Authors — Scott Macaulay
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TRAILERING SXSW’S THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER
One independent film I’ve been aware of for some time (it’s described in the press materials as “a labor of love five years in the making”) and was happy to see in the SXSW line-up is David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American Sleepover. It’s Mitchell’s feature debut, it was produced by Adele Romanski, and it was shot on the RED One by Medicine for Melancholy‘s James Laxton. Check out the trailer below. The Myth of the American Sleepover – Official Trailer from Strike Anywhere on Vimeo.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2010 -
KYLE COOPER ON THE ART OF TITLE DESIGN
Film titles? If you’re like many independent filmmakers, by the time you get to them you are low on post funds and you suddenly wind up with a newfound artistic appreciation of Woody Allen’s career-long white serif font on black approach. To inspire you to set aside some money during budgeting for a title sequence that will be as groundbreaking as your movie, check out Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, a website devoted to the art of title design. There are articles and videos about 130 different titles sequences and 70 different designers, including star title designer Kyle Cooper, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 15, 2010 -
IN BERLIN: BEAUTIFUL DARLING
Beautiful Darling, James Rasin’s documentary on the life of actress and Warhol superstar Candy Darling, premieres at the Berlin Film Festival this week. In it, actress Chloe Sevigny voices Darling. From the film’s website: Beautiful Darling, a documentary film, pays tribute to the short but influential life of an extraordinary person — the actress Candy Darling, born James Slattery in a Long Island suburb in 1944. Drawn to the feminine from childhood, by the mid-Sixties James had become Candy, a gorgeous, blonde actress and well-known downtown New York figure. Candy’s career took her through the raucous and revolutionary Off-off-Broadway theater […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 12, 2010 -
PIRATE BAY’S PETER SUNDE CREATES FLATTR
I’ve written before that I think alternative forms of currency may provide benefits for not just filmmakers but many niche content creators and also social interest vendors. Peter Sunde, one of the founders of the torrent site The Pirate Bay, has launched his venture, Flattr. Basically, on a monthly basis you commit to an amount of money that you’ll disperse to content creators. Then, as the month goes by, you click on their Flattr buttons and at the end of the month the service divvies up your funds and gives an equal amount to each person you’ve clicked. Watch below, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 10, 2010 -
The Canon Rebel T2i: The No-Excuses Camera?
At Filmmaker we’ve been interested in the use of the new DSLR cameras — the Canon 5D and 7D, and the Nikon D90 — by filmmakers. Now, if ProLost’s Stu Maschwitz is correct, a lot more filmmakers will be experimenting with these video-recording still cameras. He dubs the Rebel T2i (also known as the 550D) the “no more excuses” camera due to its combination of price — $799! — and features carried over from the more expensive 7D. He writes about it in reference to the Canon HV20 video camera: I marked the Canon 7D as the real arrival of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2010 -
BEIJING TAXI: THE METER IS RUNNING
Filmmaker Miao Wang, a Beijing native now based in Brooklyn, is currently racing to finish her feature doc Beijing Taxi in time for SXSW, where it’s scheduled to world premiere. She needs to raise $11,000 to cover post-production expenses and is just under half way there with five days left to go at Kickstarter. From the Kickstarter page: BEIJING TAXI is a feature length documentary that vividly portrays Beijing undergoing a profound transformational arch. Through a humanistic lens, the intimate lives of three taxi drivers connect a morphing city confronted with modern issues and changing values. With diverse imagery combined […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2010 -
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CLIP REEL
Most movie-moment montages work an A-B-A structure in which “A” is sentimental uplift. This montage by Paul Proulx goes for something different. (Hat tip: Anne Thompson.) the films of the 2000s from Paul Proulx on Vimeo.
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2010 -
DAVID LYNCH ON MAKING A GOOD MOVIE
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2010 -
HOW COOL IS INDIE FILM?
Indie film champions are often fond of comparing what we do to indie music. If bands can tour, why can’t we? If bands can sell merch, then we should too. If recording artists can form boutique labels, then why can’t film distributors? Like, for example, Oscilloscope, the film label of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. At Flavorwire, Judy Berman takes this assumption to task in a piece called “Why is Indie Film Dying While Indie Music Thrives?” She bases her assessment of indie film’s slow-motion death on Edward Jay Epstein’s “Can Indie Movies Survive?”, which I found to be a pretty […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 8, 2010 -
A Night at the Movies: Quentin Tarantino on Inglorious Basterds
The following interview of Quentin Tarantino originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2009 edition. Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting for almost a decade now for a project he’s discussed in interviews — a World War II-set, Dirty Dozen-style “men on a mission” movie. Big-name actors have been brought up, an epic-length storyline has been mentioned, and many imagined this project to be a return to the macho camaraderie of Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, with the warehouse expanded into the world at war. Of course this project’s journey to the screen has had as many plot […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 7, 2010
