Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“Just Getting a Bunch of Likes, or Creating a Hashtag? That’s Not Social Change”: Impact Producer Lina Srivastava
Lina Srivastava combines media, technology, art, and storytelling for social transformation. She is the founder of a social innovation strategy group that has provided project design consultation to social impact organizations, including UNESCO, the World Bank, UNICEF. But she also works as an impact producer with with filmmakers. She has worked on the Oscar-winning Born Into Brothels and Inocente, the 2007 documentary The Devil Came on Horseback, and most recently Who is Dayani Cristal? which screened at Hot Docs, Sundance and New York Film Festival in 2013 and recently won the 2015 Social Impact Media Award. She is also the […]
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“An Auteur Film with Pseudo-Anonymous Dialogue”: Benjamin Crotty on Fort Buchanan
A truly original oddity, Benjamin Crotty’s Fort Buchanan melds disparate tropes of American television, queer cinema, and French arthouse to comic and dazzling effect. Buchanan unfolds at the titular army base, where husbands and wives lay in waiting for their men overseas, though the wives tend to occupy their time by attempting to seduce the gay husbands, or the temperamental daughter of the film’s most lovelorn protagonist, Roger (Andy Gillet). If something is askew in the characters’ roving dialogue, that’s because the script is entirely adapted from American TV shows, an off-kilter choice that finds a counterpart in Crotty’s cinematic language, in which seasonal set changes are ushered in […]
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Not Without My Daughter: Jauja
Jauja courts enigmatic status, but this much can be safely established: Danish officer Captain Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) is with his daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjork Mallin Agger) in 19th-century Patagonia for unspecified military purposes. She’s a bit of a mystic, announcing “I love the desert. I love how it fills me.” “I beg your pardon?” sputters nonplussed, over-protective dad, put off both by her love of inhospitable terrain and sexual language. Ingeborg promptly runs off with a young officer and Dinesen follows, his would-be rescue made more dangerous by repeatedly coming close to Zuluaga — once a Danish officer, now something like a Red […]
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The Promise and Realities of Creating Immersive Media Projects — Best Practices: A StoryCode Report
The following report on five pioneering immersive media projects — a report detailing their viewership, audience engagement and creators’ best practices — appears on Filmmaker courtesy of StoryCode, where it is crossposted. Anyone creating immersive media has run into a similar challenge: people outside of the creators’ bubble are not exactly sure what you mean by “immersive”, “interactive”, or “transmedia” experiences. Producers of this new form of media often get questions like: Where is the business model? What are the audience numbers like? How engaged are users/what is the impact? Doesn’t this just distract us from good storytelling? This article […]
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We Won’t Grow Old Together: Amour Fou
There’s a lengthy sequence, something like the climax of Jacques Rivette’s 1969 L’Amour fou, when increasingly at-odds actress Claire (Bulle Ogier) and theater director boyfriend Sebastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) go on a manic destructive binge in their apartment, alternating sex with the decimation of their physical space, at one point tearing off the wallpaper and breaking down the wall to their neighbors’ apartment. This frenzy lasts for a considerable amount of time until Claire announces “That’s enough” — and just like that, a mutually toxic relationship hits its terminus. The delicate walls comprising the sets of Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou — covered with ornate, thin […]
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Panavision’s Dan Sasaki on their Large Format Digital Lenses, the Primo 70
Late last year Panavision introduced a new lens line, the Primo 70. These lenses are specifically designed for use on larger sensor digital cameras and, according to Panavision, cannot be used on film cameras. We spoke with Dan Sasaki, VP of Optical Engineering at Panavision, about the development of these lenses, and how they differ from film lenses. Filmmaker: What was the impetus for developing digital lenses? Sasaki: Our Primo 35 lenses have been around since the late ’80s, early ’90s, and they are designed to work with film cameras. The Primo lenses have what’s called the blue line shift on […]
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Wealth and The Game: Five Miscellaneous Observations on The Jinx
Like a lot of people, I’ve been hypnotized the past few weeks by Andrew Jarecki’s six-part HBO miniseries The Jinx. I’m not a TV writer, and I didn’t take notes while watching. These are five stand-alone observations in the interest of sharing in collective fascination with the series. NB: this is nothing but spoilers. 1. It’s completely germane that Andrew Jarecki (Princeton alum, father of a successful businessman, Moviefone co-founder) comes from money — his is surely the only family in America with the means to produce three documentary filmmaker siblings in the same generation. This privileged perspective has bitten […]
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In Memoriam: Richard Glatzer and Grief
When I first I met Richard Glatzer, it seems all we talked about was grief. It was the early 90’s and grief was part and parcel to far too many dinner conversations back then. But Richard wanted to do something more than just talk about grief; he wanted to make a movie about it. We had met at Sundance where he had given me a script he wrote and asked me to play the lead. As I started reading Grief, I was immediately impressed by how funny, touching, and wise it was — hardly the somber meditation on death the title implied. Halfway through, there was […]
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Live Streaming Panels from SXSW Saturday and Sunday, in Partnership with The CreativeLive Film Channel and The Wrap
Filmmaker Magazine is partnering with The CreativeLive Film Channel and The Wrap to present two days of streaming filmcraft dialogues and panels live from the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. The sessions will include a range of filmmakers, screenwriters, producers, entrepreneurs, and film entrepreneurs who help define the modern space of film. Scheduled to appear are: Robert Duvall, Adrien Brody, Ondi Timoner, Hal Hartley, Andrew Droz Palermo, Mickey Keating, and many more. Check out Sunday’s schedule below. All times are CST. 10:00 – 10:15: Ondi Timoner (Brand: A Second Coming); Andrew Droz Palermo (One and Two) Conversations presented by The Wrap and moderated by CEO/Editor-in-Chief […]
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“You Can’t Make This Stuff Up”: Alison Bagnall on Funny Bunny
Funny Bunny, Alison Bagnall’s third feature, opens with a man shuffling door to door in suburban, middle-class Philadelphia. He’s not pitching bibles, but rather, a means to an end of the childhood obesity epidemic. Gene (Kentucker Audley) is just one player in the off-kilter, quasi-love triangle that takes center stage in Bagnall’s idiosyncratic film, as he’s soon joined by a well-off man-child — the aptly named Titty (Olly Alexander) — and a reclusive, emotionally tenuous young woman named Ginger (Joslyn Jensen), who makes a living peddling her bunny’s ailments on the web. Much like her 2011 two-hander The Dish & The Spoon, Bagnall displays a deft touch for […]
