Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Music Video: David Bowie’s The Stars Are Out Tonight, Directed by Floria Sigismondi
David Bowie and Tilda Swinton star as a retiring couple assaulted — literally — by vampiric celebrity culture in the latest from David Bowie. It’s directed by Floria Sigismondi, who is in fine form with this electrifyingly creepy clip. With the new Bowie album due out in a few weeks, you may have seen its wildposting campaign, in which its title, “The Next Day” is superimposed over a variety of advertising images. On its blog, CPH:DOX, which has paid homage to Bowie by naming an entire section after one of his songs (“Sound and Vision”), notes their own use of the same […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2013 -
Shane Carruth Releases Upstream Color Soundtrack via Soundcloud and iTunes
Shane Carruth’s score for Upstream Color is one of the film’s standout elements, working hypnotically with the equally strong sound design to anchor the picture’s tumbling cascade of images. In advance of the film’s early April release, Carruth has released the entire score on Soundcloud and made it available for purchase on iTunes. Check it out below, and read my cover story interview with Carruth in the new Filmmaker, which you can subscribe to digitally here on the site or get for the iPad on the App Store.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 27, 2013 -
SXSW Trailer Watch: Zach Clark’s White Reindeer
As I mentioned when I recommended this film’s Kickstarter campaign, I love depressing Christmas movies. At the time, its writer/director, Zach Clark (Vacation, Modern Love is Automatic), wrote, “White Reindeer takes on thirty-as-the-new-twenty and shows a suburban Virginia where sleaze and sadness may float on the surface, but hope and compassion aren’t too far away either.” From the trailer, I’d say he’s nailed it. Check it out above and the film itself at SXSW.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 2013 -
Trailer Watch: Burning Man Doc, As the Dust Settles
We’ve featured the work of filmmaker Mike Hedge on the site before, and he’s just forwarded the trailer for his “participatory documentary” shot at Burning Man, As the Dust Settles. It premieres next week at the Byron Bay Film Festival in Australia. From the site: Following a simple rule of working on this participatory documentary 50% of the time, we captured our life-changing experiences at the annual arts festival held in northern Nevada, known as Burning Man. Our documentary reveals an intimate glimpse of what we discovered about love, creativity, community, the environment, the art, the gift economy, and reality. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 2013 -
Google Glass Releases New Demo Video, Offers Contest for Early Access
Google has released a new video demonstrating its Google Glass and is launching a new campaign, “If I Had Glass,” offering creative people a chance to buy the product early. Read details at the link but, in short, you have 50 words on Twitter or Google + to say what you’d do using Glass, the deadline is February 27, and, if selected, you have to pre-order Glass for $1,500.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2013 -
A Haunting New York Shot in HDR on the RED Epic-X
Filmmaker Colby Moore has shot an eerie New York montage in high-dynamic range on the RED Epic-X. Underneath his Vimeo video he explains his process: A short and creepy montage of scenes shot around the ever-photogenic island of Manhattan — filmed entirely in high-dynamic range and comprised of some HDR Timelapse footage I shot, along with a collection of slow-motion and normal 24fps footage processed from Red Epic-X RAW video that I recently captured and then exported as -2,0+2 TIFF stacks to be tone mapped in Photomatix using a batch processing workflow. Please note that none of this was shot […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 18, 2013 -
Seven Ways to Fail at Promoting Your Film Online (Broken Record Edition)
Since repetition in the form of rote memorization is a major element of education, I’m not going to apologize for this, one of my periodic rants on the ways in which filmmakers (and, sometimes, their publicists) fail in the promotion of their films online and through social media. I’m sure that over the years I’ve posted every one of these points before, as have other writers on our site, like Jon Reiss. But, based on my encounters with filmmakers, their films, and their websites these past few weeks, these are worth repeating. Want to decrease press interest and the size […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 17, 2013 -
Karaoke Girl’s Visra Vichit-Vadakan and Sandi Sissel
Receiving its world premiere in the 2013 Rotterdam Film Festival’s Tiger Awards Competition, San Francisco-based Visra Vichit-Vadakan’s Karaoke Girl is an evocative character study of a Bangkok working girl, a singer in a nighttime karaoke bar for whom memories of her rural past and dreams of romantic fulfillment form a pulsing lifeline away from an emotionally depleting world. A hybrid documentary/fiction film, Karaoke Girl stars newcomer Sa Sittijun as a character largely based on herself. The documentary sections of the film follow her back to her real hometown, and feature interviews with her real family, while the “fiction” sequences are […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2013 -
Conversations with Blocked Filmmakers
Independent films get made, and we cover them here at Filmmaker. But what about all the films that don’t get made? They have their own stories, and their stories can be as useful to other filmmakers as those of films that do actually hit the screen. After a brief Twitter poll, I’ve decided to invite several filmmakers who have been struggling, so far unsuccessfully, to make their films to discuss those projects here on the site. I’ll be interested in the films, the length of the development process, the avenues tried, and the possible reasons for the projects’ failure to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 12, 2013 -
Cinekink Announces its 2013 Line-Up
Cinekink NYC has announced the line-up for its 2013, tenth anniversary edition, which runs February 26 – March 3, 2013. Presented by Cinekink, “an organization dedicated to the recognition and encouragement of sex-positive and kink-friendly depictions in film and television,” the festival has historically mixed documentary, fiction and experimental work, drawing from the festival circuit, the art world, and adult production. Here’s the line-up, and further information can be found at the festival’s site. (The festival’s closing-night film is a restoration of Radley Metzger’s ’70s porno-chic hit, The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Read our interview 1997 interview with Metzger here.) […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 12, 2013
