language of a project always starts with understanding the heart of the story. On the HBO docuseries U.S. Against the World, that meant creating a bold, handcrafted visual identity that matched the grit, swagger, and emotional intensity of the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team in the lead-up to the 2026 World Cup.

Working closely with the series creators, Good Secrets developed a dynamic title sequence and graphics package that helped anchor the docuseries' non-linear narrative, seamlessly blending archival treatments, scorecards, maps, and animated sequences into a cohesive visual world. The team grounded their workflow in a scalable design system with Adobe After Effects, Essential Graphics, and Motion Graphics Templates (MOGRTs), ensuring their assets could evolve alongside an edit that was constantly changing.

We spoke with Creative Director Casey Latiolais about building the show's distinctive aesthetic, balancing creativity with the demands of a five-hour docuseries, and why sometimes the best design starts with scissors, paper, and spray paint.

How did you begin the design process for U.S. Against the World?

Casey Latiolais: We got involved because we liked the story and knew the show was going to be good. We were also handed a huge canvas, and that's an offer you can’t turn down.

We coordinated closely with the post-house so our graphics dropped into their pipeline without friction. Episodes and segments kept changing right up to the end, so we built for change. Templates for everything, sorted into categories: archival treatments, scorecards, locations, maps, etc.

With a non-linear story, there's a lot of jumping around. Our job was keeping the viewer grounded through all of it.

What conversations did you have with the wider team to align on the creative vision for the project? What did collaboration look like throughout production and post?

CL: Our earliest conversations with series creators Rand Getlin and Janina Pelayo, alongside Creative Director Lucas Harger, centered around giving these athletes a profound human authenticity. We agreed it needed to feel 70% hip hop and 30% punk rock to match the team's raw, scrappy energy. Throughout production, collaboration was a year-long marathon of constant iteration. Once we collectively cracked that gritty, handcrafted recipe, our animation team shifted into high gear and chewed through the massive workload.

Tell us about a favorite scene or moment from this project, and why it stands out to you.

CL: The main title sequence is undoubtedly our favorite moment and our absolute pièce de résistance. We actually designed the in-show graphics first to nail down the aesthetic, which meant the title sequence was one of the final pieces we created. We looked at the elements we had peppered throughout the episodes and asked ourselves, "If those sequences are a 5, what does a 10 look like?" We threw everything we had at it; spray paint, collages, and scratched film, to create an intro that perfectly sets the tone for the series.

What tools did you use on this project and why did you choose them?

CL: For the heavy-handed/complicated designs, we built within After Effects’ Essential Graphics. By building a robust system, we were able to have designer/animators jump in quickly to make changes to an ever-evolving edit. We also set up the editors with some Motion Graphic Templates (MOGRTs) to make all our lives easier. This gave them the power to change in-game clock/score, lower thirds, and subtitles without having to make the round trip to Good Secrets.

What were some specific post-production challenges you faced that were unique to the project? How did you tackle them?

CL: The sheer volume of deliverables, spanning a docuseries with five hours of non-linear storytelling, was our biggest hurdle. We had to figure out how to make hundreds of assets, scorecards, timeline portals, and archival photo treatments feel visually interesting without overpowering the narrative. We tackled this by establishing a scalable, repeatable visual recipe early on, allowing us to plow through a massive graphics order while maintaining a handcrafted look.

Who is your creative inspiration?

CL: Justin Harder and Mike Russo are two incredible designers we have looked at for years as inspiration. So we just reached out and asked if they wanted to jam together. There’s something really liberating about having a cool project; it’s hard to find a creative who would say no. We’ve gotten to work with a couple of the greats, and it was an incredible experience having them integrated with our CD/Designer/Animator Preston Gibson and the rest of our team.

What advice do you have for aspiring filmmakers or content creators?

CL: Don't be afraid to step away from the computer and get your hands dirty. The human authenticity of our project came from literally printing out frames, cutting them with scissors, and using real spray paint before ever hitting keyframes. Sometimes, the best way to stand out in a purely digital world is to embrace the imperfections, scratches, and happy accidents of physical art.

Steadicam has introduced its new Elite Stabilizer Sled, designed for broadcast applications and set to feature a smarter design and a much wider range of integrated controls.

A familiar name in the Steadicam business, Steadicam certainly knows its technology and niche very well. So when Steadicam drops a new, you know, steadicam, you know it’s going to be a top option for those looking for a trusted level of sophisticated stabilization.

And that’s what the new Elite Stabilizer Sled from Steadicam appears to offer as a lightweight stabilization system for broadcast applications, set to feature a smarter design and a wide variety of integrated controls.

Let’s look into it.

Steadicam Elite Stabilizer Sled

While it’s being marketed for broadcast applications, this new Elite Stabilizer Sled from Steadicam could certainly be used for more than just that. However, if you do work in broadcast and are looking for a new, lightweight stabilization system, this one will be no slouch, as it’s set to come equipped with two adjustable V-mount battery plates that can be pivoted and shifted around for optimal placement—giving users plenty of flexibility in terms of balance and motion.

This new Stabilizer Sled will also feature a rigid top stage that should help reduce vibration transfer, increasing 30 lb load capacity and stability. It will also have some helpful fine-adjust controls on the side of the stage that should further help it be ready for quick, intuitive on-the-fly adjustments.

The company also reports that this Elite version will come with an integrated 3-axis Volt gimbal and pan assistance to help users maintain their horizon line.

Price and Availability

The new Steadicam Elite Stabilizer Sled will be available with selectable 12V and 24V power distribution options, supported by the sled without requiring external adapters. Users will also be able to add a monitor of their choice thanks to the universal yoke-style monitor mount, and easily place the sled down when not in use with the docking bracket.

The Steadicam Elite Stabilizer Sled is available for preorder now; if you’re interested, you can find the full specs and purchase options below.

• 30 lb Load Capacity
• Rigid Top Stage, Fine-Adjust Controls
• Integrated 3-Axis Volt with Pan Control
• Dual V-Mount Battery Plates
• 12/24V Selectable Power Distribution
• Universal Yoke-Style Monitor Mount
• Docking Bracket

Steadicam Elite Stabilizer Sled

The Elite Stabilizer Sled from Steadicam offers a lightweight stabilization system for broadcast applications with a smarter design and a wide variety of integrated controls. This version of the sled comes equipped with two adjustable V-mount battery plates that can be pivoted and shifted around for optimal placement.

I wanted to write about something ridiculous today. So I legit was like, what are three words that I think would stand out on the opening page of a script and get me to lean in? What started as a new exercise for me quickly became this post.

Before you write an email to me in anger, I want to tell you that this is not prescriptive. Do whatever you need to do, write whatever you want.

But this was a fun way to break me out of my normalcy and try to do something unique on the opening page of my script.

Let's have some fun.

1. "EXCEPT"

Okay, this was one I was playing with this morning. You want the opening page to set expectations: genre, protagonist, and tone.

But what if you started on a subversion?

Starting a script with an exception instantly creates conflict, whether on the page or in the reader's mind.

You can force the reader to ask a question. If everything in the world functions one way except for this one person, place, or rule, the story has already begun.

Let's expand on that idea.

• How to use it: Put it right in your opening action description or voiceover to disrupt the status quo in sentence one.
• Example: Everyone in Suburbia Heights cleans their gutter on Sunday morning. Except Arthur. Arthur spends Sunday mornings throwing rock salt at the mailman.

See how that shows us who Arthur is right away? We see this is the exception to a rule, the one person who rebels, and we also see he's kind of a nutty guy, too.

2. "SUDDENLY"

I probably overuse this word in my writing, but why not add one more on the first page just to set the reader up for a few others in big moments along the way?

Seriously though, when placed intentionally, a word like "suddenly" acts as a sudden jolt to the reader's pulse. It signals the exact moment the normal world collapses and something exciting steps in. Page one needs energy. This word provides it.

• How to use it: Isolate it on its own line or use it to interrupt a mundane moment with immediate danger, surprise, or comedy.
• Example: Elena carefully picks the lock. Suddenly—the floor gives out, and she falls through.

