Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Dan Schoenbrun on Kickstarting collective:unconscious
Some Kickstarter campaigns sell themselves. collective:unconscious had me at, “Five of NYC’s most adventurous filmmakers are working together to adapt each other’s dreams.” The five filmmakers in question are Frances Bodomo, Lauren Wolkstein, Josephine Decker, Daniel Carbone and Lily Baldwin, and the project’s curator cum ringleader is Dan Schoenbrun, Film Partnerships Lead at Kickstarter, who previously supported several of the filmmakers’ other projects as Associate Director of Programming at IFP. Filmmaker spoke with Schoenbrun about the conception of the project, the series timeline and the protocol for working as a collective. Donate to the campaign here. Filmmaker: What was the genesis of […]
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Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s Very Own 2010
In Interstellar‘s future, a life-ending new Dust Bowl requires astronaut Matthew McConaughey to go into space, shoot through a wormhole, scope out three planets for habitation and make it back home to assure his daughter he loves her. The film is bookended and periodically interrupted by real Dust Bowl veterans’ talking heads, their hard times testimonies taken from a Ken Burns doc on the topic. It speaks to Christopher Nolan’s admirably idiosyncratic instincts that he’d ground visualizations of near-mystical journeys through quantum physics with seemingly incompatible Burns talking heads; it speaks simultaneously to his imaginative limitations that he can think of […]
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ITVFest: Is Independent TV More Than a Bridge to Mainstream TV?
In a small Vermont town on the edge of the Green Mountain National Forest, an hour and a half from Albany NY, the Independent Television and Film Festival (ITVFest) holds its annual get together. Taking place in the fall, ITVFest is very similar to a film festival, with screenings, panels and talks given by content producers. But rather than films, it focuses on TV and web entertainment. ITVFest started in L.A. in 2006, then moved to Vermont in 2013. I attended some of the screenings of web productions in a large tent set up for the event, as well as […]
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Save the Baby! On the Benefits of the Three-Act Screenplay Structure
Poor old three-act structure. It gets hammered away at, like an old punching bag, every time someone wants to challenge the primacy of the formulaic Hollywood screenwriting methods. “Take that! You follow-the-dots, color-within-the-lines, stodgy old armature!” Poor, poor three-act structure. So much to offer. So misunderstood. What if I were to tell you that in the 2,500-year history of Western dramatic literature, three-act structure is actually a radical new innovation? What would you think if I also said that its radical impact, towards the end of the 19th century, was to finally free dramatists from a highly proscriptive, closely dictated […]
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Factory 25 Acquires Little Feet and Boneshaker
Factory 25 will distribute Alexandre Rockwell’s Little Feet on a double bill with 25 New Face Frances Bodomo’s Boneshaker. The films will open at the IFC Center on December 12 and will be available for streaming on Fandor and Vimeo the same day. Little Feet was previously part of a Vimeo on Demand TIFF deal in which Vimeo gave the filmmakers $10,000 in exchange for 30-day exclusive distribution rights. Rockwell won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1992 with In The Soup, and Little Feet harkens back to the film’s 16mm black and white camerawork. Said Factory 25’s Matt Grady of the paired acquisition, “Both films are very […]
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Encounter Groups, Ghost Stories and Rapid Prototyping at the Seventh POV Hackathon
“There are a lot of things I like about your project, but the effects on the videos are not one of them.” “How is this different from Second Life?” “Your video — it’s kind of boring.” Participating in a hackathon, like POV’s which wrapped Sunday, Nov. 9, means opening yourself up to blunt feedback. Forty-eight hours of project development and rapid prototyping, POV’s hackathons pair documentary filmmakers with mentors and programmers and task them with extending non-fiction storytelling beyond the cinema (or television) walls. This month’s event — POV’s seventh — concluded with the five selected teams presenting their projects […]
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Should Documentary Filmmakers Be Friends with Their Subjects?
Luke Korem is in the final days of an Indiegogo campaign to fundraise for Dealt, his documentary on the amazing blind card magician Richard Turner. During the course of filmmaking, he’s become friends with Turner, and below he discusses that friendship within the framework of documentary ethics and practice. Read and consider visiting his Indiegogo page and contributing. It’s the question every documentary filmmaker will at some point ask themselves: “How close should I get to my subject?” Making a documentary is like running a marathon with no definite end in sight. It takes time and 100% commitment to your subject. For anyone […]
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The Reagans and Sex Parties: Recapping Female Sexual Fantasies in Film
“So many fantasies are fear based, so I can understand why you’d want Ronald Reagan shoving cake in your mouth,” said Amy Seimetz. She was responding to a particular fantasy from an anonymous audience member after a screening of Josephine Decker’s Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, nearing the midway point in its one week run at the IFP Media Center. Seimetz and Decker, along with Mild and Lovely d.p. Ashley Connor, Ry Russo-Young, Emily Carmichael, and Celia Rowlson-Hall were all in attendance for an interactive panel on Female Sexual Fantasies in Film. The filmmakers began with a discussion that centered on the […]
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“It’s No Longer Enough for Artists to Simply Be Artists”: Artel Great on His Audience-Building App, Project Catalyst
There’s a lot of talk in the independent film community about building new audiences through internet technologies but far fewer actual attempts at doing so. One person who has thought deeply about today’s challenges and developed a tool in response is filmmaker Artel Great, whose Project Catalyst attempts to combat “the Hollywood-ification of our thinking” by connecting multicultural audiences to the music and films most relevant to their lives and communities. It is, he writes, “the first application software to distinctively showcase narrative short films, documentaries, and music videos all made by talented indie artists from Black, Latino/a, and Asian […]
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He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother: Foxcatcher
One of the more graceful film segments in recent memory, a literally winning one at that, takes place about an hour into the wrestling drama Foxcatcher, directed with patience and precision by Bennett Miller (Moneyball, Capote, The Cruise). In it, each of four males labors in his own way. Straight out of small-town Wisconsin, impressionable prole Mark Schultz (Channing Tatum), heavyweight Gold Medal winner at the 1984 L.A. Olympics, is already under the spell of wealthy, patriotic, and highly educated John du Pont (a career-best Steve Carell) — less eccentric than deranged, the middle-aged heir to the chemical fortune and […]
