Master Class

In this our 25th anniversary year we are pleased to welcome back former Scribe Program Coordinator, instructor, Street Movies!

Novella Nelson’s extensive acting career has involved wide-ranging roles in film, theater and television. She also has a highly successful career as a voice-over artist. This Master Class is designed for actors, authors, performers, radio hosts and anyone who wishes to learn the craft of being a professional voice-over artist. Through a variety of exercises, recordings, critique and discussion, participants will explore the process of shaping and shifting your voice to embody characters and moods.

We are honored that the distinguished poet and playwright Sonia Sanchez will conduct a workshop this summer on writing audio monologues. Over three sessions, Sanchez will help participants find their voice through the process of creating a performance monologue. A soliloquy or monologue, told simply and directly, is what most thrills us about radio, theater and often film. The audio monologue is the essence of storytelling. Workshop participants are invited to come with an idea, an image or experience that they would like to explore and write about.

John Sayles is one of the most celebrated independent American directors of the last two decades. Together with partner Maggie Renzi, they have managed to define the meaning of the word "independent' anlways adapting to the changes in the industry and reinventing the model. Sayles never tackles the same topic twice and twists of class and power permeate his scripts.

The documentary has been a part of African cinema from the beginning of film history. But because of the allure of narrative fiction film, African documentary filmmakers have not been as widely known or recognized. In the last 10 years, an exciting new group of documentary filmmakers from countries including Cameroon, Congo, Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso, and South Africa have given new prominence to the documentary. Perhaps the most influential and widely known is Jean Marie Teno, who also serves as producer for a number of other African filmmakers.

As a cinematographer Arthur Jafa has lensed striking images for Julie Dash, John Akomfrah and Spike Lee to name but a few. He is known for his longterm quest for an "authentic" black cinema. In his words “the idea(s) is obvious, the implementation is not.”

Over the past several years, Richard Power Hoffmann has perfected a new technique using a digital still camera exclusively to make films. The evocative time-lapse effects created gives the impression of being very costly, but in reality is well within reach of the most cost-conscious independent producers. This unique storytelling approach takes advantage of today's low cost yet high resolution digital still cameras to acquire better than HD resolution imagery, and then dynamically manipulate it in post-production.

As low-cost digital video formats allow videomakers to shoot many more hours of footage, the editor, sifting through all the video and audio elements to find the story, has become even more central to moviemaking. How do you tell a story through the language of editing? What is the meaning of a cut, a dissolve, a fade?

In his own words filmmaker Marco Williams makes films “about the politics of our society, which is race relations.” Many of his films have very consciously made the effort to frame challenging questions such as how to reconcile the differences between black and white Americans. His most recent film Banished reveals the stories of three counties that forcefully banished African American families from their towns one hundred years ago, and the descendants that return to learn a shocking history and seek reparations.

The producers of Made in L.A, Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar, will use their film as a case study to tell the story of how they raised the funds to make this feature length documentary film. The film, which took 5 years to complete, grew from a short video to expose deplorable working conditions faced by immigrant workers in the garment factories in L.A. into a much expanded story of the struggle of recent immigrants to get a foothold, to learn their rights and to assert their voice in our society.