NOT A SCHOOL. A LABORATORY.
MOTIF Laboratory is a place for emerging film directors — whether you have no experience at all or are looking to make an organic transition from another discipline into directing, such as acting, writing, cinematography, or other artistic fields.
MOTIF promotes an auteur mindset and draws inspiration from the philosophy of Eastern European filmmakers who often worked with micro-budgets, frequently wrote their own films, and were driven by a willingness to break rules and a true passion for cinema.
We don’t believe there is one correct way to direct. Eastern European and American filmmaking traditions have developed different tools, different working methods, and sometimes radically different ideas about what a director does. At MOTIF, we bring those traditions into conversation.
METHODOLOGY.
Our methodology grew out of three unique systems of artistic education: the rigorous tradition of actor training, Eastern European film-directing and screenwriting practice, and the contemporary American approach to cinematic storytelling and production.
We distilled from these traditions the tools we find most useful.
Not so that you can reproduce somebody else’s method. So that you can build your own.
THE LANGUAGE.
You will have a chance to practice various methods and approaches — documentary, live action, photography, and music video.
You will write, shoot, and edit your own work to learn the core principles of each discipline and gain a fundamental understanding of how they serve the film.
We treat cinematic language not as a collection of rules, but as a collection of possibilities. We’re not selling recipes for “good” movies. Our goal is to help you discover who you are as an artist.
YOUR EXPERIENCE DETERMINES WHERE YOU BEGIN.
MOTIF is not organized by age, but into modules based on experience and artistic need.
You may come to learn the alphabet of cinema.
You may come to disrupt the language you already know.
Or you may arrive with a story in your head and need a laboratory in which to find its form.
ALPHABET. EXPERIMENT. PROJECT.
Three different points of entry, the same purpose:
To expand your cinematic language, sharpen your choices, and discover what kind of artist you are.
MOTIF doesn’t give you a voice.
It gives you the tools and the space to hear your own.
“There are two kinds of directors; those who have the public in mind when they conceive and make their films and those who don't consider the public at all. For the former, cinema is an art of spectacle; for the latter, it is an individual adventure. There is nothing intrinsically better about one or the other; it's simply a matter of different approaches.”