Take Two Film Festival Award Nominees and Winners

@TakeTwoRemakes:

Best Picture: HAPPY HALLOWEEN w/ Best Director John McDermott and Best Cinematography Andrew Caviston

Click to Enlarge:

TakeTwoRemakes Movie Posters

Full Movies - Great job on JTerm!

Steven Spielberg Discusses his Dyslexia for the First Time Ever

Thank you to Darby for finding this:

Spike Jonze

Shout out to Jackson for the find:

 

Your Trailers - Enjoy!

Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO

Alfred Hitchcock Reveals The Secret Sauce for Creating Suspense

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rules for Watching Psycho (1960)

Psycho on IMDB.com - nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Director.
Trivia: Alfred Hitchcock was so pleased with the score written by Bernard Herrmann that he doubled the composer's salary to $34,501. Hitchcock later said, "33% of the effect of Psycho was due to the music."

Who Created the Famous Shower Scene in Psycho? Alfred Hitchcock or the Legendary Designer Saul Bass?

More:

Alfred Hitchcock’s Seven-Minute Editing Master Class

37 Hitchcock Cameos over 50 Years: All in One Video

List of Alfred Hitchcock cameo appearances

21 Free Hitchcock Movies Online

The 10 Hidden Cuts in Rope (1948), Alfred Hitchcock’s Famous “One-Shot” Feature Film

Listen to François Truffaut’s Big, 12-Hour Interview with Alfred Hitchcock (1962)

12 Years a Slave: Nominated for 9 Oscars

Best Picture Nomination:



Best Director Nomination: Steve McQueen: IMDB.com





Best Actor Nomination: Chiwetel Ejiofor, “12 Years a Slave”


Nominations for Best Supporting Actor and Actress: 
Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o




Spoiler: If you have seen this film, listen to these interviews on EPIX:

Get the Scoop on the Oscars via Twitter

Check out the tweets to the right - and click the links to great commentary on the nominations.

A couple of articles to note:

Fill out a NYT Oscars ballot and share your predictions: http://t.co/kEF6RNtGct
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 16, 2014

#Oscars Nominations by the Numbers: Fun Facts and Shocking Stats http://t.co/ASdk7sijwQ
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) January 16, 2014

Film Score: Music that Makes a Film

Lastly, we have talked about sound and the importance of music to create mood; however, here's an Oscar nominated composer...

Steven Price snagged an Oscar Nomination for scoring #Gravity. Read what Price shared about composing the score: http://t.co/SgMsNLJaSF
— Rolling Stone (@RollingStone) January 16, 2014

An extended excerpt from the article: 

One of the emotions that overruns the film is fear. What's the best way to capture that feeling?Fear is one of those really primal emotions which you don't want to have incredibly exciting modulations and complex harmonies and all that kind of stuff. The approach we took with it was that it was terror, and she was utterly overwhelmed by the situation and tried to use all the devices at disposal whether they're instrumental or sonic things we were working on. And the actual theater itself, the surround nature of the cinema, would really go with that absolutely overwhelming terror. A lot of what we did was working out where those moments were, almost where the tempo of Ryan's heartbeat was.

Which scene worked best for you?There's a track called "Don't Let Go" which takes you from an intimate moment when Ryan and Matt are talking to then Ryan reveals why she's up there and what made her not want to be on Earth anymore. It goes all the way through the period where they try and get to the ISS and they have all sorts of problems. The tempo fluctuates according to their emotions and the style of writing changes considerably through that 11-minute process.

What Are the Best Movie Soundtracks of All Time?

When you were writing the music, were you working with the script? Or visuals?With this one, because their process had been so long, they'd been going for over three years by the time I got involved. So there was a very advanced cut of the film – although a lot of the graphics in it, because there's so much CGI, were incomplete. I'd go from a shot that was very developed and it'd cut to a shot that was a few polygons and a face sort of floating by. But even from that stage, you really got a sense of what the film was becoming, and the way that it was choreographed and the feeling of floating in space. That was huge influence for how I wrote the music. You didn't want to do anything too abrupt because it clashed with the mood, and even though there were eventually violent things happening, they still happened with a kind of grace, and that was really influential to the instruments chosen and the style of writing that I used.

The action stuff was always the most challenging, because when you're usually doing an action score, you're competing with all these other sounds. With this, because there was no other sound in space, it kind of meant we could rethink what an action cue could be in this complex, so I kind of have to find ways to do it without doing the normal action cue tricks.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/secrets-of-the-gravity-soundtrack-20131009#ixzz2qZne77oH 
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook

Oscar Nominations Are Out!

