Hi! I’m Courtney Holmes

We asked our members to think about a LIMITATION they could impose on their filmmaking, in order to push themselves creatively and think outside the box in order to create films that ultimately utilised or overcame those limitations.

We asked our members to think about how they could use BLUR in their films to achieve a dreamy, nostalgic feel, to draw their viewer’s eyes to certain parts of their frame, or how they could use BLUR to allow them to match old footage with new.

We also asked them to consider using specialist techniques, such as freelensing (detaching the lens from your camera) or using a specialist creative lens such as those made by LensBaby to incorporate blurry goodness into their films.

We’re true believers that the best camera you have is the one you have with you, and for this theme we asked our members to embrace filmmaking using the cameras we always have on us, our phones!

We also asked them to consider using an action cam like the GoPro to capture short films using a camera they don’t usually use and find creative ways to capture & edit their footage with these compact cameras.

It’s very easy as filmmakers, and specifically family filmmakers to get stuck in a rut of similar music choices and styles for our films. Lindsey challenged our members to try and think outside the box when it came to the types & styles of music they use for their films, but also in how they use music in their film and incorporating more than one piece of music in their work.

We decided to challenge our members to revisit and repeat one of the previous ArtHouse themes. The themes we choose for the ArtHouse are designed to give our members extra skills, tools & techniques that they can take away & incorporate into their films going forward, whether they be personal films or client work.

Sometimes less is more when it comes to creating films, and we wanted our members to really push themselves to not only make us really feel something with their films (without being really obvious about it) but to also edit their work down to it’s very best core by limiting how long their films could be.

It’s very easy as filmmakers, and specifically family filmmakers, to get stuck in a rut of using just one type of light (often the easiest or prettiest) for our films. Courtney challenged our members to try and think outside the box when it came to the types of light they use for their films, but also in how they use light in their film and using light to tell a story. This really pushed our members!

Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back.

Beth challenged our members to have fun creating a short stop motion film, or incorporating the technique into a longer film and the results were so much fun. A lot of members decided to include their kids in the creative process and by all accounts everyone enjoyed this collaborative theme.

At their most basic, an overlay is a term for any layer that you place over your existing video layer. An overlay can be text, a filter, an image or video. If you place it over the top of an existing video layer, it's an overlay. It’s something that every videographer will use in their work at some stage. and we wanted to push our members to have some fun playing around with overlays in a creative way.

Composition is how we arrange the elements of a scene within our frame. We can intentionally utilize one or more composition techniques to create a balanced frame that draws the viewer into the story we are telling. For Level One COMPOSITION films we asked our members to create a film that intentionally uses one or more composition techniques you normally don't utilize. For Level Two COMPOSITION films we asked members to create a film that uses composition to create an overall feeling.

A lot of our members have gotten really comfortable with using different types of natural light, so for this theme we really wanted everyone to push themselves and seek out alternative light sources to film in.

As photographers & filmmakers we spends a lot of time learning the rules of photography and filmmaking when we first get started. There is so much to learn and it can be hard to wrap your head around it all.

Eventually though we get to a point where we can shoot intuitively and we follow the rules we've learnt without really thinking.

Now that you've learnt those rules it's time to break them.

Intentionally!