Latest Blogs

We usually treat algorithmic conditioning as a strictly psychological crisis. We worry over dopamine hits and rising screen time. In doing so, we completely miss how this neurological shift rewrites the actual geometry of modern storytelling. The Thirty-Second Absolute Screenwriters working in the streaming economy face a brutal absolute. They have perhaps thirty seconds to halt a wandering thumb. A platform’s internal metrics value the initiation rate of a series far above its completion...

Happy Sunday, Creative Army! I hope your weekend has been a creative one so far. Whether you have been writing, filming, editing, or sketching out the next spark of an idea, I have something today that will give you a boost. So grab your coffee, and let’s dive in. This week's featured video comes from Panavision: How Director Boots Riley Brought I LOVE BOOSTERS from Big Idea to the Big Screen Boots Riley wanted to make a movie that could not play small. Something loud and funny and packed...

As writers, we often hear the phrase, “Kill your darlings.” But, that phrase is often in the context of cutting out writing or scenes that don’t work, slow down a piece, or are utterly unnecessary. Recently though, I’ve found myself taking it another way. I’m one of those people who work on multiple projects at once, and two of the things I’m working on had a similar thing happen. I cut an entire character from both. This can be more painful than cutting scenes or entire plot points. In bo...

What's up, Creative Army! I have been on the road, in the meetings, and on the phone with executives, producers, financiers, and buyers all year long. And every time I come back from one of those conversations, the same thing happens. I want to sit down with the creatives in this community, and I want to tell them everything I just heard, because so much of it is information that would genuinely change how they approach their careers if they only knew it. So that is exactly what I am about t...

Last week, Amanda shared how two of the biggest box office stories of 2026, A24's Backrooms and Focus Features' Obsession, were built on audiences that came first. Two filmmakers, Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, built devoted followings on YouTube long before Hollywood came calling, and that crowd became the proof, the leverage, and the launchpad for everything that followed. Today I want to clear up the single biggest misunderstanding I see whenever this topic comes up. Because when people hea...

Happy Wednesday, Creative Army! You've made a short film. You've put your time, effort, blood, sweat, tears, and maybe even some serious money into it. And your goal isn't just to get it seen. It's to get it seen around the world, and by the people who can actually make a difference in your career. Would being screened at an Oscar-qualifying film festival matter to you? How about having your film screened for over 1,000 executives, including managers, agents, producers, and financiers? Then...

Comedy is one of the hardest things to get right on the page, and one of the most in-demand once you do. This weekend, the Comedy Pitchfest puts your script in front of a lineup of executives, producers, and managers who develop, produce, and sign comedy writers, and who came here looking for exactly the kind of funny you write. That means every corner of comedy is welcome. Broad studio comedy, sharp half-hour pilots, romantic comedies, dark comedies, animated series, and the comedies th...

Nobody tells you the honest version of this when you're starting. You hear about residuals and royalties the way you hear about compound interest, abstractly, admiringly, as something that happens to other people. And then one day, you negotiate your first reuse clause and the abstraction collapses into something real and irritating and completely learnable. The irritating part is this: the information is buried under a thick layer of people who'd rather sell you a framework than explain...

Happy Sunday, Creative Army! I hope your weekend has been a creative one so far. Whether you have been writing, filming, editing, or sketching out the next spark of an idea, I have something today that will give you a boost. So grab your coffee, and let’s dive in. This week's featured video comes from The Movie Rabbit Hole- NOLAN'S CGI is really just INVISIBLE CGI. The truth, as the video lays out, is that Nolan uses plenty of visual effects. He just uses them invisibly. Rather than leanin...

If you had told me a while ago that I'd be where I am today, I would've said you were wrong. But "wrong" and "right" are subjective, aren't they? They depend on your goals, ideas, and beliefs. Today, I want to share my filmmaking journey with you, along with some tips that might help you if you're dreaming of directing your own short film. My Unexpected Path to Directing I pioneered female entrepreneurship in Portugal and won the most significant awards a businesswoman could win worldwid...