From SLATE:

American Hustle and Gravity lead this year’s Oscar nominations with 10 nods each, followed closely behind by 12 Years a Slave. Amid some of the more obvious picks—Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Alfonso Cuarón all heard their names called for their respective categories this morning—were some more unexpected snubs and nods. Inside Llewyn Davis was shut out of all the major categories, earning just two nominations for cinematography and sound mixing,* while dark horse Philomena picked up several, including one for best picture.

You can see the full list of nominees below.

Best PictureAmerican Hustle
Captain Phillips
Dallas Buyers Club
Gravity
Her
Nebraska
Philomena
12 Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street

Best ActressAmy Adams, American HustleCate Blanchett, Blue JasmineSandra Bullock, GravityJudi Dench, PhilomenaMeryl Streep, August: Osage County

Best ActorChristian Bale, American Hustle
Bruce Dern, NebraskaLeonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall StreetChiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave
Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

Supporting ActressJulia Roberts, August: Osage CountySally Hawkins, Blue JasmineJennifer Lawrence, American Hustle
Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a SlaveJune Squibb, Nebraska

Supporting ActorBarkhad Abdi, Captain PhillipsBradley Cooper, American HustleMichael Fassbender, 12 Years a SlaveJonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall StreetJared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

Best DirectorDavid O. Russell, American HustleAlfonso Cuarón, Gravity
Alexander Payne, Nebraska
Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave
Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

Original Screenplay
Eric Warren Singer and David O. Russell, American Hustle
Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine
Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack, Dallas Buyers Club
Spike Jonze, Her

Adapted Screenplay
Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, Before Midnight
Billy Ray, Captain Phillips
Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope, Philomena
John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave
Terence Winter, The Wolf of Wall Street

Foreign Feature
The Broken Circle Breakdown
The Great Beauty
The Hunt
The Missing Picture
Omar

Animated Feature
The Croods
Despicable Me 2
Ernest & Celestine
Frozen
The Wind Rises

Best Animated Short
Feral
Get a Horse!
Mr. Hublot
Possessions
Room on the Broom

Best Live-Action Short
Aquel No Era Yo (That Wasn't Me)
Avant Que De Tout Perdre (Just Before Losing Everything)
Helium
Pitääkö Mun Kaikki Hoitaa? (Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?)
The Voorman Problem

Music (Original Song)
"Alone Yet Not Alone" from Alone Yet Not Alone
"Happy" from Despicable Me 2
"Let it Go" from Frozen
"The Moon Song" from Her"
"Ordinary Love" from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom

Music (Original Score)
John Williams, The Book ThiefStephen Price, GravityWilliam Butler and Owen Pallett, HerAlexandre Desplat, PhilomenaThomas Newman, Saving Mr. Banks

Production Design
Judy Becker and Heather Loeffler, American Hustle
Andy Nicholson, Rosie Goodwin, and Joanne Woolard, Gravity
Catherine Martin and Beverely Dunn, The Great Gatsby
K.K. Barrett and Gene Serdena, Her
Adam Stockhausen and Alice Baker, 12 Years a Slave

Achievement in Cinematography
Philippe Le Sourd, The GrandmasterEmmanuel Lubezki, GravityBruno Delbonnel, Inside Llewyn DavisPhedon Papamichael, NebraskaRoger A. Deakins, Prisoners

Achievement in Costume Design
Michael Wilkinson, American HustleWilliam Chang Suk Ping, The GrandmasterCatherine Martin, The Great GatsbyMichael O'Connor, The Invisible WomanPatricia Norris, 12 Years a Slave

Best Documentary Feature
The Act of Killing
Cutie and the Boxer
Dirty Wars
The Square
20 Feet from Stardom

Best Documentary Short Subject
CaveDigger
Facing Fear
Karama Has No Walls
The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life
Prison Terminal: The Last Days of Private Jack Hall

Achievement in Film Editing
Jay Cassidy, Crispin Struthers, and Alan Baumgarten, American HustleChristopher Rouse, Captain PhillipsJohn Mac McMurphy and Martin Pensa, Dallas Buyers ClubAlfonso Cuarón and Mark Sanger, GravityJoe Walker, 12 Years a Slave

