What am I here for?

By Nate Marshall

I am Nate Marshall.  I was raised all over the country and have settled for the time being in the Bay Area.  I have found that one thing that has always impressed me since my childhood was the incredible power of the visual medium.  From design in toys to films to typography and what the words actual say, I have been fascinated by it all.  Visuals drive me to think harder and to act every day of my life.  This isn’t to say that I am a slave to media but you could safely say that I am often consuming media to learn more about this strange diverse beautiful and horrible world that we all live in and share.

I am a Teacher by profession currently though I will always be a student, I believe, in some fashion.  I trained to be a film producer in college @ Biola University.  My passion was to create films.  I particularly wanted to create animated films because of the freedoms involved and the relatively low cost.  The other reason I liked animation was that the smaller teams of creative individuals allows for a community to be developed and I always dreamed of living a life as an “Imagineer.”

I teach now though, and it is a perfect job in so many ways.  I teach many different classes at the private school that allows me such creative and personal freedom to teach great classes.  I offer a Intro to Video Class (how to hold a camera and point it at something interesting), Art of Filmmaking (creating the interesting image and learning from the masters how to say something Good, True and Beautiful), Applied Filmmaking (creating and distributing high quality content), Screenwriting I teach this with my wife Lindsay (How to tell a story and not look like an amateur so you can eventually put your script in the hands of people who matter).  We also have two other classes that I co-teach with other excellent facilitators and educators, Acting for Film is taught by our Theatre Department head and we offer a daily live news broadcast to the entire school.  I  co-teach this class with our Radio Dept. head.  we offer this news class so that we can live webcast school events and sports as well as provide the daily news to the student body.

My future is teaching for the foreseeable future as well as screenwriting with my wife.  We have been writing together for 5 years and have a great time doing it!  It is something that we love to do together and it keeps our marriage strong because we work together as a family and we work together creatively and academically.  That kind of bond is more valuable than anything I have ever experienced.

So this blog will be about the media, but really mostly about cinema.  I want to begin a tradition of reviewing movies in a new context.  I want to explore movies in the context of their value and their contribution of an age-old conversation on art, communication and other topic raised in the specific films.  because of this you wont expect to see many reviews of films here on the lower brow film of the week.  and you will have to be sure to expand your repertoire of films.

I want to encourage you as well to get involved reading and commenting on these films.  There is no real reason to talk to the air when we write and the only way that we can truly appreciate the films that are created is to discuss and try to better understand them.  So I call on you to challenge me and others in the goal of making us all better film viewers but essentially better people in the process.  People who understand just a small bit better the world that we live in and the world that we all share together.

Our future is together and our future is bright.  Let’s gather and speak of things that have value and create a new comunity of souls that understand the value of the visual word