San Diego,California
The Power of Presentation. How a documentary can inspire.
This is What I Believe
Every short film can be a small gem, revealing a short story in its most basic elements. A short film can pack a great story in just a few minutes. You get it fast – story, character, conflict, emotion, a surprising climax.
This common misconception about short films is that the longer the film the better. When in fact, the opposite is true. How long should a short film be? As long as it takes to tell your story well, typically 1- 30 minutes.
I have been working in video for about 20 years, mainly producing video projects for non-profit organizations, gratis. Is it my intent through making short videos to tell stories and evoke emotion in others.
Many of my documentaries are about extra-ordinary women
Beyond the Belly Dance
The Califorina mountain town of Julian boasts an award-winning belly dance troupe. This documentary is about music, dance and the heartfelt stories of women, friends and bonding.
Seniors Rock!
Have you heard about a basketball team with women players over 50 years old? How about over 80? Meet these extraordinary women and hear their story and see them compete.
Applauding The Cecilias
The backstory of a classical quartet made up of 4 young, beautiful women. Follow them as they reveal their inner feelings about music, their careers and each other.
About Us
Anne Mudge:Source and Process
Anne Mudge:Source and Process
Anne Mudge:Source and Process
Award winning artist invites the viewer into her home and studio to show how she creates her sumptuous wire sculptures.Then, we see how the Gallery at San Diego State University exhibits Anne Mudge's sculptures in a one-woman show.
Ann and Celeste: A Docudrama
Anne Mudge:Source and Process
Anne Mudge:Source and Process
This is not just an account of one woman’s struggle with a severe eating disorder, but is the story of her friend, who was trying to be supportive, but felt powerless to help.
The Julian Daffodil Project
Anne Mudge:Source and Process
The Julian Daffodil Project
How did Julian become California’s daffodil capitol? The story behind this mountain community's love of daffodils
and the woman who
began this project, Sally Snipes.
A selection of light-hearted short videos
Fancy Today!
Fancy Today!
Fancy Today!
A elderly woman surprises her gynecologist, her daughter and then.... herself.
Die Hard Fan
Fancy Today!
Fancy Today!
At a baseball game, a woman stuns a man with her comment.
OOPS!
Fancy Today!
Dog Day Afternoon
In an emergency situation, a politically incorrect mistake is made.
Dog Day Afternoon
If These Walls Could Talk
Dog Day Afternoon
Using William Wegmen's photography books, dressing his own Weimaraners in various costumes and poses, I posed my own dog doing similar stunts. It worked beautifully.
If These Walls Could Talk
If These Walls Could Talk
If These Walls Could Talk
Explore the famous Philadelphia murals. as members of diverse neighborhoods
form partnerships to fill once empty and scarred walls with colorful murals.
The Sandwich
If These Walls Could Talk
If These Walls Could Talk
Salivate as a creative chef constructs a foot tall sandwich with sumptuous ingredients and innovative techniques
The changing roles of women within immigrant families
Taking A Stand
Honoring the people who risked their lives to save the lives of others during the Holocaust.
The Window
A man’s debate with his conscience plays out in this melodrama adapted from Alan Seager's 1950 short story, The Street.
About Us
From Tree To Table
Baja Betty: Three Pawed Perfect
Preserving The Spectacular
How backcountry master woodsman and sculptor, Don Madison, created an amazing 20 foot picnic table by felling the tree, using a portable sawmill, drying and then processing the wood slabs. It turned out to be
a piece of art.
Preserving The Spectacular
Baja Betty: Three Pawed Perfect
Preserving The Spectacular
Volcan Mountain is an extraordinary treasure. Rising over 5,000 feet and covering more than 25,000 acres, this majestic 15 mile ridge lies in the heart of San Diego County's backcountry.
The Volcan Mountain Preserve Foundation is fighting
to keep it intact.
Baja Betty: Three Pawed Perfect
Baja Betty: Three Pawed Perfect
Baja Betty: Three Pawed Perfect
A true story of a mistreated dog found wandering on a street in Baja,Mexico. She was rescued and then adopted by a San Diego,California couple who opened their home
and hearts to her.
About Us
Day of the Dead
What happens when you visit San Miguel de Allende during Day of the Dead, Mexico's liveliest holiday?
Back Story about the Cecilia Quartet
Additional Information
I attended a concert by the Cecilia String Quartet and while listening to their music, I wondered who they were beyond being 4 beautiful, young musicians. I thought about their background, where they grew up, when they realized they wanted a career in music. That evening began my musings about the group and my introducing to them the idea of a video about their lives. After several days, they agreed to my making a documentary about them.
Over a three month period of filming, I took footage of them in the “greenroom” getting dressed for concerts, performing , daily practice sessions, playing for young audiences and also concertizing as solo musicians.
During interviews, they responded to questions, some very thoughtful and serious.
•When did the group form?
•How did you select the Name, CSQ (Cecilia String Quartet)? What were their other choices?
•At what age did you start playing an instrument? Your instrument?
•Who gave you the most confidence to be a musician?
•How long do you typically practice alone each day? With the group?
