The Ministry of Motion Pictures Podcast Todd Shaffer

Making one or two movies per year is huge effort. In 2020, the year of COVID, indie filmmaker, Travis Mills, shot 12 westerns in 12 months, and in the following year he released those 12 films in 12 months. Travis is with us today to talk about this amazing feat of independent filmmaking.

ministryofmotionpictures.org

He was at one time on of the youngest directors with a feature film on Netflix. Writer and director Rob Smat is with me to talk about his film The Last Whistle and a soon to be released documentary.

Rob made his feature film The Last Whistle when he was just 23 years old. It won a number of awards at some film festivals and was picked up by Netflix. The writing and directing in this film demonstrates a maturity of someone much older than 23. Though it’s not intended to be a faith film, faith does play a role in this story. Rob is currently finishing a documentary called Walkout, and it’s making the rounds to festivals this year. This USC grad is just at the beginning of his career, and it will be interesting to watch his career develop over the next decade.

ministryofmotionpictures.org

Legendary screenwriting professor, Richard Walter, is with us again in part two of my conversation with him.

Richard was professor of the UCLA Screenwriting program, which is the most successful screenwriting program in the world. It’s harder to get into this program than it is to get accepted to Harvard Law School, and for good reason.

Richard is a consummate storyteller, no matter what the medium, and that’s one of the things I love about him, every conversation is not only instructive, but a good story. And you can tell that he not only knows his stuff, he loves what he does.

I often bring a guest on the show to test my assumptions, and pose ideas swimming around in my mind that need a good rattling, and no better a rattler of assumptions in film and screenwriting than Richard.

ministryofmotionpictures.org

My guest today is the legendary screenwriting instructor at the UCLA Screenwriting Program, Richard Walter. I’ve been reading books on screenwriting since my days in film school. I have more than any screenwriter could possibly read. When an aspiring screenwriter asks me what books they should read, the first one I recommend is The Essentials of Screenwriting, written by our guest. Of all the screenwriting books I have read, Richard’s is the most grounded, and that’s just what  you would expect from a professor who was a driving force in the most successful screenwriting program in the last 20 years or more. And I’m not saying that to butter him up, this is why I reached out to him to be a guest on this podcast, which he so graciously agreed to do.

ministryofmotionpictures.org

Jason Campbell is with us today to talk about microbudget Christian filmmaking. His company is scheduled to release 20 films this year alone and will launch their own streaming platform.

ministryofmotionpictures.org

Literature  professor, Dr. Karen Swallow Prior joins me to talk about novels,  story, and Christian film. Given that Christian films tend to be very  message driven, I was interested in learning at the feet of Dr. Prior as  she walked her readers through these great novels. How did these  time-tested storytellers communicate moral and spiritual virtues?

I believe filmmakers should be readers of good fiction, especially  given that we don’t have a very strong storytelling tradition in fiction  or Christian films. Christians, historically, are a people of  propositions, not stories. Good authors of fiction have a great deal to  teach Christian filmmakers.