References & Open Source

Film Directors

Key Texts

• Robert McKee — Story (1997)
• David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson — Film Art: An Introduction (2012)
• Sergei Eisenstein — Film Form (1949)
• Sidney Lumet — Making Movies (1996)
• François Truffaut — Hitchcock/Truffaut (1967)
• Andrei Tarkovsky — Sculpting in Time (1987)
• Akira Kurosawa — Something Like an Autobiography (1982)
• David Lynch — Catching the Big Fish (2006)
• Martin Scorsese — A Personal Journey Through American Movies (2011)
• Peter Brunette — Wong Kar-wai (2005)
• Matt Zoller Seitz — The Wes Anderson Collection (2013)
• Alison Castle (ed.) — The Stanley Kubrick Archives (2005)
• Donald Richie — The Films of Akira Kurosawa (1998)
• Helen McCarthy — Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation (2002)
• Michael Berry — Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (2009)
• Joseph Mai — Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (2010)
• Stephen Teo — King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (2007)
• Tony Zhou — Every Frame a Painting (video essays, 2014–2016)
• Mark Cousins — The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011)
• Walter Murch — In the Blink of an Eye (2001)

Techniques & Terminology

Dolly Zoom · Steadicam · Match Cut · Long Take · Dutch Angle · Freeze Frame · Jump Cut · Rack Focus · Whip Pan · Tracking Shot · Step Printing · SnorriCam · CinemaScope · IMAX · Low-key Lighting · Golden Hour · Chiaroscuro · MacGuffin · Femme Fatale · Film Noir · Dogme 95 · Hip-hop Montage · Heroic Bloodshed · Soviet Montage Theory · Mise-en-scène

Open-Source Software & Tools

• Next.js — MIT — React framework
• FastAPI — MIT — Python API framework
• PostgreSQL — PostgreSQL License — Database
• Redis — BSD — In-memory data store
• Transformers — Apache 2.0 — ML models
• FlagEmbedding / BGE-M3 — MIT — Text embeddings
• Shanyin Director Master — MIT — Directing methodology reference
• RQ (Redis Queue) — BSD — Task queue