•What do you do to put yourself "in the moment" for playing?
•How does the quartet prepare for a concert?
•What is most pleasurable about being a musician?
•What are the downsides?
•Why do you live in separate residences ?
•How do you adjust to each other's personalities and moods?
•Other than your music, do you enjoy doing anything else together?
•What is the best professional decision the group has made?
•What process does the group use to make decisions?
Back Story about Seniors Playing Basketball
Additional Information
Older people playing sport – whatever their sex – usually seem comic. They don’t really run, many are overweight, balance or joint problems can make them seem clumsy. Older women, who have usually developed their “look”, refined their hair, make-up and clothes styles and know how to appear elegant and confident – can seem even odder when dressed for sport and working up a sweat.
What an impossible subject for a serious film! Unless you are Joyce Axelrod.
You were obviously well aware of all those issues and were determined to present these remarkable, determined, inspiring women with dignity and admiration.
The heart of the movie is a series of interviews. Talking heads can get pretty boring on a movie screen. That meant you had to edit them down to the minimum, so that they pack a punch and then devise a means of adding visual interest. It was notable that many of the women were interviewed against a plain black background while David Hall got a baseball court in the background. Arguably the plain background put the focus on the ladies themselves.
So your dilemma then is how to present the players themselves, introducing them carefully to avoid any hint of mockery. Your solution was an exuberant montage of stills, video clips of group posing and some on-court action all zipping around the screen like Ken Burns on amphetamine and set to bouncy music. Brilliant! You engage the audience at once; introduce us to the players as individual people and as a group.
The interview with Kirsten Cummings is a refreshing change because it is done against the background of a live game and with the interviewer in shot. It is always good to find ways of adding visual variety like this..
The half-time section does give you a chance to use a nice variety of action shots.
You have celebrated a remarkable institution and a wonderful group of women. You have transformed a talking heads show into a vibrant piece of film. Congratulations.
Edited notes by Dave Watterson
Judge of the American Motion Picture Society Film Festival 2010
About documentary, "Seniors Rock!" by filmmaker, Joyce Axelrod
Back story about our documentary
Generaciones ( Generations)
In 1905, artist,Viviana Lombrozo and I submitted a proposal for a grant to the California Council of the Humanities. They were interested in stories about diverse Californians. We teamed up with the Barrio Logan College Institute in San Diego and through its prominent involvement with the Hispanic community, they helped us locate Hispanic families for our video project.
Our proposal was to document, through video and an art project, the lives of three generations of Mexican women showing their journey to California, their challenges in integrating into a new community, their trials in maintaining their culture of origin while adapting to a new one, and the changing roles of women within immigrant families and in the rest of society as a result of these struggles.
What was fascinating was that the 3 sets of grandmothers were basically strong women who had high hopes for their daughters and granddaughters to lead gratifying and productive lives in the United States. All but one of the granddaughters went on to get advanced degrees (one aspiring to be an astronaut after graduation with an aeronautical engineering degree) One granddaughter had a baby in her teens and as a single mom needed to work in a menial job to support herself. In one scene, big tears welled up in her eyes, as she assumed she had disappointed her mother.
The grant proposal specified that we partner with The Museum of Man who featured our documentary from March through August 2005 .
Filmmakers with Arellanos family
Taking A Stand
The creation of an art installation
For artist Viviana Lombrozo’s 2001 one-woman show, Taking a Stand, at the Gotthelf Gallery in La Jolla, California, my video was part of the exhibition, detailing the creative process of her work.
In this interactive mixed media installation artist, Viviana Lombrozo honored the people who risked their lives to save the lives of others during the Holocaust and encourages viewers to "take a stand" against all kinds of hatred, intolerance and prejudice.
Stories of rescuers were celebrated in in this art installation. Lombrozo, born in Mexico and now living in the United States, is an artist who has used a wide range of formats, from very small sculptures to this powerful installation, and she has worked with an even wider range of materials, mediums and tools—wood, metal, paper, canvas, computers, fabrics, and more. Taking A Stand represents the work of five years of planning, research, documentation, interviews, painting and building.
Back story about Ann and Celeste
How did this documentary begin
In a culture where fattening food is ubiquitous, thinness is a national ideal.
From early childhood food becomes tied up with other things like love, hate, power and control.
Being anorexic, which surveys find is by no means confined to teenagers is sometimes defined as not maintaining minimal normal body weight, having intense fear of fat and gaining weight, and having a disturbed perception of body size and shape.
Ann and Celeste: A Docudrama is not just an account of one woman’s struggle with a severe eating disorder, but is the story of her friend, who was trying to be supportive, but felt powerless to help.
This story begins in 1999 when Ann asked a friend of hers, Celeste, for a favor. Ann had been on “death’s doorstep” dozens of times over the past years, had been in and out of intensive care, in and out of residential care facilities and off and on welfare. Ann wanted a video to be made about her in the hope that it might deter others from becoming vulnerable to this terrible disease,
Filming takes place over a 4-year period, viewing Ann intermittingly in her residential care facilities, hospitals and doctors’ offices and during therapy sessions.
