Shoe Leather Launches

Over at my day job, we’ve launched a new blog called Shoe Leather, by Teri Tynes, that’s part of a new, bigger project called Reframe. While Reframe doesn’t launch to the public for a few more weeks, you can visit the site now to learn more about how it works, and we felt so sure that Teri would be a good blogger that we wanted to launch this blog right away. I've known Teri for years, having first met in South Carolina where she was the editor of the local weekly. She writes an amazing blog called Walking off the Big Apple, that is literally the best non-film blog I've read lately, so I've been wanting to have her write for us for some time now.

What does the world need with another film blog, you might ask? I think that Teri’s idea for the blog – presented to me over some amazing sushi with mutual friends – is a unique angle for discussing films, and one that should catch on. As Teri says in her intro to the blog today:

Think of me as a curator who hands out cultural street maps of the film-going experience.

While she’ll begin the blog by working “in-family” on the Tribeca Film Festival, this blog won’t be partial just to Tribeca, or Reframe, films and events, so stay tuned post-fest for some great new takes on film.

Here’s a bit from her intro to the blog:

Shoe Leather: An Introduction

Think how many scenes you've seen in the movies of a character or characters strolling down the sidewalk or walking down steps of a courthouse or quietly strolling through a park. "Shoe Leather," a term used in filmmaking, refers to these parts of a movie that precede other scenes and serve to make sense of the transitions. These sequences, while seemingly pedestrian, establish necessary continuities, open up the action to establish a sense of place, and give the viewer an understanding of how characters arrive at their destinations.

I'll be writing this blog, titled "Shoe Leather," for Reframe in much of the same spirit as these shoe leather sequences. With the occasion of the Tribeca Film Festival and in anticipation of the curated digital collections forthcoming from Reframe, I'll be seeing several of the films featured over the next ten days and then suggesting on this site related films that go down that same street, so to speak. The films that form the 2008 festival naturally group into shared subject matter, such as films by or about visual artists, narratives of immigration, stories of military and state terror, and documents of fading neighborhoods, to name just a few categories, and I'll point you to similar films worth seeing. Think of me as a curator who hands out cultural street maps of the film-going experience. Read more.

photo credit: WOTBA