TRICKS OF THE TRADE: When you stage A Christmas Carol, the opportunities are almost endless for stage trickery. I mean, it’s a ghost story, so there are plenty of surprise entrances and things going bump in the night. But the Dallas Theater Center was nice enough to give Good Morning Texas a backstage look at how it makes the magic happen. Learn all the secrets in the video above.

SUNDANCE BOUND: Some North Texas filmmakers will be booking passage to Park City, Utah, in January for the Sundance Film Festival. Shane Carruth, who made the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner Primer while living in these parts, will bring his new film, Upstream Color, to the festival. The subject of the film is, “A man and woman are drawn together, entangled in the life cycle of an ageless organism. Identity becomes an illusion as they struggle to assemble the loose fragments of wrecked lives.” And David Lowery (St. Nick) is pulling double duty. Pit Stop, a film he wrote about two gay men in a small Texas town, will debut there. And he’ll also bring Ain’t Them Bodies Saints – which he wrote and directed. That may be the film that really puts him on the map nationally – it’s got an impressive cast led by Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck and Ben Foster. You can check out the full list of recently announced films on the festival’s website.

QUOTABLE: “In the years that I’ve been working in Fort Worth, the theater people consider me a visual artist, and the visual artists consider me a theater person. I’m outside of both, but I also feel very lucky to be working in both.”

– Painter, photographer and playwright John Carlisle Moore, in a profile on fwweekly.com. Moore’s paintings are a part of the multimedia exhibition “Dancin’ Rabbits, Burnin’ Cowboys, and Outsider Art,” currently on view at Arts Fifth Avenue in Fort Worth.