3. "WRONG"

I'm always searching for the right words, but what if the right word is the wrong one?

Whether a character makes a catastrophic mistake, misinterprets a situation, or realizes they've walked into a trap, the word "wrong" delivers dramatic irony that can layer your theme into the very first page.

Audiences love knowing something a character doesn't, or finding out a plan has fallen apart. It sets up immediate stakes for the reader.

• How to use it: Use it in action lines to highlight a miscalculation or reveal that something or someone isn't what it appears to be.
• Example: Leo checks his GPS, grins, and steps into the elevator, convinced he’s following the tracking device. But if he bothered to look up to see the dead body, he'd know he was completely wrong.

Summing It All Up

I hope these words help you get out of your own head and just write the best scene possible. Using subversively simple words like EXCEPT, SUDDENLY, and WRONG on page one keeps the reader turning pages and eager to see what happens next.

And hopefully it gets you writing page two onward, as well.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

We all know that opening scenes are all about setting the tone for the movie, but if you're strapping in for a war film, how can you set the genre while also delivering something more surprising than just a battle?

We already know that when we're watching one of these kinds of films, the stakes are inherently life-and-death. Today, I want to talk about how the best opening scenes in war movie history use that to their advantage, while also finding a way to set the theme right from the start.

Let's dive in.

1. Apocalypse Now (1979): The Art of the Psychological Dissolve

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The opening of this movie functions as a Doors music video juxtaposed against the horror of Vietnam. You get the music, the sound of the helicopters, the exploding jungle, and suddenly you're inside Francis Ford Coppola's madness.

He and legendary sound designer Walter Murch collaborated to deliver one of the most iconic openings in cinematic history.

• The Technique: Slow-motion dissolves overlay a line of peaceful palm trees and a thumping helicopter blade, taking us to an overhead fan beating down hot air on the ghostly, upside-down face of Captain Willard (Martin Sheen). We're right inside this guy's mind, and we can see the toll war has already taken on him. And it's going to ask for more.
• The Sound Design: Murch was actually the first person credited as a sound designer ever for this movie. He matched the rhythmic whirp-whirp of helicopter blades to the sound of a ceiling fan in Willard’s Saigon hotel room. It set the existential tone right away without needing any words.
• Filmmaking Lesson: You don't need a multi-million-dollar explosion to convey internal chaos. Sure, we have one here, but the real tension is bringing us into Sheen's frame of mind and thenhis stupoor of drinking and thrashing. This is a guy on the brink, given a mission that will only take him further. We can tell the theme of this movie is a man at war with himself right away.

2. Saving Private Ryan (1998): Visceral Immersion and Subjective Camera

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Two videos? Yeah, I'm cheating. We're talking just the whole movie opening here. While most people want to talk about Omaha Beach, it doesn't really work without the old man at the start.

This is a movie about survival. By showing us a person who made it through, we're given life and death, but we're also given a story of someone who lived. That becomes very important later.

Then, we roll right into a match cut to Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach. Now, this scene changed war cinematography forever. Janusz Kamiński’s camerawork rejected Hollywood slickness in favor of documentary-style chaos that gave real veterans PTSD when they watched.

• The Technique: Kamiński used a 45-degree shutter angle (which removes motion blur and creates a crisp, jarring, staccato effect), handheld camera work at eye level, and desaturated color grading to make us feel like we were at war. It was staggering for the audience to consume.
• The Pacing: After a brief present-day framing device at the Normandy cemetery, Spielberg strips away the non-diegetic musical score entirely during the 20-minute landing sequence. It's like he tricks us, takes a movie away, and presents reality. He took away the safety nets, and we really were now in this old man's mind.
• Filmmaking Lesson: Spielberg forces the audience into the perspective of an infantryman and then never lets go for three hours. Test your scene without music; do you need them to feel the reality or can you survive without it?

3. Inglourious Basterds (2009): Sustained Tension Through Dialogue and Spatial Awareness

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We've written a much longer post about the Inglourious Basterds opening scene, but you have to mention it here for how it sets the tone of the movie and also leans into Tarantino's auteur aesthetic.

Quentin Tarantino proves that war is fought just as ruthlessly in a quiet dairy farm kitchen as it is on the front lines, as long as you have a scary enough villain present.

The opening scene introduces Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) and sets the story of a relentless killer who will never stop.

We are now on a journey of someone who has to kill him or be killed.

• The Technique: The scene relies on Hitchcock’s "Bomb Under the Table" suspense theory. The audience learns early on that a Jewish family is hiding beneath the floorboards. So now we have this massive dramatic irony while Landa politely sips milk and threatens their lives above.
• The Geometry: Tarantino uses blocking and slow push-in tracking shots that gradually tighten the frame as Landa’s polite questioning turns into an interrogation. And we feel his clever camera work. The story becomes claustrophobic.
• Filmmaking Lesson: High tension doesn't require motion or gunfire. You just have to add a bomb under the table and then edit it in a way that brings the audience into the story and sets them up for the rest.

4. Dunkirk (2017): Acoustic Tension and Environmental Horror

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I think this is one of Nolan's best movies. It grips you right away and catches you up on the situation very quickly. This is him doing a simple plot extremely well. It's a rescue mission, and these guys can't retreat; they're literally on the beach facing the water. They need boats.

• The Technique: Nolan uses long takes following characters from behind. We get the emphasis of their isolation before a sudden sniper attack forces them to run, and we get the reveal of the full situation.
• The Sound: Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack incorporates a Shepard tone, which creates the auditory illusion of a continually rising pitch—alongside the physical ticking of Nolan's pocket watch.
• Filmmaking Lesson: Instead of characters discussing the situation, German propaganda flyers falling from the sky visually tell the audience: You are surrounded. Then, after running, we see how bad it is and immediately understand that the story is to get off that beach.

Summing It All Up

I'm sure I could figure out more scenes to put on here, but these came to mind first. I think they have diverse lessons and give filmmakers a glimpse at what it's like to boil it down to an opener and to set the audience up to understand what's happening.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Another Blackmagic Design firmware update is out, this time with the latest Desktop Video update (version 16.3), focused on adding improvements for the DeckLink 8K Pro Mini, as well as other top models in this space.

If you’re currently using Blackmagic Design’s low-profile, 8-lane PCIe Gen2 digital cinema capture and playback card, or interested in adding it to your workflows, here’s what you need to know about this latest update and what it’s set to add with new support for HANC capture and playback.

Blackmagic Design Desktop Video Update

While this isn’t a major Desktop Video update from Blackmagic Design, it is notable for those who use or are interested in a few specific products. Namely, the DeckLink 8K Pro Mini, the DeckLink 8K Pro G2, and the UltraStudio Express Monitor 3G, as all three of these products are set to get improvements.

However, while the latter two are mostly just getting minor bug fixes, the DeckLink 8K Pro Mini is set to get the biggest boost with new support for capturing and playing back horizontal ancillary data, as well as improved ancillary data capture.

This should be quite welcome news for anyone using this popular low-profile 8-lane PCIe Gen2 digital cinema capture and playback card, which has a lot of appeal thanks to its four bidirectional 12G-SDI micro-BNC connectors, which allow it to be a nice option for accepting resolutions from SD, DCI 4K (4096 x 2160), and DCI 8K at up to 60 fps.

Desktop Video Update 16.3

Here’s the full list of everything in Desktop Video 16.3:

New feature on DeckLink 8K Pro Mini:

• Add support for HANC capture and playback.

Bug fix on DeckLink 8K Pro G2:

• Fix a bug preventing capture of some HANC packets in 6G and 12G modes.

Bug fix for UltraStudio Express Monitor 3G:

• Fix intermittent playback issue in 1080p23.98 and 1080p29.97 formats.

