ARRI has met with some success in digital filmmaking with their ALEXA camera. As just one indication of their dominance, the ALEXA was used on three-quarters of this year’s Best Picture nominees. It’s been praised for its image quality, ease of use and ruggedness. But it’s not cheap, and it’s not light. ARRI last year announced the AMIRA, and described it as a documentary camera. It’s smaller and lighter than the ALEXA, but if you were hoping for a significantly cheaper camera, you’ll be disappointed; the base AMIRA is $39,999. For those on a budget, renting the camera remains the […]
I’m not writing this for the careerists. For the ones just looking for an edge, for a way in, who think they have an idea that can sell and are poking for a soft spot in the walled city. If that’s you, you can stop reading now. Hell, just stop. I’m writing for the hopeless lot who scramble for meaning. Who care about what’s in the box, not the pretty package. Who care about result, impact, and why people and societies do the things they do. This is why we shot a movie over four months in a remote Ghanaian […]
The documentary Fight Church looks at the intersection of Christianity and mixed martial arts, and how pastors training fighters can reconcile their faith with a violent sport. The film premiered at IFFBoston. Co-director and editor Bryan Storkel previously directed and edited Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians, which examined a devout blackjack team. Filmmaker: How did you get into filmmaking? Storkel: I went to school for media, but I never made my own stuff until after I really became a fan of documentaries. I started watching documentaries and going to film festivals. I think I went to […]
Opening today in theaters, Steven Knight’s Locke has been winning plaudits since it premiered last year at the Venice Film Festival. Giving a bravura performance, Tom Hardy plays father of two, Ivan Locke, a project manager dealing with stress in both his personal life and at work whilst on a drive to London along the motorway. The whole film takes place during the car journey in which Locke makes and receives phone calls to his wife, a friend in London and a work colleague. The construction job, use of a mobile phone and the fact that just one actor is […]
A few more details have emerged over at Deadline regarding the on-set negligence that led to 2nd AC Sarah Jones’ death in Doctortown, GA. Midnight Rider was the third feature to be shot in the Savannah area by director Randall Miller and his Unclaimed Freight production company, and it appears that this tragic instance of reckless conduct was no isolated incident. During filming of 2012’s CBGB, Miller and his crew reportedly dropped a grand piano down a homeowner’s staircase without permission, and went the entire shoot without a safety bulletin. They illegally removed a stop sign, blacked out another, and didn’t bother […]
Welcome to Filmmaker Magazine’s fourth annual digital cinema camera round-up. Each year for reasons of publishing schedule, this overview is written on the brink of the big NAB show in Las Vegas. By the time some of you read this, journalists and bloggers will have breathlessly uploaded each and every scrap of breaking news from the frenzied show floor, saving you the airfare, sore feet, and those Vegas cab fares calibrated to expense accounts. But what do these splashy product introductions mean? Do we need to trade up our cameras? How soon? Are more resolution, bit depth, frame rates, color […]
Short films are a peculiar enterprise. They are well regarded as an investment vortex, with nearly zero prospects for return and lots of prospects for expense. Many are made and vanish after a run on the festival circuit, if they are even seen at all. But they are also an essential tool for honing one’s craft, and, given the bitesized format, ripe for cultivating an audience. I was impressed by the intelligence and honesty Jim Cummings displayed in his talk on the digital recession at SXSW, so I asked if he’d be interested in doing a quasi-followup for Filmmaker. Given ornana’s […]
“If I had to make [Noah Baumbach’s 1995 pic] Kicking and Screaming today, I’d make it for $50,000, not $1 million,” said producer Jason Blum (The Purge, Insidious, Whiplash) at his SXSW keynote address on Sunday. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times’ John Horn, Blum blended his own producer origin story with practical advice for filmmakers seeking to emulate his rise to top of Hollywood’s low-budget horror hierarchy. “Don’t wait for the industry to go forward,” he told the crowd, explaining that his own career was accelerated when he learned from a past error: passing on The Blair […]
The Internet and digital filmmaking tools have opened up new possibilities of crowdsourcing material–Life in a Day, Declaration of Interdependence, One Day on Earth, even the interactive Star Wars Uncut–and given new life to the omnibus/anthology film format. The latest project to adopt the form is 50 Kisses, a film created by the London-based Chris Jones and hundreds of collaborators from around the world. The film, which includes 50 scenes built around a Valentine’s Day and a kiss, premiered on February 13–the day before Valentine’s–at the Genesis Cinema in London’s East End. Further distribution is now rolling out. Jones, a filmmaker […]
Four films that played at the Berlin Film Festival highlighted how directors are using modern technology to completely change the way in which productions are being put together and scheduled. Both 52 Tuesdays and Boyhood were shot intermittently over a long period of time. The Turning had 17 different shoots running concurrently throughout Australia, while the Bollywood film Highway decided where to travel to next and shoot scenes on a day-by-day basis. What marks these productions out from any number of other low-budget independent films is that their directors believed a non-traditional production schedule would result in a better end-product. Rather […]