Spring Break
Stablehouse Productions seeks to unify film students
Kady Smith
Issue date: 2/28/07 Section: ARTS
Stablehouse Productions is a film collective founded by Dallas seniors Richard Card and Chris Bryan, students in the radio, TV and film department.
Two months ago, they moved into a house with the intention of starting up a film collective that would motivate students to make films outside of the classroom. The collective is analogous to Texas Filmmakers, another film organization at NT that seeks to bring a sense of community among the filmmakers in Denton.
"We are very similar to Texas Filmmakers, but we are by no means a competition," Card said. "We use them, we work with them, but we are meant really as a motivation, to get people to start doing work again. [In] your entire career at NT, eight films is the most the department has you make in classes."
The collective has a studio space that has already been used for several short films and an office that serves as headquarters inside the house the two aspiring filmmakers share.
Card and Bryan said the real goal of Stablehouse is to establish a sense of community among filmmakers in Denton and act as a source of motivation, especially for those who have been discouraged by the department.
"More than anything, this is a way to keep people motivated about film," Bryan said. "If you are not in the major status, which takes at least two years, or if you are a pre-major, it is really hard to stay motivated when you don't have access to any of the equipment or to any of the production classes. Even in the advanced classes, you are equipped to do certain things you may not even want to be doing. It all gets muddled up in schoolwork, and this is a way to keep people on the track they want to be on."
Because the department is so limited in what it prepares students to do, the collective seeks to provide a means to allow students to work in aspects of film that intrigue them, and not just the Hollywood preparation they receive in their classes, Card and Bryan said.
It intends to do this by assigning projects to the collective as a whole, where everyone works on each other's films. The collective is looking for anyone interested in any aspect of film to join the collective and has a variety of ideas to coalesce the different facets of filmmaking, Card and Bryan said.
"We had the idea to take a song, have one director make a visual representation of that song as a short film, then give that video to a composer in the music school who then scores the film, and that's the soundtrack that goes with the film," Bryan said. "Then you give that song without the visuals to another director, and they direct something based off that song, and so you end up with this long chain that all goes back to one song but is going to change completely throughout."
The collective extends its invitation not only to filmmakers, but also to actors, actresses, composers, photographers, designers, musicians and anyone interested in cinema.
For information on how to get involved, visit www.myspace.com/stablehouse.
Two months ago, they moved into a house with the intention of starting up a film collective that would motivate students to make films outside of the classroom. The collective is analogous to Texas Filmmakers, another film organization at NT that seeks to bring a sense of community among the filmmakers in Denton.
"We are very similar to Texas Filmmakers, but we are by no means a competition," Card said. "We use them, we work with them, but we are meant really as a motivation, to get people to start doing work again. [In] your entire career at NT, eight films is the most the department has you make in classes."
The collective has a studio space that has already been used for several short films and an office that serves as headquarters inside the house the two aspiring filmmakers share.
Card and Bryan said the real goal of Stablehouse is to establish a sense of community among filmmakers in Denton and act as a source of motivation, especially for those who have been discouraged by the department.
"More than anything, this is a way to keep people motivated about film," Bryan said. "If you are not in the major status, which takes at least two years, or if you are a pre-major, it is really hard to stay motivated when you don't have access to any of the equipment or to any of the production classes. Even in the advanced classes, you are equipped to do certain things you may not even want to be doing. It all gets muddled up in schoolwork, and this is a way to keep people on the track they want to be on."
Because the department is so limited in what it prepares students to do, the collective seeks to provide a means to allow students to work in aspects of film that intrigue them, and not just the Hollywood preparation they receive in their classes, Card and Bryan said.
It intends to do this by assigning projects to the collective as a whole, where everyone works on each other's films. The collective is looking for anyone interested in any aspect of film to join the collective and has a variety of ideas to coalesce the different facets of filmmaking, Card and Bryan said.
"We had the idea to take a song, have one director make a visual representation of that song as a short film, then give that video to a composer in the music school who then scores the film, and that's the soundtrack that goes with the film," Bryan said. "Then you give that song without the visuals to another director, and they direct something based off that song, and so you end up with this long chain that all goes back to one song but is going to change completely throughout."
The collective extends its invitation not only to filmmakers, but also to actors, actresses, composers, photographers, designers, musicians and anyone interested in cinema.
For information on how to get involved, visit www.myspace.com/stablehouse.
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