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The Editor's Blog
Contemplations and digressions from Filmmaker's Editor-in-Chief by Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker’s Top Ten Posts of January, 2014
Here are our most-read posts of January, 2014.
1. Why Your Film Needs a Good Gaffer: How Lighting Changes a Face. This hypnotic video featuring a pretty model whose face morphs from seductive to menacing to funny based on the lights that hit it went viral. It’s a great watch that prompted a lengthy dialogue about the relationship between D.P and gaffer on our Facebook page.
2. The Women of Sundance 2014. There has been a lot written about the underrepresentation of women directors, but I think filmmaker Danielle Lurie knocked it out of the park with this 5,000-word piece framing the issue through the experiences of this year’s Sundance filmmakers. Lurie looked at the UCLA report issued at last year’s festival and asked filmmakers whether its conclusions applied to them. And, she did it with personality and a sense of optimism.
3. Amazon Launches Free Storyboard Tool. Michael Murie’s post on Amazon’s new — and free — storyboarding tool for screenwriters took our number three spot.
4. Trailer Watch: Nymphomaniac, Volume 2. Lars Von Trier’s new, two-part Nymphomaniac is a page-view boon to film sites everywhere.
5. No Green Screen? Try Kubrickian Front-Screen Projection. Sarah Salovaara’s posting of a video demonstrating how Stanley Kubrick used front-screen projection in films like 2001 was our fifth most-read piece this month.
6. Hitchcock to Scorsese: 47 Years of the Dolly Zoom. Sarah Salovaara posted this supercut by Vashi Visuals mashing 23 separate dolly zooms demonstrating the power of this vertiginous in-camera effect.
7. The Wolf of Wall Street‘s Seamless Visual Effects. Speaking of Scorsese, Sarah Salovaara’s pick-up of one of the film’s VFX vendor’s reels demonstrated how pervasive — and invisible — visual effects are in films today.
8. Gordon Willis on the Elegance of Simplicity. Next on our list is this short video from our friends at Craft Truck featuring legendary The Godfather D.P. Gordon Willis on why simpler is usually better.
9. What Richard Stanley Learned from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Bummer! The video I linked to for this post, a shot-by-shot breakdown of the climactic scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly has been taken down. Oh well. There’s more to this post, however, including a link to one of my favorite film essays of all time.
10. Mark Cuban Blasts Patent Troll’s Movie Download Lawsuit. Thanks to a tweet by Mr. Two Million Followers, Mark Cuban, this post on a truly ridiculous lawsuit rounds out this month’s list.