Achievement in Makeup and HairstylingAdruitha Lee and Robin Mathews, Dallas Buyers ClubStephen Prouty, Jackass Presents: Bad GrandpaJoel Harlow and Gloria Pasqua-Casny, The Lone Ranger

Achievement in Visual Effects
Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, Dave Shirk and Neil Corbould, Gravity
Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and Eric Reynolds, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Christopher Townsend, Guy Williams, Erik Nash and Dan Sudick, Iron Man: 3
Tim Alexander, Gary Brozenich, Edson Williams and John Frazier, The Lone Ranger
Roger Guyett, Patrick Tubach, Ben Grossmann and Burt Dalton, Star Trek Into Darkness

Achievement in Sound Editing
Steve Boeddeker and Richard Hymns, All is Lost
Oliver Tarney, Captain Phillips
Glenn Freemantle, Gravity
Brent Burge, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Wylie Statemen, Lone Survivor

Achievement in Sound Mixing
Chris Burdon, Mark Taylor, Mike Prestwood Smith and Chris Munro, Captain Phillips
Skip Lievsay, Niv Adiri, Christopher Benstead and Chris Munro, Gravity
Christopher Boyes, Michael Hedges, Michael Semanick and Tony Johnson, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
Skip Lievsay, Greg Orloff and Peter F. Kurland, Inside Llewyn Davis
Andy Koyama, Beau Borders and David Brownlow, Lone Survivor

The Fourth Wall

Great post by OpenCulture.com:

Watch Them Watch Us: A History of Breaking the “Fourth Wall” in Film

Women in Hollywood

A candid and compelling recent blog post by Director Lexi Alexander: 

An Oscar-Nominated Director Gets Real About How Women Are Treated in Hollywood

Lexi Alexander writes:

Facts:

1) The media has never covered the lack of women in film and television more extensively than right now (skip the links if you must, just trying to make a point):

"Because We Need More Kathryn Bigelows: Segregate the Oscars by Gender!"

"Only Two of the 100 Top-Grossing Movies of the Year Were Directed by Women"

"The Bigger the Film, the Fewer the Women: Nominations for This Year's Oscars Will Prove Hollywood's Sexism"

"Golden Globes by Gender: Where Are All the Women?"

"Quote of the Day: Manohla Dargis: 'The Movie Industry is Failing Women'"

"Hollywood Sexist? Female Directors Still Missing in Action"

Those are just from the past few weeks. The list goes on and on.

READ the Entire Post

At the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010, Kathryn Bigelow made history when she became the first (and only) female to win best director for The Hurt Locker:

 

5 Epic Speeches & Charlie Chaplin

In looking for some inspiration for today, I found this...



I expected the first four films, but I was most impressed by the #1 Epic Speech
from The Dictator written and directed by Charlie Chaplin.

I admit I've never seen this speech until this morning.

Well worth watching this speech for 4 minutes.

 


If you don't know much more than the icon of Charlie Chaplin, watch this intro to his Bio:

Day 8: Update on Take Two Remakes

(Scroll to good advice on Audio Editing minute mark 5:30-7:45)


CRUNCH TIME

We are heading into Day 2 of postproduction as the 5 groups continue to edit their respective films.

This afternoon we will watch rough cuts in order to give feedback before final cuts are due Friday.

Tomorrow students will work on Trailers, Title Sequences, and Credits with outtakes. 

To Do List: 

                  The Deadlines 

                  GRADES: Honor vs. Passing

                  Post to Student Blogs

FYI - "5 Paragraph Movie Review" for Honors is in addition to the "Review of the Review"

                Comment on this Class Blog

Make a film that you are proud of - once you post it to YouTube, it will be public!

And if you need a little motivation today...

How To Be Creative

Titles, Beginnings, and In Media Res

A Brief Visual Introduction to Saul Bass’ Celebrated Title Designs

The Film Before the Film: An Introduction to the History of Title Sequences in 10 Minutes

In Media Res - "In midst of things"

Explosive Beginnings:The Hurt Locker Opening Scene Analysis By Caroline Phillips The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) is an award-winning film that captured the attention of many filmmakers and audiences It’s a film about an Army bomb squad in Iraq during the war that must find and disarm bombs in order to protect people...READ MORE Opening Scene: Opening Scene from The Hurt Locker with Commentary from Kathryn Bigelow The Hurt Locker has a very untraditional beginning; there are no credits and beginsin medias res. It jumps right into the characters in action. The story is told in linear form with some flashbacks.

