“Filmmaking has become the new garage band.”
So says Peter John Ross, co-creator of WOSU-TV series Framelines, a program focused on Ohio filmmaking.
“Now that anyone with a cell phone can shoot and edit videos with titles and music, you can see that there’s this burgeoning filmmaking movement that didn’t exist before.”
Ross and co-creator Scott Spears started Framelines as a way of celebrating and furthering that movement, particularly in Central Ohio. The pair will be fundraising for their third season Monday night at Gateway Film Center with a screening of three locally made shorts.
The three films – Olsky by Steph Greegor, Jason Tostevin’s award-winning A Way Out, and Jim Higgins’s The Cycle – are all subjects of Season 3.
“Framelines is a TV series about filmmakers in Ohio,” Ross says. “It’s like DVD extras for films that are locally made.”
According to Ross, each episode contains five segments. In one segment, Ross and Spears highlight a local filmmaker. They follow this with their Spotlight On segment, which looks into a topic related to filmmaking – a festival, film commission, or theater, for example.
The third segment – Tech Tips – is the gem in Framelines’s crown. Nominated for multiple awards, Tech Tips offer instructional videos on how to make movies.
“Those have been the biggest things that have taken off for us online, too,” says Ross.
Tech Tips are followed by the On Location section, a behind-the-scenes piece recorded at a local film shoot. Finishing out each episode is a panel discussion.
Ross and Spears plan, shoot, and edit each of the 13 episodes that make up a season.
“We’d like to see the show get bigger, get better,” he says. “We’re trying to up our game a bit with the new season, travel a little further. We want to go to LA and talk to some Ohio transplants who’ve had some success out there.”
According to Ross, plans for Season 3 will require more funding than what they currently receive from small grants.
“We can only afford to do the show in our spare time, so it takes us 18 – 20 months to complete the 13 episodes,” he says. “If we had a little more budget, we could turn those around a lot faster.”
It’s more than just Central Ohio waiting for Season 3. Framelines has become a popular go-to in university classrooms, too.
“The latest thing we did was an interactive tutorial,” Ross says. “We put that out online for anybody to use for free, and that got picked up by nofilmschool.com and filmmakeriq.com – sites like that. And then it started to get used in colleges,” he says.
“I know that Full Sail University is assigning it in their editing classes. CAPA University, University of Alabama is using some of our videos, Washington State,” Ross says. “It’s mind blowing to me that this stuff’s being used like that.”
As a self-taught filmmaker, Ross is especially pleased by the popularity of the Tech Tips.
“The whole reason those videos exist is because, every time I’d learn something, I’d want to share it with people,” he says. “I used to teach at the Ohio Center for Broadcasting and I love teaching. That’s the highlight of the show for me, and it’s been a blessing that those are the segments that have gotten the Emmy nominations many years in a row.”
Aside from the three locally made shorts and some behind-the-scenes footage shot for the upcoming season, Ross has other plans for the event.
“With every ticket for the screening you’ll get another ticket for a raffle,” he says. “We’ll give away a book we just published on filmmaking tips, and we’ll give way a DVD of the whole run of every episode that’s available right now.”
The Framelines fundraiser takes place Monday, May 23, from 7 to 10pm. Tickets are $5.
For more information, visit framelines.tv or gatewayfilmcenter.org
You can also contribute to Framelines’s IndiGoGo here: https://igg.me/at/framelinestv/x/4801
Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her weekly horror movie podcast, FRIGHT CLUB.
Looking for more film events in Columbus? CLICK HERE to visit our Events Calendar.