Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Portland’s Historic Hollywood Theatre Caters to Cinephiles with 70mm
Within the course of one week in late December 2015, the historic Hollywood Theatre in Portland, Oregon made movie news twice. First, the non-profit theatre announced it would open The Hollywood Theatre @PDX, a new airport theatre which will highlight short films telling stories specific to Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Then, none other than Quentin Tarantino showed up after a screening of The Hateful Eight (in 70mm, of course!) and took part in an impromptu Q&A. Both instances were indicative of The Hollywood Theatre’s efforts to court cinephiles with innovative programming, community outreach, and 70mm projection. As film audiences increasingly opt to stay home and […]
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Tribeca Critic’s Notebook #1: National Bird, Equals, The Fixer and The Family Fang
What to make of the ever-sprawling Tribeca Film Festival, whose early publicity was dominated this year by a film that it didn’t screen? A festival with a household name and an ad budget to make most political campaigns jealous, the Tribeca Film Festival now enters its fifteenth year and began on a bizarre sour note with Vaxxed, an anti-vaccination documentary from a discredited physician. When the program guide came out, both the documentary and scientific communities raised hell, leading Tribeca founder Robert De Niro to accept responsibility for the programming and then, a day later, withdraw the film’s invitation. Thankfully, […]
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Tribeca 2016: Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill on their VR Piece The Ark
One of the most moving exhibits in New York last year was a lone Galapagos tortoise in a corner of the American Museum of Natural History. Lonesome George was the last Pinta Island tortoise in the world, and after he died in 2012 the only way to encounter this entire species was to view his mounted form through glass in a museum. With a mass extinction at least as great as the one that killed the dinosaurs happening all around us, many other species will soon be visible only in the same way. But now Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma, a […]
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Sundance’s Missy Laney Joins BitTorrent to Collaborate with Filmmakers
Last week, BitTorrent announced that it had hired Missy Laney as the company’s new Director of Creative Initiatives. Laney, who has spent years at the Sundance Institute as the Manager of their Artist Services Program, will focus on collaborating with filmmakers to build sustainable distribution strategies and guide platform development for creators. While at Sundance, Laney led their creative funding initiative with Kickstarter and oversaw digital and direct-to-fan distribution efforts. During that time, Laney guided over 250 filmmakers through successful crowdfunding campaigns, including Sean and Andrea Fine’s Oscar Award-winning Innocente, Adam Nimoy’s documentary For the Love Of Spock, and David Alvarado and Jason […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Kicks Director Justin Tipping
The Tribeca Film Festival kicked off on April 14 with the opening night premiere of Justin Tipping’s Kicks, an ambitious coming-of-age film set in an inner city enclave in Northern California. Though it’s Tipping’s feature debut, he’s far from a novice filmmaker, having already won a Student Academy Award and the Lexus Short Film competition. The semi-autobiographical Kicks focuses on 15-year-old Brandon (newcomer Jahking Guillory in a breakout performance), who buys himself a sweet new pair of “kicks.” But when the local hood snatches them, Brandon goes on a mission to retrieve his new stolen sneakers with his best buddies’ help. Along the […]
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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 […]
