Their success from a technical aspect was based in part on separating the camera from the sound recording device (David used a Nagra) by accurately controlling the speed of the camera and the tape recorder, allowing the two devices to be moved independently with respect to each other, an impossibility in commercially available equipment at the time. Long takes with ordinary equipment of the era would invariably lose synchronization.

“The hardest thing I’ve learned over the years is that I’m getting paid a lot of money to produce a movie, but sometimes the best thing to do is nothing,” he told The New York Times in 1992, when he was making “Hoffa.” “I don’t need to impose myself.”Nonetheless, he knew he played a vital role.“It’s the creative urge that makes me work,” he told American Film magazine for a 1988 article. “The pleasure is, to some extent, vicarious, but it’s no less creative for that. It is creating a world by bringing together creative financing with creative filmmakers. In a sense, producing can be compared to conceptual art.”

Mr. Luddy at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival. The festival became a gathering of devotees to the religion of filmmaking, and Mr. Luddy was its most fervent believer and its main officiant.

So, what is a stringout?  Simply put, a stringout is a sequence of shots that a Story Producer assembles and gives to an Editor to serve two purposes; 1) to give the Editor a “head start” on getting through the raw material that has been shot, and, 2) to give the Editor a “road map” on what the story of a specific scene should be. 

When did you start working on it and how long did it take to make? It took nearly four years from the first draft to final cut. The first script was complete in early 2014, which we then adapted into a picture storybook as a proof of concept. We received funding almost a year later and we hit the ground running full-time (into eternity).

As a student, you have to be very good at the craft

Mitchell said, “You have to do what you want to do. Don’t make a film so you can get into Pixar or DreamWorks.”

Pete Doctor, the director of Up, said that he went into school thinking that he needed to learn how to draw and left school believing that acting and storytelling were more important.