This succinct, no nonsense tutorial video from RocketJump Film School breaks down the various components of a call sheet, showing how to read each section and understand various acronyms. Best tip for those making a call sheet: make sure to include the address of the hospital nearest to your set, and make sure it has an ER. You never know.
Given the news that Columbia House — the mail-order CD club that famously promised eight CDs for a penny — is filing for bankruptcy, there’s no better time to (re)watch Chris Wilcha’s The Target Shoots First, his 2000 documentary about his time working there in the ’90s. What once played as a blackly funny portrait of trying to stay sane while working in a cynical corporate culture is now oddly nostalgic, given the relatively relaxed working environment. For more context, it’s well worth reading this AV Club piece by Annie Zaleski, in which she interviews four former Columbia House employees (including Wilcha) about […]
Paul Thomas Anderson’s music video for Joanna Newsom’s new single is very much in the loose handheld mode of Inherent Vice. Newsom wanders Manhattan while reeling off some typically complicated lyrics and the camera follows in her wake. Her new album, Divers, is out on October 23.
Taking its earliest footage from 1968’s Bullitt, generally considered the origin point for the modern car chase, and its most recent footage from this summer’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Michael Mirasol’s very fine supercut breaks down chase sequences into their common constituent parts. Starting with many POV shots of the road racing before a speeding car, “The Chase” builds to a steady compare-and-contrast stream of head-on collisions, heavily-braked 360s and impossible vehicular leaps.
Animator “dono” is responsible for this impressive super-montage of Hayao Miyazaki’s work. Recreating Miyazaki’s settings with the animation software Blender, dono then places the 2D characters into this 3D amplification of their original worlds. It’s technically adroit and, if you’re a fan, quite lovely.
A shocking exposé on the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts, David Felix Sutcliffe and Lyric R. Cabral’s (T)ERROR is in danger of not seeing an official release due exorbitant legal and insurance fees. In profiling a longtime informant, Saeed “Shariff” Torres, Sutcliffe and Cabral demonstrate enough evidence to suggest that the FBI might invent terrorists just as much as it prevents them. The film is an essential conversation piece, and one that deserve to reach the widest audience as possible, so please consider donating to the Kickstarter to fund the theatrical release.
Jake Mahaffy appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2005 following his Tarkovsky-esque black-and-white (shot on a hand cranked camera, no less) tale of American collapse, War. His very different 2008 feature Wellness won the Grand Prize at SXSW and now, seven years later, Mahaffy is back with the Venice-premiering Free in Deed. Produced by Mike Ryan, it’s easily the film I’m anticipating most on the Fall festival circuit. From the film’s Facebook page: Set in the distinctive world of storefront churches and based on actual events, Free in Deed depicts one man’s attempts to perform a miracle. When […]
From the copyright notice to the ominous voiceover, the latest trailer for Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth plunges us into the world of ’60s/’70s arthouse psychological horror — mid-period Bergman, Polanski and Allen’s Interiors, for example. Here, Elizabeth Moss (Mad Men, Top of the Lake) retreats to the lakeside home of her best friend, played by Katherine Waterston (Inherent Vice), to recuperate after twin emotional jolts. There’s history, however — the lingering after effects of another weekend at this house spent one year earlier. Wrote Scott Foundas in Variety: The flashbacks in Queen of Earthh are like little Proustian […]
Fall festival season means trailers are dropping at an ever quickening pace, and here’s one that was recently announced as a TIFF premiere, Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank follow-up, Room. Based on the novel by Emma Donoghue, Room stars Brie Larson as a woman who raises her child in captivity after having been kidnapped at a young age. A24 will release the film on October 16.
The first trailer for Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s The Revenant, an Alaskan-wilderness-survival saga, is here. The major point of interest for the technically inclined is that the film was the first to make use of the ARRI Alexa 65, which boasts a 65mm sensor. The footage looks accordingly/appropriately shiny; opens Christmas Day.