Editing: Slow-Motion & Wes Anderson

Watch A Supercut Of Wes Anderson's Slow-Motion Scenes  via @HuffPostEnt



Wes Anderson's most recent film:



Guess what Wes Anderson study at University of Texas?

Watch the video below to find out.

Did you know Owen Wilson was his roommate at UT?

BLADE RUNNER: Are Film Critics Always RIght?

Blade Runner is a Waste of Time: Siskel & Ebert in 1982 http://t.co/NETx0PTg9q Ebert's Reappraisal 25 years later: http://t.co/yY0NzTtbAS
— Martin T. Allen (@TakeTwoRemakes) January 14, 2014

Philip K. Dick Previews Blade Runner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Overwhelming” (1981)

More on Blade Runner from Open Culture:

The Making of Blade Runner

Blade Runner: The Pillar of Sci-Fi Cinema that Siskel, Ebert, and Studio Execs Originally Hated

The Blade Runner SketchbookFeatures The Original Art of Syd Mead & Ridley Scott (1982)

Blade Runner: The Final, Final Cut of the Cult Classic

Lastly, listen to Harrison Ford, once a carpenter, talk about his early years in the business up to 1982...
(post Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Blade Runner)

Filmmaking Topics Covered in Take Two: Film Remakes

Vocabulary

Form vs Content
Content - The subject of the artwork. Form - The means by which a subject is expressed.
We discussed the differences between these two terms and how two films/works of art can have drastically different form, despite featuring the same content.

Lighting plays an important role in the tone of your shot. We discussed ways to work with the lighting in different settings to help filmmakers control the emotions of their audience.

Narrative, or the story being told by a filmmaker. The content is selected and arranged in a way that tells a story to the audience.  A narrative requires characters, a setting, and events.

Narrator - The voice helping us tell a story. It may either be a character in the film or not.  We have seen examples of films that use a narrator to help move a story along vs those that do not.  The first film remake we compared was True Grit (1968, 2010). The 2010 version removed the first few minutes of the original and replaced it with a few sentences of narration.

Genre - Using the form or content to categorize a film. We came up with a list of genres (with examples) and discussed why it might be helpful to categorize films.

Theme - A public idea or familiar conflict used to help structure a story. The themes of a film are often the "why" when we discuss the reason for telling a particular story.

Setting - where and when the story takes place.  A change in setting can often be the most influential reason a film is remade.  A change in setting can tell a similar story to a new audience, whether in a different country, during a different time period, or refreshing actors for a new generation of audience members.

Story vs Plot
Story - the events and elements we see and hear on the screen, in addition to the implied events not shown on screen.
Plot - The chronology of cause-and-effect events that take place over the course of the narrative.

Characters - Those who play a functioning role throughout the course of the narrative. Our groups had to do a good deal of reflection about how to develop characters over the course of a short time, and had to make decisions about how to work around only having a few actors available to them.

Mise-en-Scène - everything that is taking place on screen. Also known as "staging," the mise-en-scène is the overall look and feel of a film.  Our filmmakers had to carefully consider everything going on in a scene as they thought about the feelings they wanted to illicit from their audience.

Two main components to the mise-en-scène are the onscreen vs offscreen space, and the diegetic vs nondiegetic elements. The onscreen and offscreen space focus on what the viewer sees, compared to what is happening just offscreen. Diegetic elements are those that take place within the world of the story, while nondiegetic elements are those the audience experiences, but the characters in the story do not (think music the characters are listening to vs background music only the audience hears).

Types of Shots

Establishing Shot - Also called an extreme long shot - a shot that is often used to set the location and background information.

Long Shot - A shot from far enough away to include the full human body.

Medium Shot - A shot showing part of the human body. The most typical shot to be used during a human conversation.

Close-up - A shot where part of a body (such as the face or a hand) or other object fills the frame. This is used when the filmmaker wants the audience to focus their attention on one object.

High Angle vs Low Angle - These shots are created by placing the camera at a different level than the human eye. This can create a sense of superiority/inferiority between two characters.

Dutch Angle - A shot where the camera is not level. This can create a sense of disorientation for the audience.

Aerial View (Crane Shot) - A shot taken from high above the actions of the story. Often accomplished through the use of a helicopter or crane (neither of which we had available), these shots create a sense that the observer is an omniscient viewer and can view everything.

Pan Shot - Shot created through the horizontal movement of a camera. A basic camera technique that can be used to create meaning.

