Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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A Real-World Look at Magic Leap’s Augmented Reality
With backing from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcom and movie studio Legendary Entertainment — and an on-staff Chief Futurist in the form of science-fiction author Neal Stephenson — the somewhat mysterious Magic Leap is one of the most fascinating tech start-ups around. For the vision — not virtual reality but augmented reality — the company is going for, check out their startling home-page. For the current reality, check out the video above, which is a real-world demo of some galaxy clusters hovering over an ordinary workspace. For an explanation of why this simple video is more impressive than the rigged concept […]
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The Rasmussen Brothers on Shooting Their Microbudget Horror Film, The Inhabitants, Part Two
In this second part of the interview with brothers Michael and Shawn, they talk about directing their microbudget movie The Inhabitants, the music and sound mixing, and distribution for the movie. Filmmaker: With one of you running the camera and the other doing sound, how did you manage to handle directing at the same time? Michael: I think we’ve learned to multi-task, but it is hard. You are trying to make sure that everything is in focus and you’re pulling focus yourself, you’re doing all that stuff. The good thing is that Shawn is standing there with the boom, he can […]
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Diary of a Teenage Girl, Carol, Spotlight Top 25th Annual IFP Gotham Award Nominations
For its 25th anniversary year, the IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards served up an eclectic mix of nominees from films all over the budgetary and aesthetic map. The best picture nominees include two films budgeted well under $1 million — with one of them shot on an iPhone — and are split between titles consisting of star-driven casts and casts comprised of total newcomers. The Best Feature nominees announced today are Todd Haynes’s Carol; Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl; Josh and Benny Safdie’s Heaven Knows What; Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight; and Sean Baker’s Tangerine. Heller’s film, in addition, […]
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John Sayles’ New Project To Save the Man Set to Shoot Next Summer
Two pillars of the independent film movement are set to collaborate for the first time on To Save the Man, a boarding school movie set in 1890 at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The film tells the story of an Ojibwe boy named Antoine LaMere who is sent to Carlisle, where native boys and girls from all over the country have been brought to learn how to be white — and to reject their own cultures. Antoine uses his wits to survive, falls in love, and when the spiritual movement known as the Ghost Dance spreads on the western reservations, culminating […]
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“What Drives Me is an Interest… in Conveying to Other Women That We’re Not Crazy”: Ann Friedman on Journalism and Podcasting
Ann Friedman is a freelance journalist who lives in Los Angeles. She writes a weekly column about politics, culture and gender for New York Magazine. She also contributes to the Columbia Journalism Review, ELLE, The Guardian, Los Angeles Magazine, The Gentlewoman, among other publications. She’s the co-host of popular podcast Call Your Girlfriend and reviews books for The New Republic and Bookforum. Ann understands the importance of developing your own voice. She understands how our shifting landscape has changed the way people consume media, and how having a personal connection and point of view as an author, allows readers an […]
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The Rasmussen Brothers on Shooting Their Microbudget Horror Film, The Inhabitants, Part One
Two years ago the Rasmussen brothers, Michael and Shawn, spoke to us about the production of their low-budget horror movie Dark Feed. Now the directors and screenwriters (they scripted John Carpenter’s The Ward) are back to talk about their new New England-set horror film The Inhabitants, and the lessons learned making a movie on an even tighter budget. Filmmaker: How did this project start? Michael: The whole thing came about as we were finishing Dark Feed. One of our filmmaker friends said, “You want to keep the momentum going and get started on the next project.” A producer friend who had […]
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Miami Female Filmmakers: Three Points of View on Thursday, October 22
I’ll be moderating a Q&A tomorrow night, Thursday, October 22, in Miami with three of the city’s most compelling and original filmmakers: Jillian Mayer, Monica Pena and Carla Forte. It’s the closing night of this edition of the Miami Beach Cinematheque’s “Speaking in Cinema” series, and we’ll be discussing the individual works by these directors that have played at this series as well as the filmmakers’ general practice and thoughts on the Miami scene. Filmmaker readers will be familiar with Jillian Mayer’s work as she, along with partner Lucas Leyva, were selected for our 25 New Faces list in 2012. […]
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How to Stretch One Apartment into Five Locations: Ricky D’Ambrose on Making Six Cents in the Pocket
Ricky D’Ambrose’s Six Cents in the Pocket premiered at this year’s New York Film Festival. In a guest post, he explains how the film was made, in both technical and artistic terms. Six Cents in the Pocket was made improbably, at a pittance, with a cast of four and a crew of two, for eight days in February and March of 2015. Shot chiefly in one apartment serving at different times as two separate homes, a coffee house, antique store, and a picture-frame shop, the film was a chance to satisfy, in some small way, two needs: first, to make something — […]
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Atomic Living as a Productive Way to Advance in Life: Musician Kiran Gandhi on She Does Podcast
Kiran Gandhi toured the world as M.I.A’s drummer, earned a business degree from Harvard, and trained to run a marathon, all at the same time, but there’s a lot more to her than that. She’s an outspoken, ambitious, radical young woman who pours herself and her skills into gender equality, especially within the music industry. Kiran made headlines, both positive and negative, after she ran the 2015 London Marathon as a “free-bleeder,” or without a tampon. This week on She Does Podcast we talk about how to handle pushback and criticism, about her wholesome but unconventional upbringing, about living spontaneously, […]
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NYFF Critics’ Notebook: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Junun
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to speculate that any director, following his second ambitious, divisive high-profile theatrical underperformer/probable money-loser (or anyone fresh off a recently completed production, really), might generally welcome a chance to get out of town. It’s unclear how far in advance Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood planned to go to Rajasthan to collaborate on an album with Israeli-born, Indian-residing Sufi convert Shye Ben Tzur, or whether Paul Thomas Anderson initially committed to tagging along; regardless, it seems to have been restorative fun. Junun is a 54-minute music doc in which Anderson shoots whatever he wants, however he wants to. There are five credited camera operators, including Anderson […]
