Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Sony PXW-FS7 Test Footage at 180 FPS
Footage from Sony’s PXW-FS7 new camera is starting to make its way online. Michael Murie ran down its tech specs in September, and now we have this intriguing test from DP Ed David, who put together this short video of footage captured at 180 fps. As he told No Film School, David enjoyed the “incredibly ergonomic, small, and intuitive” camera but had some trouble figuring out waveforms and with the non-intuitive zebra feature.
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Up in the Air: Announcing the New York City Drone Film Festival
Within an overly crowded film festival landscape, it takes something special for a new event to stand out. Such is the case with New York’s newest festival, scheduled for February, 2015: the New York City Drone Film Festival. While the FAA’s drone filming rules are still being developed, festival founder and cinematographer Randy Scott Slavin intends to use the event to celebrate robotic aerial filmmaking and to change the public’s perception of drones. He told the New York Post’s Chris Perez, ““These flying robots are amazing and exciting technologies, but because the word drone is so controversial, its constantly being […]
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Short Film: A Tale of Momentum and Inertia
Sometimes enemies can be misperceived as friends… and vice versa. From Portland animation studio HouseSpecial is this short, A Tale of Momentum and Inertia, directed by Kameron Gates showing why the “shoot first, ask questions later” approach isn’t always the best. Gates has previously contributed effects works to such films as Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, King Kong and Hellboy. The short is currently on the festival circuit, but you can watch it above.
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“It’s No Longer Enough for Artists to Simply Be Artists”: Artel Great on His Audience-Building App, Project Catalyst
There’s a lot of talk in the independent film community about building new audiences through internet technologies but far fewer actual attempts at doing so. One person who has thought deeply about today’s challenges and developed a tool in response is filmmaker Artel Great, whose Project Catalyst attempts to combat “the Hollywood-ification of our thinking” by connecting multicultural audiences to the music and films most relevant to their lives and communities. It is, he writes, “the first application software to distinctively showcase narrative short films, documentaries, and music videos all made by talented indie artists from Black, Latino/a, and Asian […]
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Trailer Watch: 50 Shades of Grey, Now with More Plot and Money
In the second trailer for 50 Shades of Grey, we get a much clearer overview of the plot trajectory: successful corporate boy meets shy journalist girl for interview, later runs into her and asks her “Are you free?” Meaning, presumably, both schedule-wise and also with reference to her soul/libido. Then out come the S&M tools. The big change from the first trailer is that the emphasis is equally split between the softcore elements and what Tom Wolfe once deemed the “plutographic,” i.e. the graphic depiction of the acts and vices of the rich. Look for lots of private jet plane rides and […]
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Trailer Watch: Two Days, One Night
Here’s the first U.S. trailer for the Dardenne’s Two Days, One Night, which arrives stateside on December 24 from Sundance Selects. An allegory for human empathy and compassion, the film follows a fragile Marion Cotillard as she goes door to door, begging her co-workers to give up their bonuses so she can keep her job. At times too glossy for its subject matter — which has little to do with its star — the film proves an interesting exercise in repetition, with a closing act that is as heart-wrenching as it is cleverly calculated.
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Watch: David Lynch in Conversation at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
David Lynch is notoriously averse to discussing the meaning of his movies, so this recent “in conversation” exercise from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts gets above-average results by getting him to focus on the process of making his artwork instead. There are anecdotes about creating art using mice, discussions of his love of stone lithography, and this unbeatable evaluation of what’s changed about Philadelphia since Lynch’s mid-’60s art school time there: “There was a lot of fear and insanity and violence, and then we’d hear about corruption and police brutality, and there was a lot of sickness in the people, and […]
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Watch: Recreating Interstellar’s Black Hole
“How ever sophisticated your CGI is,” says Christopher Nolan, ” if it’s been created from no physical elements and you haven’t shot anything with the camera, it’s going to stand out.” A notable proponent of practical effects, Nolan shot his latest extravaganza Interstellar without a single green screen. In this new episode of Shanks FX, Joey Shanks recreates the film’s illusion of the black hole with a little smoke and lighting. Watch above.
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Listen: Donnie Darko DP Steven Poster on his Career
Best known as Richard Kelly’s go-to cinematographer for Donnie Darko, Southland Tales and The Box, cinematographer Steven Poster will conduct a masterclass on Saturday at the Made in NY Media Center, run by Filmmaker‘s parent organization IFP. The day begins with a Donnie Darko screening and includes lunch. Curious to know more about Poster’s career beforehand? This half-hour podcast is pretty comprehensive, covering the childhood moment Poster decided he wanted to spend his life working with photography, his learning experiences at his career’s start as part of the second unit on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and, of course, […]
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Trailer Watch: Ava DuVernay’s Selma
You seldom see a female filmmaker making the quantum leap from a $200,000 Sundance title to a Brad Pitt-backed Christmastide blockbuster, so hats off to Ava DuVernay on the upcoming Selma. A retelling of the 1965 voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the film stars David Oyelowo (also of DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere) as Martin Luther King, Jr., with a substantial ensemble in Tom Wilkinson, Oprah Winfrey, Keith Stanfield, Tim Roth and Lorraine Toussaint, among others. Shot by the brilliant Bradford Young, Selma is set for a December 25 limited release and a national rollout on January 9, 2015.