People are fascinated by stories such as Ann’s, but the larger question was why Celeste maintained her friendship with Ann over the years. The documentary explores this and comes to the conclusion that Ann’s story is also Celeste’s story.
Ann at 70 lbs.
Union Tribune article September 2018
A fascination with films leads to festival in her name
Joyce Axelrod became interested in filmmaking in the 1970s as a teacher when she was given a camera and asked to film the progress of her students.
“At that time, I was teaching a class of young people with special needs, while writing a curriculum to assess small increments of behavior,” she says. “This idea of filming was fascinating to me.”
Years later, she would go on to help found the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, which started as two to three films shown in the gym of the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in the 1980s. Now, it’s an 11-day annual festival with dozens of curated films and multiple showings at local theaters.
The festival — designed to celebrate the diversity of Jewish history, culture and identity — also included a program of short films that was eventually named for Axelrod and called The Joyce Forum. This year, that program makes its expanded debut as The Joyce Forum Short Film Festival on Oct. 6 and 7 at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in La Jolla.
Axelrod — who lives in Mission Hills with her husband, Joseph Fisch — took some time to talk about her own filmmaking, her love of short films, and this new festival highlighting the work of the creatives who make them.
Q: What is your current involvement with the San Diego Jewish Film Festival?
A: I curate short films with a committee, and these films are submitted through FilmFreeway, a popular submission site for filmmakers, writers and artists to present their work for film festivals around the world. We strive to pick the best of the submissions, using a rating system, and then program the highest rated into five, well-rounded programs, selecting narratives, documentaries and animations, while trying to balance each 90-minute program with films that have humor, drama and historical information.
Q: Tell us about the Joyce Forum and how it began.
A: For one of my hallmark birthdays, my husband made a contribution in my honor to the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. The producer of the festival suggested that we have a program of just shorts and named it “The Joyce Forum — A Day of Short Films.” It grew incrementally over the past 10 years. As the shorts grew in popularity, the festival producer decided that the films could be spun out of the main festival and shown as a stand-alone festival over two calendar days in a different month.
Q: What can people expect if they attend The Joyce Forum Short Film Festival?
A: As chair of the shorts, my curating committee and I previewed 130 films from 17 countries to whittle down the selection to 25. The selections will show Oct. 6 and 7 at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center’s Garfield Theatre. Our filmgoers will see short documentary, narrative and animated films. Plus, there will be guest filmmakers.
What I love about Mission Hills ...
Mission Hills is walkable. All the businesses I most value are in my neighborhood.
Q: What have you learned about the genre of short films as a result of working on this festival?
A: Short films play a major role in the film industry. They are cheaper to produce, making them more accessible to any filmmaker. Shorts let filmmakers take creative risks, which often lead to commentaries on relevant topics or experimentation in filming styles. I think shorts are sometimes a lot harder to do well than feature movies; they expose the skill of the writer or filmmaker. A good short film usually has an “a-ha” moment at the end, making it very satisfying.
Q: Can you tell us about any specific short films that you particularly enjoy?
A: Several years ago, we showed a film that really touched me. It was about a young, female medic on her first tour of duty, who finds herself emotionally unprepared for the consequences of a wrong move. It had tension and then resolution. That film, titled “11 minutes,” was also the juror’s pick for best direction.
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Q: Please talk about the kind of films you like to make on your own.
A: I usually make documentaries and look for a subject that will personally interest me and also will take me out of my comfort zone, like the documentary I produced about one woman’s struggle with a severe eating disorder. Video certainly has the power to move people to action, to educate, and of course, to amuse. I produced a documentary, “Beyond the Belly Dance,” about a belly-dancing troupe from Julian and personally know women who started taking belly dancing after seeing my video. Who knows how many others were motivated in some way? A documentary I made honoring senior women who play basketball took about a year. I loved producing that film because I was able to interview fascinating women, some over 90, and then shoot them doing fancy work on the basketball court. And some of my documentaries have been promotional pieces for non-profit groups.
Q: What’s been challenging about your work as a filmmaker and as a festival organizer?
A: The most challenging thing about making a video is finding an idea, story that you’d love to tell and writing a good script. As a festival organizer, the hard part is getting the word out about the festival to the general public.
Q: What’s been rewarding about these types of work?
A: Probably the most rewarding thing about the Shorts Festival is providing a venue for artists to show their films. I am particularly excited this year to premiere films by two local filmmakers: One is “Witnesses,” by Costa Fam. The other wonderful film is an animation, “The Driver is Red,” by Randall Christopher. I am in awe of filmmakers who know their craft, and I get to meet many of them through our festival.
Q: What has this work taught you about yourself?
A: Be humble in the presence of real talent.
Q: What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
A: Now is the time to enjoy.
Q: What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
A: I was born and grew up in New Mexico.
Q: Describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
A: Having dinner at a neighborhood restaurant and walking to the Hillcrest Theatre to see a movie or to the Cygnet Theatre in Old Town to enjoy a play.
Email: lisa.deaderick@sduniontribune.com
Twitter: @lisadeaderick
An article in the San Diego Union Tribune
LISA DEADERICK
SEP. 8, 2018