Best books about creativity according to Reddit

Reddit mentions of Making Movies

Sentiment score: 9
Reddit mentions: 15

We found 15 Reddit mentions of Making Movies. Here are the top ones.

    Features:
  • Vintage
Specs:
ColorBlack
Height7.98 Inches
Length5.15 Inches
Number of items1
Release dateMarch 1996
Weight0.5 Pounds
Width0.59 Inches
#11 of 461

idea-bulb Interested in what Redditors like? Check out our Shuffle feature

Shuffle: random products popular on Reddit

Found 15 comments on Making Movies:

u/broncobluster · 16 pointsr/TrueFilm

Making Movies by Sydney Lumet might work for you. He spends a chapter on each of th films he directed and talks a lot about his role as the director in each phase of the movie making process.

https://www.amazon.com/Making-Movies-Sidney-Lumet/dp/0679756604#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1482972580505

u/incnc · 14 pointsr/Filmmakers

Do NOT go into debt for film school.

If it is payed for, then sure, it should be a lot of fun. But your reel already surpasses 95% of what I see from students who have already graduated film school.

If you are taking out money to go to film school.... dont. Student loan payments are one of the biggest obstacles when trying to launch a freelance career. Also, a film degree doesnt mean dick to most people in this industry. Unless you want to have a 9-5 at a studio or something. And thats stupid.

Use the money to:

  1. live for a year without having to take a job and start working for free on any set you can get on. This type of education far exceeds anything you will glean at a film school. By the end of the year you should have been

    or

  2. use the money to make a low-budget feature. Your photography is already strong, now go buy:

    http://www.amazon.com/Story-Substance-Structure-Principles-Screenwriting/dp/0413715604/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=

    http://www.amazon.com/Screenplay-Foundations-Screenwriting-Syd-Field/dp/0385339038/ref=pd_sim_b_9

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Writers-Journey-Structure-Edition/dp/193290736X/ref=pd_sim_b_5

    http://www.amazon.com/Save-Last-Book-Screenwriting-Youll/dp/1932907009/ref=pd_sim_b_2

    http://www.amazon.com/Making-Movies-Sidney-Lumet/dp/0679756604

    Absorb. Read again. Then write and shoot your own movies. It will cost less than film school, it will be MORE fun than listening to failed film makers telling you how to make movies, and it could potentially launch your career.

    Also, if you are ever in New Orleans, PM me and I will buy you a beer.
u/T-MACK · 9 pointsr/movies

Very sad. He wrote a terrific book called Making Movies that offers production insight on tribulations, confusion, and excitement on ordinary days in the film industry. One of the best books on filmmaking out there.

u/jwc1138 · 4 pointsr/Filmmakers

Here are a list of my favorite behind the scenes:

Hearts of Darkness (The Making of Apocalypse Now)

American Movie

Full Tilt Boogie (The Making of From Dusk 'til Dawn)

And the BEST book tha I've found (and buddy, I have a lot of 'em) is Making Movies, by Sidney Lumet. This takes you through every step of the movie making process by a master filmmmaker. I cannot recommend this book enough if you really want to know how hollywood movies are made.

u/monday_thru_thursday · 4 pointsr/TrueFilm

Sidney Lumet's book, Making Movies, covers most of the spectrum and is simply a great read.

As for other books, they are generally more technical. For screenwriting, there's McKee's Story; for editing, there's Reisz and Millar's Technique of Film Editing; for cinematography, there's Blain Brown's Cinematography Theory and Practice. And Lumet's book would complete this tetralogy, being a book essentially about directing.

u/suaveitguy · 4 pointsr/Filmmakers

It is a tough industry in many ways, and built around some very specific cities. One decision you should make is what exactly you want to do in film. If you want to be an artist and create your own films, you don't necessarily need to go to film school or even work your way up in the industry. There is lots of cheap gear available. Chances are you have more than enough film making gear right now in your phone and PC, more than you could have dreamed of affording 20+ years ago- when film was film.

