Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Memories of Afterdevelopment: John Magary on Making The Mend
[Editor’s note: The Mend writer/director John Magary has written for Filmmaker before in a critical capacity. Today he contributes an essay about the making of his debut feature, with bonus oral history appended. For information on playdates, click here.] “This movie…it’s a quilt!” — Russell Harbaugh, exiled roommate Over about five weeks in September and October of 2013, an unusually sustained period of bright and pleasant weather, we shot The Mend in New York City. The idea early on, before the first index card was pinned up, was to make something makeable. “Makeable” is a funny word, an aspirational spin on “possible,” […]
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Shooting A New Feature on Super 8: Director Matthew Wade on the Three Years It Took to Complete How the Sky Will Melt
Matthew Wade‘s How the Sky Will Melt premieres September 1st on NoBudge.com. In this guest post, he explains the difficulties of shooting a Super 8 feature and completing post-production over the course of the last three years. There are two questions I’ve become all too familiar with since prepping my first feature film, How the Sky Will Melt, three years ago (principal photography took place October 2012). The first and most common were “Are you crazy?” The question is not asked because I want to make a movie, or even a feature length movie, nor even necessarily that I’m choosing […]
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Mother Load: Xavier Dolan’s Tom at the Farm
I have the romantic’s weakness for tales of thwarted opportunities in the relationship department. Saddest and most frustrating are those for whom faulty communication, intentional or otherwise, generates the lion’s share of the blame. Ever read Poe’s short story “The Purloined Letter?” It involves theft, blackmail, a woman of royal lineage — it’s opiated Poe, what do you expect? — but we Little People can suffer in our more ordinary ways from the exchange of tainted information. I use the word exchange purposely: The action pains not only the victim, but the perp as well. Quebecois director Xavier Dolan puts […]
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Watch: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Extreme Close-Ups
Here’s a thorough, succinct look at the rather particular use of extreme close-ups in the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. Note how they are almost never routine inserts or signifiers — there’s always a motion to the shot, either within the frame or as the camera pushes in toward its subject. Check it out above.
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Samyang/Rokinon Announce New Cine Lens Line: XEEN
Samyang [also sold under the Rokinon brand] attracted quite a bit of attention from budget filmmakers when it started selling its budget line of “Cine” lens. These were their traditional still lenses with standard geared focus and aperture rings, de-clicked aperture ring, and remarking for T stops rather than F stops. The lenses received generally positive reviews from users — particularly as they provide a good mix of image quality/construction for the price. They are, however, fully manual lenses, with no auto-focus support or image stabilization built in. But adding teeth to the focusing ring of a lens doesn’t truly, a […]
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“… You Just Have to Remind Yourself, ‘I Can Do Anything'”: Kirsten Lepore Talks Animation on She Does Podcast
Animator Kirsten Lepore is the writer and director of an upcoming episode of Cartoon Network’s popular show Adventure Time. Until now, a majority of her career has been spent in her garage, which is actually her workshop, carefully moving tiny, handmade characters in the worlds she’s built for them. The films she made at Maryland Institute College of Art and CalArts, Sweet Dreams and Bottle, won countless awards and screened at SXSW, Slamdance, the Vimeo Awards, the Annie Awards, among others. She’s made work for big names like Google, MTV, Whole Foods, Nestlé and Nickelodeon, upholding her own raw but […]
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Advocating for a Character-Driven Screenplay Structure
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I was considering the possibility that there might be more to screen drama than external conflict-driven plotting when, as if hit by a thunderbolt, a new paradigm of story structure downloaded onto the page in front of me. I had been teaching script analysis, a lecture class analyzing the dramatic structure of successful films, for a few years by then, and it had led me to notice ways that character elements were able to move stories forward. They were not simply providing an added layer of human interest. They were serving a […]
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NYWIFT and IRIS Announce Inaugural Participants for The Writers Lab, Funded by Meryl Streep
Back in April, I interviewed the directors of NYWIFT and IRIS about their noted launch of The Writers Lab, a retreat for women screenwriters over 40, that received a substantial amount of funding from Meryl Streep. The 12 inaugural participants, listed below, were selected from a pool of over 3,500 applicants. The eight mentors for the weekend long September lab are Jessica Bendinger (Bring It On, Aquamarine), Caroline Kaplan (Time Out of Mind, Me and You and Everyone We Know), Meg LeFauve (Inside Out), Darnell Martin (Cadillac Records), Lydia Dean Pilcher (Darjeeling Limited, The Talented Mr. Ripley), Gina Prince-Bythewood (Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights, Mary Jane Skalski (Win Win, The Station Agent) and […]
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10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Roger Corman
The following interview, in which producer and director Roger Corman broke down the filmmaking rules he lives by, was conducted in 2013 and is reposted today on the sad occasion of Corman’s passing last Thursday at the age of 98. R.I.P. Roger Corman. The legendary Roger Corman is America’s proto-independent filmmaker, having produced literally hundreds of films and directed dozens more, most of them genre films made under a “fast, cheap and profitable” model that still offers guidance for new filmmakers everywhere. And while Corman is best known for films made during an earlier independent era, one in which regional […]
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Road “Flic”: Jon Watts’s Cop Car
One day non-discerning encyclopedists will politely dismiss the new top-of-the-line Cop Car. It is Jon Watts’s second low-budget feature (after the spooky 2014 Clown) made prior to his surprise anointment as director of the upcoming Spider-Man “reboot” (Spider-Man: The New Avenger?), which once again visits Peter Parker during his high school years. That angle is off and condescending. It makes perfect sense that Watts was plucked from indie obscurity to run the show for a pull-out-the-stops studio production loaded with stars, not newbies and B-list actors/executive producers; spectacular CGI and highest-tech editing instead of jerry-rigged FX and less sophisticated montage; […]
