IBC is the European equivalent of NAB, and one of the few times lots of manufacturers are announcing and updating products. This show has seen some big news, particularly from Sony and Blackmagic. Sony PXW-FS7 Sony made a huge splash with the PXW-FS7. This camera slots in between their NEX-FS700 and the PMW-F5, and while it has the same E-mount as the NEX-FS700 it is a very different camera. Sony has almost completely rethought their design, intending this one for the documentary and news shooter, and focusing on making it shoulder useable without the addition of a rig. The key […]
Freefly made a splash with their MōVI brushless gimbals, and now they have a remote controlled car. The Tero is a remote controlled car that has had a “full overhaul.” This includes run flat wheels, larger shocks, and wire rope isolators between the mounting cheeseplate and the car to further reduce vibration. At the recent Massachusetts Media Expo, Dylan Law, the in-house Freefly MōVI tech at Rule Boston Camera, talked about the car and even did a short demo. The car can reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour and is literally plug-in and go. The car was fitted […]
We recently spoke to director Timothy Woodward Jr. about the production of the movie Checkmate. Much of the discussion centered on the Blackmagic Production 4K camera, because this was one of the first feature movies shot with that camera. But in the course of the discussion, Woodward made a couple of observations about shooting that seemed worth highlighting separately. The first covered the continued importance of practical effects, and the second was about organizing your shooting schedule and why it’s worth getting it right on the day. Filmmaker: You did a lot of practical effects in the movie? Woodward: We […]
The title Years of Living Dangerously could just as easily refer to the time its creators spent producing the recent series, and it has indeed been a busy few years for the journalists-turned-film producers Joel Bach and David Gelber. The pair left their posts at 60 Minutes several years ago to pursue a passion project, a long-form documentary on global warming. The result was a nine-part series that aired on Showtime this spring and, last week, took home the Emmy for the best nonfiction series, beating out Fox’s fantastic, much-lauded series Cosmos. Now the team is gearing up for phase two of the release, a DVD […]
On August 13 the disruptive Australian company Blackmagic Design took over the Grand Ballroom at the historic New Yorker Hotel at 8th & 34th to showcase their growing stable of switchers, signal converters, encoders, routers, and test equipment along with their latest unorthodox production products: cameras, monitors, disk recorders, and grading/NLE software. Plus a new scanner for film transfer. Call it a make-up day for Northeast media makers who missed out on Blackmagic’s crowded NAB booth this year. Since few companies boast the range of products Blackmagic now produces, no less their erosive pricing, it made good marketing sense to also […]
The New York Times broke the news this Sunday that BuzzFeed received $50 million in funding for their Los Angeles-based Motion Pictures arm. Recognizing the massive revenue generated by the company’s video content, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti hired Ze Frank, “web video pioneer,” to produce a “rapid-fire” stream of everything from “six second clips made for social media to more traditional 22-minute shows” under the new banner. Eventually, the company will look to produce feature-length films and TV series, not unlike Netflix. Another thing BuzzFeed Motion Pictures has in common with the online streaming paradigm is an unsurprising affinity for data science. In […]
With all the attention on brushless gimbals it’s easy to overlook cranes — pieces of equipment that can add cinematic motion to any shot. Cranes can also be large, difficult to move and hard to operate. The ProAm Taurus Jr is a small crane that solves most of those problems; its only limitation is that its range of motion may not meet every need. The Taurus Jr is 50” long and 5 ¾” wide and constructed primarily of two parallel rectangular tubes that are 2” x 1”. It is primarily constructed of powder coated and anodized aluminum. The only item that […]
I love being on set. Mine, yours, whomever’s. I like eating exorbitant amounts of food. I like idle conversation. I like the feeling you get when sleep deprivation kicks in and the dullest minutiae is suddenly hilarious. But mostly I like being around a group of people who have cast aside their better judgement to create something together. So when Nathan Silver asked if I wanted to come to the Stinking Heaven set, I gladly hopped the train to Passaic. I was excited to see how Nathan, who works from outlines and improvisation, constructs a film from the ground up. The following is a loosely timestamped diary […]
Writer, director and editor Devin Lawrence says that when he set out to make Sympathy, Said the Shark he’d already gone through two projects which had stalled out due to lack of financing, so he decided he had to come up with something where “money can no longer be the ultimate road block.” The resulting project was shot in 14 days and primarily in one location, but it was by no means a simple project to make as much of it was shot using a POV rig built around the Blackmagic Pocket Camera. Lawrence, who works in LA primarily as […]
Thunder Funder is the recently announced film production arm of Thunder Studios, a Long Beach, California soundstage and production house, and it’s making a bold play for independent projects. Rodric David, founder and CEO of both Thunder Funder and Thunder Studios, has announced $12 million in annual investment and partnerships with several other companies — post-production services vendor Pace Pictures, Red Digital Cinema and, to handle distribution, indie vet Cassian Elwes of Elevated Film Sales — to bring to independents “all the tools required to present audiences with a film that is truly the best it can be.” A dive […]