When we asked Jesse Harris (filmmaker and founder of the NFFTY film festival) what he’s learned about filmmaking, both from creating his own projects and from helming a large, international film festival, he remarked how often a fine film turns sour because of bad acting.

Case in point. Wonder how these would have turned out with different casting decisions?

Maybe this one could have even been saved with a different lead?

To promote his book, Budd Moss (coincidentally the agent of Constance Towers; one of The Storyteller‘s cast members) guested Larry King Now, which you can see below. He recounts how stars were made by passionate people with a vision, and he acknowledges how embarrassingly (his word) hard it is for today’s actors to even get considered for a bit part in a TV show.

So what’s the take-away from this? In my opinion, that they’re still out there. The good guys. The people who wants you to succeed and who wants to see movies made because of the magic, not because of the YouTube views. And that’s a comforting thought for young filmmakers.

Other publications do great jobs of analyzing and commenting on contenders and snubs – check out for example The Hollywood Reporters coverage – but it’s easy to get caught up in the politics of the awards circus. There’s a lot at stake for a lot of people, and I can appreciate that, but for me personally, I like to keep focus on the films. The stories. The products of passionate people working tirelessly to create movie magic.

So. In honor of just that – movie magic – we’ve put together a super-cut of some of the many memorable moments from the Academy Awards ‘Best Picture’ winners of the past 25 years. Enjoy!

Which one is your favorite and who do you think will be next on the list? Trumbo? Carol? The Revenant? Room? Spotlight? Ah, let’s not worry about that, but instead just sit back and enjoy the films.

Nicole Duport recently completed her own series, BURNS, which went through many rewrites and months of pre-production, before the cameras started rolling. Here she shares her thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages to using the webseries medium versus, for example, a short or even feature film.

We talked to Nicole about how BURNS became her creative outlet, even though she had never written her own material before, and how she set about getting it made. This is a two-parter. Please enjoy.

That seems to be the mantra that led actress Nicole Duport to sit down and take a stab at writing. The result, the series BURNS, is a hilarious look at a trainwreck of a girl who just wants to be her own goddamn awesome self.

BURNS is not yet available for your viewing pleasure, but instead Nicole was kind enough to talk with us about the process of creating her own show and what she’s learned.

Check out Nicole’s credits and be sure to check back for more videos soon. May we suggest subscribing to our newsletter?

Well, Rachel Noll is here to tell you that learning by doing is an art form, and one of the most important lessons you can force yourself to learn if you want to produce your own film. Sure, you want everything to be done right, but if you’re working on a low-to-no budget, chances are that you’re often better off simply getting things done, than worrying about getting things done right. Because if you won’t settle for anything less than perfection, you’ll be stopping production before you even get started.

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I was fortunate enough to have an experience a few weeks ago shooting a complex and involved action scene for a film. I was kidnapped and pulled out of a building after a massive explosion, I got to kick some ass, run and dive, steal a van and peal out of a parking lot, get shot, inject a man with a syringe, and watch a man fall down a flight of stairs. This was the first time I had been a part of a shoot like this, and not only was it a blast, but it was done on a very low budget. Here’s how it was all done.

Explosions!

First of all, lets talk about on screen explosions. Or at least the one I witnessed. The scene called for a building exploding. Windows broke, the door busts open, and a group of scientists are pulled out of the rubble.

I watched the pyro team set up a big air machine in the doorway of a building façade on New York Street in the Manhattan Beach Studio lot. They filled it with a grey powder. When the director called ACTION they pressed a button and the air machine fired off a loud noise accompanied by a cloud of dust and debris shot out of the machine. The building itself remained unharmed.

Glass fell out of a window onto one of the actors as the explosion happened – this was achieved by a bucket of candy glass, which is small squares of rubber made to look like shattered glass, poured from above and thrown over the actors on the street below. The effect is surprisingly realistic, and avoids any harm coming to the actors, or having to worry about shards of glass for the rest of the day.

Fighting and falling!

The next sequence involved a team of assassins pulling me and another doctor through the smoke and out into the street. The smoke from the initial explosion had cleared as they set up this new shot, so in place of the grey dust from the explosion effect, they now set up a smoke machine in the doorway to mimic the previous shot. When all of the actors were set in the awning, they filled the doorway with smoke from a small smoke machine. When the director called action, I was pulled down the stairs by an assassin holding my arm. He had a gun to my ribs. I was grateful he was there with me, because I couldn’t see the steps to save my life, and without him to lean on and guide me down the stairs I probably would have fallen.

The stunt performer was wearing pads underneath his costume that were so thin they couldn’t be seen. Before we did the first take, the Stunt coordinator came to speak to us and talk us through the stunt that would happen after we got down the stairs. Basically, we would tussle a bit, and I break away and elbow him in the face. The elbow to the face was actually an elbow to the air about a foot away from his face, but with the right angle and correct execution from me and him, it looked like I had clocked him pretty good. At the moment I broke away from his grasp, the director yells “BANG” and the stunt performer who had grabbed me reacts as though he got shot. He throws himself up into the air and falls into the stairs, rolling down three of them and landing on the concrete. It looked incredibly painful and real, but he got up and performed the same action four more times without injury or complaint.

Gunfire!

After he fell down the stairs, I grabbed a vile from his pocket and ran down the sidewalk as one of the other assassins fired a machine gun after me. Bullets ricocheting on the pavement next to my feet as I ran. This was achieved by the stunt coordinator standing just off camera with a pellet gun containing dirt pellets. As they hit the ground they would disintegrate into powder, giving the effect of bullets chipping at the pavement and the ground. Even if one of them had hit me, it wouldn’t have hurt.