And here’s the full breakdown of what models are currently supported for this update:

• DeckLink Duo 2
• DeckLink Quad 2
• DeckLink Quad HDMI Recorder
• DeckLink 8K Pro G2
• DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G
• DeckLink IP HD
• DeckLink IP HD Optical
• DeckLink IP/SDI HD
• DeckLink IP 100G
• DeckLink Micro Recorder
• DeckLink SDI Micro
• DeckLink Mini Monitor HD
• DeckLink Mini Monitor 4K
• DeckLink Mini Recorder HD
• DeckLink Mini Recorder 4K
• DeckLink SDI 4K
• DeckLink Studio 4K
• UltraStudio Recorder 3G
• UltraStudio Monitor 3G
• UltraStudio Express Recorder 3G
• UltraStudio Express Monitor 3G
• UltraStudio Mini Recorder 12G
• UltraStudio Mini Monitor 12G
• UltraStudio Mini Replay 12G
• UltraStudio HD Mini
• UltraStudio 4K Mini
• UltraStudio 4K Extreme 3
• Intensity Pro 4K
• ATEM Mini Extreme ISO G2

Third Party Software Support:

• DaVinci Resolve 20 and 21.
• Fusion Studio 20 and 21.
• Apple Final Cut Pro.
• Adobe Premiere Pro CC 25 and 26.
• Adobe After Effects CC 25 and 26.
• Adobe Photoshop CC 25 and 26.
• Adobe Character Animator CC 25 and 26.
• Autodesk Flame 2026.
• Avid Media Composer 2026.
• Avid Pro Tools 2026.
• Magix Vegas Pro 23.
• Foundry Nuke.

Blackmagic Design does recommend that if you have installed the drivers prior to installing any of these applications, they recommend that you uninstall and reinstall the drivers. This will ensure that all relevant components are installed in their required locations.

For more info, you can head over to Blackmagic Design’s website here.

There are a few shortcuts we can use as filmmakers to quickly gain audience buy-in, and telling a story about friendship is one method. It can be the driving force of a narrative regardless of genre and often is. Or it can just add emotional texture. Either way, you can hang a lot on friendships, whether they're just developing or long-established, because of what it reveals about characters and backstories.

Buddy comedies, romance films, enemies-to-friends tales—so many stories rely on characters having this most fundamental relationship. You can build an entire universe around friendship.

Today we're taking a look at some of the most iconic movie friendships and what they can teach us. Come on, buddy!

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Sam and Frodo in The Lord of the Rings

Trust me, you could pick almost any duo from Peter Jackson's trilogy as an example of strong friendship. Merry and Pippin, Legolas and Gimli... Saruman and Wormtongue. But the most iconic pair has to be Sam (Sean Astin) and Frodo (Elijah Wood), the Hobbits who saved Middle-earth.

Astin told The Wrap that the emotional scene when Sam runs after Frodo at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring wasn't even in the original script.

"When Frodo and Sam go off on their own at the end of the first film, that scene wasn't written until well into the production. Like well, well, well into the production. And Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens wanted Elijah [Wood] and I to come and have a meeting with them, and we were like, 'Well, this is new.'"

What emerged from that scene was the beginning of a brotherly devotion between the pair. If you're finding a friendship, maybe the biggest moments come out of rewrites when you're already shooting. Jackson did this often as he was cutting and keeping from J.R.R. Tolkien.

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Butch and Sundance in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

William Goldman's screenplay for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is pretty much the template for the buddy movie. Butch (Paul Newman) and Sundance (Robert Redford) don't really have backstory but share a bond that comes alive in their scenes together.

George Roy Hill, the film's director, talks about the making of the film in a documentary from producer Robert Crawford (via INSP). He said:

Most actors can sometimes be a terrible pain in the ass, where they're jealous of each other. But on thth iis one, even though they didn't know each other before they started, Bob and Paul consciously established a relationship that was excellent. It included Redford having to laugh at all of Newman's God-awful jokes.

We wrote recently about one of Butch's key lines from the film and how it reveals their viewpoints.

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Harry and Sally in When Harry Met Sally

Can men and women just be friends? This film argues that question and ultimately loses the fight, but it's worth it to see Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan) talk for 10 years before they fall in love.

The late Rob Reiner told CNN's Chris Wallace that the film originally ended with the pair walking away from each other (via The Hollywood Reporter). "I met my wife Michele, who I've been married to now 35 years. I met her while we were making the film, and I changed the ending."

The emotional finale works because Reiner had been on both sides of the argument and could sell friendship and romance. Nora Ephron's script is one of the best ever written.

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Thelma and Louise in Thelma & Louise

Two women (Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon) drive off for a weekend away and end up in over their heads, wth the bond between them sustaining their journey.

Writer Callie Khouri told Variety at the film's 30th anniversary screening that the finale was like a lightning bolt. "It literally just appeared in my head. And I knew that that was the ending."

Of the characters' kiss, Sarandon said:

“I just felt by that time that they were finishing each other’s sentences and that they loved each other and this was a big moment and the sun was going down. We had one take because they spent all day with the helicopters and everything else. It just felt right… it was just an intuition thing.”

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Molly and Amy in Booksmart

Booksmart was Olivia Wilde's celebrated directorial debut, and it follows two high school best friends (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever) as they're about to graduate and move on to college. As overachievers, they decide to use the night to party hard and make up for lost time. Some call it the femme Superbad, but the female friendship gives it a totally different tone.

Wilde told NPR:

Society gives us so much context for the romantic relationship—there are so many love songs about romantic relationships ... beginning the middle and the end. We have very few love songs, movies, stories about friendship — platonic friendship—and yet it is in so many ways deeper. ...
People realize this later in life after maybe romances come and go—that those friendships are incredibly significant. And I hope that this film allows people to look around them and value those friendships even more.

Bottoms has a similar pair in a high school setting if you need a recommendation for a double feature.

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Bill and Ted in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Is there a more quotable '80s film with a more bodacious couple of dudes? I think not. Bill S. Preston Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted "Theodore" Logan (Keanu Reeves) go traveling through time in this teen comedy to pass their history final and go on to become rock stars. The two characters love and support each other through all their dumb mistakes.

Writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon told Flickering Myth that part of what made the movie work was the chemistry between the actors. Matheson said, "We got so monumentally lucky with those two guys. We really did. Not only that, but these two guys really legit like each other. And they're not Bill and Ted, but the depth of their friendship is real. You feel that, and it's beautiful."

It's one of Reeves' best.

Can you remember the movie that made you want to work in film? That memory is a little hazy for me. I had a few distinct childhood periods of hyperfixation that certainly contributed, including a paleontology phase inspired by Jurassic Park and a space obsession triggered by Apollo 13 and Star Wars. Soon I had stolen my family's camera and was making videos whenever I could wrangle my cousins as crew.

It's always interesting to see those inspiration points in other storytellers, too. What about Timothée Chalamet?

In 2024, the actor gave an interview to The New York Times alongside Denis Villeneuve in which they discussed the making of Dune: Part Two. During the discussion, he revealed the movie that made him want to be an actor was Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

He would have been 12 years old at the time. It's safe to call this a formative experience for him. Isn't it wild how some moving images on a screen can change a person's life?

We want to look at that phenomenon today. What did Chalamet see in the film, and what can filmmakers learn?

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Why the Screening Changed Everything

Chalamet was asked about whether he'd been offered superhero roles, which the reporter noted had started to fizzle out in the zeitgeist.

"Well, Leonardo DiCaprio said to me, 'No superhero movies, no hard drugs,'" he replied. "Which I thought was very good."

Villeneuve asked which particular bit of advice he was following.

"I follow them both!" he said. "But the movie that made me want to act is a superhero movie, The Dark Knight. If the script was great, if the director was great, I'd have to consider it."

