Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Tech Meets Entrepreneurship Meets Storytelling: Five Takeaways from Kara Oehler on the She Does Podcast
It’s difficult to sum up what Kara Oehler does in a single title. The process quickly turns into a hyphenated chain of words — documentarian-radio producer-tech founder-interactive media producer-entrepreneur-academic. We chatted with the co-founder of Zeega and GoPop — the latter which was recently acquired by Buzzfeed — about her early influences in radio, starting communities like UnionDocs Collaborative Studio and metaLAB at Harvard, living out of her car to document Main Streets across America and being a female in the tech and startup world. Come along for the ride, it’s a lot of fun. Listen to this teaser from […]
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IFP Announces New Lab for Serialized Web Projects and Theatrical Launches for Web Series
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the launch of its Screen Forward Labs, a year-long program and incubator for the creators of serialized projects aiming to push storytelling forward. Eight innovative media creators will be selected each year and provided mentorship, six months free residency at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP and $10,000 of services aimed at helping them to develop cutting-edge work. An intensive, week-long Lab in November 2015 will provide participants with the knowledge, resources and mentor support necessary for developing strong pitches, securing financing, creating marketing strategies and finding unique avenues […]
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Can a Filmmaker Balance Movies with a Full-Time Teaching Career?
Selected for Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces series, filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck are currently on Kickstarter via producer Laura Heberton’s campaign to cover festival expenses for their latest feature, God Bless the Child. In the below guest essay, Machoian, who works as an adjunct professor, ponders the current dilemma in his life: should he accept a full-time teaching position that will necessarily change the rhythm of his filmmaking? Read on, and check out the film’s campaign on Kickstarter and consider donating. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” This is a phrase I hear thrown around often, I […]
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Getting Close: Remembering Albert Maysles
I woke up in a strange bed in Harlem on a cold and rainy Saturday morning. I was in the second floor guest bedroom of a beautiful old brownstone. The bookshelves were lined with revolutionary material from all cultures, resources for creating manned insurrections, overthrowing governments and surviving months in the wild with only a backpack. Stacks of old records littered the room, mostly ’70s funk, Afro-Cuban jazz and Fela. I grabbed my iPhone, which had slept by my head next to the pillow and considered tweeting or instagramming the moment but quickly dismissed the idea. I stumbled down a […]
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Directors and Producers Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein on The Amazing Randi Doc An Honest Liar
I’ve been a fan of Tyler Measom’s work ever since I wandered into a screening of his and Jennilyn Merten’s nail-biting portrait of teen exiles from the FLDS Church, Sons of Perdition, at Tribeca five years back. (The doc ultimately went on to be picked up by the Oprah Winfrey Network for broadcast the following year.) Now Measom has teamed up with producer Justin Weinstein (a scientist turned filmmaker and both executive producer of Ryan Murdoch’s Bronx Obama and writer/editor of Constance Marks’s Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey) to craft another festival success story. An Honest Liar is an up […]
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R.I.P., Documentary Great Albert Maysles
The legendary documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles passed away last night, reported The Criterion Collection on the day it is rereleasing one of his most indelible and influential works, Grey Gardens (co-directed with David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer). He was 88. With David, his brother, Albert Maysles made “direct cinema” documentaries that were politically and socially impactful upon release and aesthetically groundbreaking for generations of filmmakers to follow. The 1969 documentary Salesman (co-directed with Charlotte Zerin) captured the everyday sorrows of ordinary people — in this case, door-to-door Bible salesman — toiling in the shadows of both the American […]
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Say it Again: How to Do No-Budget ADR for Independent Films
My first feature, Veer!, was shot primarily on Super 16mm, on an old Eclair ACL I got off eBay. While it shot beautiful images, the camera sounded like a helicopter taking off when rolling. Interior dialog scenes were especially nightmarish for sound, and one scene in particular retains no original production audio because of this. We had to re-create the scene’s audio — dialogue, background ambience and foley — completely from scratch. But when I point out which scene it is, people don’t always believe me. Indeed, good ADR goes unnoticed, and as much as I’d like to pat myself […]
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Watch: “The Unloved: The Lone Ranger & Heaven’s Gate“
“How do we define failure when it comes to motion pictures?” Simultaneously defending the more-or-less rehabilitated Heaven’s Gate and the not-so-much The Lone Ranger is a hard task, but presumably someone has to do it. In this video essay, Scout Tafoya gives a surprisingly plausible stab at arguing that both are underrated slabs of greatness with much in common, alternately grimly realistic and expensively glossy takes on the genocide of the Native Americans, presentational flip sides of the same coin.
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Is Netflix’s Move Towards Traditional Distribution In Favor of Filmmakers, But Against the Theaters?
The notion of boycotting day-and-date releases seems a bit extreme since it’s a widely practiced distribution strategy for several years running, but that’s just what AMC, Regal, Cinemark and Carmike are planning with Cary Fukunaga’s Netflix-acquired Beasts of No Nation. The exhibitors informed Variety that they will not screen the film for the sole reason that “they do not want to provide screens to films that do not honor what is typically a 90-day delay between a theatrical debut and a home entertainment release,” thus conflating the latter, last step in the release process, with the more preliminary day-and-date. Their reasoning, however, speaks to the […]
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Sons of Anarchy: Cymbeline at Film Comment Selects
In delivering the first fully 20th-century filmic transplant of Hamlet, Michael Almereyda made wondering how he’d update each famous beat part of the fun, from “to be or not to be” rendered as prince Ethan Hawke’s internal monologue against Blockbuster’s “Action” aisle (totally unexpected, too-obvious only after its execution) to the total collapsing of “The Mousetrap”‘s text into a wordless Lewis Klahr short. That 2000 rendition took place in sleek, ever-more-expensive Manhattan — the birthright setting of one of Shakespeare’s most familiar plays, which deserved nothing less. This Cymbeline‘s location is never specified, but you can see Bay Ridge A-train subway stops at the frame’s sides; it’s an outer-borough and upstate […]
