Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: A Scorsese Fast Dolly Zoom-In Supercut
From faces to guns to cocaine to pasta sauce, the fast dolly zoom-in is one of Martin Scorsese’s go-to expressive camera moves. Here, Jorge Luengo Ruiz compiles four-minutes of them in what is both great mid-day cinematic eye candy as well as something of a critique. Ruiz writes: Martin Scorsese’s penchant for a specific kind of zoom, one where he runs the camera right up to the face of his subject, falls somewhere in between the subtle and the obnoxious. Seduced as we are by the style and panache of Scorsese’s oeuvre, we let this habit of his pass us […]
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Watch: Tony Zhou on Marvel’s Lackluster Scores and Temp Track Mediocrity
In this video essay, Tony Zhou gets deep into why the Marvel Connected Universe — the highest-grossing franchise of all time — sports not one memorable musical theme that people can recall. The answer involves a crippling dependency on temp tracks bordering on the potentially lawsuit-worthy, making this a good look at the general state of Hollywood musical scores beyond the MCU.
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Watch: The Look of Fear
Just in time for Halloween, Fandor shares the above video essay which analyzes how film can effectively convey fear. Spanning 1920-2014, the video highlights the best reaction shots featuring “the look of fear.” In the accompanying essay, Daniel Mcilwraith explains, “This video asks you to contemplate several questions within these faces of fear. Which gender is most burdened with the look of fear? Which is more effective: paralyzing shock or a piercing scream? I asked myself why the look of fear was so persistent in horror cinema—perhaps it can tell us more about the human face as the most powerful cinematic spectacle.”
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Watch: Walter Murch’s Six Criteria While Editing
Walter Murch speaks in this video about his top six considerations while editing, from emotion and story down through the more technical considerations of keeping the audience’s eye moving. Oddly, the video (edited by Max Chatfield) begins with a lengthy montage of opening credits logos from some of the films Murch has worked on and ends with an end credits montage of same; the meat of the comments starts around the 50-second mark.
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Watch: Effie T. Brown’s 2016 Film Independent Forum Keynote
“You have a story to tell that’s worthy. You have experience to share and you have a valid point of view,” producer Effie T. Brown told the audience during Sunday’s inspirational keynote at the 2016 Film Independent Forum at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles. Brown, who produced films such as Dear White People and Real Women Have Curves, is executive VP, production and development for TV and film at Lee Daniels Entertainment. Brown spoke of the need for diverse creators and told the audience they can make a difference with their wallets. “The next time there is a movie where there is […]
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Watch: “Whiplash: From Short to Feature”
Jacob T. Swinney’s new video essay intercuts the short and feature versions of Whiplash seamlessly, showing how close the first incarnation was to the final feature project. And it’s also probably the only legal way you can see parts of the original short for now.
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Watch: Kubrick’s Influence on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
Candice Drouet’s latest video compares a number of shots from Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence — which he famously took over at Stanley Kubrick’s request — with shots they’re modeled on from Kubrick’s work. Refreshingly for a supercut video, the Spielberg shots do seem directly modeled after specific Kubrick shots rather than merely relying upon vague similarities.
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Watch: Barbara Kopple’s New Short Documentary for Free
Fortune has partnered with WorkingNation to distribute four episodes of “FutureWork,” a series of digital shorts by award-winning director Barbara Kopple. The first of the films, A Story of Yesterday & Today, which explores the demise of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY, and the impact it has had on local families, is available for free now. You can watch it above. It is also available at Fortune.com, Time.com and WorkingNation.com. WorkingNation is a new not-for-profit national campaign dedicated to raising awareness of the looming unemployment crisis and skills gap in the United States. The series consists of four 10-minute […]
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Short Film Premiere: Iva Gocheva’s Sunday
Receiving its online premiere today here at Filmmaker is Iva Gocheva‘s haunting short film, Sunday, an impressionistic portrait of a young Bulgarian woman living in New York who is grappling with all the various impacts — emotional and existential — of her expired visa. It’s the second short from Gocheva, who has been seen most recently on screen, as a lead, in Claire Carre’s sleeper hit, Embers. Here, the Bulgaria-born, New York-based Gocheva writes about her impetus to make the film: I feel this story started from the idea of home and what it means or feels to each of […]
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Trailer Watch: Sophia Takal’s Award-Winning Always Shine
In Sophia Takal’s Always Shine, two actress friends (Halt and Catch Fire’s Mackenzie Davis and Masters of Sex’s Caitlin FitzGerald), leave Los Angeles for a weekend getaway in hopes of reconnecting. But as the two women’s suppressed jealousies and deep-seated resentments bubble to the surface, they lose grasp not only of their relationship, but also of their own identities. Check out the trailer to the film, which earned Davis the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival award for Best Actress, above. Always Shine will hit theaters on December 2.
