Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Devan Scott’s Video Essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”
Accompanying his debut article in Filmmaker’s print edition, “Did You See (and Hear) That?),” Devan Scott posts today a video essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”, that provides visual backup for his points. “Contemporary visuals are commonly diagnosed as dark,’ ‘underexposed’ or ‘underlit’. In actuality, they describe an array of phenomena, many of them widely misunderstood,” he writes. “The most common charge, dim,’ is often used interchangeably with ‘underlit.’ Tools are frequently blamed; ‘the digital look’ is as much an accusation of modern equipment as an assessment of its apparent effects.” Watch Scott’s new video above.
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Trailer Watch: Small Town Universe, Director Katie Dellamaggiore’s Astronomy Documentary
In advance of its premiere April 7 at the Cleveland International Film Festival (and, the next day, North America’s solar eclipse), the filmmakers have shared a trailer for Katie Dellamaggiore’s documentary, Small Town Universe. The documentary explores Green Bank, West Virginia, home to the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope. While the telescope explores the universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, the town’s residents communicate in more traditional ways; in order for the telescope to function, wi-fi and cell phones are banned in the town. “Within the telescope’s orbit, Green Bank residents experience defining moments of life and loss and […]
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Trailer Watch: Furiosa: A Max Max Saga (Trailer #2)
After the mixed reception given to the first trailer for George Miller’s forthcoming, Cannes-anticipated Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, where Anya Taylor-Joy plays a younger version of Charlize Theron’s Furiosa from Max Max: Fury Road, Warner Bros. has dropped a new trailer today that reveals a lot more of the film’s action, chronological sweep (different actors play Furiosa here) and overall look. Scored, to my ears at least, to an orchestral version of David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold the World,” the trailer is found above.
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Watch: Devan Scott’s “The Holdovers, the ‘Film Look’, and Why it Matters” — The Video
One of Filmmaker‘s most popular articles last month was Devan Scott’s “The ‘Film Look’ and How The Holdovers Achieved It.” Of course, any discussion of cinematography and color grading is immensely aided by the actual visuals, and now Scott has made an hour-long essay video based on that article. Check it out above.
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Exclusive Clip: Katie Mathews’s SXSW-Premiering Roleplay
Plenty of — and perhaps too many — nonfiction films today borrow from dramatic storytelling, but that synthesis of documentary and drama is the productive premise of Katie Mathew’s feature documentary debut, Roleplay. A group of Tulane University students collaborated with Mathews to create an immersive play drawn directly from their own experiences of, according to the press release, “sexual violence on college campuses, from the codes of silence, the isolation of people of color, the homophobia, the way Greek Life rules the social order, and the lack of guidance regarding issues like rape, racism, addiction, and trauma.” It’s project […]
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Trailer Watch: Antony Crook’s SXSW-Premiering Mogwai Doc, If the Stars Had a Sound
The Glasgow-based “post rock” band Mogwai is no stranger to cinema, having scored numerous films and TV shows, from the original French version of Les Revenants to Douglas Gordon and Phillippe Pareno’s experimental doc, Zidane, to, most recently, the Apple TV+ show Black Bird. And now, after a 25 year career that has included 10 studio albums, the band is the subject of its own documentary, Antony Crook’s If the Stars Had a Sound,” which premieres March 12 at SXSW. Band member Stuart Braithwaite says in a press release: “We’re incredibly excited for people to see Antony’s film If the […]
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Watch: Apple-Produced Takashi Miike Film Shot on iPhone 15 Pro
In what is a refreshing — at least for us at Filmmaker — changeup from the usual sorts of films that get the iPhone demo treatment, Apple has released a new 19-minute short, Midnight, directed by Takashi Miike. It’s no Audition or Ichi the Killer, naturally, but his adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga is a lot of fun. There’s also an accompanying short behind-the-scenes video, below, that demonstrates the use of iPhone modes like Action and Cinematic — the former’s handheld stabilization and the latter’s rack focus — as well as, most impressively, the use of the phone’s LIDAR scanner […]
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Trailer Watch: Alison Tavel’s SXSW Premiere, Resynator
Initially endeavoring to make a short about the synthesizer her late father, who died when she was ten weeks old, invented, documentary director Alison Tavel found herself learning much more about her dad and his legacy, leading to a feature film that’s both a music picture as well as one of family reckoning. Resynator, named after the synthesizer, premieres March 10 at SXSW, features music names such as Peter Gabriel and Jon Anderson, and is Tavel’s first picture. She’s made previously shorts and music videos for the Tom Petty Estate, where she’s the sole archivist. Read below her director’s statement […]
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(Redband) Trailer Watch: The Zellner Brothers’s Sasquatch Sunset
“You know animals are hairy?,” sang the Talking Heads David Byrne. “They say animals don’t worry…” Well, in David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset, forthcoming from Bleecker Street Pictures, the latter statement is definitely not correct as the filmmakers — Filmmaker 25 New Faces from back in 2008 — wring wonder and joy but also anxiety and fear of encroaching humankind in their story of a family of Sasquatch living undetected in the wilds of Colorado. Bleecker Street’s redband trailer leans hard into Sasquatch sex while cleverly underlining that there’s name talent (Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough) in this movie. […]
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Trailer Watch: Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast
The U.S. trailer for Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast has arrived. The latest film from Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) marks his third collaboration with Léa Seydoux, who gives not one but three great performances across three different timelines. The Beast enters release on April 5, and our next issue will feature an interview with Bonello conducted by Michael Almereyda.