Tilt Shot - Similar to a pan shot, although using vertical movement.

Dolly Shot - Mounting the camera on a moveable structure to allow physical, seamless movement of the camera.

Handheld Camera - When a person is physically holding a camera. This can create a sense of chaos due to the lack of stability in the shot.

Slow Motion - Slowing down the action of a shot to make it take place over a longer period of time then the event itself. This can help create a sense of drama.

Fast Motion - Speeding up a shot to take place over less time than the actual event. This can help show a passage of time.

Long Take - A shot that can last anywhere from one minute to ten minutes. This can create a sense of events passing in real time for a viewer.

Point-of-View Shot - A shot meant to seem like it is coming from the point-of-view of a character. This creates a sense that the audience is sharing the experience with the character.

Shot/Reverse Shot - An editing pattern, consisting of alternating shots of different characters, usually in conversation with one another. Shots are framed over the characters' shoulders and utilize the 180-degree rule to maintain continuity.

SFX/CGI - special effects, created through the use of camera techniques or effects created during postproduction (camera effect vs laboratory effect). CGI means compter-generated imagery.

Types of Cuts

Match Cut - a cut that maintains continuity between two shots.

Parallel Edit - Also known as intercutting or crosscutting - editing two or more actions taking place at the same time to create the effect of a single scene rather than two distinct actions.

Jump Cut - A sudden, potentially disorienting, instantaneous advance in the story.

Fade - A gradual fading in or fading out to suggest a break in time, place, or action.

GRADES: Passing vs. Honors

In order to pass the course, you must do the following:

• 5 blog posts to your Student Blog - for more detail. Include links, images, and videos for your viewer.
• 1. Screenwriter
• 2. Producer
• 3. Cinematographer
• 4. Director
• 5. Review of a review

• Final Project - click to see deadlines.
• Post remake of your movie to YouTube
• Post Trailer of your movie to YouTube

• Course Reflection - Hard Copy AND email to kobrien@episcopalacademy.org
• 1. What did you do? What was your role in your group? 
• 2. What did you learn? What was most surprising?
• 3. Peer review: What did others do? (how specific people did in your group)
• 4. What would you do differently in making your film?
• 5. What would you recommend for this course next year?
• Minimum 5 paragraphs - answer the questions above.

In order to achieve Honors in the course, you must do the following:

• At least EIGHT blog posts: 5 of which are excellent (reflecting research and sharing embedded videos as well as links and quotes). Additional posts could share helpful videos: writing, filming, editing, etc. 
• Final Project is excellent - shows enhanced use of the techniques and skills you learned in class.
• 1 five-paragraph film review (use blog for a PDF on how to write a movie review)
• Course Reflection (see above) 
• Comment on 5 of the 50+ blog posts on the class blog. 
• What posts did you find most interesting?
• What posts did you find helpful? 
• What did you learn?

HONORS: In essence, you've gone above and beyond the minimum. 

PASSING: You've completed all 3 bullet points.

So we make it clear: skipping any of those first 3 bullets will result in a failure for the course.

Movie Review

Part of being a good movie maker...

is understanding how to be a good movie reviewer.  

In order to get Honors credit in the course, you will need to post to your blog AND take a movie of your choosing and write a movie review on it following the outline in the link below.



1. It needs to be multiple paragraphs (follow the directions completely) and

2. It should be uploaded directly to your blog entitled:
   
                       "Movie Review of __________; (Snazzy subtitle) ".

             EX: Movie Review of The Departed; Three Lessons to Learn from Scorsese

3. Embed (with HTML) the Youtube trailer, or relevant scene, or video about the making of the film, director, actors, etc.


CLICK HERE for directions on how to write a solid movie review.




Good luck!

Neil Gaiman on Writing, Revising, Reading, and Writer's Block

Foster your creativity: follow Brainpickings on Twitter or Facebook,

Always great content that inspires!

Tell your story. Don’t try and tell the stories that other people can tell. Because [as a] starting writer, you always start out with other people’s voices — you’ve been reading other people for years… But, as quickly as you can, start telling the stories that only you can tell — because there will always be better writers than you, there will always be smarter writers than you … but you are the only you.

                                                                                                           - Neil Gaiman

 


Are you interested in a career in the Arts? 

Watch the graduation speech below:

Read: Full Transcript to the speech.



Here's a few choice lines (my intention was to cut more - but it's all so good!):

First of all: When you start out on a career in the arts you have no idea what you are doing.

