In this video essay, Adam Tinius (aka “Entertain the Elk”) makes the case for Stanley Kubrick’s mastery of practical lighting.
Michel Gondry has made a charming and inventive — in his typically lo-fi way — short film for Apple that shows off the video capabilities of the iPhone 7. With elements of The Red Balloon, Toy Story and, I’m sure, memories Gondry has revisited from his own childhood family vacations in France, the short follows a family on their annual summer sojourn, a trip that winds up leaving the youngest child’s prized red tricycle along the side of the road. Impressively, the short doesn’t try to fake some kind of crazy bokeh, or indulge in trick macro shots. No, like […]
The title is literal: this video essay looks at some of David Lynch’s key visual inspirations, including Rene Margritte, Edward Hopper, Arnold Böcklin and Francis Bacon.
The iPad is my favorite device of all time, yet, after a brief stab at writing and editing for this site on it when the first iPad came out, I pretty much gave up on it as a productivity device. I’m waiting for iOS 11 to see if that changes — I suspect for me it won’t, actually; I’m too committed to my multi-window writing workflow. But one app I may try to play around with is the new Luma Fusion, which looks like an impressive leap over iMovie and other iPad video editors. Here’s 9 to 5 Mac’s Jeff […]
One of my favorite Filmmaker video interviews is one from 2012 where, spontaneously, This American Life creator Ira Glass goes on a rant about the job of film producer. As you can see and hear above, his jeremiad is both passionate and quite specific — Glass is not going off about a job he hasn’t done. No, anyone whose name sits — or deserves to sit — above-the-line on a call sheet will recognize the laundry list of tediums and indignities that comprise a substantial chunk of the glamorous job of the producer. But, as noted above, Glass gave this […]
Several 25 New Faces — directors Andrea Sisson and Pete Ohs as well as star Julia Garner — grace the Los Angeles Film Festival premiere, Everything Beautiful is Far Away, which screens tonight at 9:10 PM. Here’s the festival capsule: Traveling across a barren landscape, Lernert digs through piles of rubbish in an attempt to build a body for his companion, Susan, the unresponsive robot head who hangs from the back of his pack. The pair come across Rola, a spirited young woman who lacks survival skills but makes up for the deficiency with sheer determination. This unlikely trio navigates […]
Andreas Halskov — whose useful overview of David Lynch’s visual references we posted a while ago — has also gone deep on the director’s much-discussed use of noise and interference, examining it as a stylistic device, recurring motif and general theme.
As part of a series of lens tests, Matt Porwoll delves into the Fujinon MK 18-55mm Zoom. As he writes as part of a thorough technical breakdown: The Fuji MK 18-55 is an extremely lightweight lens, but solidly built. Weighing in at just over 2 lbs, it balances well with lighter-weight cameras like the Sony FS7 and FS5. It will also be a nice addition to the Sony a7SII, giving cinema style operation to a camera that otherwise would have difficulty supporting such a lens style.
With his new Twin Peaks: The Return scrambling our minds every Sunday, we at Filmmaker are experiencing a collective case of the feels for David Lynch these days. Giving us our fix until Episode Six streams this weekend is this video of Lynch’s television commercials compiled by Jeff Keeling. As with many directors, Lynch directed many of his best short TV spots for overseas brands, so look for work here like a Twin Peaks tie-in spot for Japan’s Georgia coffee that I, at least, have never seen before. A complete list of commercials included is below. (I venture to say […]
Here’s a great video from Criterion in which documentary filmmaker Steve James (The Keeper, Stevie, Hoop Dreams) discusses how he was influenced by Robert Altman’s Nashville. He begins by noting that your most influential films are the ones you see when you’re young and falling in love with cinema, and he then goes on to say that he wasn’t interested in documentary filmmaking when he encountered Altman’s work. But there were aspects of Nashville that impressed him — including, yes, the zooms! — as well as notions of structure that wound up rippling into films like The Interruptors.