Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Nine Answers for Anxious Film Investors
The process of finding investors for independent film can be trying, to say the least, but it can also be illuminating. Anyone who has ever attempted to find money for a film knows that there are typical questions that always get asked by first-time investors: How will I make back my investment? When do the investors get paid? How is the deal structured? Can I come to the premiere? While looking for partners for Lazy Eye, our micro-budget feature, writer/director Tim Kirkman received an e-mail from a potential investor who had forwarded our package to a friend/advisor. The email contained […]
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“Hollywood is a Town that Especially Wants Women to be… Not Human…”: Caitlin FitzGerald Talks Acting on She Does Podcast
Caitlin FitzGerald, writer and actor, is one of Hollywood’s emerging talents. She may be best known for her role as Libby Masters on Showtime Network’s Masters of Sex. The series, which is currently in its third season, is set in the late 1950s and is a drama centered around the true story of the pioneers of the science of human sexuality. You may have also seen FitzGerald in the feature films It’s Complicated, Damsels in Distress and Newlyweds, and TV shows including Gossip Girl, How to Make It In America, and Law & Order: SVU. Additionally, FitzGerald co-wrote and starred […]
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New German Cinema: Uisenma Borchu and Marie Wilke at the Munich International Film Festival
Audiences respond to movies at the Munich International Film Festival much like the way popcorn is served — sweet or salty. It’s a relatively peaceful festival, with neither chaotic ticket lines nor crowded after-parties. But pouring out from small dark cinemas into the summer sun, attendees quickly share ruthless but straightforward critiques, a la Roger Ebert thumbs-up or down. This definitive sweet or salty response to a film feels standard among the German crowds. It’s certainly an effective method for rating movies. But when I need some time to marinate after watching Uisenma Borchu’s world premiere of Don’t Look At […]
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Film Writing on the Spam Internet: A Hasty Categorization
We were deep in production on our summer issue last week, so I didn’t have much time to think about the extremely sudden shuttering of The Dissolve, the three-days-shy-of-two-years site that attempted to fill a surprising hole on the internet by primarily/substantially dedicating itself to writing moderate-to-lengthy reviews for just about every film released. This is a service still performed by the trades, The New York Times and other periodicals, but decisions inevitably must be made about which films to relegate to 200 terse words or less, or to ignore entirely. Ignoring this hierarchy, The Dissolve made sure all reviews […]
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Pain, Gain: The Sublime Stations of the Cross
How would you transpose 14 sequential artworks on canvas that hail back to the 15th century to contemporary technology and artistic sensibilities? The closest approximation might be a group of photographs, or a film comprised only of a series of fixed shots. Stringing together the individual tableaux would create a slightly disjointed narrative disregarding conventions that have been in effect for sequences for over a century. Even though each shot could stand on its own, there is a flow to the whole. Continuity is implicit, not laid out neatly with eye-line matches, shot-reverse shot set-ups, and cutting from establishing shots […]
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Test Footage of the GoPro HERO4 Session
Today GoPro announced the release of their first brand new camera in nine years: the GoPro HERO4 Session. The reviews trickling in thus far are fairly positive, despite noting the trade offs that accompany a design that is 40% smaller than the current HERO4 line. (For starters, the camera will reorient itself based off a 180 degree axis, but it cannot rotate at a 90 degree angle.) On the plus side, the Session comes waterproof (up to 33 feet) straight out of the box, and has an in-camera microphone that drains as you move from liquid to air. It’s available July 12 for […]
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Jazzed: Asif Kapadia’s Amy
When it came to music, Amy Winehouse forcefully played dual roles, as much master as slave. She had a tough time separating the two. As a young teen in the barely middle-class Southgate section of London, she was under strict instructions from older brother Alex, who constantly played music in his room, never to enter without knocking. Otherwise, she said, “He would throw things at you.” One time, however, she could not stop herself, and stormed in without permission. Dumbfounded, he imagined an emergency. “What’s this?” she asked, pointing to his record player. “It’s Ray Charles,” he answered. “’Unchain My […]
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Christopher Makoto Yogi at the Sundance Directors Lab
Hawai’i-born director Christopher Makoto Yogi is at the Sundance Directors Lab with his feature, I Was a Simple Man. “Like marionettes on a toy stage, the ghosts of Seiichi’s past haunt the countryside in this tale of a Hawai’i family facing the imminent death of their eldest,” is how its described by the Sundance Institute. Below, Yoti describes leaving the Labs and finding quiet time — but missing the experience. Read Part One of Yogi’s diary here. The final night of the Directors and Screenwriters Labs went something like this: fellows, advisors and staff roved up to a mountain house […]
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Livi Newman on Shooting Successful Sex Scenes at the Sundance Directors Lab
Olivia Newman is at the Sundance Directors Lab with her feature First Match, the tale of “a teenage girl from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood [who] decides that joining the all-boys high school wrestling team is the only way back to her estranged father.” She is also eight months pregnant. Below, she writes about shooting sex scenes. Read Part One of her Sundance Diary here. “Shoot every scene like a sex scene and you’ll be wildly successful.” That’s what James Mangold said to me. I was sitting in a circle with the Week Three Creative Advisors who had all just watched the […]
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To Not Be Crippled by Storytelling: Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person
Early in Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person, we see a shirtless, bearded man in cutoffs standing in an empty white pool nonchalantly scooping tiny scorpions into a mason jar with a piece of paper. At first, this action is underscored with “Take Me” by George Jones, carried over from the prior scene, which featured Jones playing in musician Leon Russell’s riverside Oklahoma recording studio. As the Jones song winds down we’re treated to the scorpion catcher’s musings on creativity, on how letting children draw on blank walls is sensible parenting, on how he’s made uncomfortable by prefabricated […]
