David Licata | January 27, 2012
I’m very pleased to announce that a flash fiction piece I wrote, The Wolf Is in the Kitchen, was recently published in Sole Literary Journal. When Sole notified me they were taking it, I decided to look back at how this piece transformed draft by draft. And since I’m wearing my writer hat at this [...]
David Licata | December 10, 2011
I am always awed by how cinematographers see so much more than I do. We can be looking at exactly the same thing, the same angle, the same frame, and they’ll register all sorts of details, big and small, on an initial viewing that I won’t see until I’ve viewed the footage they shot several [...]
David Licata | November 9, 2011
Before I get to the clip, some background. My first meeting with Bob Darden of the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project was in Chicago, August 2009. During our sit down interviews it became clear very quickly that I would have to go to Baylor University (Waco, TX) to shoot audio engineer Tony Tadey in action. [...]
David Licata | October 19, 2011
Here’s an excerpt from the Redwoods section of the sample of A Life’s Work. Notice the first two shots and the last two shots. Here’s about five and half minutes of raw footage from the Redwoods shoot. The first two and last two shots from the first clip come from this raw footage. This was [...]
David Licata | June 7, 2011
I had an idea early on that I wanted to include someone trying to decipher an ancient language; code breaking, essentially. I researched and discovered that Etruscan was one of these undeciphered languages. Etruscan. Tuscany. My ancestors. Very exciting stuff. They left behind tombs with spectacular frescos that predate the Roman Empire. A little more [...]
David Licata | March 4, 2011
For someone who studied music and plays music, I have a difficult time knowing what music to use with these moving images I capture. So much so that in my first film I didn’t use music at all, but used a multi-layered sound design instead. With Tango Octogenario, I knew I had to use tango [...]
David Licata | January 28, 2011
First there is a lot of procrastination. I’m not a procrastinator by nature, but something about editing really brings it out in me. Like now, as I’m writing this, I have Final Cut Pro open and I should be working on a SETI sequence for A Life’s Work. But instead, I’m going to write about [...]
David Licata | November 30, 2010
I was going through my closet the other day and came across a flat file that contained this: This poster, designed by Heidi Fener, is for my first film, 8 1/2 x 11. (Heidi also designed the poster, postcards and DVD cover for Tango Octogenario.) 8 1/2 x 11 was an exercise in economy, from [...]
David Licata | November 4, 2010
Here are the first few images shot for A Life’s Work (fall 2006). It’s a distillation of the first twenty minutes of footage. It’s only after twenty minutes of tape that the fifth shot, the one of Arcosanti, appears, which is to say cinematographer Wolfgang Held shot the landscape around Arcosanti before we attempted to [...]
David Licata | August 25, 2010
August 18, 2010 – Inyo National Forest: Patriarch Grove I had an idea that I’d capture the sunrise, which meant getting out of bed around 3am. But insomnia, exhaustion from the day before, and mostly not having spotted a good sunrise location on the 17th kept me in bed until 7am. Glutes burned most of [...]