This is great. People who know what they are doing know the rules, and know what is possible and impossible. You do not. And you should not. The rules on what is possible and impossible in the arts were made by people who had not tested the bounds of the possible by going beyond them. And you can.

If you don't know it's impossible it's easier to do. And because nobody's done it before, they haven't made up rules to stop anyone doing that again, yet.

Secondly, If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that.

And that's much harder than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so much easier than you might imagine. Because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be...

I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work.

Thirdly, When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life, a life in the arts, is sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love. And you have to accept that you may put out a hundred things for every bottle that winds up coming back.

The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, and things go wrong...

 The problems of failure are hard.

The problems of success can be harder, because nobody warns you about them.

The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now they will discover you. It's Imposter Syndrome, something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police...

The problems of success. They're real, and with luck you'll experience them. The point where you stop saying yes to everything, because now the bottles you threw in the ocean are all coming back, and have to learn to say no.

And after that, the biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful. There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby.  I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.

Fourthly, I hope you'll make mistakes. If you're making mistakes, it means you're out there doing something. And the mistakes in themselves can be useful...

And remember that whatever discipline you are in, whether you are a musician or a photographer, a fine artist or a cartoonist, a writer, a dancer, a designer, whatever you do you have one thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.

And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that's been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones.

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.

Make good art...

Make it on the good days too.

And Fifthly, while you are at it, make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can...

And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.

Sixthly. I will pass on some secret freelancer knowledge. Secret knowledge is always good. And it is useful for anyone who ever plans to create art for other people, to enter a freelance world of any kind. I learned it in comics, but it applies to other fields too. And it's this:

People get hired because, somehow, they get hired. In my case I did something which these days would be easy to check, and would get me into trouble, and when I started out, in those pre-internet days, seemed like a sensible career strategy: when I was asked by editors who I'd worked for, I lied. I listed a handful of magazines that sounded likely, and I sounded confident, and I got jobs. I then made it a point of honour to have written something for each of the magazines I'd listed to get that first job, so that I hadn't actually lied, I'd just been chronologically challenged... You get work however you get work.

People keep working, in a freelance world, and more and more of today's world is freelance, because their work is good, and because they are easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don't even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you.

When I agreed to give this address, I started trying to think what the best advice I'd been given over the years was.

And it came from Stephen King twenty years ago, at the height of the success of Sandman. I was writing a comic that people loved and were taking seriously. King had liked Sandman and my novel with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, and he saw the madness, the long signing lines, all that, and his advice was this:

“This is really great. You should enjoy it.”

And I didn't. Best advice I got that I ignored.Instead I worried about it. I worried about the next deadline, the next idea, the next story. There wasn't a moment for the next fourteen or fifteen years that I wasn't writing something in my head, or wondering about it. And I didn't stop and look around and go, this is really fun. I wish I'd enjoyed it more. It's been an amazing ride. But there were parts of the ride I missed, because I was too worried about things going wrong, about what came next, to enjoy the bit I was on.

That was the hardest lesson for me, I think: to let go and enjoy the ride, because the ride takes you to some remarkable and unexpected places.

And here, on this platform, today, is one of those places. (I am enjoying myself immensely.)

To all today's graduates: I wish you luck. Luck is useful. Often you will discover that the harder you work, and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get. But there is luck, and it helps.

We're in a transitional world right now, if you're in any kind of artistic field, because the nature of distribution is changing, the models by which creators got their work out into the world, and got to keep a roof over their heads and buy sandwiches while they did that, are all changing. I've talked to people at the top of the food chain in publishing, in bookselling, in all those areas, and nobody knows what the landscape will look like two years from now, let alone a decade away. The distribution channels that people had built over the last century or so are in flux for print, for visual artists, for musicians, for creative people of all kinds.

Which is, on the one hand, intimidating, and on the other, immensely liberating. The rules, the assumptions, the now-we're supposed to's of how you get your work seen, and what you do then, are breaking down. The gatekeepers are leaving their gates. You can be as creative as you need to be to get your work seen. YouTube and the web (and whatever comes after YouTube and the web) can give you more people watching than television ever did. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are.

So make up your own rules.

Someone asked me recently how to do something she thought was going to be difficult, in this case recording an audio book, and I suggested she pretend that she was someone who could do it. Not pretend to do it, but pretend she was someone who could. She put up a notice to this effect on the studio wall, and she said it helped.

So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just behave like they would.

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here. Make good art.