Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva’s No Seasons
MTV is now piling on the short form digital content game with the release of No Seasons under their MTV (other) brand. Created by Borscht Corp.’s Jillian Mayer and Lucas Leyva, the web series sees Miami-bred Julian Yuri Rodriguez (director of the very entertaining Lake Mahar) spinning stories about his life in the city. Fusing recollections with recreations, No Seasons functions as a gonzo porthole into Rodriguez’s life and relationships. Check out the first in eight episodes above.
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Watch: Laura Poitras’s The Art of Dissent
In her latest Op-Doc, Laura Poitras documents a meeting between the artist Ai Wei Wei and technologist Jacob Applebaum as they meet in Beijing to stuff toy pandas with shredded NSA documents that were given to Poitras and Glenn Greenwald by Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, some two years prior. As Poitras notes in her accompanying write-up in the Times, “During the encounter, Ai and Appelbaum continually filmed and photographed each other. Between their cameras and mine, we created a zone of hyper-surveillance.” Watch above.
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Watch: Jack Dunphy’s Serenity
Jack Dunphy, a co-writer on Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven and a frequent collaborator of Caveh Zahedi, is currently raising funds for his first feature, Living With Others, on Kickstarter. To celebrate crossing his initial goal, Dunphy has released his animated, Sundance-selected short Serenity online. Living With Others, which just added Zahedi as an executive producer, will blend live action and animation, and Dunphy had the following to say about his choice: I’m punctuating the movie with animation because it makes it easier for me to communicate difficult thoughts and emotions. Subconscious hang-ups are brought to the surface when I animate, and that helps me realize […]
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Trailer Watch: Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk
Just announced as the Opening Night film of the New York Film Festival, Robert Zemeckis’ The Walk dramatizes Philippe Petit’s 1971 high wire balancing act between the Twin Towers. Staring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, The Walk was described by NYFF festival director Kent Jones as “a classic heist movie in the tradition of The Asphalt Jungle or Bob le flambeur” but with access in lieu of money as the objective. The Walk is set to open (in IMAX) worldwide in October.
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Trailer Watch: Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America
It’s hard to nail a trailer for a satire that stars such a gratingly self-obsessed character as Greta Gerwig’s Brooke in Mistress America, and this first look from Fox Searchlight sells Baumbach’s latest film as far more ‘quirky’ than it actually is. After seeing it at Sundance, I found it to be a rather clever, entertaining critique of the half-hearted do-it-all millennial ethos, so you can expect much more out of the screwball comedy than this teaser suggests. Mistress America will be released in theaters August 14.
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Watch: How to Direct a Dinner Scene (x2), with Nathan Silver
In this video, director Nathan Silver breaks down a dinner scene from his film Uncertain Terms (currently playing in New York and Los Angeles, as well as being available for streaming on Fandor) two ways. In the first part, he shows where each person in the conversation sits around the table, freeze-framing each shot as he cuts to another person; it’s an interesting lesson in seeing how editing for film space doesn’t necessarily bear much relationship to literal space. In the second part, we see the scene uninterrupted as Silver talks through his decisions.
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Watch: Crosshair Framing in Mad Max: Fury Road
Sometimes it’s good to state the seemingly obvious, so Vashi Nedomansky has performed a public service in assembling this brief video showing how centered and symmetrical framing helps guide viewers’ eyes through the many cuts of Mad Max: Fury Road. Audio of John Seale discussing director George Miller’s constant instructions as to where to keep the camera’s crosshairs in each shot clarifies the point being made visually. Read more at Nedomansky’s site; thanks to The Playlist for the heads-up.
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Watch: Tony Zhou In Praise of Chairs
Video essayist Tony Zhou recently griped about the preponderance of Fincher, Scorsese, Anderson, Nolan, etc. dissections, and has since turned his efforts to more unusual facets in film history. His latest video, for instance, explores the role of the chair — or, an extension of the production designer — in storytelling. With a wide range of clips, he interrogates the furniture as a conduit for a person, a situation, and the filmic context.
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Trailer Watch: James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour
Here’s the first trailer for James Ponsoldt’s David Foster Wallace biopic, The End of the Tour, which picked up several nice notices out of Sundance, if not from his family and literary estate. Starring Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as the Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky, the two-hander winds through a leg of the former’s book tour for Infinite Jest. A24 will release the film on July 31.
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Artel Great Launches Project Catalyst at Cinema Research Institute Event
Project Catalyst, an “innovative transmedia initiative that fuses creative community building with cinema, art, music, and technology” and is aimed at multicultural communities was pitched at an NYU Cinema Research Institute event last month, hosted at AOL Build. In the video above, learn how Great intends this smartphone app to connect audiences with filmmakers in original ways and in order to support diverse content.
