Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“It’s Great. What Are You Going to Do with It?”: Web Series Pilot Zero Point at IFP’s Screen Forward Labs
[The following is a guest post from IFP Screen Forward Labs participant Christian Lybrook.] “It’s great. What are you going to do with it?” A friend — a filmmaker and media strategist — asked this question after watching the pilot to our pre-apocalyptic thriller Zero Point. But let’s back up a sec… Two years ago, Gregory Bayne and I set out to make a web series — 8-12 minute episodes, maybe we’d do six episodes in a season. We’d put it out on the web and hopefully people would watch. That was our original plan. But something happened along the […]
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Stories about Others: Inside (and Outside) Crimson Peak
The man in front of me at the ticket booth didn’t understand the new system at the theater. It was news to him that he had to pick a seat. He had never heard of such a thing, and an alcoholic beverage being an option just about blew his gasket. I was going to be missing some trailers, there was no doubt about that. This guy wanted a full verbal tour of all the recent developments at his local Cineplex. And he wasn’t going anywhere till he was satisfied and clear. I started saying underneath my breath, louder and louder […]
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Eco-Sexuality, Mountaintop Removal and Goodbye, Gauley Mountain
I remember the year that Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle showed up at Mountain Justice Summer, an annual training camp for anti-mountaintop removal activists. They were at camp, in part, to lead an eco-sexuality workshop. I was twenty-one, a resident of a direct action community in southern West Virginia, and surly as hell. Eco-sexuality, or what I presumed it was, annoyed me. Sure, I was queer, but I was queer as in “fuck you,” not queer as in “let’s rub ourselves in dirt and marry things.” I did not attend their workshop, or any of their events in Appalachia. But […]
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Lena Olin-Starring A Critically Endangered Species Wraps Production
Oscar and Golden Globe-nominee Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Enemies, A Love Story) has wrapped production of A Critically Endangered Species, an independent drama directed by award-winning poet T. Zachary Cotler and novelist/producer Magdalena Zyzak. The film was produced by Mike Ryan of Greyshack Films and Morgan Jon Fox, a director and producer who placed in the 2009 edition of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces. Olin stars as a famous novelist who, after deciding to commit suicide, calls on young male writers to submit their work to her so that she can name one her literary executor. Starring alongside […]
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The Repertory Film Tradition Continues at the Brattle Theatre
Boston is home to many historic landmarks and buildings, but for film buffs and film students, the best-known may be the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square, Cambridge. The Brattle has been running as a repertory theater (specializing in older “classic films”) since 1953, and has been credited with keeping movies like Casablanca in the public consciousness through the ’50s and ’60s. In addition to classic films, the Brattle shows foreign and independent film, and just celebrated 15 years running as a non-profit. The Brattle Theatre is housed inside Brattle Hall, which was built by the Cambridge Social Union and opened […]
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Love and Death: James White
Bereavement brackets James White. At the beginning of producer Josh Mond’s impressive directorial debut, we encounter the nearly catatonic eponymous character to the accompaniment of a drug-enhanced, inside-the-mind sound mix: Bursts of blasting synthesized music vie for dominance with smoother, softer fragments from Ray Charles and Billie Holiday. Sweaty, stinky, loaded, and dressed down in his signature raggedy sweatshirt and hoodie after a full night of clubbing, drinking, and pill popping, twentysomething James (Christopher Abbott, no longer the pretty, slender androgyne hooked on Allison Williams in Girls, but hefty and hirsute, hopefully for role construction) barrels past dressed-up adults in the hallway […]
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“To Make an Independent Movie is Delusional in a Way”: Alaska is a Drag‘s Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller at US in Progress
US in Progress is a biannual event held in June during the Champs-Elysées Film Festival in Paris and in October during the American Film Festival in Wroclaw. It’s a five-year-old industry event that aims to strengthen transatlantic film collaborations and partnerships between European industry and emerging American filmmakers. The fifth US in Progress recently held in Wroclaw featured six films in various editing and post-production stages. The participants included: Mike Ott and Nathan Silver, Actor Martinez Shaz Bennett and Melanie Miller, Alaska is a Drag Zachary Shedd and Daniel Patrick Carbone, Americana Benjamin Kruger, It Had to Be You Joel […]
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The Plane and the Film: On Fears of Flying and Filmmaking
I believe there is a correlation between flying and filmmaking. Walter Murch makes reference to it in the documentary The Cutting Edge, but his coloration is different. He says that flight and cinema were invented in the same year, and then later he states that editing gave flight to cinema. While I agree with these correlations I think there is more, and it didn’t totally hit me until recently, as I shared with my students a documentary on Sally Mann and then a few days later boarded a plane to Copenhagen to attend CHP:DOX. In the documentary, Mann discusses a […]
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“I Feel Purple Today”: Director Andrea Sisson on She Does Podcast
Andrea Sisson is a multidisciplinary visual artist who creates films, photos and performance art pieces for the design, art and fashion industries. Her work has been shown online and offline, in places like the São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound and on NOWNESS, where she featured Sia’s choreographer Ryan Heffington. She’s the co-director of Everything Beautiful is Far Away, a pop art sci-fi feature currently in post-production, and a feature documentary I Send You This Place, which Andrea made as a 2010 Fulbright Design Fellow. In 2013, Andrea and her husband Pete Ohs were selected as a duo for […]
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It’s an Ice Age-Flavored Dilution of Your Legacy, Charlie Brown: The Peanuts Movie
The two opening logos for The Peanuts Movie say pretty much everything about the two differing sensibilities birthing Charles Schulz’s characters into the 3D CGI 21st century. First there’s the 20th Century Fox logo, its familiar fanfare rearranged to accommodate Schroeder’s extra piano flourishes in front of the spotlight beams. Then emerges Skrat the squirrel, mascot of Blue Sky Studios, the animation studio whose signature product is the Ice Age franchise. In line with its competitors at DreamWorks and Universal Animation, Blue Sky specializes in a very particular kind of animated family product, one in which heavy-handed lessons are blended with admirably caricatured […]
