Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Award-Winning Life, Animated, More Than a “Film About Autism”
Directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams, Life, Animated, won the directing award in the U.S. documentary competition at Sundance earlier this year before making the festival circuit. Based on the bestselling book by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, the documentary tells the inspirational story of Owen Suskind, a young man with autism who connects to the world through animated Disney films. The film, which just got its first trailer (above), follows Owen as he takes his first steps towards independence. Interweaving classic Disney sequences with scenes from Owen’s life, the film’s original animation provides access to Owen’s amazing imagination. “Owen’s world and […]
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Watch: Rainbow Flag of Film: A Tribute to LGBTQ Cinema
In the latest Fandor Keyframe video essay, Candice Drouet considers how the values of the rainbow flag relate to the images found in LGBTQ cinema. Featured films include Carol, Milk and Blue Is the Warmest Color, among many others.
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Watch: The Lion City, 2, a Mind-Blowing, Multi-Year Time-Lapse Video
Australian filmmaker Keith Loutit, a pioneer in tilt-shift photography, has just raised the bar in time-lapse photography with his latest video, The Lion City, 2. A portrait of a changing Singapore, the video features time-lapse shooting that took place in multiple locations over years. Writes Loutit: When we pass by landscapes they appear fixed in time, but they change around us constantly. The idea behind this film is to reveal this change by returning to the same camera positions over the years. In the comments, Loutit reveals that he shot the video over three years, and while his ability to […]
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Watch: A Message from Martin Scorsese
Leandro Copperfield created “Kubrick vs Scorsese” in 2010, paying tribute to filmmakers Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese in the form of a video montage. Scorsese has now responded to the video with a message to Copperfield, six years after the initial release of the homage. (If you are unable to see this video on your mobile device, click here.)
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Watch: Understanding the Cinematography of Robert Elswit
Sareesh Sudhakaran examines the cinematography of Paul Thomas Anderson’s frequent DP Robert Elswit in the latest wolfcrow video. Sudhakaran discusses lighting and camera techniques, including camera movement and the use of specific lenses in Elswit’s work.
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Watch: Three Minutes of the Most Incredible Cinematic Drone Footage
I juried the New York City Drone Film Festival last year, so I’m even more impressed with this amazing compilation reel of this year’s winners. Drone cinematography has come a long way in just a year, with some knock-out moments on this reel that move drone filming away from landscape shots and sports coverage. Don’t get me wrong — sports are big here, and some of these aerial shots of soaring snowboarders are amazing. But check out the narrative winner, The Smallest Empire, from Corridor Digital, which adds a tilt-shift technique to depict the blossoming of an entire civilization. (The […]
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Watch: Quentin Tarantino Had the Last Laugh
Laughter doesn’t immediately come to mind when you think of Quentin Tarantino’s body of work. But as video essayist Candice Drouet reveals in her latest video essay Tarantino Had The Last Laugh (above), Tarantino’s characters laugh more than you may recall….and the effect is quite menacing. The four-minute supercut features every instance a Quentin Tarantino character or the director himself laughs in one his films. The result is less hilarious than insidious as anyone familiar with the works referenced will understand the context of these laughs. More often than not, these characters are laughing at another character’s suffering or before or after they have inflicted suffering.
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Watch: Coen Brothers Documentary on VICE Guide to Film
George Clooney, Jeff Bridges, John Turturro, and composer Carter Burwell are among the talking heads who analyze the filmmaking brothers’ oeuvre in VICE Guide to Film‘s recent episode on the Coen Brothers (above). The segment, which amounts to an extended video essay, breaks down scenes from some of their most memorable films and delves into their collaboration process. Discussing the directing duo, Turturro says, “It’s like a two-headed monster.” Previous episodes of the show have focused on the work of Kelly Reichardt, Gus Van Sant, John Carpenter, Todd Haynes, and other directors.
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Watch: “Indy Vinyl: Close Ups, Needle Drops, Aerial Shots – Records in US Independent Cinema 1987 – 2015”
This video from Ian Garwood compiles various vinyl depictions in US independent cinema from 1987 until 2015. A longer 14-minute version provides a more analytical approach of the subject.
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Watch: Bill Plympton’s Hitler’s Folly for Free
Academy Award-nominated animator Bill Plympton has released his latest feature film, Hitler’s Folly, for free on the Internet. Running 67 minutes, the controversial mockumentary, which mixes live-action with bits of animation, re-imagines Adolf Hitler as a successful animator and artist. “This is a very very provocative and kind of wacky look at the movie industry and also Hitler’s career if he became a cartoonist,” explains Plympton in the introduction to the film (which you can watch above). Plympton wrote, directed, designed and animated the film, which stars Nate Steinwachs (Goddess of Time) and Dana Ashbrook (Twin Peaks). Reviewers have not been kind to the film, with […]