So if you want to work in the industry, it will mean 'paying your dues' and might mean never getting to make a film on your own - schools, training programs, etc... are a good idea. You might be poor for awhile, you might have a job so busy and high pressure that at the end of the day more film work (even on your own dream projects) might be the last thing you are interested in doing. Another approach is to come up with a solid day job outside of the industry so that you can pursue your own creative pursuits on the side until such time as they pay off. If you have to count on film making to pay the bills, you would be very fortunate to direct corporate videos and cooking shows and stuff you might not really feel. You will be so close to your dream, but so far away at the same time and that can be frustrating - depending on your goals. If you want to make films on your own terms, you can and should start right away. Don't feel bad if the first 5 or 10 of them are terrible. You are working the bugs out. Read Lumet, a bit of Mamet, and some Rodriguez. Watch a lot of Making of docs on Youtube.

​

Robert Rodriguez wrote El Mariachi with a bit of a brilliant approach. He listed all the interesting ('expensive') things he had access to through his friends (a pit bull, a bus) and incorporated those in his script so it looked a little more big budget. If you write a helicopter landing on a bridge, you would have to pay for it. If your grandma has access to a tennis court and your uncle has a dirt bike - write that instead, and you could pull it off for free. Don't get caught up buying gear, use what you have. You don't need to use lacking gear as an excuse for not making something, and don't need to use buying gear as a replacement for being creative. I have seen that a lot in film, photography, and music. You could hypothetically make a great film for free as a flip book on a pad of paper, and if you do you could show that to people that would help pay for more gear if you need it. Anyway, ramble ramble - free advice is usually worth what you pay for it. Good luck!

u/Liebo · 3 pointsr/suggestmeabook

William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade is a great read on the subject and details some massive flops (and successes) Goldman was involved with as a screenwriter. Goldman is a great writer and its a fun and easy read.

Making Movies by Sidney Lumet predictably focuses more on the director's side of film production and has a good amount of "what it's like."

u/soapdealer · 2 pointsr/TrueFilm

I always feel you get better information reading works by practitioners than from academics or journalists. My two favorite film books:

In the blink of an eye by multiple Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch is probably the best book for understanding film editing and the theory behind why it works.

Making Movies by Sidney Lumet (who presumably needs no introduction) is the best all-around book written on filmmaking.

u/TMA-3 · 2 pointsr/Filmmakers

Watch FilmmakerIQ, DSLRguide, D4Darious, Basic Filmmaker, Film Riot, Every Frame a Painting, LightsFilmSchool, nofilmschool and etc. similar channels that you discover on your own

Watch a fuckton of movies.

Make your own projects--write, shoot, direct, light, etc. just create stuff and learn about what specific parts of the process intrigue you the most, and focus on those.

Read this book and also this book.

Get on set, that's how you'll gain most of your experience. Start as a PA in the production department and you can work your way up from there to another department. Get on as many sets as you can in the beginning, like indie shorts and web series and student films, and make friends with the people you meet. BE A NICE PERSON AND STAY IN TOUCH WITH PEOPLE.

Be open to all the possibilities and don't assume you know what all the jobs are and what they involve, because you don't. You never know what you'll end up being interested in--as an aspiring writer/director I really wanted to learn cinematography (I dropped out of school) by working in camera department and tried to transition to being a 2nd AC or camera PA from just a regular PA on a student thesis so I could learn the ins and outs of how cameras work, however I ended up being assigned to G&E (grip and electric) which I wasn't thrilled about. However I ended really enjoying it and a year later it's still what I do.

You'll go through bouts of discouragement and experience lots of ups and downs, and it'll be easy to lose hope quickly, but the only way you'll know for sure that you'll fail is if you give up, so don't ever give up if this is really what you want to do.

u/find_my_harborcoat · 1 pointr/CineShots

No problem at all! In this case, I mostly learned it by reading a lot of essays and interviews and books, in this case especially ones on Kubrick and on cinematography. I don't remember specifically what stuff in particular, unfortunately. The best advice for watching EWS (or any film) in its intended format is to find a screening of it that's in 35mm--depending on where you're located, good bets are museums like MOMA in NYC, a local university, or arthouses and repertory theatres that might have a Kubrick retrospective or something.

