Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“As a Film Community, We are Moving Away from a Culture of Scarcity and Toward a Culture of Plenty”: Emily Best on She Does Podcast
Emily Best is the founder and CEO of Seed&Spark, a crowdfunding and distribution platform for independent filmmakers. She’s also the publisher of Bright Ideas Magazine. Emily has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in crowdfunding for film and contributed to over 300 campaigns to date through Seed&Spark. She brings experience from producing live theater and running restaurants to the film industry, and she lets us into the world of investors and film distribution. Emily travels to festivals and conferences around the world on the #stayindietour and was named one of the 2013 Indiewire Influencers, 2014 New York Women of Influence, […]
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DaVinci Resolve 12 Public Beta Now Available
Blackmagic first announced DaVinci Resolve 12 back in April at NAB, but now they have released a public beta and say that the final release will be available in late August. DaVinci Resolve began life — and is widely known — as a color correction tool, but the last two updates have seen significant advances in its editing capabilities, making it a possible competitor to programs like Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut. For those on a budget, the free version offers a surprisingly complete feature set. With the release of the public beta comes some new features that weren’t […]
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Rachel Morrison Talks Dope, Her Favorite Shot and Career as a Cinematographer
As the second largest film festival in Germany, Filmfest München programs a large German slate and a range of international titles. In addition to the Alexander Payne retrospective and homage to Andy Warhol’s cinematic experiments, this year’s festival highlighted an assortment of U.S. films. Picked up by Open Road Films and Sony Pictures at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope had its German premiere in Munich. Below is my conversation with cinematographer Rachel Morrison. Filmmaker: How did you decide to become a cinematographer? Morrison: I grew up with a still camera in my hand, determined I could freeze […]
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Fabricated: Petzold’s Astounding Phoenix
Still bearing facial scars from vain attempts to kill her in a concentration camp, the festering infection that followed, and drastic plastic surgery to re-create her (the doctor’s term) in a hospital in her bombed-out hometown of Berlin, the once ravishing Jewish chanteuse Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) recklessly saunters out alone into the night to search for the Aryan pianist husband she has not seen since her arrest. Extremely self-conscious, she asks a blind street musician where to even begin looking. Pointedly, he recommends the American sector: That’s where the clubs and the action are. The film’s title is the […]
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Stealing Thunder: How to Fight Piracy While Remaining Cool
If you’re like most young-ish filmmakers, you grew up and matured in an open source world of Napster, YouTube and BitTorrent. Whether it was making mixtapes for your college girlfriend, or ripping CDs and DVDs with your film school pals, “appropriating media” might have been a way of life for you to consume and share your favorite songs, films and TV. You scoffed at FBI warnings on VHS tapes and mocked MPAA PSAs. You’ve mashed up, mixed up and just plain stolen your way through the early 21st century with nary a tinge of regret. Hell, we’re living in an […]
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Our 25 New Faces of Film List for 2015 is Live
This is one of our flagship features, and we’re very proud of it. Check out the list here.
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TV is Not the New Film
As much as I love Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men and Twin Peaks, as great and as groundbreaking as those shows were, they still are not cinema. The recent explosion of quality long-form cable series has taken the TV form to a new level of artistry and craftsmanship. A show like Mad Men is not only thrilling because of its commentary on its era, but because of the zeitgeist energy created by everyone watching the show, talking about it and sharing opinions on social media. Today, perhaps more than ever, a new season of a quality show becomes a […]
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Going Mobile: The Alpha1 Mobile Film Lab
In 1932, the Russian filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin convinced Soviet authorities to give him three decommissioned train carriages to turn into a mobile film studio. The “film-train” would travel across the USSR’s expanse, bringing with it 32 spots to sleep, six editing tables, a projection room and a film-processing lab. Equipped to handle all aspects of production and projection from beginning to end, the film train would record local issues and expose problems that the people would need to solve: in Medvedkin’s words, the portable facility would act as “a kind of special fire brigade to put out problem fires.” These […]
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Milestone Films’ Dennis Doros on Ornette: Made in America and Project Shirley
Since founding Milestone Films in 1990, the husband and wife team of Dennis Doros and Amy Heller have been restoring and distributing some of the most significant and overlooked titles in the American independent cannon. Ornette: Made in America, one of four feature films in their “Project Shirley” Shirley Clarke collection, is wrapping up a week long run at Spectacle today, as part of a celebration of Ornette Coleman. Filmmaker spoke to Doros about the acquisition and restoration process behind Clarke’s characteristically singular documentary, as well as Milestone’s recent objection to Stephen Winter’s Jason and Shirley, which liberally re-imagines the set of Portrait of […]
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“I’m Always Attracted to the ‘Mutt’ Aspect of Sets”: Production Designer Michael Shaw on Orange is the New Black
Michael Shaw has had an illustrious career as a production designer, moving from some of the most notable independent films of the 1990s (Heavy, Boys Don’t Cry, You Can Count on Me) to a string of this decade’s top television shows (The Big C, Orange is the New Black). On Saturday, July 25, he’ll be leading a production design masterclass focused on Orange is the New Black at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center. Shaw kindly took time out from designing the Wall Street environs of Showtime’s upcoming Billions to speak about his career as a production designer, […]