At the end of my run down the pavement, I had to leap and dive underneath a tree as another man took a bullet aimed for me. There was a pad hidden beneath the tree off camera to catch my fall, and the stunt team talked me through the movements to make the fall both safe and realistic. We moved through this sequence several times to get different angles, and then it was time for the work with the van.

Stunt driving!

I was nervous going into this sequence, because I had never driven a van before, let alone driven it while doing a 7-page dialogue scene and being shot at. I had a stunt double on the set who, in wider shots, did all of the more extreme van work. She would do the fast driving and peeling out. She slammed on the breaks and skidded to a stop before rounding corners.

When it came time for me to get behind the wheel, they had rigged a big square light onto the windshield directly in front of my face to light me for the shot. This made it incredibly hard to see out the windshield. The first action was me jumping into the car, grabbing the keys, and peeling out as bullets batter the side of the van, and one of them hits me in the shoulder. I didn’t have to drive fast, but I had to do a lot of fast thinking, acting and reacting very quickly, while also trying to steer the cumbersome van through the narrow lot and around the corner.

The camera, for my coverage, was rigged to the driver’s side window, and the director was in the back of the van with a monitor. We drove laps around the lot, me quickly learning the route and getting more confident in my driving, though still nervous about the bright light shining in my eyes. The lines, with all this action going on, were falling right out of my head even though I had them completely memorized. Because we were on such a tight schedule, we didn’t have time to spend on getting me comfortable behind the wheel before we were shooting. We were losing daylight, and we just had to do the best we could with everything being thrown at us all at once.

Injections!

The final shot of this sequence involved an actor dying from a gun shot wound and me injecting him with a vile of liquid. Tubing was rigged underneath his shirt with fake blood that seeped out slowly as the scene went on, giving the illusion that he was losing a lot of blood. After we stopped the van, they reset the shot and I jumped in back. There were two syringes in my pocket. One, a real syringe that I had to stick into a vial of liquid and fill, and then a fake syringe with a needle that would push up into the syringe itself when pressed against the actors neck and look like it was going into his body without actually hurting him.

I had to fill the real syringe, and then set it off camera, grab the fake one, and jab it into the actor’s neck. Because they were identical, the actor being injected held the fake syringe for me, so once I had set down the real one, I could grab the fake one from him and both of us would know I had the right one.

As this was happening, the pyro team had rigged a strip of spark lights along the back wall of the van. In sequence, they went off one after the other creating noise and white sparks that looked like bullets hitting metal.

There were a lot of moving pieces involved in this 13-page sequence – and each one essential in pulling it off in a realistic way. The stunts and pyro effects were incredible to witness first hand, and getting to glimpse behind the smoke and mirrors of some of these common and impressive effects helped me to see that there are ways to accomplish realistic effects on a lower budget. Doing some stunts myself, and then seeing the more impressive stunts done by the others was humbling and exhilarating.

It really is magical to see how a sequence like this is shot. What we see up on the screen is one big magic show – we are fooled into believing that what we are seeing is real, and that is the beauty and the magic of filmmaking.

In this video, Rachel Noll – at times a writer, at times a director, at times an actress, at times a producer, at all times a filmmaker – talks about the benefits of having been involved in more than one aspect of the filmmaking process.

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Acting should be easy, right? It’s like playing dress-up with a little more intentionality behind it. If that were actually true, we’d all act and the pool would be that much thicker to wade through in finding the greats. So what separates the Laurence Oliviers from the Pauly Shores? Usually a semester or two at Juilliard, or just basic talent, but even more so it’s a muscular conditioning of the extraocular variety. Yes, the eyes are without a doubt the most important physical aspect of an actor’s ability to embody a character. Don’t believe me? Go back and watch Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight, for that matter. All of these performances are bolstered by the intensity, discrepancy and overall directionality of the eyes. Admittedly there’s an entire body to go along with them, but every presentation has its focal point and the eyes tend to standout in the most standout performances.

The actual movement of the eyes reveals intent or contempt, love or hate, truth or mistruth. The best actors can communicate a myriad of emotions in only a few moments with their eyes. After years of directing all shapes and sizes, I finally asked an actor if my fascination and effectively higher standards for eye-performance was warranted. He told me it’s one of the most basic principles that, for the most part, goes unspoken. See, it’s like watching the NBA and saying, “wow, he’s an amazing dribbler!” Instead you’re just waiting for a dunk. The dribbling is seen, it’s registered, but is also gone unmentioned. Why? Because it’s rudimentary, a foundation. The eyes are always there, and even the most exceptional ocular effectuation is invisible simply because it’s so good. The best kind of acting is that which either goes unnoticed or becomes immortalized. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote or Brando’s Don Corleone were both understated, with eyes that barely moved for all the weight these characters carried around their necks. In contrast, Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Charlize Theron in Monster were accentuated, darkly-spirited performances in which the eyes were more carnal, frustrated and deadly bright.

In the same ways the eyes can seal a truly great performance, so can they undo the less honest ones. I’m not such a vicious critic that I’d list examples of poorer actors so cavalierly as I did the greater ones, but I’d encourage anyone interested in my theory to go back and vivisect any performances you consider to be truly bad. Watch the eyes. Watch where they track. Watch how they vibrate or else awkwardly dart from place to place. The most telling moments will be when these actors are not delivering dialogue but are instead giving silent reactions. In situations of tension the truer eyes will remain focused, unmoving and almost three-dimensional in their potency while the untruer will glaze in and out of attention, thinking more about the script or what’s for lunch than the world of the scene.

So, be you actor, director or casting manager, keep in mind the windows to the soul may in fact be the windows to your character as well.