Authors — David Leitner
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Slamdance Notes: If Fitzcarraldo Made a Violin
Slamdance remains the little festival that could, a throwback to analog film festivals of the early 1980s, with their cinema-obsessed audiences and packed makeshift screening rooms. A halcyon age of innocence, before the onslaught of marketing, branding, corporate sponsorship, publicists, producer reps, agents, and social media. At Slamdance there’s still no red carpet and no one checks your bags or makes you open your coat for inspection before entering every screening. Nonetheless every year Slamdance, with its tiny slate, upstages Sundance with one or two films that soar. This year’s not-to-be-missed Slamdance film is Stefan Avalos’s Strad Style. Strad Style has […]
by David Leitner on Jan 25, 2017 -
Sundance Notes: On Political Action in Park City
Sundance coincides with Presidential inaugurations, and I have indelible memories of twice racing to find a cozy Main Street bar in order to watch the live television broadcast of Barack Obama’s inauguration and speech. All of us in the bar, strangers but inspirited fellow citizens, were glued to every minute. Saturday, sitting in an idling car outside the Park City Marriott, I happened to catch Trump’s speech over the car radio as my partner was inside picking up our press credentials. Something about “carnage.” Ho-hum. Hyperbole and bombast may be the new normal, but this act grows old fast. Films […]
by David Leitner on Jan 22, 2017 -
Sundance Notes: The Nile Hilton Incident
Twice in a row the first film I’ve seen at Sundance is so brilliant, so accomplished that I start Sundance on a mountain high — and it’s not the thin air. I had to miss 2016 Sundance, but two years ago it was Tom Hardy in Steven Knight’s Locke, a tour de force of a one-hander that’s nonetheless a nail-biter — Hardy in close-up the entire film, speeding through the night in his car, his life crumbling in real time with each harrowing Bluetooth call. You learn a lot about concrete pours and the consequences of poor choices. But I […]
by David Leitner on Jan 22, 2017 -
How to Appreciate the Techno-Aesthetic Breakthroughs of Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
Tonight, Friday, October 14, 2016, the Film Society of Lincoln Center makes cinema history with the New York Film Festival’s world premiere of Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, presented at the 600-seat AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 IMAX theater on its 100-foot-wide screen, the largest in North America. The brief on this technological milestone? Images shot and projected at 120 fps, dual 4K RGB laser projectors that display wide color gamut and high dynamic range, bright RealD 3D, 12-channel audio with overhead speakers plus sub-bass. Talk about immersive! And what of the film itself? Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime […]
by David Leitner on Oct 14, 2016 -
Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2016: New Horizons
In this, my sixth annual camera round-up for Filmmaker, I’ll explore the latest developments and trends associated with cameras — as I have each year — which taken together continue to define new directions in digital cinema. I’ll highlight cameras that exemplify these trends. Those seeking an end-in-sight to a decade’s worth of profound change in camera technology might want to stop reading here. In my 2015 camera round-up, I touched on issues of design including modularity, new materials, a return to ergonomics; the birth of camera apps; wirelessness and the dawn of camera IP connectivity; the mirrorless revolution with […]
by David Leitner on Apr 21, 2016 -
Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2015: The Dust Settles
Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]
by David Leitner on Apr 28, 2015 -
Kit: 10 Favorite Tech Innovations of 2014 (And Perhaps 2015)
I fall into that category of independent filmmaker who, as the need exists, writes, produces, directs, shoots, records sound, edits, even grades their own footage. (What we used to call color correction.) Then again, often times I’m “just” the DP. 2014 was my busiest year ever, and at some point I found myself taking on each of these basic roles. As a result, the scope of my “kit” is necessarily broad, encompassing both production and post. (Kit is a Britishism for one’s working collection of gear, a name I intend to lend to a series of brief tech reviews in […]
by David Leitner on Feb 9, 2015 -
Editing Today: Beyond the NLE
David Lean once called editing the soul of filmmaking. Today it’s more like the Mission Control. You’ve got to understand pixel counts, bit rates, bit depth, color sampling, sampling frequencies, frame rates, codecs, RAW files, deBayering, audio channels, waveform displays, vectorscopes, audio levels, LUTs, proxies, file-wrappers, Log gammas, XML, titling, effects — need I go on? Arcane stuff that used to be the domain of video engineers with EE degrees. To ensure a smooth and efficient postproduction “workflow” (term borrowed from I.T.), you must know about cameras too: which frame sizes they capture, which codecs they employ, which gammas they […]
by David Leitner on Oct 20, 2014 -
“Dying of the Light” at MASS MoCA
Do not go gentle into that good night, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. – Dylan Thomas If you’re anywhere near North Adams in the northwest corner of Massachusetts, close by the New York and Vermont borders, anytime between now and February 1, 2015, do yourself a favor and drop by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art to contemplate their exhibition marking the last days of photochemical motion pictures: The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor. With the contraction of film manufacturing and virtual demise of laboratory services in the face of near-universal digital imaging, the medium of […]
by David Leitner on Aug 28, 2014 -
Blackmagic Does Manhattan
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 […]
by David Leitner on Aug 27, 2014
