By Mark Lamster
Architecture critic
“But what I really want to do is direct,” goes the old joke. For most of film history, that was wishful thinking. That’s no longer the case. These days, just about everyone walks around with a sophisticated movie camera in their pocket, and in Smartphone Cinema: Making Great Films with Your Mobile Phone (Routledge, $48.99), Dallas filmmaker Bart Weiss will teach you how to use it like a professional.
There could be no better teacher. If you’re from Dallas and you’re interested in film, you are almost certainly familiar with Weiss, whose resume is as long as an art film by Andy Warhol: longtime professor of film at the University of Texas at Arlington; host of the series Frame of Mind (featuring independent Texas filmmakers) on KERA; founder of Dallas VideoFest; cohost of the podcast Fog of Truth, on documentary film; and past contributor to this paper.
In Smartphone Cinema, Weiss covers everything an aspiring filmmaker could need to know, from how to expand a story to the basics of composition, techniques for quality audio, tips on useful apps and equipment, and even methods for getting it accepted his masterpiece. from south to southwest (good luck).
What are you for? Get a try.
Correction, 3:57 p. m. January 9, 2025: An earlier edition of this tale misindicated the name of Bart Weiss’s book. It’s smartphone cinema: making movies with your mobile phone.
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Mark Lamster is an architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News and a visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he is also a Loeb Fellow. His 2018 biography of late architect Philip Johnson, The Man in the Glass House, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.