leena pendharkar

I team teach a class and LMU called “Media Innovation,” in which the students shoot, edit and post movies using cell phones or other low-fi camera devices.  The goal is to worry less about production, and just really go out and make movies.  It’s a fun class, and has evolved nicely over the past couple of years.  This week, my co-professor, Art Nomura, came up with this exercise called “the Shaggy Dog” in which students collective create a story on the fly.  Then this week, they will go out and shoot what they created, and we’ll put it all together.  It’s an interesting exercise, because surprisingly, on the first go round, they actually came up with a story that was pretty interesting and cohesive.  I enjoyed seeing people do this, because in a lot of ways, storytelling is a natural and inherent part of human existence.  We live and breath stories everyday as human beings.  But as a filmmaker/writer, you are trying to take this medium/format and push the boundaries with it…  I found this story about a teen in Japan who wrote a “cell phone novel” to be pretty interesting….