Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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; […]
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Looking and Listening: Jem Cohen on Counting
Hewing closely to the tradition of documentary as diaristic essay, Jem Cohen’s Counting moves from New York to Sharjah as the cinema eye ruminates on street life, destruction, displacement and disparate urban portraiture. Divided into 15 chapters, Counting seldom forces any conclusions, drawing on the viewers’ emotional responses to its alternately lyrical structure and literal depictions — the removal of Brooklyn’s iconic Kentile Floors sign among them. Filmmaker spoke to Cohen about where Counting falls in the documentary tradition, and how his approach was not all that different from his most recent “narrative,” Museum Hours. Counting is now in theaters from Cinema Guild. Filmmaker: What is your process on an essayistic […]
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Trailer Watch: David Simon’s “Show Me a Hero”
The Wire creator David Simon moves up the East Coast for his latest drama, Show Me a Hero, that’s set in Yonkers in the 1960s. Based on a true story, the six-part miniseries portrays a young mayor, played by Oscar Isaac, who, amidst the civil rights movements, fights local powers to build low-income housing in his borough. The cast is impressive and includes Alfred Molina, Bob Balaban and Winona Ryder. The series debuts August 16 on HBO.
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Little Things Mean a Lot: Alex R. Johnson’s Two Step
A visibly irritated, middle-aged leader of a small-town criminal syndicate lectures a younger, much more junior member of his band of thugs. The latter has just informed him that he might be able to rustle up a portion of the 10 grand he owes him over the next few days. “I don’t live in a $10,000 world of maybes, Webb,” says the boss, Duane (Jason Douglas). I live in Texas.” (The troubled and troubling sociopath Webb is played by James Landry Hebert, a man who will be going places.) Don’t look for logic in the sage’s upbraiding. The statement is […]
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One Brick at a Time: the Post-Production of A LEGO Brickumentary
A LEGO Brickumentary, a documentary that looks at the culture and appeal of the LEGO building block, opens July 31. Like many historical documentaries, this project involved working with a wide range of archival footage, but it also made use of footage shot with a wide range of modern cameras — in one case, all shooting the same event. Co-producer and post-production supervisor Chad Herschberger of Milkhaus talked to us about the work they did on this documentary and the ins and out of post-production work, including animating faces on LEGO bricks, moving media between Avid Media Composer and DaVinci […]
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The Five Terrors of Filmmaking
Filmmaker 25 New Faces Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck’s latest feature, God Bless the Child, premieres at IFP’s Made in NY Media Center on Friday, August 7th and runs through the 13th. Robert, Rodrigo, Producer Laura Heberton and many special guests will be there in person. Tickets are available here. The film will be digitally released on many platforms on August 18th and is already available for pre-order on iTunes. Below, Machoian and Ojeda-Beck open up about what terrifies them when they make a film and offer a clip from a new series of shorts about their film, 40 Years […]