This isn't the first time Chalamet has mentioned the movie's impact on him. In 2018, he received the Best Actor award at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards for Call Me by Your Name. He said (via IndieWire):

"When I was 12 years old, after attending one of my sister Pauline's [ballet] performances, I petitioned my Mom and grandma to see Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight with me. We went to AMC Empire 25 in Times Square for a 7:30 screening. I left that theatre a changed man, and I'm serious about that. Heath Ledger's performance in that film was visceral and viral to me, and I now had the acting bug. I didn't know that around that time, Mr. Ledger was accepting the award for Best Actor at the New York Film Critics Circle for Brokeback Mountain. I didn't know that a brilliant director halfway across the world named Luca Guadagnino was beginning preproduction on a film called I Am Love. I didn't know that Michael Stuhlbarg was wowing audiences in The Pillowman on Broadway. I didn't know that a nervous Armie Hammer was getting prepared to audition for David Fincher in The Social Network. I did not know that a genius author named André Aciman was in a small apartment on the Upper West Side putting the finishing touches on a book called Call Me By Your Name. And there was certainly no idea that I would get to collaborate with all of these incredible artists some eight years later in northern Italy for three months, an immersive acting experience I will use as a model to prepare for all my future roles."

Imagine being a young aspiring performer soon to build all these connections, including with Nolan, with whom he worked on a small role in Interstellar.

'The Dark Knight’ Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

What Made The Dark Knight Hit So Hard

Chalamet names Ledger as a key inspiration in 2018, for good reason. The role of the Joker continues to resonate across the industry as not only one of the strongest performances in a comic book adaptation, but also one of the best portrayals of a villain of all time.

Ledger famously worked extremely hard to bring the character to life. In 2009, he told Empire:

I sat around in a hotel room in London for about a month and I just locked myself away and formed a little diary and experimented with voices. I ended up landing more with in the realm of like a psychopath, someone with no empathy. Very little to no conscience towards his acts. Which is fun, because there is no real limit on the boundaries to what he'd say or how you would say something or what he would do. And I don't know; it's always a very personal process in terms of how you land in the character's shoes, so to speak. It's a combination of reading all the comic books I could and the script and then just really closing my eyes and meditating on it.

Visually, Nolan was drawn to Francis Bacon's paintings. If you've never stood in front of one of those visceral, dark pieces, they're kind of hard to explain—usually daunting in size, with almost violent applications of paint. Conor O'Sullivan, prosthetics supervisor, said Ledger helped use that inspiration to apply the character's makeup.

During a 2024 exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, Nolan said he showed Ledger one of Bacon's triptychs, "and he instantly sparked to its tortured and torturing humanity. It informed the makeup for the character in the most tactile of ways" (via The Guardian).

While Ledger and the rest of the creative team were busy nailing down the character's look and behavior, Nolan and DP Wally Pfister were blazing a technical trail using IMAX cameras for the first time in major feature film history. The Dark Knight includes six IMAX sequences, including that beautiful Joker opening sequence.

All this together led to one of the most ambitious comic book movies most of us had ever seen at the time, including young Chalamet.

The Lesson for Filmmakers

Okay, so most of us will never work at a scale that Christopher Nolan does. And that's okay. The point is that you never know who's sitting in the back row of a screening of your indie film at a festival, or who is watching you work on a set, or who you might ultimately inspire.

And if you love a film or filmmaker, those creatives might just become your collaborators later. In 2021, Chalamet talked about being able to be in a movie scored by Hans Zimmer.

"The Dark Knight was the movie that made me want to act," he told Deadline. "That movie had a score by Hans Zimmer, and he has done the score for Dune. … It's a pinch-me moment all over."

Tom Cruise is such a massive star that I don't feell ike he has any forgotten hits, but I was scrolling my library last week and pulled out The Last Samurai. I mean, when was the last time you watched this movie?

It's Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe in an Ed Zwick epic that's about not only the East meeting the West but overcoming your own personal demons to be a part of something bigger than yourself and taking your place in history, dying for what you believe is right.

One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is not a battle but a quiet conversation about fate.

Let's dive in.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

The Scene in Question

Okay, this movie is about Tom Cruise playing a Civil War and American Indian Wars veteran who has PTSD and is now living in Japan. He's hired to join the Imperial Japanese Army to train its recruits.

The recruits are not good, and they all get forced into battle too early.

In that fight, Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is captured and spared by samurai leader Moritsugu Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe).

Stripped of alcohol and forced out of his downward spiral, Algren now becomes a member of the samurai forces he was hired to destroy.

These two men form a bond as Algren slowly comes to see the other side.

Katsumoto doesn't interrogate Algren about military tactics; instead, he asks about his nightmares, his history, and his soul.

Algren sees human existence as a series of chaotic, regret-filled accidents that have driven him across the globe, away from his sins.

But Katsumoto views every trauma as a way to get to another destination that might be better.

These tête-à-têtes between the men carry the entire middle of the movie, as they then plan to fight back against the Imperial Forces, who want to destroy the samurai villages.

We see Algren fully arc when he and Katsumoto prepare for the final battle, and the trauma leaves him, and he can only see what fate and destiny truly mean.

That gets summed up in one line.

"A man does what he can until his destiny is revealed."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

What The Quote Means

So this line functions on a couple of different levels. You get the narrative purpose of how it should work in terms of story. And then you get the human version of how it heals him as a person.

• Action Meets Acceptance: The first half—"A man does what he can"—rejects passive fatalism that was shown to be Crusie's character flaw right from page one. The second half—"until his destiny is revealed"—supplies the arc, which we come to understand whether he is fully becoming who he was meant to be.
• Subtext Over Exposition: Instead of five pages of dialogue detailing Katsumoto's worldview or Algren's grief, eight words reframe the central conflict. Algren isn't drifting toward death; he is being prepared for a purpose he hasn't yet seen.

Summing It All Up

Great screenwriting ties both the emotional arc to the physical one, and I feel like this line is one of the best examples. You want your screenplay to work on multiple levels so that the audience is both entertained and has an emotional attachment.

It's a fun lesson in how a single sentence of dialogue can define a character's entire journey.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

When director Poh Si Teng began following three American physicians into Gaza, she captured an unfiltered look at healthcare workers operating under extraordinary conditions inside a warzone.

But how can you take that powerful footage and translate it into a documentary?

Enter veteran editor Christopher White, ACE.

He took over the edit from Ema Ryan Yamazaki and later collaborated with her across a 12-hour time difference between New York and Tokyo.

We spoke with Christopher White about the emotional challenges of working with sensitive footage, the mechanics of balancing three distinct character arcs without a script, and how a global tag-team edit brought this essential story to life.

Let's dive in.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

NFS: Hi Christopher! Could you begin by telling us how you got involved with American Doctor?

Christopher White: Ema Ryan Yamazaki was the first editor on this film. She started in February of 2025. At that stage, the director Poh Si Teng had only started following the doctors with her camera the month before. So there wasn’t much footage to work with, and it wasn’t certain what type of film this could be…a short, a feature?

Ema encouraged Poh to keep filming if she wanted it to be a feature, which Poh did. But Ema’s schedule only allowed her to work through April. It was then that I came on board to carry the project through the summer and fall. Poh continued filming for several more months, and it became clear that there was enough footage and story to aim for a feature-length film.

NFS: How did the project challenge your existing understanding of its subject matter?

CW: The project was challenging for me because I felt I didn't know enough about the circumstances in Gaza. I was definitely in over my head at the start of this edit, which is fine with me. I often choose projects based on what I don’t know, but want to know more about. Like Dr. Mark Perlmutter says in the film, I only knew “what I was told.” To be able to spend months and months working with this footage, getting to know the people of Gaza, experiencing their day-to-day existence through the lens of these three American doctors, was a real privilege. I also learned so much from the Director Poh Si Teng, as well as Producers Reem Haddad and Kirstine Barfod. Their perspectives and life experiences informed me and, therefore, the film. Now, after completing this film, perhaps I know just a fraction more. My education continues…

NFS: American Doctor follows the journey of three different doctors working in Palestine. How did you balance each of their arcs in the edit, and did you find yourself gravitating towards any one character as your work unfolded?

CW: Poh was interested in these three doctors because of their different personalities. And she was quite astute in recognizing these differences from the start. Dr Thaer Ahmad is more reserved, more deliberate with his words. Dr Feroze Sidhwa is highly informed and cerebral. And Dr Mark Perlmutter basically says what is on his mind. Early in the edit, I found myself leaning towards Dr. Mark because he was the most unfiltered, which provides great opportunities in the edit, though I grew to appreciate and admire Dr. Thaer so much as well. Often what is left unsaid can speak the loudest. The juxtaposition of what one doctor can say to the media without repercussions versus what another doctor can say is quite apparent.

