With Isaiah’s Phone, French-American filmmaker Frederic Da caps off an informal trilogy cataloging the contemporary teenage experience by corralling his film students at a private high school in Santa Monica as crew and on-camera as actors. Short “Ava Dates a Senior” was expanded into the ensemble feature Teenage Emotions—both of which are lensed on multiple iPhones and had their premieres at Slamdance. Da’s latest, Isaiah’s Phone, employs a diegetic, found footage framing device, following a young student Isaiah (Isaiah Brody) as he navigates the difficulties of high school. On-screen text up top teases “a horrific act of violence,” explaining that […]
by Caleb Hammond on Jul 3, 2025“You can love it, you can hate it, you just can’t ignore it,” says artist and UCLA lecturer Bill Barminski about the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in filmmaking. Barminski’s sentiment is echoed by other film school faculty, staff and students, who all recognize this divisive technology is here to stay and that it would be foolish for students not to engage with—or at least understand—it. AI is a wide-reaching term, encompassing text-based services like ChatGPT and DeepSeek, which many film students say they use for ideation or to help with loglines, script notes, grant writing and pitch-deck creation. AI […]
by Caleb Hammond on Jun 18, 2025Nearly 1,100 vendors spread across three halls of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center for the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show which, over five days each April, covers a lot of ground, both physically and with the wide scope of technology encompassed under “broadcast.” In a press conference, Karen Chupka, NAB’s managing director and executive vice president, highlighted this Show’s new points of focus, including sports and content creators; ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith was a featured guest speaker at NAB earlier that same morning. Scrolling through each day’s list of scheduled panels and talks illustrates just how […]
by Caleb Hammond on Apr 21, 2025Carson Lund understood choosing rural New England for his directorial debut, Eephus, would be an unorthodox experience, but he couldn’t have predicted that securing a dream location would find him pitching an intimate town meeting on a Tuesday night. Eephus takes place over the course of the last amateur “Fall ball” baseball game on an old field before a new school is built on the site. Using Google Earth satellite view and following up in-person if a field looked promising, Lund estimates he visited upwards of 100 baseball fields across New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts. Often, he was disappointed to […]
by Caleb Hammond on Mar 18, 2025With The Empire, French filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s career is now evenly split between two modes. His first seven films operated within an identifiably Bressonian tradition, while the five films and two mini-series following operate in a more comic, slapstick register. Conversations surrounding the starkness of this pivot—which began in 2014 with miniseries L’il Quinquin—are understandable yet potentially overstated, as there is strong connective tissue through all of his work. The two hapless detectives in L’il Quinquin and Coincoin and the Extra-humans (who reprise their roles in The Empire) drive their cop car on two wheels; a dune buggy wreck into […]
by Caleb Hammond on Mar 11, 2025Los Angeles is a city in constant renewal. When the Arclight Cinemas closed during COVID in 2021, the initial despair was lessened as a host of repertory options sprang up in its aftermath, including Quentin Tarantino’s revamped Vista Theatre, the Academy Museum and Micah Gottlieb’s Mezzanine series. On the festival side, when L.A. Film Festival and OutFest both shut down a few years apart, much discussion centered around why this city has such difficulty sustaining a film festival, especially when on the opposite coast, the New York Film Festival thrives. (This line of questioning largely overlooks the long-running, can’t-miss AFI […]
by Caleb Hammond on Feb 20, 2025In 2006, Rune Bjerkestrand was on the Universal lot in Hollywood, far away from his home country of Norway. His brand-new invention, the Cinevator, could create a film negative from a digital file in real time—a vast improvement over other recorders that could take 10 days or more to craft a negative for a 90-minute film. But was the quality there? Technicolor set up a blind test to find out. “We didn’t really have a clue about film, about film technology, about the film industry, about film machines—nothing,” Bjerkestrand says. After the split-screen test footage ran, everyone in the theater […]
by Caleb Hammond on Dec 16, 2024A 4DX screening offers a host of bells and whistles engineered to make the moviegoing experience less passive. Three motors in every seat work in tandem to shake a participant around violently during big action setpieces or vibrate lightly during quieter moments. There’s a back kicker for imitating punches or kicks thrown during fights. Lightning effects and fog fill the theater at large, while sprays of water interact with each audience member. The premium format received a massive visibility bump this summer when viral clips of audience members watching Lee Isaac Chung’s Twisters lit up TikTok and X. On this […]
by Caleb Hammond on Aug 26, 2024Every start of summer, the Cine Gear Expo comes to Los Angeles. Initially held on the Paramount lot, the Expo had a short stint at the LA Convention Center for two pandemic years before landing this yearat the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. The movie lot aspect assists greatly with vibes: While its chief competitor, NAB Show—held a few months earlier in the Las Vegas Convention Center—feels like a traditional trade show, at Cine Gear you can peruse the latest lenses as the iconic Animaniacs water tower looms in the distance, just visible behind a camera crane which swings around […]
by Caleb Hammond on Jun 21, 2024