Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Director Peter Medak Plans to Resurrect The Ghost of Peter Sellers
It was 1973 and Peter Medak was a hot director on the rise. Following the success of The Ruling Class, which had earned Peter O’Toole an Academy Award nomination the previous year, United Artists offered him Death Wish. But when the studio insisted on casting Charles Bronson instead of Medak’s pick, Henry Fonda, Medak passed on the project. Back in London, Medak ran into his friend Peter Sellers, who asked him to direct his next film, Ghost in The Noonday Sun, which was set to be filmed on the island of Cyprus. Somehow the idea of filming a 17th-century pirate comedy aboard real ships on […]
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Watch: What Does a Camera Operator Do?
A reader, Dylan Toombs, passes along this video shot earlier this month at the The Banff Centre for Story Summit 2016 and featuring his interviews with three top Hollywood camera operators: Mitch Dubin (Saving Private Ryan, Bridge of Spies), Steve Fracol (Songs of Anarchy, Scandal), and Dave Thompson (American Hustle, Silver Linings Playbook). At the head of the video, Dubin offers perhaps the most concise description of the camera operator’s job that I’ve every heard, and the rest of the short, four-minutes-and-change interview contains other perceptive insights into how these three men view the nature and definition of their job. […]
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Cancer and Video Games: Malika Zouhali Worrall and David Osit on Thank You for Playing
A video gaming experience therapeutic for both players and its grief-stricken creator, That Dragon, Cancer can currently be purchased for use on your Mac/PC and other devices. Created by Colorado-based developer Ryan Green, the independent video game serves as a reflection of a tragedy he and his family recently experienced: the death of Green’s young son, Joel, who passed away after a sustained battle with cancer. Working on the project as Joel was receiving treatment, Ryan and his family incorporated very real moments of personal history into That Dragon, Cancer, even going as far as to sample Joel and his family’s actual voices […]
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Blackmagic Ships URSA Mini 4.6K Camera Without Global Shutter
The Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6K was supposed to ship back in October, but after encountering some engineering issues Blackmagic has finally announced that it is shipping, though minus one important feature: global shutter. In a press release announcing that the URSA Mini 4.6K and the Micro Cinema Camera are shipping, Blackmagic acknowledged that they had encountered problems with the global shutter in both cameras, though the problems were evidently different for each. Blackmagic decided to give up on the feature, in part because they think the key feature of the Mini 4.6K is really the high dynamic range, and when you […]
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Letterboxd, the Social Network for Cinephiles, Finally Has an iPhone App
Film fans, film journalists and all varieties of film lovers post reviews and get into passionate debates about their favorite films on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. But Letterboxd is the only social network exclusively for sharing film reviews and recommendations. With the introduction of an iPhone app, the popular social network from New Zealand has just become an even more essential resource. For newbies, when you log into the free service, you’ll be asked “what are you watching?” and then invited to keep a film diary and create and share lists of your favorite films. Follow people and you can see which films […]
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SXSW: Teenage Cocktail DP Justin Kane on Capturing “Raw Youth”
In his directorial debut Teenage Cocktail, director John Carchietta examines the plight of best friends Annie (Nichole Bloom) and Jules (Fabianne Therese), who just want to get out of their small town and move to California. Nothing is off the table, including webcam modeling, which places the adventurous young women in danger. In advance of the film’s premiere at SXSW, DP Justin Kane talked about his work on the project, going deep into the technical aspects. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being […]
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“Time, and How to Manage It”: Miss Stevens DP Sebastian Winterø
Building on eight years of pedagogical experience, Julia Hart’s debut feature Miss Stevens tracks a troubled teacher (Lily Rabe) and three of her high school students as they attend a statewide acting competition. Victory means possibly forestalling the closing of their cash-strapped school’s fine arts division, but Hart focuses equally on the complicated relationship between the teacher and her charges. Here, DP Sebastian Winterø (who recently shot Sia’s “Umbrella” video) discusses the importance of making sure the director has enough time, being fascinated by California’s light as a European, and how much work should be done for the DI. Filmmaker: How and why […]
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SXSW: Interactive Documentary EXIT: A Mobile Guide to the Post Apocalypse
Audiences are slowly growing accustomed to watching films on their phones — and even watching movies shot on phones — but what about projects made explicitly for phones? Today at Convergence at SXSW, in a session entitled “Cinematic Apocalypse: Storytelling for Smartphones,” audiences will get a sneak preview of the first segment of Jongsma + O’Neill‘s interactive documentary, EXIT: A Mobile Guide to the Post Apocalypse, which was designed to be experienced on a phone. Along with POV and Submarine Channel, Kel O’Neill, one half of the married award-winning Dutch-American filmmaking team of Jongsma + O’Neill, will present the first chapter of the project, A Kid-Friendly Apocalypse. This segment focuses on a Portland, Oregon-based […]
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SXSW: Five Questions for Slash Writer/Director Clay Liford
Love stories set in a specific subculture are a hallmark of independent cinema, and for most directors the challenge is to simply find a fresh subculture that hasn’t had its inner workings drained and exploited by sundry other jndie movies or cable series. And while I won’t swear that no one else has set a romance in the world of erotic fan fiction, I can’t think of one other than Austin-based Clay Lifford’s Slash, which premieres today at SXSW. Below, Lifford talks about the “slash” world, not shooting his own film and Google search terms you should definitely avoid. Filmmaker: […]
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The Hidden Playbook of the Modern Horror Film
Horror films are designed to maximize the experience of fear, terror and subjugation. They are unique among films in their physical impact on the audience: sending brains into a fight-flight response, resulting in muscles tensing, hair standing on end, screaming, and startled jerks and jumps. [1] How is this remarkable achievement accomplished? By following what might be called the “Horror Film Playbook,” which — once understood — becomes almost embarrassingly obvious in many popular modern horror films. More important is the sad fact that key components of the Playbook still rely heavily on misogynistic tropes, as filmmakers target the predominantly […]