NFS: The film also has a mostly vérité approach. Can you describe how that style of storytelling shapes your edit, and why that was the right decision for this film?

CW: Poh knew early on that she wanted to tell a story that was a present-tense, verite approach. No talking heads, no “experts”, just experiences. I love this type of storytelling, and she didn’t have to convince me at all! But this also means you can’t really edit a film like this on paper. Transcripts aren’t really relevant. So you must watch (and watch and watch) not just for content or information, but for feeling and emotion. It might be a brief interaction, a certain tone in a voice, or a fleeting expression that becomes the moment the film needs. You are seeking the feeling of a scene as much as the content. I imagine that this type of storytelling is closer to working on a fiction film with actors, except that we have only one take.

NFS: How do you practice self-care and maintain focus while working on a film with such sensitive material?

CW: To edit a film like this, one has to intentionally become desensitized to the material so you can work with it, so you can think of what you are witnessing as a story element. You have to become a little calloused to some of the footage. Ironically, as the film has travelled the festival circuit, and those callouses have receded, I have found the film more challenging to watch.

But frankly this is a hard question to answer because while yes, spending day after day watching and working with sensitive material can desensitize one to the subject matter, it is nothing compared to the experiences of the people present in the footage, those in Gaza. And not only the people in front of the camera but also behind the camera. Ibrahim Al Otla, the cinematographer, and Mohammad Sawwaf, the producer in Gaza - this is their lives! I am still awestruck at the quality of their work, under duress and danger. I hope to be able to meet them and shake their hands someday, to thank them for their commitment and dedication to capturing their experiences. So that people like me can know more. It has been an honor to share their story even further.

Christopher White Credit: Impact24

NFS: The film has seen a great deal of success on the festival circuit and may even be an early Oscar contender for Best Documentary. What has it been like to share the film with audiences across the country and around the world?

CW: It has been a pleasant surprise and a real privilege to see the film received around the world. During the edit, I was worried. I remember thinking “who is going to watch this?” Not because I didn’t have confidence in the film we were making, but the topic of healthcare workers in Gaza was just not really on many people’s radar, certainly in America. But something has happened since the film was finished and premiered at Sundance. It feels like the interest and awareness of Gaza has grown. More and more people are speaking up, expressing frustration that the situation in Gaza continues unabated and unchanged. And then, fold in our complicity as Americans. The film, very intentionally called American Doctor, seems to be meeting this new moment.

NFS: You also co-edited the film with Ema Ryan Yamazaki, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker in her own right. What can you tell us about the collaboration between the two of you?

CW: The collaboration between Ema and I became one of the most productive collaborations I’ve ever had, despite the fact that we were on opposite sides of the world. She is based in Tokyo, and I am in New York. The AE on the project, Mizuki Toriya, was also in Tokyo. We used Premiere Pro Productions for this film without any issues. It didn’t matter where we were in the world; we could always edit.

Because Ema had a few months on the project before I came on board, I didn’t want to waste precious production time reviewing dailies as she had. Because she is so talented and astute, I knew I could trust her selects and her story instincts.

So I started to drill down on the structure of the film. Between these two approaches, a film started to take shape.

As we headed into the fall and the home stretch of locking picture, Ema returned to the edit. It was all hands on deck. And it became clear that what I thought was going to be a disadvantage, - literally being in opposite time zones on opposite sides of the world - became one of our greatest strengths. She could work on scene(s) in her evening, and I would inherit them in my morning. And vice versa. Because of the time differences, the entire edit team literally had a 24-hour edit room going.

Poh started filming with the doctors in Dec of 2024, and we locked in November of 2025 - a very fast edit!

I would say to producers, consider hiring two editors on opposite sides of the world. It’s very productive!

NFS: Is there a specific scene or structural decision in American Doctor of which you are especially proud?

CW: The opening scene, where Mark shares his photos with us, was a challenge. Not because we didn’t know its strength, but because for a long time, we didn’t think we could open the film with this scene. It was too potent. So for a long time it was the third, fourth, or fifth scene. We felt we needed to place our doctors in Gaza from the start of the film, and then we could ease into this scene. But as time passed, it kept inching its way towards the top, until it basically became the opening of the film. Now that I have experienced the film with many audiences, I realize how much work this scene is doing to set the tone and framing for the film. It’s kind of surprising to look back and think we ever thought it could be anything else.

NFS: Is there anything else you would like to tell us about the film or any other upcoming projects?

CW: I’m currently working on another verite-oriented feature that is a little closer to home. While I can’t divulge the topic at this moment, it’s similar to American Doctor for several reasons. The events in the film are happening now, as we edit. This creates real story challenges, and we have to remain adaptable. And we also have to strive to transcend a “current events” story into hopefully something a little more timeless. And to keep looking for those small, revealing moments that become so valuable to the story.

Since its launch in 2023 by brothers Michael Cioni and Peter Cioni, who worked at notable companies such as Frame.io and Netflix, Strada has been one of the more intriguing brands in the collaborative remote storage space.

And while it might be hard to imagine now, before the AI revolution swept all of film and video technology into a vacuum, cloud storage was the big topic, hotly debated and viewed as the future. Strada has quietly continued on this path to find a way to connect teams without the expensive, slow file transfer speeds that usually come with cloud storage.

Let’s look at Strada 2.0, which is live now and is promised to be a new platform for video editors, filmmakers, and creative professionals looking for fast, secure, and cost-effective access to large files—without constantly uploading everything to the cloud.

What is Strada, Again?

So, as mentioned above, Strada has been around for several years now and, thanks to its 'founders' combined pedigree, it quickly became a major brand in the remote storage space almost immediately after its launch.

Still, if you aren’t super familiar with the company and what it offers, this explainer video from the brand does a good job of catching any interested viewer up. Hosted by Michael Cioni, who, if you’ve ever wandered the halls of a film and video tech trade show like NAB, you’ve likely encountered as he’s been a dynamic spokesperson, as he was with his role with Frame.io before.

Basically though, Strada offers the following capabilities:

• Transform your on-premises storage & computers into a global peer-to-peer video network
• Enable instant video editing with lightning-fast access to remote files
• Save time, reduce costs, and eliminate dependence on traditional cloud services
• Collaborate seamlessly with your team — no matter where they are in the world

The goal is to be more than just basic storage software, but a holistic collaboration platform for entire post-production teams.

Strada 2.0 is Here

Originally debuted back in June, Strada 2.0 certainly kicks things up a notch and further upgrades its features. And, in truth, it actually kind of simplifies what the company does and offers, which it outlines in the following simple three-step process:

• Step 1: A teammate shares a folder with you —They invite you to any of their folders or drives in just a few clicks.
• Step 2: Instantly see their folder in your Finder — Their shared folder appears right in your Finder, just like a local drive.
• Step 3: Open in your favorite tools — Edit directly in Premiere, Resolve, Photoshop, ProTools and more.

And Viola, you’re Strada-ing.

Price and Availability

The latest version of Strada is out now and offered with different subscription tiers, including a free version for solo creators and a low-entry point for pros and small teams at $8 a month. You can find more info on the company’s website here

Well, after months of teasers and reporting, that weird ARRI x HONOR Robot Phone camera thing is now officially alive—in China at least.

The companies have issued press releases announcing that the HONOR Robot Phone is now officially available, which they celebrate as the mobile debut of ARRI Image Science and HONOR’s gimbal camera technology.

Set to be a “new species of smartphone” that integrates key elements of ARRI Image Science and carries a “co-engineered” credit, the HONOR Robot Phone is fully debuted with a range of mobile imaging, AI, and robotic camera technologies and with ARRI LogC3, ARRI Wide Gamut 3, and ARRI Looks.

Let’s check it out.

