Ryan Connolly of Film Riot is a rather perky fellow, but he’s also got some good insight into how camera techniques affect a film’s narrative. Connolly begins with a simple scene of two actors walking across a yard, examining how a dolly versus a tripod versus a handheld shot conveys tonality to the audience. A tripod pan, for instance, may insinuate that the actors are being watched. Connolly covers a number of mechanisms — including the implications of a jib — in the above video, which serves as a helpful reminder that the camera should always being doing more than […]
Commissioned by the designer Miu Miu as part of a series of seven films, “Women’s Tales,” Spark and Light is a lovely and wonderfully executed short by Treeless Mountain director So Yong Kim. Riley Keough, in a sensitive, affecting performance, plays a motorist stranded in snowy Iceland as she’s on her way to visit her dying mother in the hospital. Dreams, memory and reality all merge as Keough’s character turns her moments alone into a hypnotic emotional journey. Special mention to Eric Lin’s subtly expressive cinematography.
Oscilloscope Laboratories has released the trailer for 25 New Face Matt Wolf’s inventive documentary Teenage, which uncovers the genesis of youth culture at the turn of the 20th century. Comprised of archival material, recreations and narration lifted from diary entries — courtesy of Jena Malone and Ben Whishaw’s dulcet tones — the film had its world premiere at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival and will be released in New York on March 14. According to a recent Vogue article, Wolf is currently at work on a documentary about Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight at Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner’s production company.
Before there was Gravity, there were sliders and stop-motion. In their latest informational video, the masterminds at Shanks FX demonstrate the old-fashioned illusion of the space flight, as seen in Star Wars, Close Encounters, Star Trek and beyond. With a mere DSLR, some rigging and a model, they’re able to produce animated sequences of ships in flight.
Given the breadth of his reverential cannon, it’s surprising that the number of Dostoyevsky adaptations remains relatively slim. The English comedian Richard Ayoade has brought a noted flourish to his translation of The Double, the Russian giant’s novella about a man haunted by his far more confident and aggressive doppelgänger. Well received at Toronto and Sundance, the film, which stars Jesse Eisenberg and Mia Wasikowska, will open in the U.S. on May 9, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. I, for one, am interested in seeing the typecast Eisenberg working to convey some bull-headed magnetism as the titular character.
“There is no such thing as history,” Ken Burns says at the top of this short promotional clip for his new iPad app, Past Is Present. It’s more like a series of recurrences: “not cycles, but patterns.” To help the average eye better examine such connections, Don MacKinnon conceived, directed and produced this interactive exploration of common threads in Burns’ work. Clips from the likes of The Civil War and Baseball are grouped by both theme and time period, allowing its user to make scenes “20 years apart, suddenly interrelate in a new way.” Burns offers up interviews and his own clip assemblies, determined by […]
Who is your audience? For all of us, argues Frieze co-editor and art critic Dan Fox, it starts with our parents. Soon, though, it — or, perhaps, our conceptions of it — change. In this video, based on a talk he gave at The Kitchen, Fox “…presents a personal perspective on how we think about audiences as we grow older, and as our responsibilities evolve.”
The gap between your creative ambitions and your creative output — that’s the subject of a new video by Daniel Sax based on 2012 interview by Ira Glass. Sax was actually inspired by another video, one by David Shiyang Liu, which used animated typography to illustrate the same interview. Sax writes that he watched Liu’s video over and over again, letting Glass’s advice about getting through that period where your work just isn’t good enough ease him past his own disappointment in his endeavors. Glass’s words became motivation, and the result is this clever and, yes, inspirational piece of work. […]
A few weeks back, I posted a breakdown of the camera packages selected by this year’s Oscar-nominated cinematographers. RED was nowhere to be found. After a long delayed release, the 6K RED Dragon finally hit shelves this summer alongside some pretty nice test footage from Mark Toia. Making another case for ARRI’s underling is some new airborne footage from Freefly, shot with a 11-16 mm lens. In places, the images are so clean, they almost look computer generated.
Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair, from 2013 crop of “25 New Faces,” have just debuted the latest episode of their awesome and very funny web series High Maintenance. “Matilda” deviates a little from the usual rules of the show as Sinclair’s unnamed pot dealer is for the first time the central figure in the story, and the action extends beyond its usual environs of New York City. For regular watchers of the show, there are also some welcome return appearances by notable characters from previous episodes; to say more would only be ruining things…