Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Facebook Unveils an Open-Source 360-Degree Video Camera
Facebook introduced Surround 360, a high-end video camera, today at F8, the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In reality, Facebook unveiled a reference design for the VR video camera, which it plans to release as an open-source project on GitHub this summer. In other words, Facebook will not be producing the camera. Instead, Facebook is open-sourcing the camera in order to encourage developers to take the design and create their own version of the camera. “In designing this camera, we wanted to create a professional-grade end-to-end system that would capture, edit, and render high-quality 3D-360 video. In doing so, we hoped to meaningfully […]
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Personal Filmmaking: There is “No Alternative”
It isn’t hyperbole to say that personal filmmaking in Hollywood is on the verge of extinction. It’s nearly impossible to hook Hollywood into funding a project that isn’t a thriller, or a horror movie or a comic book movie. By and large, the filmmaking community and its viewers have been left with tentpoles (studio movies made for 150 million and up) and microbudgets (movies made for under a million, often far less than a million). Harvey Weinstein recently said in The Hollywood Reporter, “The studios don’t care about making smart adult films for the public, but rather only care to make them […]
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A New Sound, a New Feeling: Writer/Director Joachim Trier on Louder than Bombs
In Joachim Trier’s Louder than Bombs, Isabelle Huppert plays Isabelle Reed, a celebrated war photographer who, three years before the movie begins, has died, not while on assignment but in a car crash just miles from her home in upstate New York. Her absence in the family is very much a presence in the film. She’s seen repeatedly in flashback, and her death — a suicide, the fact of which has kept from her youngest son, Conrad, a withdrawn player of online roleplaying games essayed with compelling sullenness by Devin Druid — is the fulcrum by which the other actors […]
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Doing Things Strangely: No Place for the Living on Kickstarter
As I write this, I’m trying to raise funds for my latest film, No Place for the Living, a feature film about a German immigrant who, in 1930s Key West, spent seven years sleeping with a corpse. Not exactly the easiest film to find financing for. So why put myself though this torment? My last film had equal hurdles. It chronicled another historical oddball (albeit a slightly less disturbing one) named Walter Potter. Potter pioneered the field of anthropomorphic taxidermy (putting dead animals in human scenarios). The film wound up going far beyond my expectations, premiering at the 2015 Tribeca […]
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5 Questions for Raising Bertie Director Margaret Byrne
Raising Bertie follows three young men over the course of five years as they grow into adulthood in Bertie County, a rural African-American-led community in North Carolina. Director Margaret Byrne had originally set out to make a short film about The Hive, an alternative school for at-risk students. But when the school was shut down due to lack of funding, she saw the potential for a broader project about the underfunded rural educational system and how it affects African American boys, in particular. Shot in intimate verité style, the film follows Reginald “Junior” Askew, David “Bud” Perry, and Davonte “Dada” Harrell […]
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Gary Hustwit Launches New Virtual Reality Content Studio with Top Filmmakers
There’s so much buzz about Virtual Reality technology, but to really catch on with a broad audience VR needs compelling original content to drive the new medium. “It’s kind of a chicken and egg thing,” filmmaker Gary Hustwit (Helvetica) told Filmmaker. “You’ve got to have enough players out there and headsets out there for people to be able to watch VR and for people to understand what it is. At the same time, you’ve got to have content that gets them to try it and also hooks them.” With the launch of Scenic, a new Virtual Reality content studio focusing on […]
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Steve McQueen’s Latest Film? A (NSFW) Burberry Ad Shot in 70mm
Director Steve McQueen hasn’t made another feature since winning an Academy Award for Best Picture for Twelve Years a Slave in 2014. He had been plugging away on the new HBO series Codes of Conduct, which the pay cable network described as Six Degrees of Separation meets Shame. But despite a cast including Paul Dano, Helena Bonham Carter and Rebecca Hall, HBO scrapped the project after initially giving it a six-episode order. But McQueen has kept busy with short film projects including All Day, a 9-minute video installation featuring Kanye West. Of course, he’s no stranger to the short film format, having made some 20 short films since he was an […]
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Why Louis CK’s Horace and Pete is the Most Important TV Show of the Decade (and Maybe the Best)
The penultimate episode of Louis CK’s independent television series Horace and Pete, self-released via the comedian’s website over the past ten weeks, ends with a quote from the late Garry Shandling: “The world is too noisy and distracted to probably ultimately survive. Everyone needs to shut the fuck up. The answers are in the silence. Monks set themselves on fire to protest and to make this point. Just consider it.” Watching the episode upon its release, this quote gave me chills. And not just because it was a haunting encapsulation of CK’s narrative ambitions with Horace and Pete — a […]
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Watch: Inside the Rooms of No Home Movie, Take 2
Late last week, we published a video essay from Kevin B. Lee, chief video essayist at Fandor, about the spaces in Chantal Akerman’s final documentary, No Home Movie. Lee estimated that about 70% of the film took place within the walls of the filmmaker’s dying mother Natalia’s apartment. To re-orient himself in Natalia’s apartment, Lee reorganized the footage by room. Initially, he edited the video to music, using Schubert’s Impromptu D. 899 Op. 90 No. 3, not coincidentally the same music used in Michael Haneke’s Amour, which also follows an elderly woman’s demise. But after receiving some complaints, including from the distributors of the film, Lee reassessed […]
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Nonfiction Filmmakers Invited to Oregon Doc Camp
Now in its third year, Oregon Doc Camp, presented by Women in Film Portland, invites experienced documentary filmmakers to gather in an intimate, informal setting and work on career development. The event will run from May 12-15, 2016 at Silver Falls Lodge and Conference center in Sublimity, Oregon. This year’s programming will be centered around the themes of narrative storytelling and independent distribution, with a three-day program consisting of workshops, lectures, case studies, screenings and a master class, as well as the opportunity to screen works-in-progress. Director Jennifer Grausman, who most recently directed and produced the feature documentary Art & Craft and previously directed and produced […]
