Spotlight: Women in Film

Monday, Mar 8, 2021

Edie Peffley setting up a shot for a film project

Edie Peffley setting up a shot for a film project

Happy International Women's Day! Today we're celebrating by highlighting two women filmmakers, Online High School Filmmakers Workshop instructor Shivani Khattar and alumna of the program, Edie Peffley.

Student Spotlight: Edie Peffley

Edie Peffley is from Richmond, Texas, and took the Online High School Filmmakers Workshop last summer. One of the group projects for this course is the Exquisite Corpse. Edie explains: 

"During this project, we had to gather footage, edit, and create a short film. However, there was a twist. Instead of using 100% of our own footage, we had to include shots that our crewmates gathered. This means we had to be adaptable and clever in the way we constructed our stories. I used a Canon T5 to shoot my footage. All of my footage was taken on a field in front of my house."

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"At the beginning of the project, my crewmates and I got our own individual footage without really discussing it with one another. This ended up being really great because it meant that we had a lot to experiment with. After we all edited our own films, we had a meeting where we talked about what worked and what didn't for each film. From that point, we wanted to refine and reshoot. We asked each other for specific shots we needed to make out stories complete. Seeing the results of everyone taking each other's clips and creating completely different stories was genuinely remarkable."

Shivani Khattar

Shivani Khattar

Instructor Spotlight: Shivani Khattar

New York-based independent filmmaker Shivani Khattar teaches the Online High School Filmmakers Workshop as well as the Film Workshop for working professionals. An alumna of the Graduate Film program at Tisch, Shivani's work includes feature films, branded content, and commercials. Her short films have been screened at film festivals around the world including SXSW and the Palm Springs Short Film Festival. Her short documentaries have been nominated for several journalism awards, most notably the Webby Awards in 2017. A film she shot also won the Albert Maysles Award in the same year at the Tribeca Film Festival. Most recently she was nominated for her cinematography at the International Filmmaker Festival of World Cinema, Berlin. 

In December, her project "What It Means to be Black in Brazil" was featured on Vox. You can watch it below.

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Look for Shivani's next short film, Para Todo Mal Para Todo Bien: A Mezcal Trilogy, set to release later this month.

Contact Tisch Special Programs for more information about the Online High School Filmmakers Workshop, Tisch Pro Courses, and more.  

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