The ARRI x HONOR Robot Phone

To be honest, when it was first announced, this product confused us as it’s certainly unique. Set to basically be a smartphone with a built-in gimbal camera, or a gimbal camera with a built-in smartphone, depending on how you look at it, this is a product that is unlike any we’ve seen before.

“The HONOR Robot Phone is an important milestone in ARRI’s expansion into Content Creation. Together with HONOR, we are translating ARRI’s perspective on image quality, color, and visual storytelling into a new category. This gives more creators access to greater creative control and a stronger connection between capture and post-production.” — David Bermbach, Chief Product Officer of ARRI.

And while we’ll likely have much more to say and explore with it now that it’s officially launched and set to be available to users and reviewers, in China at least, it’s also undeniably a bold step for both companies, with ARRI’s work here being the most interesting part.

The HONOR Robot Phone Features

So, you can judge for yourself based on many demos and featurettes already put out by the company, but it’s safe to say that this new robot phone will at least try to offer some new features that haven’t been seen in this type of setup.

Its key feature, of course, is its Titanium Agile Gimbal, which is designed to support stabilized movement, subject tracking, and hands-free operation, while the ARRI technologies involved will further provide a consistent foundation for image capture and creative finishing.

The Robot Phone gimbal camera will also have some fun AI object-tracking moves, like a spinshot feature, which will allow the camera to support two modes: a 90-degree view and an 180-degree view.

Price and Availability

Again, we’ll have more to say and explore about this new robot phone as it becomes more widely available, although from the sounds of things it might not be coming to the US soon, as it could be hampered by the same issues that DJI is facing with its drones.

Still, as far as pricing goes, it looks like the HONOR Robot Phone is set to retail for 9,999 Yuan, which is just below $1,500 if it were available in the US.

You can find more info on the official launch on the company’s website here.

Tired of not being able to decide what to watch on TV? What if you just turned your brain completely off and let AI feed slop through your eyeballs and into your frontal cortex non-stop 24/7?

That may sound like the obese future from Wall-E, but I have to inform you it is already here.

Last week, The Roku Channel launched Fairground AI, a 24/7 channel that runs entirely on AI-generated content.

You get a nice mix of narrative shorts and commercials, all created for humans by our AI overlords.

It's the kind of mind-numbing stuff they forced Alex DeLarge to sit through in A Clockwork Orange, and now you have access to it in your own home.

Let's dive in.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Does Anyone Actually Want This?

China’s short-form video ecosystem is currently undergoing a massive, AI-driven pivot:

• Mass Production: More than 95% of the ~128,000 microdramas released in China last quarter were AI.
• Explosive Viewership: In January, AI-generated short-form dramas captured 38% of the top 100 hits (up from just 7% a year prior), pulling in an astounding 2.55 billion views.
• Synthetic Superstars: The Tilly Norwoods of China, "Qin Ling Yue" and "Lin Xi Yan" are already set to star in 60+ shorts.

The Future of the Living Room Screen

Is the West destined for what the East already views as commonplace?

Founder & CEO of Fairground Entertainment Colin Petrie-Norris said of the new Roku deal, “Cable and linear TV was the realm of the very well-financed. FAST disrupted that by doing away with retransmission fees and making it easier for smaller digital brands to launch their own 24/7 network. Generative AI offers that same democratization for storytellers.”

Now, these are all fancy words, but do people believe viewers will embrace them? I mean, OpenAI tried this, and their channel failed because no one was watching.

You can say China is usually ahead of us on tech, and this may be the case. Mostly because this stuff is cheap; it costs them virtually nothing to produce and put out into the world.

They want a world where we become desensitized enough to watch or create with it.

Right now, multiple people online are talking about the wonky physics of some shows and extra fingers or hands on characters, but even ardent haters like myself have to admit some of the tech is getting better, and right now there's enough scope to run a channel off it.

Even if I think that channel should be sent to Guantanamo to torture prisoners there.

Rolu is betting on it becoming popular enough to be good, which is interesting.

Summing It All Up

Whether AI shows and channels are embraced remains to be seen, but they are here, so they're worth talking about. I don't see Roku pulling a bunch of young creatives off the street to put new, diverse stories on the air using AI. So until that happens, I don't see an opportunity for many filmmakers.

But one thing is for certain: more will be on the way if this works.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Let me know if you feel the same, but I have trouble watching many movies. As a writer, I am frequently engaging on a craft level, even with new films.

It's very rare that I enjoy a movie so much that it sweeps me off my feet and takes me out of my analytical brain and into my entertainment one.

And I have to admit, this happens a lot to me with Nolan. Because I know he's a masterful craftsman, I start picking apart every scene as I go. And it's my fault when I wind up having to see his movies a few times to tell if I really like them.

But in my defense, Christopher Nolan is famous for constructing narrative puzzles. And I like working them out, although the director thinks I should just shut up and watch...Which I kind of agree with.

In a candid clip, Nolan told people like me to just enjoy the movie.

"It's my job as a writer-director particularly to try and be the audience for the film as I'm writing them. People who really try and understand the structure or analyze it as they're watching it tend to get very frustrated with it and dislike the film intensely. People who kind of just let it wash over them—which is more the way I'm intending it—they tend to sort of get it the way I intended it a little bit more."

Christopher Nolan’s Response to Making Complicated Movies #shorts #dunkirk #christophernolan youtube.com

Feeling Over Decoding

Okay, I have to admit, I feel targeted by that Nolan comment, but he is right; I do wind up loving most of his movies the second time they wash over me, and I have released all my anxieties about what's happening.

I have to say, the first movie I watched as an audience member was Oppenheimer, which just blew me out of the water.

For Nolan, the goal isn't to force the viewer into an academic exercise in real time; it's to get them out of their own heads and entertained.

In fact, the moment an audience member steps out of the emotional experience to map out timeline mechanics on a mental whiteboard, the spell breaks and the movie magic disappears.

What Filmmakers Can Take Away From Nolan’s Approach

The lesson here for all of us is to be okay with setting aside our own desires to put a puzzle together outside our minds and become an audience member.

And with our work, we think about the audience as we put it together.

How they look, feel, and care—we should always have them in mind so we understand whether each scene clicks for them.

A few other takeaways:

1. Be the first audience member: When writing a spec or directing a scene, constantly test the impact of every scene. If a scene relies purely on gimmicks rather than narrative, it won't land emotionally.
2. Prioritize emotional clarity: You don't need the viewer to master every rule of your worldbuilding universe instantly. They just need to know what the protagonist wants and what's at stake right now so they can follow.
3. Trust instinct over over-analysis: Design structures that work on an intuitive level. You have to feel that it works.

Summing It All Up

The next time you sit down to write a script with shifting timelines or layered reveals or any kind of puzzle box that you use to see, ask yourself: Are you building a maze for people to solve, or an experience for them to feel?

Are you allowing room for the audience, not just the filmmaker?

Will people lean in when they read/watch this story?

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Gustav Danielsson, FSF, earned an Emmy nomination for his work on the stunning "In the Name of the Mother," the fifth episode of HBO's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The episode features the climactic Trial of Seven battle sequence, for which the creative team has received a great deal of well-deserved attention.

The sequence has been unpacked in exhaustive technical detail elsewhere, so we wanted to speak with him about the practicalities of working on a smaller budget than the show's older brother, Game of Thrones. What budget-shaped decisions did they have to make, and how did that influence how the series looks?

"I know our showrunner, Ira Parker, said we had a quarter for every dollar," Danielsson told us.

The series follows Dunk, a hedge knight who aspires to greatness at a local tournament. He meets Egg, a small boy who becomes his squire. Together, they meet noble families and tradespeople who help them on their quest for greatness.

The show was shot (for the most part) on two ARRI Alexa Mini LF cameras with Panavision Ultra Panatar anamorphic lenses, and Panavision VA series lenses for some night scenes.

We spoke with Danielsson via Zoom to learn more.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Prepping with Owen Harris

Danielsson has now worked with director Owen Harris a handful of times across TV and commercial work. Their partnership began on a low-budget Swedish commercial that Harris flew over to shoot. He sought Danielsson out because he had shot Roy Andersson's You, the Living, Danielsson's debut as a DP.

