Category: Learning

Cost-Effective Compassion: The 10 Most Popular Strategies for Helping the Poor

What I find interesting, and telling, is that none of these strategies are really incarnational. That is, they don’t involve us getting too close, too involved, too personally invested, in the people we are trying to help.

My family talks about this stuff often, and we desire to become more and more effective at doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with our God (Micah 6:8).

Here’s an interesting article about some of the ways we (typically middle-class Christians in North America) try to help the poor and oppressed. Most importantly, some folks tried to analyze the real impact of these popular ways we try to help. [Click the link below for the article.]

Cost-Effective Compassion: The 10 Most Popular Strategies for Helping the Poor | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction.

My family pursues a few of these strategies, hoping it will make a real difference. What I find interesting, and telling, is that none of these strategies are really incarnational. That is, they don’t involve us getting too close, too involved, too personally invested, in the people we are trying to help. The gospel, as communicated in the Bible, is inherently incarnational. Could not God have just ‘written a check?’ Perhaps not. So, Christ chose to renounce his privilege and position and distance from the people with the problem – us.

In my family’s discussion of all this, we are finding ourselves more and more drawn to what we know to be the truth; while some help can be offered from a distance, true understanding and true transformation most often requires us to come alongside those we desire to help. This article shows how complex some of these situations really are. Unless we are part of the context, we will almost certainly miss that complexity and come up with a solution that is only partially effective, or one that even makes problems worse!

We are thinking about how we can free ourselves from our self-centeredness, our need for security, approval, or just our stuff – to become free to incarnate in a more fully Christlike way among those who Jesus came to serve and save.

13 Rules For Realizing Your Creative Vision

I find myself needing to shift back and forth during the course of a film project – from being a pirate and letting the chips fall where they may (The ‘Done Manifesto’ stage) to the obsession stage where I am looking to polish and perfect.

If you have ever worked to launch a project or product, you know how different it feels than when you’re working on something that is well-established. I like this “Done Manifesto” as a way to capture the need to work and think differently in the wild days of beginning something new – like at the beginning (and at various stages) of a film project.

Click here to see the full graphic from FastCoDesign:

Infographic Of The Day: 13 Rules For Realizing Your Creative Vision | Co. Design.

But the funny thing about realizing a creative vision–whether it’s a startup or a personal project–is that it requires a set of working rules that is almost the opposite of the slow, careful deliberation that typically rules our working lives.

Examples of principles they suggest:

#1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion

#8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.

#10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

In a filmmaking process, I’m trying to think of the dividing point when a project moves from the startup phase, where rules like this apply, to the stage where something is established and you need to begin to shift your thinking. I know that brainstorming and the first stages of scripting benefit from these rules. Even the first stage of rehearsals with actors and the first assembly edit of the film.

I find myself needing to shift back and forth during the course of a film project – from being a pirate and letting the chips fall where they may (The Done Manifesto stage) to the obsession stage where I am looking to polish and perfect.

If you’re an indie filmmaker, you probably need to learn to function in both modes. Not always an easy thing to learn.

Screenwriters Slogans For The Wall

42 ways to improve your screenplay – from Chris Jones blog

From screenwriter and instructor Alexander MacKendrick – a great set of 42 aphorisms he had on his walls as he wrote and taught screenwriting. Good writing is not about learning everyone’s rules and ‘can’t miss’ methods. But learning from those who have gone before is part of task.

Read the complete list at: ChrisJonesBlog.com- Screenwriters Slogans For The Wall… by Alexander MacKendrick.

A few of my favorites that I haven’t read in every screenwriting book:

Self pity in a character does not evoke sympathy.

Coincidence may mean exposition is in the wrong place, i.e. if you establish the too-convenient circumstances before they become dramatically necessary, then we feel no sense of coincidence. Use coincidence to get characters into trouble, not out of trouble.

Ambiguity does not mean lack of clarity. Ambiguity may be intriguing when it consists of alternative meanings, each of them clear.

The role of the ANTAGONIST may have more to do with the structure of the plot than the character of the PROTAGONIST. When you are stuck for a third act, think through your situations from the point of view of whichever characters OPPOSE the protagonist’s will.

If you’ve got a Beginning, but you don’t yet have an end, then you’re mistaken. You don’t have the right Beginning.

DRAMA IS EXPECTATION MINGLED WITH UNCERTAINTY.

Write Lots, Write Shorts

All the arguments aside about whether or not shorts can help you make it in Hollywood, I believe writing short film scripts can serve your craft in much the same way writing lots of bad (and a few good) songs helps a songwriter.

I just completed a short film script for a contest, one of these speed-writing deals where you get seven days to write a script no more than 12 pages long. I did it for fun and I’m not anxious whether or not my script gets picked as a finalist or anything like that. I did take it seriously, but it was more for my own benefit than any big dreams. I have made movies and I’m working on more, so it’s not my ‘ticket outta here’ win or lose.

[AND, I do really like my final script; that also makes it fun.]

What struck me today as I was e-mailing my entry off to the powers-that-be is that short film scripts could be more of a core creative outlet and emphasis for me. I have always envied people in other arts like songwriters, painters, sculptors, and poets. I have dabbled in some of these creative forms so I know the same discipline, drudgery, and pain are present in the creative process. However, in each of these you have at least two things going for you: typically a more compact end product, and you can usually complete something on your own. [I know there are epics in any medium, but I’m talking about more usual forms.] When I write a song or a poem I know that it will fit in perhaps a few pages at most. If I could paint, I could create full expressions in a corner of my room if I chose. I will certainly work and re-work the song but it is usually in a whole different category than a feature screenplay – which is more like an opera or symphony.

I recently found and shared a short video clip featuring some words of wisdom from Ira Glass, host of “This American Life” on NPR. He was speaking somewhere about storytelling.

Ira’s main point is that storytellers need to tell lots of stories, tell them often, make mistakes, and hopefully get better. I’m sure I’m not alone if I admit that I get bogged down and intimidated at the thought of cranking out many feature-length screenplays.

Obviously, there are things you can only learn by writing a feature. You can’t really master the many beats in a feature, full act structures, sub-plots, and many other things you must eventually master. However, writing a short film script can help you to master characters, scene construction, dialogue, economy in your writing, transformations, and many other principles that are essential to good writing. I had a lot of fun working within the arbitrary constraints of a 12-page screenplay. It’s like doing a tv commercial. People complain about the storytelling constraints until they learn that they can pack their seconds and frames with story, creativity, and characters; it just takes a different kind of discipline.

So, all the arguments aside about whether or not shorts can help you make it in Hollywood, I believe writing short film scripts can serve your craft in much the same way writing lots of bad (and a few good) songs helps a songwriter. Even better if you want to direct and produce as well because you can benefit in the same ways because you are actually working in your craft rather than bogged down in the epic. That will come with time.

The 99 Recommended Steps For Making Good Movies > Hope for Film

Great post from Ted Hope; inspiration to indie filmmakers everywhere. It may exhaust you to read this list, but read it anyway. Filmmaking is not for the half-interested or half-committed.

The 99 Recommended Steps For Making Good Movies > Hope for Film.