Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Five Questions for Applesauce Writer/Director Onur Tukel
Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood was a hit of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, a work that saw the Brooklyn filmmaker venture from the relationship comedy drama of his previous pictures towards a sly, anarchic genre tale — in this case, a vampire story. Far from a generic riff on the genre, it contained all of Tukel’s typical emotional queasiness and edgy humor while adding quite a bit of the red stuff. With Applesauce, his latest, Dylan Baker plays the role of a man coaxed into recounting a story from his past on a radio show one day. He probably […]
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“Can You Get to the Truth of Something?” Mike Finkel on True Story
I first met Mike Finkel around two decades ago through a mutual friend. He was planning to write a piece for Sports Illustrated on the log-rolling championship to be held in Wisconsin, and I was going to go with him to take photographs. It was a fun, strange day. It felt surreal, but it was nothing compared to the kind of surreal that Mike’s future held for him. Mike and I kept in touch. He continued his career as a journalist writing for prestigious publications including The New York Times. He was ultimately fired from the Times for compositing three […]
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PolarPro Has Tons of Clever Rigs for the GoPro Action Shooter
I know, another company with more GoPro accessories. At first I was skeptical that I’d see something new, but as someone who dives and hikes, just about everything I saw from PolarPro solved a lot of mounting and accessibility problems I’ve had in the outdoors, from keeping the camera quickly accessible to adding extra power. It’s not much of a surprise these are well thought out accessories. Company founder Jeff Overall is an action sports enthusiast himself and was looking for a decent polarizing filter for his GoPro for snowboarding. When he couldn’t find one he made it and started PolarPro during his […]
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Alma Har’el on her Work-in-Progress LoveTrue at the Tribeca Film Festival
Alma Har’el’s 2011 Bombay Beach is one of the most striking feature debuts of any sort, fiction or doc, in recent years. In writing about the film and Har’el for our 25 New Faces of 2011, I called it “not only a loving, deeply empathetic portrait of the diverse characters who make up the town” (a small burg in the Salton Sea) “but also a beautifully poetic cinematic essay on the power — and necessity — of play and self-invention.” Bombay Beach, shot largely by Har’el herself on a handheld, $600 Canon consumer video camera, had style to burn, and […]
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Georgian on My Mind: Tangerines
A four-hander of a chamber play shot quickly in a single location in the lush, mountainous Georgian region of Guria, Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines was a surprise nominee for best foreign language film at the Oscars. The Georgian director’s third feature is meticulously crafted. Composer Nias Diasamidze’s repetitive sad strings are appropriate for a story where winning is implausible. Ongoing slight, smooth camera movements reframe relationships and offset the threat of stasis. Urushadze and ace DP Rein Kotov go for strong, contrasting lighting effects not only for their beauty in this widescreen picture, but as another weapon against inertia. Small and dynamic […]
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Five Questions with Men Go To Battle Director/Co-Writer Zachary Treitz and Co-Writer Kate Lyn Sheil
Hats off to director Zachary Treitz and co-writer Kate Lyn Sheil for sidestepping the more introspective, resource heavy trends of much contemporary independent filmmaking, and swinging for the fences with their Civil War period piece, Men Go To Battle. Set in 1861 Kentucky, the brothers Francis and Henry Mellon (Tim Morton and David Maloney) are desperate to scare up some funds for their overgrown farm before winter arrives, but the pair’s constant quarreling is a hindrance to much progress. Eventually fed up with Francis’ heavy drinking and general flippancy, Henry takes off to join a far more populated battle amidst the Confederate army. […]
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DIY Previs: Developer Dan Fearing on ShotPro
Just as pencil-and-paper storyboarding has by and large given way to computer-based previsualization software, high-end previs suites are now confronting much more budget-friendly software and apps. The newest of these is ShotPro, an iOS app from WebGames3D.com that premiered on the App Store late last year. Developed by Dan Fearing and a small team of Sacramento-based designers and coders, ShotPro already looks like a game changer in the world of DIY previsualization. It launched loaded with characters, props, settings, lights and even lenses, and two updates have already followed, adding scalability for onscreen items, animatable cameras, new camera models, moveable keyframes and other features. Version 1.5 […]
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The Wizard of Odds: John Maclean’s Slow West
A trio of black musicians performs a Congolese song in a desolate area inhabited by relentless bounty hunters, surviving Native Americans, and individuals — enterprising or on-the-lam — seeking reinvention in the anonymous open frontier. A finely-choreographed triangular shootout puts both a general store and a starving family of German immigrants out of commission. Set in Colorado in 1870, five years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox ended the Civil War, Slow West is positively — in every sense of the word — disconcerting. Which is precisely Scottish filmmaker John Maclean’s ballsy aim. Wildly but meticulously blurring the boundaries between genres, […]
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Post Workflow Gets Blurred and (Sometimes) Free with Updates From Avid, Blackmagic, Adobe, Apple
While most of the attention paid to Blackmagic’s releases at NAB went to their slew of new and updated cameras, they also released DaVinci Resolve 12, which they say has made a bigger improvement in the last year than their last five years of updates. When they introduced 11 last year, they announced new editing tools within the app. They’ve further expanded Resolve as a feasible NLE with multicam features, tons of trim mode options, and a brand new audio engine for audio editing. I played around with Resolve at the booth. The timeline definitely felt familiar and the ease of making […]
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New Rugged Hard Drives from LaCie and G-Tech
LaCie announced some updates to their familiar rugged line at NAB. There is now a larger housing with two drives for RAID 1 or 0. It includes both a thunderbolt and USB 3 interface, with 4 TB for $419. Also new to the rugged line is a 1 TB SSD drive, priced at $899. There’s a variety of other options in both SSD and spinning disk ranging from 250 GB to 2 TB. Not rugged but a new mobile addition is a USB-C drive. Expect to see more of these now that Apple has made it clear that’s the new direction of connections. Comes […]