That commercial led to Black Mirror's "Be Right Back," then to the Emmy-winning and much-lauded "San Junipero," then to feature and TV work.

Danielsoon said their approach to A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms held a lot of respect for what came before it, meaning Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, but they knew their show would be different.

"It's a very intimate story, mainly about Dunk, our hero, and his squire, Egg. And so it's going to be intimate, it's going to be about them," he said. "And also it's got this kind of weird humor to it that you sometimes find in the Game of Thrones world, but it's definitely something that is a little bit new in this show, and that's how it starts. It starts out quite light and humorous, and you get to learn these characters."

They shot most of the series naturalistically in Northern Ireland. His biggest problem was controlling the sky.

"Basically, it could be sunshine in the morning and almost no wind, and then the wind picks up, and then you have rain and clouds, and then you start shooting a scene, and when you change direction, you might have rain when you started out sunny," he said. "So it's just constant planning, checking your weather app, and always knowing, 'All right, we can shoot this way, but we can't really embrace the sun in this scene, because later on today's going to be cloudy.'"

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Timing Magic Hour for a Painterly Look

Again, everyone rightly calls out the Trial of Seven as incredible work, but there are constant gems across Danielsson's episodes in the series. For instance, in Episode 2, the characters partake in a tug-of-war game that looks beautiful.

The technical skills behind the sequence involved timing and backlight.

"That is one of the sequences we were able to shoot very late in the day when the sun is about to set, which means you can actually start controlling the light a little bit more. So we added some backlight to this scene. If you add some backlight in the middle of the day, you need so much light to compete with the natural light. So it's almost no use."

Danielsson said they used two cranes with two 24-kilowatt open-faced HMIs to light the sequence. (An open-face fixture is a lamp head without a lens over the bulb. DPs go for open-face when they need punch or hard light.)

"It was nice you recognized it because that was the feeling we wanted. A nice afternoony feeling with a very, very controlled light, so you get that painterly effect. It's not overly contrasted or anything like that."

Smoke as a Budget Solution

Danielsson told us that the intense haze of the Trial of Seven was partly budgetary (to reduce the need for crowd extras), but it also served the story.

"I think the smoke has so much more importance because it adds to the feeling we wanted in this fight. This fight is a very visceral and also very subjective, chaotic, almost claustrophobic because you're inside of his helmet. You're him. And the smoke makes everything very disorienting."

He and Harris looked at the Battle of the Bastards from Game of Thrones, but they knew a straight comparison was not possible due to their lower budget.

VFX supervisor Arron Roebuck and his producer Paul Russo stayed at Danielsson's side, calling shots when the smoke was almost right. He said the alternative was the day getting away from them.

"They say, 'Okay, let's shoot now.' Because you can't just wait for the perfect moment every time because the show needs to go on."

'A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms' Credit: HBO

Three Cameras, 30 Minutes, One Child Actor

Dexter Sol Ansell, who plays Egg, is under U.K. school-leaving age, which put strict limits on how long he could be on set. Danielsson said that turned some nights into puzzles. They had no alternative but to work fast because they had to get some exterior scenes at night.

"Normally, we had two cameras on this show, but towards the end of the shooting when we did lots of bigger scenes, we had three cameras. We had half an hour to pull off a scene with Dexter in it, and that's almost impossible. Well, I lined up three cameras to shoot a wide shot, a closer top shot. It's the ending of Episode 1 where they're looking at the stars."

If you're shooting with young actors, prep for the multi-camera solution before you need it.

What He Wishes He'd Known Earlier

What would he tell a DP coming up? He gave us two connected ideas, the first about control.

"When I started out as a director of photography, I was much more controlling in terms of where I wanted everything to be, lights and lamps ... But I tend to, the more I work, leave other creatives to give their ideas [the chance] to sing. If there's a nicer idea in the room, you should grab it, because you might have nice ideas yourself, but if there's even nicer, then you should just grab it."

The second was about trust. He said his gaffer, Seamus Lynch, could anticipate him. If he needs a crane, it's already on its way. That kind of relationship also means you can say no when something isn't working.

"If it doesn't look good, you should tell him to switch it off."

We're pretty far removed from the pilot of Friends, the New York-based sitcom that follows a group of hot young professionals all living in and around the same building and getting into various hijinks. The show is over 30 years old at this point.

Even so, Friends just topped a fan-voted list of the greatest sitcoms ever made, edging out millennial workplace cringe-fest The Office by more than 17,000 votes.

Per a Ranker crowdsourced tally, the NBC hangout comedy pulled 55,052 votes to Dunder Mifflin's 37,506, as FandomWire reported.

Okay, we get this is all opinion. We're not here to relitigate whether the crowd got it right. The more useful question for writers and aspiring showrunners is why a 1994 multicam is still ahead of the single-cam mockumentary that supposedly made shows like Friends feel obsolete. Here's what we can learn.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Two Shows, Two Formats

First, let's acknowledge the differences. Friends is a multi-camera sitcom shot on a proscenium set in front of a live audience. It's about chosen family. These six 20-somethings all have their own hopes and dreams and loves but orbit the same coffee shop and apartment building.

Meanwhile, The Office is a single-camera mockumentary shot in a documentary style, with characters constantly breaking the fourth wall, complete with talking-head confessionals and a fictional film crew you're never supposed to forget is part of the storytelling. The premise is the workplace. Characters are often in love-hate relationships, with dynamics people can relate to.

Both are ensemble comedies. That's about where the similarities end. If you're not clear on how the mechanics of multicam differ from single-cam, we've broken it down before. The two formats are doing different jobs, and each comes with a distinct set of tools and limits.

Which Premise Can Go Bigger?

In short, the hangout premise of Friends can get broader. The workplace setting of The Office just... can't.

The Office is pretty bound by its setting as a workplace comedy. The show is Dunder Mifflin. Whenever the writers pulled characters out of it, for example when Michael Scott went to Colorado, the documentary crew was revealed in Season 9, and a lot of the post-Steve Carell run, the show started to fall apart slightly. The premise didn't travel well.

Friends can move outside Central Perk and even New York City. Its premise is the people, not the location. That's why we're able to see their dates, their workplaces, a wedding in London, babies, and an eventual move to the suburbs. The show relied on the relationships.

If you're pitching a hangout comedy show and want to think about reaching that coveted 100th episode, consider tying the premise to the characters, not a specific location. Our longer piece on writing sitcoms has more advice for you.

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Using a Live Audience

I'll grant that multicams do have a slightly dated feel in many cases since many modern popular shows have gone single-cam. And the format gets dismissed because of its canned laughter feel. But the live studio audience can be beneficial for more than just its noise. It's like a real-time punch-up room.

If your joke dies in front of 300 people? Yikes. If you have the showrunner there, you can use the in-the-moment feedback to rewrite the punchline. Friends was famously rewritten on the floor during rehearsals and tapings, and the actors could improvise, week after week, for 10 seasons. The audience was like a spare writer.

Obviously, mockumentary can't do that. What The Office has instead is interiority. Those talking heads could never work in a live setting unless you're using stagecraft like live theater. Multicam has gags and theatrical rhythm.

If you want to learn structure, check out our guide to sitcom beats.

Six Leads or No Lead?

The Office is Michael Scott's show until it's... well, no one's show. The drop-off after Carell left in Season 7 could be used as a modern television case study. The show was built around the single fool archetype (a role we've written about at length), and when he was gone, the show suddenly had to try to prove it could survive without him. It only lasted two more seasons.

Meanwhile, Friends was a six-hander. Everyone got equal weight, and roughly equal screentime throughout the series run. Characters got thrown together in interesting ways, including romantically. You could have different pairings in any given episode (Chandler and Joey, Ross and Rachel, Monica and Phoebe, etc.) without the show flopping.

Our very own Jason Hellerman talked about the various characters in his piece on the Friends pilot script.

