Authors — Caleb Hammond
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NAB Show 2026 Moves Toward Broadcast, but Cinema Products Still Excite
“NAB has always been the broadcast show,” Paul Hawxhurst, senior technical specialist at Canon USA, told me at the show this year. “For a little while there, it was cinema, cinema, cinema. Right now, it’s going back to broadcast, broadcast, broadcast.” On the floor in Las Vegas, that shift is hard to miss. As I made the rounds on the final day of the show, I asked vendors how business had been, and nearly all described a quieter year. Some companies reduced their footprint or skipped booths altogether, opting instead for smaller presences as a sponsor within NAB’s Cine Central […]
by Caleb Hammond on May 7, 2026 -
Los Angeles: The Movie-Watching Capital of the World
Moviegoing in Los Angeles has never been better, at least not in the 13 years I’ve lived in the city. When covering Slamdance’s move from Park City to LA last year, I listed a host of these either new or newly expanded theatrical offerings. In the year since, American Cinematheque, the undisputed king of repertory cinema in the city (at least in terms of scale), has acquired the historic Village theater in Westwood, with plans to re-open it next year. And Kristen Stewart’s recent purchase of the Highland Theatre is particularly exciting, especially considering that it’s located only one mile […]
by Caleb Hammond on Apr 29, 2026 -
Review: The New Nikon ZR Shoots RED RAW Footage on a Budget
One year after camera giants Nikon and RED Digital Cinema merged, their first collaboration comes with the release of the Nikon ZR full-frame digital cinema camera. The ZR differentiates itself from its mirrorless competitors—whether Panasonic’s LUMIX line, Sony’s FX line or Blackmagic cinema cameras—with its unique ability to record 12-bit REDCODE RAW (R3D NE), internally at up to 6K and 60 frames per second. And it’s available at the enviable price point of only $2,199. (By comparison, Sony’s full-frame FX3 costs nearly twice as much.) Surveying the camera body, its large 4-inch screen immediately stands out. The addition of an […]
by Caleb Hammond on Feb 19, 2026 -
Lines Begin Here: Independent Animation’s New Generation
Coming up in the animation world in the 2010s, artist Julian Glander identified a clear pipeline for industry success: “An animated short would premiere at a great festival like Sundance, Toronto or Annecy, collect festival laurels for a year, then debut online, get the Vimeo Staff Pick and get covered on a lot of blogs. The happy end to the cycle would be getting the attention of an art director, producer or some powerful person, which could lead to either a commercial animating gig or a job on a TV show. Now, it feels like every single piece of that chain is […]
by Caleb Hammond on Sep 17, 2025 -
“A Lot of Movies Right Now are Just Shrugs”: Frederic Da on iPhone-Shot Found Footage film Isaiah’s Phone
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 -
Transformer Model: AI in Film Schools
“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, 2025 -
NAB 2025: LED Screen Advancements, Tariff Concerns and Hybrid Lenses
Nearly 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, 2025 -
Frequent Flying: Location Shooting in 2025
Carson 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, 2025 -
“I Always Make What I Can and Not What I Want”: Bruno Dumont on The Empire
With 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, 2025 -
Slamdance Co-Founder Peter Baxter and Fest Director Taylor Miller on Moving to Los Angeles
Los 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, 2025
