Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Gingger Shankar
“I became a film composer by accident,” admits Gingger Shankar, who was called in one day by a music supervisor to work on some cues for The Passion of the Christ. A vocalist and musician raised in Los Angeles and India, Shankar has performed on stage with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Frank Zappa to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Smashing Pumpkins. But contributing music that would accompany the cinematic image? “I was swimming in the deep end,” she says. Her work on John Debney’s The Passion of the Christ score impressed the folks at the Sundance Composers Lab, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Kirby Ferguson
It’s hard to create something original about the remix. Okay, that would seem to go without saying, but I’m not referring to the subject of the remix — I’m talking about the discourse surrounding it. From Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix to Brett Gaylor’s feature doc, RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the creative, social and political issues surrounding the rise of remix culture have been debated with brio. Paradoxically, then, the familiarity we have with the issue of remixing is precisely what makes Kirby Ferguson’s four-part Web series, Everything is a Remix, so compelling. Rather than push a copy-left agenda or hype […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Sophia Takal
Sophia Takal is engaged to filmmaker Lawrence Michael Lavine and their roommate is actress Kate Lyn Sheil. After the three worked on Lavine’s debut feature, Gabi on the Roof in July (Takal played the eponymous lead, and Sheil co-starred), Takal decided to make her own movie, which would explore the theme of jealousy. She cast rising star Sheil as an insecure bookstore clerk, Genevieve; Lavine as Sebastian, her intellectually patronizing boyfriend; and herself as Robin, the offbeat, emotionally hungry local girl the couple meet when they rent a country cabin where Sebastian will document for his blog the planting of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Panos Cosmatos
When Panos Cosmatos was growing up on Vancouver Island, his parents wouldn’t let him watch scary movies. He’d go to his local video store and, he says, “spend hours looking at the box covers of the horror and science fiction films, just imagining my own versions of them.” One of the first R-rated films he was able to see was Alien. “My parents were watching it in the living room,” he explains, “and I was supposed to be in bed. But I snuck into this other room where I could see the film reflected on a framed print that was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Everynone
If you listen to the radio, then you may have seen the short documentary essay films of the New York collaborative, Everynone. For the last two years, the three filmmakers — Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante and Julius Metoyer III — have been creating witty and allusive short films to accompany the popular WNYC radio program Radiolab, heard on more than 300 public radio stations around the country. Radiolab explores science and philosophy in the guise of radio theater, mixing music and sound effects into presentations that thrillingly veer from the pedagogical to the personal. And if you listen to Radiolab […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Yance Ford
Yance Ford was a sophomore at Hamilton College 19 years ago when her brother was murdered. “My brother’s death picked up my life and put it down somewhere else,” Ford says. “I had an image of myself in my mind as a working artist, and when he died, all of that changed.” By her senior year, Ford, who made images as a photographer, decided she wanted to make a film about her brother’s death. She moved back to her hometown New York, worked as a p.a. and took a Third World Newsreel production workshop. Then in 2002 she became series […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
David Lowery
In the middle of writing the follow up to his 2009 feature, St. Nick, David Lowery was stuck. “I reached a point in the script where it became very difficult,” Lowery remembers. “I was trying to make it an action movie, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to make the story. So I did what I always do when I’m fed up, which is go for a run.” While jogging, Lowery plucked the seed of a scene from his script — a father talking to his daughter one night — and spun it out into something a little different: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Andrew S Allen & Jason Sondhi
By the time Andrew S Allen and Jason Sondhi posted their latest short, The Thomas Beale Cipher, on the Internet, they had it all figured out. “There’s a myth about online video that you can just put it up and the masses will discover it, that it’s a meritocracy,” Allen says. “But that doesn’t always happen. There are great films online that only have 200 views.” Allen wrote and directed the animated film, Sondhi produced, and they both knew to do things like post it on multiple platforms at once and to immediately mobilize a community of video bloggers to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Dean Fleischer-Camp & Jenny Slate
Dean Fleischer-Camp and Jenny Slate came up with the idea for their utterly charming and unexpectedly poignant lo-fi animation, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, while at a friend’s wedding. Slate remembers, “We were in a hotel sleeping six to a room because most of us were really broke, and I was beginning to feel really small. I had been doing this little voice over the weekend, so I started talking like Marcel: [in a squeaky, slightly forlorn voice] ‘I’m just feeling really squished here.’” “We were both feeling unfulfilled in our jobs,” Fleischer-Camp adds. “We were coming from a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Alma Har’el
L.A.-based Alma Har’el was making a Beirut music video with the band’s Zach Condon at the Coachella festival when she decided to find a less distracting location. A friend told her about Bombay Beach, the spare, sun-blasted community in California’s Salton Sea, so she hopped in a car with a $600 Canon Vixia camera and shot footage that made it into the video. Rather than return to L.A., she stayed by herself in the economically-distressed, end-of-the-world-seeming town, using her DV camera to go a level deeper into not only the lives but the imaginations of the people she met there. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011
