The Rhetorica Network is my documentary film brand. This blog offers commentary and analysis about documentary filmmaking and information about my films. Important: Owing to a server snafu, much of what I published between 2002 and 2021 was lost. You may find the content from the early years of this blog at Archive.org. The Rhetorica Network once offered analysis and commentary about the rhetoric of the press-politics relationship in America. --Andrew R. Cline, Ph.D.
I just posted my second tweet of the day regarding yet another list of documentary films. I sort of play this for a chuckle because there are so many of these lists published. But, really, I find these “listicles” very useful because I try (and succeed imperfectly) to watch a documentary film every day. I maybe actually watch only three or four per week 🙂
Now that I’m back from my trip to Portugal (see my personal project on becoming an expat), I’m back to work on the back-to-the-land documentary being directed by Denise Vaughn. I’m the cinematographer and doing some project consulting. Many of the interviews with members of the original 1970s movement into the Missouri Ozarks will be housed in the Special Collections at Meyer Library at Missouri State University.
Posted by acline | June 14, 2022 | Posted in: documentary, education | Comments Off on Work Continues on Back-to-the-Land Documentary
A bumper in the film business is a form of studio branding. You’ll generally see two or three at the start of almost every film. Here’s a list of famous ones you’ve seen dozens of times (sadly, an old list with a few gaps).
Sometimes bumpers are simply visually striking with little attempt to create meaning. The best ones, I think, try to say something about the studio. Here’s the bumper for Carbon Trace Productions, the non-profit documentary studio I co-founded in Springfield, Missouri.
We thought we might be making films about broadly environmental issues of all sorts. Our first film — Downtown: A New American Dream — was a new urbanist film examining the movement back to cities by boomers and millennials. We ended up focusing more on humanitarian service. But the bumper was designed to indicate a cleansing of the earth through our documentary efforts. Hence the smoke cleared away as the moon sweeps by and the name is revealed.
Here’s a draft bumper I’ve developed for The Rhetorica Network.
Rhetorica is a character that represents the concerns of the discipline of rhetoric — the persuasive use of language. I’ve mixed the Old English font with Greco-Roman imagery to connect the past to my application of my academic field (rhetoric, not media) to the persuasive concerns of documentary filmmaking.
Anyway, bumpers are cool and fun to make. So here you go.
Posted by acline | June 12, 2022 | Posted in: documentary, education | Comments Off on Playing Around With Bumpers