As far as becoming well-versed in film, the first step is to watch everything you can get your hands on, even if you think it will be awful, and pay as much attention to the choices that are being made, how a camera is moving, what is in the frame and what isn't, lighting, color, dialogue, etc., even if you have no idea really what to be paying attention for. Anything you can think of or see onscreen, think about why that choice is being made and what the purpose of that choice is. And then after viewing something, look up some reviews of it (to find good critics, a good start is to go to Rotten Tomatoes, narrow down a movie's reviews to Top Critics, and then read the full reviews from there), positive and negative, and try to match what they're talking about to what you just saw and see if you can recognize what they're mentioning. And if you can't, just store the type of thing they're talking about and remember to think about it during the next movie you watch, and the next, and so on. Practicing this will build up your knowledge quite quickly, and it will become second nature to pick up on all kinds of things, and once that becomes habit and you don't have to pay as much attention consciously, you'll pick up on more and more subtle nuances. (If you want to have a starting point for films, you can go with a list like this, a list of 1000 movies that are "the best of all time" as a result of aggregating several different polls. Obviously, you never want to put too much stock in other people's opinions of what the best is, and it seems intimidatingly long, but like I said, it's just if you want a reference point. And they link to the polls they use, so if you want a smaller list to work with you, you can try one of those. This is helpful because again you'll discover what you like, so you might find one movie on that list by a director you love and then go off and watch everything else she ever did. And then you come back to the list. So it's not really about completing the list, just using it as another starting point for discovery.) Also, I recommend you keep at least a brief log of everything you watch, along with some notes about it--this will help you keep track of directors/screenwriters/cinematographers you like, as well as help you understand what you like and don't like about films better.

Once you start to feel comfortable with some of the basics, you can start seeking out books that discuss the film-making experience. With both movies and books, you'll discover your tastes as you go along, so it's best to start casting a broad net and reading books that cover a lot of topics, and then you might find that cinematography interests you most and then start reading books that are more specifically about that, and subscribing to specialty magazines like American Cinematographer, or you might find it all appealing and want to read books on all aspects of filmmaking.

That probably seems like a ton of info and fairly intimidating, but I basically started from nothing and basically just taught myself whatever I know by this method, no film school or anything certainly. Not saying I'm an expert on this stuff by any stretch of the imagination, but I've been able to become knowledgeable enough.

Some specific recommendations that I found immensely helpful that hopefully might be helpful to you too:

Current film critics: Dana Stevens (Slate), Stephanie Zacharek (Village Voice), Karina Longworth (freelance), Manohla Dargis (NYT), Wesley Morris (Grantland), A.O. Scott (NYT)


Kubrick:
The Stanley Kubrick Archives - A great book that also features Kubrick's drawings, personal notes, continuity photos, and interviews with him

Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made - A book on SK's uncompleted Napoleon film

The Kubrick Site - A really amazing online resource with a lot of links to essays and articles


Film magazines: Sight and Sound, Film Comment, American Cinematographer, Filmmaker, Little White Lies, Screen International


Books (if you only ever read one book on film, I'd make it Hitchcock/Truffaut--I learned more from it than from any other single source):
Hitchcock/Truffaut

What is Cinema?

Pictures at a Revolution

Negative Space

A Cinema of Loneliness

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls

The Age of Movies

Making Movies

u/RedGryphon_RachelN · 1 pointr/IAmA

My advice would be to start where you're at right now. The internet is full of great websites and videos, and there are some good books to get.
Start developing your skill with a camera, composition, lighting etc.
Here is a great website and a youtube channel I particularly enjoy:
http://nofilmschool.com/
https://www.youtube.com/user/filmriot

And here is a highly recommended book on cinematography:
http://www.amazon.com/Cinematography-Practice-Cinematographers-Directors-Videographers/dp/0240805003/ref=cm_lmf_tit_1

Here is a book that got me seriously interested in being a Director:
http://www.amazon.com/Making-Movies-Sidney-Lumet/dp/0679756604/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1394579190&sr=1-1&keywords=sidney+lumet+making+movies