Filmmaker Videos
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Smoke and Mirrors: How to Create a Hologram
“The classic technique, called the Pepper’s Ghost technique, has been used since the late 1500s,” instructs Joey Shanks, of Shanks FX, in his new video on a seeming diversion that he deems the future: holograms. Using a downward facing projector and a mirror placed at a 45 degree angle, Shanks was able to recreate his own version of the headline grabbing Coachella Tupac resurrection. With a little experimenting in the way of lighting and mist, the spectacle is all the more atmospheric. Shanks notes that Apple recently secured a patent to create interactive holograms, which may offer insight into their hopes and dreams […]
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New Digital Bolex Footage is Here
We’ve been covering development of the Digital Bolex camera for a while now. Designed to look like a 16mm camera and meant to simulate a filmic quality, it’s been a buzzed-about piece of technology since a March 2012 Kickstarter to raise funds for manufacture of the first 100 cameras. “I had been frustrated for a really long time that I was never quite able to get the look that I wanted with the cameras that were available to me,” camera co-developer Elle Schneider told Michael Murie in an interview last year. During his NAB new camera roundup last month, David […]
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Duplicating Without a Green Screen in The Double
Richard Ayoade’s The Double successfully eluded me on the festival circuit, so I’ll be excited to catch it when it opens in New York theaters tomorrow. For The Creators Project, Ayoade and his VFX producer Simon Walley speak about duplicating Eisenberg without the standard green screen keying, instead relying on a more camera-heavy process called “rotoscoping.” Removing Eisenberg’s body double in post, the VFX team was able to essentially combine takes, or “overlay layers,” as Ayoade puts it. The tricky part was working with the motion control rig, which meant Ayoade had to choose his preferred take on the spot, so that Eisenberg could switch characters and play […]
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Trailer Watch: Alice Rohrwacher’s Le Meraviglie
Conventional wisdom says to wait until a foreign trailer has subtitles before posting, but the gist is apparent enough in this first snippet from Alice Rohrwacher’s Cannes Competition entry Le Meraviglie. Set in the Umbrian countryside, the film centers on the eldest daughter of a provincial bee-keeping family, whose summer is upended by the arrival of a young German boy and local television competition, headed by none other than Monica Bellucci. Already silly/offensive conjectures are being batted around about Rohrwacher’s chances given the fact that both she and jury president Jane Campion are women, but we’ll see if they’re at all warranted in the ensuing weeks.
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Trailer Watch: Lav Diaz’s Norte, The End of History
The Film Society of Lincoln Center recently announced, along with their all-star Summer calendar, that they’ll be hosting a Lav Diaz retrospective, set to run from June 2014 through February 2015. That’s not quite as drastic as it sounds: beginning with his latest, Norte, The End of History, the Film Society will screen one Diaz per month in a cheeky nod to the Filipino auteur’s generous running times. (2004’s Evolution of a Filipino Family clocks in at 540 minutes.) In conjunction with said announcement, Cinema Guild has released the official trailer to Norte, which is billed as “an epic reimagining of Crime and Punishment.” The film […]
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Trailer Watch: Bruno Dumont’s P’tit Quinquin
“Open that cow’s ass so I can look inside” is just one of the bizarro takeaway lines from this trailer for Bruno Dumont’s first-ever miniseries. P’tit Quinquin (the French title scans less awkwardly than the archaically phrased suggested English title, L’il Quinquin) is 200 minutes of rural murder mystery, and by the looks of it it combines the usual Dumont staples — surly villagers, casual racism, banal brutality — with a seemingly newly discovered sense of (odd) humor. The title presumably comes from the French lullaby (translation: “Little child”), which can be investigated in full here. Dumont evidently likes “Quinquin” […]
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The One-Cam: Under the Skin’s Customized CCD Camera
Eventually we’ll stop posting about Under The Skin but today is not that day. Last month, I ran a featurette from A24 about the film’s guerrilla style execution. The production rigged Johansson’s vehicle with eight hidden cameras, recording her improvised interactions with any given passerby in real time and with maximum coverage. Now, we have yet another featurette that gets into the specifications of said cameras, called “One-Cams,” which were developed especially for the occasion. For the van sequences, the VFX studio One of Us rigged a CCD camera (about the size of a GoPro) with anamorphic super 16 lenses. Though the rest of the […]
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“It’s Never All In The Script:” Dennis Hopper on Nicholas Ray and Rebel Without a Cause
“I’m the best damn filmmaker in the world who has never made one entirely good, entirely satisfactory film,” so said Nicholas Ray, according to his friend Dennis Hopper. In a bit for Turner Classic Movies in 1997, Hopper reflected on Ray’s work and their relationship, which began during his debut role as Goon in the filmmaker’s iconic Rebel Without a Cause. At the time, Hopper remembers thinking “that James Dean was directing [the] film, he had so much input in his character and lines, even deciding how a scene would be shot,” later to realize that Ray “gave Dean the freedom he needed…[he] […]
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Trailer Watch: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood
Trailer cutting is an art in itself and more often than not the results undersell or miss-sell the very package they promote. So goes this slightly corny bumper for Richard Linklater’s masterpiece, Boyhood, though as I recall from my knee jerk reaction to the Coldplay-scored opening sequence, any glimpse of heavy handedness in the film is not worth fretting over. It’s simply one of the most profound viewing experiences I’ve ever had and the less you know going into it, the better. That one of the more holistic family portraits in film has earned an R from the MPAA is an egregious error. IFC Films […]
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“What I Regret Most in My Life Are Failures of Kindness”: George Saunders, Animated
Author George Saunders’ 2013 Syracuse University commencement address dealt with the subject of kindness. Much in the same way that David Foster Wallace’s This is Water was turned into both an animated short as well as a tasteful stocking stuffer, so too Saunders’ rueful musings. Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness is the name of the 64-page book, and an excerpt has been nicely animated by the folks at Serious Lunch.
