Gigantes Verdes Teaser Released

Posted on June 14, 2025 by Andy Cline

And here it is! The first teaser for my documentary project Gigantes Verdes:

 

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Os Marnotos Production Began This Week

Posted on March 27, 2025 by Andy Cline

I began production this week on a documentary short film called Os Marnotos (The Saltworkers). I’m telling the story of making sea salt in Aveiro, Portugal by methods that have changed very little since the Romans were in town.

 

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From Coverage to a Visual Style

Posted on February 12, 2025 by Andy Cline

I consider this the basics (exactly where I began with journalism and documentary film students): Capturing sequences is the beginning of visual storytelling.

A sequence is a series of photos or video (or both) that tells a particular story, or examines a particular moment, within a larger story. You begin learning to capture sequences by following the “rules” of  coverage: Making sure you have the three basic scene types. These are 1) wide establishing shots that set a scene, 2) medium shots, usually focused on people doing things, to capture the relevant action, and 3) detail shots that take us closer than would be possible by our just standing there.

For example, here’s a short short that’s really just a single sequence packaged into a mini-doc, I guess. But it’s easy to see how this is constructed from shots described above.

What happens when you run this well-worn framework through the decisive moment and Malick’s dogma?

So I don’t have a slick answer to that question. Maybe what I mean is to state it like a command: Hey, you, run the classic form of the video sequence through the decisive moment and Malick dogma and see what happens.

I think that is how we might begin to move from coverage to creating a visual style.

Posts in this series:

Where I Differ With the Dogma | Frame by Frame (rhetorica.net)

Visual Style Conveyed in Words — Maybe | Frame by Frame (rhetorica.net)

What is Lyrical Style? | Frame by Frame (rhetorica.net)

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Approaching 1K Images on Instagram

Posted on January 20, 2025 by Andy Cline

I posted my first picture to Instagram on 22 November 2010. I think I was using an early iPhone — the 3G perhaps.

Screenhunter 9705 Jan. 20 11.01

It’s just a tree outside my office at Craig Hall on the campus of Missouri State University. I had recently installed the app (it was released that October), and I was looking for something to share. This tree seemed good enough at the time.

I think “good enough at the time” probably has been the ethos of the entire project as I approach 1,000 published photos. Eighteen more to go.

Over the years I’ve put in varying amounts of effort into Instagram. Mostly that effort was focused on documenting something odd or interesting or personal. I have a series of sorts that’s been running for a decade — “stuff you see,” i.e. weird things I run across. Sometimes I even thought I might be doing art. But no matter what, I forgot about the vast majority of these images soon after posting.

More recently, I’ve begun using Instagram to promote my work — especially after 2014 when I successfully moved my academic career from research (the rhetoric of journalism) to creative (documentary filmmaking).

There’s a wide variety of images on my feed. But what hasn’t changed is the utter lack of any audience beyond friends, family, and a few hangers-on. I have 411 followers. I’m happy to have every one of them.

I have given up trying (perhaps I didn’t try hard enough) to grow an audience like the one I had with my Rhetorica blog back in the day.

I’ll alert you when I hit 1,000. Days from now? Weeks? I don’t know. I won’t be trying to hit 1,000.

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Days Away From More Misery

Posted on January 16, 2025 by Andy Cline

The last time Donald Trump was president, he took children away from refugee parents attempting to enter the United States. As a deterrent.

It was an immoral policy and one we’re now likely to see again soon — or something equally reprehensible. Can it get more reprehensible? I don’t even want to think about that.

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Josh Rubin, of Brooklyn, New York outside the internment camp at Tornillo, Texas. in 2018.

The Carbon Trace Productions documentary crew filmed some of the protests in the summer of 2018 and along the way met Josh Rubin, of Brooklyn, New York. Here was a guy willing to put his body on the line for an idea and a technique of disobedience. The idea was to call attention to moral failings of all of those who helped run the entire apparatus of the child internment camps — from cooks to Congressmen. The technique is called Witnessing. Basically you keep watch, and you let everyone who goes into the camps, for whatever reason,  know that you’re watching.

Ahead of whatever terrible things Trump has in store for refugees, you might wish to re-visit the past. Check out our film, Witness at Tornillo, about a lone guy who started a movement now called Witness at the Border.

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