'The Office' Credit: NBC

Comfort Can Be a Craft Choice

Sometimes, people are just looking for a cozy watch. (Just look at the cozy horror trend.) And the Ranker result is really about comfort-rewatching. Both shows are in syndication already and in heavy streaming rotation, so no one really loses. But Friends is one people put on to feel seasons (much like Gilmore Girls in the fall), to fall asleep to, to cook to, sometimes for the twelfth time.

What makes it cozy? It's less "cringe" than The Office, which loves to make its characters uncomfortable, and you could probably think of several moments in the show that feel dated in a different way—as in, looking back, some of the jokes don't really hold up and wouldn't really fly today despite being closer to the present day. Like, sometimes characters are just straight-up sexually harassing each other or being overtly racist.

The show's cringe is load-bearing, and for some people, that discomfort isn't something they want to revisit.

That's not to say Friends doesn't have its own issues, but it benefits from not actually trying to make characters or audiences actively uncomfortable. It has low-stakes A/B/C structure, easy resolutions within the runtime, and a warm '90s color palette.

If you're writing a hangout comedy, are you wanting to be quotable/memeable, or rewatchable for comfort? Both are great goals, but the ensemble mechanics will be different.

Both of these are critically acclaimed shows, and a fan poll isn't proof of quality. It is, however, proof of what the majority of viewers will want to turn on after a long day. And that can be useful if you're trying to come up with your own series ideas.

If you’re a drone operator, or—excuse us—an aerial cinematographer living and working in the United States, you’ve likely been following this DJI drone ban story as it’s been evolving over the past year. For a quick catch-up, the FCC has added DJI and all foreign-made drones to a “covered list,” which effectively bans the sale of new drones by the company and other foreign ones here in the US.

This drone ban hasn’t extended to every DJI drone, though, and it’s allowed previous models to continue operating, just not new models being released and sold here.

Yet, that all might change even more as the FCC has put out a new “fact sheet” that seeks to further take “action to secure the drone supply chain” here in the states. Here’s what we know so far, including what DJI drones could now be in the FCC’s crosshairs.

The DJI Drone Ban Latest

Again, to recap, as it currently stands, the FCC has added DJI and all foreign-made drones to a “covered list,” which effectively bans the sale of new ones in the US. DJI has been fighting this as hard as it can, but at this point it seems the Chinese-based company has given up and, possibly in retaliation or to err on the safe side, has decided to pretty much stop releasing any new products it has in the US.

This means non-drone DJI products like gimbals, action cams, and microphone systems are not being released in the US. Or, if they are, DJI is being quiet about it. There’s also a whole other direction to explore where it looks like DJI is effectively white-labeling its products under different names, but that’s a whole different can of worms.

Regardless, this new FCC document makes it look like things might be ramping up here, and, based on the doc itself and other reports online, many are starting to worry that the effective drone ban might be expanding.

“Military-Grade Drones” Are in the Crosshairs

Now, without getting too much into editorializing here, from the FCC “fact sheet,” it does look like the commission is looking to simply ban the commercial sale of foreign-made military-grade drones in the US.

Of course, on paper, that makes sense, we guess, but as many online have pointed out, this definition of “military-grade” looks quite broad and could be used to cover many DJI drone products, which certainly don’t seem to be military in nature or grade.

This move would be a major step up for the DJI drone ban, as it could target DJI drones that had previously been approved and remove them from stores. LiDAR drones are also in the crosshairs, which—again—covers many drone models and ones that clearly don’t appear to be military.

What’s Next?

So, the big worry here is that this DJI drone ban could be ramped up and possibly expanded to cover models that had previously been fine to use, like the DJI Mini 5 Pro.

It’s hard to say whether and when this next level of the ban might be implemented or take effect, but we’ll do our best to stay on top of this story. You can also read the full FCC document here for context.

The most quoted thing in Trainspotting started life as an advertisement for staying clean. Kinda ironic, right?

"Choose life" was a wholesome anti-drug slogan before the iconic character of Mark Renton got hold of it, essentially turning a public-health message into a battle cry for anyone who ever wanted to opt out of what he feels is a normal, boring lifestyle. Here we are, 30 years later, and the "choose life" monologue is still iconic.

Let's get into why.

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The Scene

In Trainspotting, heroin addict Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) struggles through cycles of getting clean and relapsing while living chaotically in Scotland with his equally chaotic friends.

As the film opens, Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" kicks in with its drumbeat, and Renton and his friend Spud are sprinting down an Edinburgh street, stuff that they've shoplifted spilling from their jackets with store security on their heels. Over the noise and confusion, Renton's voiceover begins one of the greatest opening salvos in movies.

"Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family," he says. It's like a checklist of a respectable existence.

Meanwhile, he's fleeing down the street, leaping down stairs, rolling over the hood of a car.

He says, "Choose a fucking big television."

The monologue pivots starkly.

"Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers."

He grins into the car that clipped him as his friends flee. We see him in a rundown flat.

"Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed- interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends."

We see him and his friends on a soccer pitch, playing another team. The monologue continues:

"Choose leisure wear and matching luggage. Choose a three piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose D.I.Y and wondering who you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing sprit- crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish brats you have spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life."

Renton passes out on the pitch, and in the flat.

"But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?"

That's the set-up of the entire film and character.

Where "Choose Life" Came From

"Choose life" didn't come from Trainspotting. British fashion designer Katharine Hamnett put it on an oversized T-shirt in 1983, drawing from Buddhist teaching to create an anti-suicide, anti-drug, anti-war message.

Wham! wore it in the video for "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go," and the slogan went on as an inspirational message of positivity.

So it's clear the message came before both the film and the novel by Irvine Welsh that inspired it. So Renton's version of the slogan is a deliberate hijacking. No self-destruction? Boring! In his eyes, "choosing life" doesn't mean staying alive, but instead means giving up and falling into a life made up of consumer choices and a slow death.

The feel-good slogan and its years of positivity collapse when this seemingly happy-go-lucky addict twists them around to serve his own outlook.

'Trainspotting' Credit: Miramax

How the Monologue Works

Obviously, this all takes place via voiceover. You'll hear plenty of warnings (including from us) about voiceover narration, because to be frank it can get clunky in the hands of inexperienced writers.

But Renton's works because it doesn't just explain the plot or who he is. He's not telling the audience what he's doing or where he comes from or the why about anything. This voiceover adds to the images and tells us more about the point of view than the visuals ever could. He's running, he's using, and he probably wouldn't realistically say these things in any other context.

Still, we get it in Renton's clear voice. It's profane, sarcastic, and belongs to him.

Screenwriter John Hodge took the speech that originally fell in the middle of Welsh's novel and moved it to the front so we would understand who Renton is immediately.

So that's why it functions for the character and structurally. But we can go deeper. The speech repeats "choose" throughout. That's textbook anaphora, which is a rhetorical device that uses repetition, like a hammer hitting. It builds pressure with every beat. The tension increases with the speech and with the building action, until Renton passes out in a drug haze.

Why the Anti-Establishment Claims It

Even though this character is a disaster and things don't go super well for him, his carefree attitude still comes off as inspirational to those who feel boxed in, especially in the context of this story.

The monologue illustrates the period's Thatcher-era consumer culture. At this point in the U.K., the youth especially felt trapped and stifled under the expectations of older generations who only seemed to be making things worse for them. And were things so good for their parents, anyway? Not in this character's view, who saw them surrendering to boredom and retirement after following the rules. So why not have a little fun and destruction on the way?

That's why the monologue became so iconic and essentially defined a generation. It took a public service message and turned it into rebellion. Again, the addicts of this story don't have a sunny alternative. But seeing a character reject the default was invigorating.

Danny Boyle'smovie also inspired filmmakers. It made a generation of storytellers feel like anything was possible. Break the rules, tell the story you want, use the tools you have. Reject what is expected of you, take routes outside the studio system. It's admittedly an easy message to get behind!

The monologue has kept its bite through the generations. When Boyle and Hodige revived it for T2 in 2017, they updated the message's targets to things like social media.