Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Happy Hour, The Best 317 Minutes of New Directors/New Films 2016
Bad news first: Happy Hour is pretty much a must-see. Given the option of watching 5+ hours on a weekend afternoon, I suspect most of us would rather not, but there are things it’s worth blowing your day up for. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 317-minute drama is a mysterious movie that begins as one kind of straightforward film before mutating into something much stranger — discussing it thoroughly without spoiling it is tough. I’ll try. Happy Hour initially presents itself as something like a shomin-geki, a term Wikipedia snippily notes is a “pseudo-Japanese word invented by Western film scholars”; Donald Richie defined it as “the drama about common people […]
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Robert De Niro Issues a Statement about the Tribeca Film Festival’s Screening of Vaxxed
The following statement by Tribeca Film Festival co-founder Robert De Niro was provided to Filmmaker by the festival in response to the controversy that has arisen around the screening of Andrew Wakefield’s documentary, Vaxxed, discussed here in Penny Lane’s open letter. From Robert De Niro: Grace and I have a child with autism and we believe it is critical that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed and examined. In the 15 years since the Tribeca Film Festival was founded, I have never asked for a film to be screened or gotten involved in the […]
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Nuri Bilge Ceylan on Collaborative Writing, Discarding a Screenplay and Returning to Russian Literature
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2014 effort Winter Sleep won what is arguably cinema’s most coveted prize, Cannes’ Palme d’Or. Since then, he has been remarkably quiet. So it was with some anticipation that the 57-year-old Turkish director delivered a master class at Qumra, an industry event taking place in Doha at which filmmakers funded by the Doha Film Institute present their projects to the great and good of the film industry. During the master class, Ceylan revealed that he had discarded a script that he had spent a year slaving over after his Cannes victory. That was just one of many tidbits that Ceylan […]
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Primary Colors: On the Sun Valley and Miami Film Festivals in the Hour of Republican Reckoning!
Despite the complete lack of interest from much of the population — and assuredly the tax incentive and rebate-averse Idaho State Legislature, the same one chronicled by Frederick Wisemen a decade ago in one of his lengthy, late-career epics — film culture is thriving in the Gem State. There’s no more evidence of this than the fifth annual Sun Valley Film Festival, directed by Ted Grennan in a relaxed, welcoming style and inventively programmed by Laura Mehlhaff. And while the absence of incentives might hamper both Hollywood and indie productions from coming here — during the Q&A for a local […]
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“Try On Who We Could Be”: Filmmaker and Dancer Lily Baldwin on She Does Podcast
Lily Baldwin is a New York-based filmmaker and dancer who uses movement of the body and unconventional narrative structures to tell human stories. Her short films (Sea Meadow, A Juicebox Afternoon, Sleepover LA, and Swallowed) have played at festivals like SXSW, Berlinale EFM, and the Lincoln Center and been featured on NOWNESS, Short of the Week, Fandor, Filmmaker and Vimeo Staff Picks. Baldwin fell into filmmaking when she was performing as a professional dancer in David Byrne’s two-year world tour, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. Baldwin often writes, choreographs, directs, edits and plays the leading role in her films, […]
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New OSX App Hedge Manages File Transfers
Released this week, Hedge is an OS X app for streamlining the process of importing camera footage and making backups. Hedge will transfer multiple disks at the same time and verify each copy. Paul Matthijs Lombert came up with the idea for Hedge, and is CEO of the developer, The Sync Factory. He answered the following questions via email. Filmmaker: Where did the idea for Hedge come from? Matthijs Lombert: I’ve been an acoustician and mastering engineer for over ten years. I originally came up with the idea for Hedge when working on a Dutch multicam documentary. I designed the audio […]
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Atomos Announces 7” HDR Field Monitor/Recorders that can Display Log Footage
Atomos has announced the Atomos Flame series of field monitor/recorders. These new units feature 7” 1920x 1080 resolution screens with 1,500 nits of brightness — four times the brightness of their existing screen. Atomos claims it’s the world’s brightest and widest dynamic range panel in a field monitor. But what is HDR footage? Atomos CEO and co-founder Jeromy Young explains that if you have a camera that shoots in a Log format, and that will output that over SDI or HDMI, you already have an HDR camera. The problem is that it can be difficult to see what that Log image is […]
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The Graphic Design of High Rise
Here’s a fascinating article by Mark Sinclair in the Creative Review about graphic design in Ben Wheatley’s High Rise. In most films, contemporary and near-period, production designers will seek clearance to use actual logos and products. When those clearances aren’t granted for whatever reason, the art department will mock something up. But unless there’s been real attention paid to these graphics, they can often look cheesy — like the film equivalent of clip art. The fantastic, dystopian qualities of High Rise — a science fiction tale set in an imaginary pre-Thatcherite early ’70s — has enabled Wheatley and his designers […]
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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. […]
