Since Leviathan, I’ve been more curious than ever about the functionality of GoPros. Often categorized as toys and far more prevalent on ski slopes than sets, it took Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel strapping the pocket-sized gizmo to the underside of a fishing vessel to illustrate its cinematic advantages. A little while back, Letus announced the release of a 1.33X Anamorphic Adapter for the camera, to be known as the AnamorphX-GP. Scheduled for shipment on January 31st, the first wave of test footage has arrived from Jared Abrams at Wide Open Camera. Though the characteristic fish eye traces remain intact, the wide aspect […]
A streamlined extension of his open collaborative site, Joseph Gordon-Levitt will premiere “Hit Record on TV” on Pivot, next Saturday at 10 pm. The first episode, which is currently available online, promises an amalgam of forms and tastes, as “Regular Joe” and his merry band of global collaborators stitch together short films (featuring Elle Fanning), musical interludes and animated sequences. Being that it is the inaugural affair, the episode centers on the number one, its connotations and translations, as told through said media and its fair share of webcams. The hitRECord address is one well worth visiting, as it encourages artists […]
The simpler the better, or so says Gordon Willis, celebrated cinematographer of The Godfather, Manhattan and Annie Hall. Willis echoes Steve Jobs in his belief that simple outshines complex and stresses sticking only with the necessary in making choices. As he sees it, one natural window light can do much more than six artificial ones, and the bare bones of an idea often do the heavy lifting in communicating the story to an audience. The full Craft Truck interview with Willis can be viewed here.
The cover story of our 2013 Fall issue, All is Lost proved a herculean exercise in filmmaking. Nearly dialogue free, J.C. Chandor’s sophomore feature plots its arc from the timeless motif of man versus nature, miraculously abstaining from repetition. Chandor exhibits a clear confidence in silence, allowing the surroundings and sun-stained face of Mr. Robert Redford to propel the story forward. Despite its effortless looks, making the movie was surely no cakewalk. In this behind the scenes video from HitFix, key players including underwater d.p. Peter Zuccarini, production designer John P. Goldsmith and editor Pete Beaudreau discuss their experiences in realizing […]
Along with Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, a book — an essay comprised of diary excerpts, actually — I recommend to all aspiring directors is Richard Stanley’s “I Wake Up Screaming.” It originally appeared in the 1994 third edition of the film anthology Projections, and it’s now published (with permission, the site claims) at the director’s unofficial website, Between Death and the Devil. “I Wake Up Screaming” documents Stanley’s attempt to make an ambitious Namibia-shot art horror-thriller called Dust Devil years after an earlier production fell apart. The movie Stanley went on to make instead, […]
Here’s a hypnotic video showing the importance of film lighting. Watch as this woman — yes, this is just one woman — finds her features altered as the lighting shifts around her. The plans of her face move, the vibe she projects alters, and the genre of film she’s in morphs from drama to horror to comedy. (Hat tip: Sploid at Gizmodo.) The video, “Sparkles and Wine,” features music from the band Opale and was directed and produced by Nacho Guzman. According to Petapixel, the video was shot “using a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR and two lenses (a Canon […]
Launched in 2011, the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab is an intensive program for artists working “at the convergence of film, art, media, live performance, music and technology.” This Fall, it completed its third Lab, bringing together artists with an impressive variety of mentors from all of these fields. Among the folks traveling to the Sundance Resort was filmmaker Samah Tokmachi (Living in a Global Society) in the role of Creative Observer. Sundance invited him to make a short video, posted above, “in hopes that his reflections would enrich the wider discourse about media innovation and the future of storytelling.” […]
Why is Martin Scorsese a great director? Because he’s always wondering where to put the camera. Here’s a priceless and little-viewed French television clip of Martin Scorsese traveling to the airport to present The King of Comedy in Cannes in which the director talks about his toughest set-up. Warning: it’s not from any of his films. Indeed, the clip, in addition to capturing great ’80s NYC street ambiance, is a good illustration of what makes Scorsese Scorsese. After telling the interviewer about all the decisions a director must make when it comes to framing a shot, he answers her question […]
Wishing all of our readers a very happy holiday season!
Ambiance Man is a new comedy web series from MOCAtv created and directed by filmmaker (and sometime Filmmaker contributor) Alix Lambert and starring, as the eponymous superhero, Portlandia‘s Fred Armisen. The concept, Lambert says, hails from her teens, when she imagined a superhero who would sweat the small stuff. She tells MOCA, “Ambiance Man is a series about a super hero who fixes what we really need fixed in our day-to-day lives. While most super heroes are focused on preventing the end of the world, Ambiance Man is focused on transforming the moments that feel like the end of the […]