This week Canon announced a new mid-level DSLR, the EOS 70D. The latest in their series of black, semi-pro DSLRs, the 70D has a 20.2 megapixel sensor, a DIGIC 5+ image processor and built-in wi-fi support. Expected to ship in September with an estimated retail price of $1,199, you’d be forgiven if you assumed this latest DSLR will have little impact on the video production field. You might be wrong. Canon remade the video industry with the 5D Mark II, but for the last two or three years their DSLR updates have offered virtually no improvement in video capability or […]

What do you do when you get a new camera? Some people run out and shoot test footage, while others just gamble and use the camera on the next shoot they have lined up. When Stefan Müller, an Austrian freelance film director, d.p. and editor acquired a Canon C100, he went out and shot The Scent, a 12-minute short. One of the stars of this short is a black Labrador called Sky. Despite W.C. Fields’ admonition, “Never work with children or animals,” Müller captured a great performance from the dog, yet when asked if anything interesting or unusual happened during […]

The preacher in torn blue jeans and brown suede boots sipped his pint before delivering his sermon as video projections all around flashed clips of films. The church was the open-air foyer at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto, and about 60 of the faithful gathered Saturday night to hear world-renowned d.p. Chris Doyle pontificate about cinematography, aesthetics, and his alter ego, Dù Kefeng. Last week, Dù Kefeng was one of the stars gathered to launch TIFF’s Century of Chinese Cinema summer program. The program will present the likes of action superstar Jackie Chan and heavyweight producer Nansun Shi, […]

Ten features shot by the late cinematographer Harris Savides are included in “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” a series opening at MoMA today. Writes curator Anne Morra: A Savides shot is often characterized by a sensitivity to design and the striking mutability of light, and a special attention to the actor’s place in the composition. The films in this special tribute represent the wide range of his work, and the many directors who chose his camera to reflect their most personal stories. The series opens with Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, which was the film concentrated on by Zach Wigon in Filmmaker‘s remembrance […]

Ben Pender-Cudlip is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker who recently switched from shooting with a DSLR to the Canon C100. His first project shot on the C100 was a short that included a segment on ice climbing. In this second part of our interview with him about switching to the C100, Pender-Cudlip talks about the project and what it was like to use the camera in these conditions. Filmmaker: How did this project come about? Pender-Cudlip: It’s a film for a woman named Lauren Schaad. She approached me about shooting a TV pilot. She was looking to get into reality TV […]

Ben Pender-Cudlip is a Boston based filmmaker who specializes in nonfiction work. His short film Sanjiban, which chronicles the passing of filmmaker Sanjiban Sellew, premiered at Hot Docs last year. Ben recently switched from shooting on a DSLR to the Canon C100. In part one of this interview he talks about his experience switching to the C100, and in part two he talks about the first major project shot with the camera: documenting an ice-climbing expedition. Filmmaker: What were you using prior to getting the C100? Pender-Cudlip: Before the C100 I was using a Canon 60D, which is sort of […]

Cinematographer David Kruta spent a week in Indonesia this February shooting footage for the SurfAid charity to use in their promotional and educational campaigns. He took with him a RED EPIC, and says that the goal was to “bring a cinematic approach” to something that would be more often shot in a documentary style. Filmmaker: How did the project come about? Kruta: The director, Michael Lawrence, is a good friend of mine and I’ve done five or six projects with him. He said he had a shoot in Indonesia, and that he was going there to revisit the places he photographed after […]

One of the most frustrating things about covering film festivals is making discoveries that few movie lovers will ever see. Filmmaking is an industry after all, and as such, artistry will always play second fiddle to marketability. Even so, I was quite surprised to learn that one of my favorite films from the 2011 edition of the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival never found U.S. theatrical distribution. Surely someone could have figured a way to sell a John Turturro-starring, NYC-set story about two lost souls on opposite ends of an adult chat line? (Especially considering Turturro last year appeared […]

Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011.   Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]

Sometimes a piece of everyday equipment can be used for an unusual purpose. While shooting a recent music video for the band Run 8 Rider, director Sean Meehan noticed a stair climber at the location and wondered if it couldn’t be used to create some kind of crane shot. An additional twist is that the shot would consist of three sequences shot at different times in the shooting day and be spliced together. Sean explains how the shot was made: We walked in, I saw this stair climber and my first thought was “That’d be really cool to use for […]