Join us for a laid back discussion about internationally acclaimed animation director Hayao Miyazaki of Studio Ghibli and how he utilizes storyboards to plan and create his films. One of our regular hosts, Devan Scott, is away this week, so our associate producer and resident Ghibli enthusiast Paige Smith joins Will Ross to explore how Miyazaki works — and how that affects his films.

How do prolific local filmmaking communities come about… and how do they slip away? The push and pull with larger-scale, Hollywood style means of production and distribution can be demoralizing and confusing, so on this episode we're tackling its causes thoroughly. Curator and film critic Josh Cabrita joins us as we take our own home of Vancouver as a case study for how creative and institutional stagnation happens, and what we can do to counteract it.

Ever seen the original Star Wars trilogy? Which versions? Multiple new “official” editions of the films have emerged since 1997, with the original films as seen in the 70s and 80s left without any official release. The work of tracking all these changes and preserving the originals has largely fallen to fans, one of whom, Drew Stewart, runs Star Wars Visual Comparisons, a compendium of every visual alteration to the original trilogy. Drew dropped by to talk about how and why all this happened to Star Wars, and how communities rise up when studios fail to protect the legacy of their films.

Join us as we open our ears to the stylized sounds of a bustling commercial existence circa the 1930s — that is, the way they sound in some of the more daring documentaries of the time. Tanya Goldman, a Cinema Studies PHD candidate at NYU, walks us through these films, how their radical soundtracks express their politics, and how the soundscapes of documentaries have shifted in the decades since. All the major films of discussion can be viewed for free online, and are linked in the shownotes below.

An extra special thanks to Tanya for enthusiastically providing the majority of content and links for the shownotes this week.

What does it mean to write for documentaries? Alison Duke of Oya Media Group takes us through her experience co-writing the television documentary Mr. Jane and Finch — a process that netted her the Canadian Screen Award for Best Documentary Writing.

We went in-depth into her commitment to honoring the truth of her subjects, the challenges of structuring a story as it unfolds in front of you, and some of the ethical quandaries that come with non-fiction filmmaking.

There are a million ways to make an independent movie, and today Dan Sallitt came on the podcast to tell us about the one he chose to make Fourteen. The film's story spans many years, and was shot in several separate periods in 2018 and 2019 — yet it was precisely planned and plotted from the start.

That topic winds up leading us to personal discussions about how our own personalities, anxieties, and circumstances dictate how we make movies and how we compare ourselves to other filmmakers. Dan winds up offering a pretty candid portrait of his feelings and personal philosophies, a great example of the personal side of production methods.

Author and critic Mike Thorn swings by to talk about Prince of Darkness, John Carpenter's 1987 horror film, and how it both expresses and interrogates the subject of epistemophobia — the fear of knowledge.

We get into how the film withholds or ambiguates information for the audience, the film's balance between pessimism and intellectual humility, and its place in Carpenter's "Apocalypse Cycle" of movies.