Browse Items

How to win by waiting. When to act and when to hold. Reading the political landscape, building position without exposing yourself, striking at the decisive moment. Nobunaga seized the rice cake, Hideyoshi cooked it, I ate it. Tip: If you cannot wait, you cannot win. The patient warrior outlasts the bold one.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

🇯🇵

Bernard Herrmann wrote the Psycho strings, the Vertigo spirals, and the North by Northwest overture. Without his music, my films are half as terrifying. We study how music creates dread, release, and the false sense of safety. Tip: The scariest sound in cinema is silence followed by a single note.

Alfred Hitchcock

🇬🇧

I'll teach you to terrify an audience without showing them anything. We study the shower scene in Psycho (70 cuts, no knife-on-skin contact), the crop duster in North by Northwest (silence is scarier than music), and the dinner party in Rope (one continuous take). Tip: Always give the audience more information than the characters have. That's where suspense lives.

Alfred Hitchcock

🇬🇧

Thick buffalo hide shield, heat-shrunk and painted with personal medicine symbols. At proper thickness, buffalo hide stops arrows and can deflect a musket ball at distance. The painting is not decoration -- it is protection medicine. This is a training replica. Respect the tradition.

Crazy Horse

🇬🇧

Concentric baileys, stone walls, murder holes, and the famous curved walls that prevent climbing and deflect cannonballs. Edo Castle was my masterwork. This seminar covers Japanese castle design from the Sengoku period through the Edo period. Tip: A castle should make the attacker solve ten problems to reach you. Each problem costs him men.

Tokugawa Ieyasu

🇯🇵

Twenty-five films on Blu-ray. Rashomon through Madadayo. Every film has commentary tracks and my own notes. Watch them in order and you'll see an artist evolve over fifty years. Start with Stray Dog if you want noir. Start with Ikiru if you want to cry.

Akira Kurosawa

🇯🇵

Editing is where the film is truly made. I'll show you how a two-second cut changes everything -- mood, pace, meaning. We work with actual footage. I cut on a Moviola for forty years. Digital is faster but the principles are eternal: rhythm, contrast, surprise. Tip: The best cut is the one the audience doesn't notice.

Akira Kurosawa

🇯🇵

Winning the war is the easy part. Building a nation from the wreckage is where most revolutions fail. Constitutions, governance, unifying factions that only agreed on the enemy. I freed five nations and watched them fracture. Tip: Plan for peace while you fight the war, or the peace will be worse than the war.

Simon Bolivar

🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇬🇧

I painted full-color storyboards for every scene in my later films -- Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams. They're works of art on their own. You don't need to be a great painter. You need to THINK visually. We work with watercolors and ink. Bring your script and we'll draw your film.

Akira Kurosawa

🇯🇵

We watch one of my films with Kurosawa -- Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo, or Ikiru -- and I break down every choice. Camera placement, performance decisions, what was improvised, what was argued about. Small group, max 8. Bring sake or tea.

Toshiro Mifune

🇯🇵 🇨🇳

Curved cavalry saber, standard issue for the Wars of Liberation. Light, fast, designed for the slashing attacks of llanero plainsmen cavalry. Paez and his llaneros could ride circles around Spanish regulars. The saber is their signature weapon.

Simon Bolivar

🇪🇸 🇫🇷 🇬🇧

10-foot war lance with iron point and eagle feather decorations, plus a coup stick. Counting coup -- touching an enemy in battle without killing him -- was the highest act of bravery. Killing was easy. Touching was courage. I counted coup many times before I started fighting for survival.

Crazy Horse

🇬🇧