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Hey, guys.  Hope you're having a terrific Sunday and cultivating the seed of fantastic and meaningful relationships during Introduce Yourself Weekend. Today, I have 2 videos designed to educate, motivate and inspire. First up, from the Royal Ocean Film society, one fantastic video essay:  Lessons for the No-Budget Filmmaker.  We hear many excuses around these parts regarding the reasons not to pick up a camera and start shooting.  This video will make those excuses moot. Next, it's inargua...

Last week I published a post that talked about the launch of a subscription based service for short form video. That same week, my writing partner sent me a link to an article about an app called BlackPills, another platform for short form content. He did this because we're in the midst of our creating a 10-episode web series called OutSkirts and we're looking for different ways to garner attention. Yes, we'll do the festival circuit. Yes, we'll chase producers down at Starbucks. (No, we won't...

I decided to get into film and TV later in life. I was more than ten years "behind," compared to the people who moved to L.A. at 18. Needless to say when I finally decided to become an actress, I had no credits on my resume. To get them, I needed to book jobs ASAP. I knew I couldn't book the things I wanted without a resume, so I dove in hard. I did research on every aspect of the business because that's my personality. However, you don't have to. To help you get booked, here are five tips to ac...

If you’ve shot a film and either edited it yourself or watched an editor do it, than you know that editing different shots together can create a whole new meaning not already present in the original shots. It’s called the Kuleshov Effect, and when it was birthed in the early 1920’s by soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, it changed the way filmmakers told their story. According to independent filmmaker Mark Duggan, actors can learn from this historic, cinematic effect, and apply it to their own acti...

It’s back! The thrills, chills, the horror of it all. The most popular horror and thriller screenwriting contests is here! It’s the 5th Annual Search for New Blood Contest. We’re looking for the next A Quiet Place, Get Out, Hereditary, Witch, Red Sparrow, Unsane, John Wick, It Comes at Night, Happy Death Day, 47 Meters Down, The Meg, Atomic Blonde, The Shallows or whatever horror or thriller concept your twisted mind can dream up. We're giving one deserving writer the opportunity of a lifeti...

If you caught the blog post How to Break into Voice Acting, then you know what it takes to get in the game. In this second post by voice acting mentor and speaker Stephanie Ciccarelli, she dives deep into why voice acting is just as relevant as stage and screen acting, and a fantastic way to supplement your income. Have friends doing voice over jobs online who are able to work from wherever they are, whenever they want? It may drive you crazy to hear about auditioning from home in their pajama...

Hope you are all having a fantastic weekend.  Let's amp it up further with a little Coffee & Content action. First up, a Film Courage video featuring one of our very own.  Mark Sanderson is not only very active in the Stage 32 community, but is constantly helping writers behind the scenes as well.  Here he discusses what he believes are the 5 worst habits screenwriters fall into. Next up, some quality advice from Emmy Award winning casting director, Holly Powell.  In this video, Holly guides...

  The Old West is generally considered the territories west of the Mississippi River between the years 1850 and 1900. The West, however, has also been defined more broadly to include the earlier period of the Spanish colonies of California and New Mexico (1800-1849) and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, as well as western Canadian history of the 1800s. So, let’s accept that the American Old West covers the westward pioneer movement and development across the North American continent during th...

One of the questions that comes up time and time again for screenwriters is – Do you have to live in LA to have a career? Nope. Obviously, it makes life a lot easier if you live in a creative hub like LA or London or New York, but the world’s a big place and there are artists EVERYWHERE. You can live where you like, but the real truth of the matter is that at some point in your career (if you want a career rather than a hobby), you will need to network with the kind of people who can actu...

Family feuds, bad blood, near bankruptcy, and stories that would shake the #metoo movement today, all aided in what author Leonard Maltin calls the Death of 20th Century Fox. His words come after the July 27th sale of Fox to Disney. Maltin recollects the massive movies made on today's Century City lot with some of the biggest names in Hollywood. Movie attendance was at an all time high after the Second World War, but sank incredibly after the introduction of television. But is the acquisiti...