Based in Los Angeles, Danna Kinsky has worked in a wide range of genres and formats, from independent features and documentaries to music videos, concerts, commercials and aerial cinematography. She is affiliated with several groups: The International Female Collective of Cinematographers (ICFC), The American Society of Cinematographers’ Motion Imagine Technology Committee, and Women in Media. Since the COVID-19 lockdown, Kinsky has been shooting drone footage of a deserted Los Angeles. Filmmaker: How have you been coping with the lockdown? Kinsky: Generally, as a filmmaker, I always strive to keep costs low. Finances are a problem, just like they are for […]

Cinematographer Łukasz Żal received an Oscar nomination for his first feature, Ida, and well as for his second collaboration with director Paweł Pawlikowski, Cold War. Last year he worked on his first US production, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and based on the novel by Iain Reid. Żal spoke with Filmmaker by phone from Poland. Filmmaker: How are you? Łukasz Żal: I’m good, I’m staying in my parents’ house by a lake. I don’t feel comfortable because the whole world is suffering. Hopefully it will end well. But this time honestly is not so […]

Natasha Braier has worked on a wide variety of films, from Claudia Llosa’s intense 2009 drama The Milk of Sorrow / La Teta Asustada to Nicolas Winding Refn’s ice-cold 2016 feature The Neon Demon. In 2018 she shot Gloria Bell, Sebastián Lelio’s English-language remake of his earlier movie Gloria. Last year she was director of cinematography on Alma Har’el’s feature debut Honey Boy. Braier’s work is distinguished not only by her vivid imagery but also by her acute psychological insight into characters and narrative. Braier was in preproduction on Don’t Worry Darling, director Olivia Wilde’s follow-up to Booksmart, when the […]

Scheduled for this year’s Cannes Film Festival was a 20th-anniversary screening of Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love. Along with awards for actor Tony Leung Chui-wai and editor, costume designer, and production designer William Chang Suk-ping, the film received the Grand Prize of the Superior Technical Commission for directors of photography Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing. Doyle had hoped to present his latest films, including Love After Love, at the festival before it was postponed on April 14. Directed by Ann Hui, Love After Love is a period romance adapted from a work by writer Eileen Chang. […]

Cinematographer Jasper Spanning’s debut feature, Den skyldige / The Guilty, won several awards during its international run. Directed and co-written by Gustav Möller, the movie followed one character, primarily on a single set, as he deals with a mounting crisis. Spanning spoke about it in a Filmmaker interview with Chris Doyle. He followed it with the May el-Toukhy’s controversial drama Queen of Hearts, about a charged relationship between a wife and her stepson. It was a World Cinema audience award-winner at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, with Director of Programming Kim Yutani called it the most provocative film she had […]

In 2010, Eric Austin made a bold choice. The Texas-based father of three quit his day job as a sales rep to focus solely on his side hustle, flying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—commonly known as drones. He had a three-month job lined up on a Disney-produced show in Hawaii piloting his single-rotor helicopter adorned with a Canon 7D. In those few months, he would earn more than in a year at his old job. But before Austin ever spun his blades, he was grounded. Inundated by aerial permit requests and unable to get definitive guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration […]

Since Sean Baker’s Tangerine hit the scene as the first feature film shot on iPhone, more filmmakers have embraced mobile production as a viable filmmaking tool. Steven Soderbergh shot Unsane and High Flying Bird on an iPhone 8. Claude Lelouch shot over 30% of his latest film, The Best Years of a Life, on an iPhone and loved the experience so much that his next film (not yet released) was shot entirely on an iPhone. Behind all these iPhone-lensed features there has always been one go-to app: FiLMiC Pro. FiLMiC Pro unlocks professional-level control over the phone’s camera, including exposure, […]

Bradford Young and Neil Fanthom first forayed into edgier glass during their collaboration on Solo: A Star Wars Story. Fanthom, Arri’s director of technology at the time, worked with Young, the acclaimed cinematographer of Arrival, Selma and A Most Violent Year, to develop a set of Arri Prime DNA lenses personally tailored to his needs. The DNAs are essentially rehoused vintage glass meant to cover the Alexa 65 sensor, fine-tuned and developed from the ground up for the specific needs of a cinematographer on a particular film. While testing the lenses for Solo, Fanthom called in Young to look at […]

Fred Elmes invited me to a DI Theater at Harbor Picture Company, a post-house bustling around the corner from Film Forum, to talk about his work on Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. There was just an hour left of the allotted time to finish the HDR version of the film when I arrived at the DI suite, but Fred retained his cool as he lulled us to the finish line. In my time there, he liked to vignette the edges more or less, and bring faces up or down a level or two. Usually down.  Our meeting there was […]

Most of the big news that comes out of NAB you’ll hear about, whether you’re there or not. Where NAB gets interesting is when you wonder around the cavernous Las Vegas Convention center, especially towards the back or perimeters, and stumble on some interesting gems of tools that might a unique solution or make production life just a tiny bit easier. Here’s a round-up of some of the smaller finds from NAB (as well as a few bigger ones), all focused around production (post-production is coming up next).  Litra Litra has some amazingly clever battery-powered portable LED lights. The LitraPro […]