Create your own short film

- Welcome to Filmmaking 101, How to Tell Your Story. My name is Avi Glijanksy and this class is all about the theories, skills, and core craft you're going to want to know in order to make your first web series or short film. I'm an independent filmmaker based in Los Angeles, I'm a writer, director, producer. My web series The Further Adventures of Cupid and Eros was one of the first nominees at the first annual International Academy of Web Television Awards. Another show of mine, the Silver Lake Badminton and Adventures Club took home the judges prize at the Celebrate the Web web pilot festival a couple years ago. In addition to the stuff I do as a writer, director, producer, sometimes all three, sometimes in combination, I've been working in the industry for a little over 12 years now and I've pretty much done everything. I've fetched coffee, I've been a set PA, I have been an assistant camera operator for reality TV shows, I have even been a development and production executive at a small indie production company. This is all to say that I spend a lot of time thinking about visual storytelling and the best way to get ideas up onto the screen and also to prepare and run productions and when I was just starting out, I had some really awesome teachers who gave me great advice and really helped me understand how to approach this process because the thing is, there are a ton of moving parts, there are thousands of questions that you are going to be asking yourself when you're creating your first project. It can be really overwhelming but when you know what the steps are, when you know what the reasoning is behind this choice versus that choice, suddenly it seems a lot more manageable and that's what I'm hoping to help explain to you guys. The class is divided into five chapters, three of those chapters are going to be about the core craft of telling stories through moving pictures. So writing, because everything starts with a script. The language of moving picture so understanding camera and lighting and sound as well as working with actors because they're going to be some of your most important collaborators. And then we have two chapters that are really just on the nuts and bolts of preparing your production and also then once you are shooting, running your set. So that's the idea, this isn't an overly technical course, we're not going to be worrying too much about this type, this brand of lens versus that brand or what the best settings for your particular camera are, this is really about giving you an understanding that's going to let you know what tools are at your disposal, to tell the story that you want to tell and then equally important, to be able to convey what you're trying to do to the collaborators, to the awesome crew that are hopefully going to help you do that. So, you can start at the beginning and go all the way through and hopefully you'll learn something in every single section but no two beginners are exactly alike, everyone brings a little bit of knowledge to this so feel free to skip around also if that will be more useful to you. So, all right, having said all that, let's get started, we're going to start at the start, talking about story and your screenplay.