Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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“There are No Restrictions, Except For Pornographic Material:” Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld on High Maintenance
High Maintenance, the widely reputed, gold standard of web series, began as an experiment of sorts between Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. When interviewed for our 2013 25 New Faces issue, the pair expressed the foremost need to “get out all these weird stories that have happened over the years.” Now Vimeo’s first venture into original programming, the husband and wife team are pushing the envelope in a whole new way. With episodes nearing a 20-minute runtime and tonal highs and lows as accomplished as any feature film, High Maintenance challenges the very serial format it calls home. As of today, all three episodes from […]
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Blackmagic Releases a Free Version of Fusion 7
Back in September Blackmagic announced they had purchased eyeon Software, developers of the high-end VFX application Fusion 7. And now they have done the same thing they did after acquiring DaVinci Resolve; they have drastically slashed the price of the application. You can get Fusion 7 for free, or buy Fusion 7 Studio for $995. The base version supports 3D compositing, paint, rotoscoping, retiming, stabilization, and titling. Fusion 7 Studio adds features such as optical flow, stereoscopic 3D, support for OpenFX plug-ins and distributed network rendering. Fusion Studio 7 also includes a multi-user workflow and collaboration tool called Generation and […]
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“This is The Kind of Thing I Want in a Restaurant:” Vanessa McDonnell on John’s of 12th Street
If you’ve ever worked in a restaurant, you may have a sense of the sort of family dynamics the harried environment can rapidly inspire. John’s of 12th Street, a dyed-in-the-wool Italian establishment in the East Village, takes this close-knit enclave to its apotheosis. As rendered in Vanessa McDonnell’s observational documentary of the same name, the restaurant is purely populated by the sort of old school New York characters that can only be regarded as a dying breed. From opening till close, McDonnell captures as many yarns spun over the tables as chicken parms are laid into the oven. In advance of John’s of 12th Street‘s world […]
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“I’m Not Trying to Wreck Anything”: Douglas Trumbull, Kubrick and Truth at 120 Frames-Per-Second
Jean-Luc Godard said that cinema is truth at 24 frames-per-second, but Douglas Trumbull feels it should be 120, or at least 60. The director and special effects wizard behind Blade Runner, Close Encounters of The Third Kind and 2001: A Space Odyssey speculated about the future of cinema at the TIFF Bell Lightbox last weekend as part of a Stanley Kubrick retrospective. A sold-out audience of mostly male cinephiles and tech-heads listened intently to their SFX guru as he denigrated the standard 24 fps format of today’s cinema, though he admitted, “It’s a beautiful medium. I’m not trying to wreck anything.” […]
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Finding Inspiration and Motivation from Within: Kickstarter Sci-Fi Shakespeare Project, Ambition’s Debt
Writer/director Devin E. Haqq is currently on Kickstarter raising funds for his ambitious indie Shakespeare adaptation, Ambition’s Debt. Read his essay below on deciding to crowdfund, and consider supporting his project. Night after night, I lose sleep, wracking my brain over this mad dash to reach an unbelievable goal on Kickstarter. With everything involved in this crowdfunding campaign for my feature project, Ambition’s Debt, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I find myself asking the same question; “What the hell was I thinking?” People say it’s a full-time job and it’s so intense, but you can never really know […]
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Building the Message Machine: Takeaways from the Film Independent Film Forum
The Film Independent Forum held October 24 – 26 in Los Angeles focused heavily on beginnings and endings of the filmmaking process, largely leaving technical details and production needs aside. The panelists agreed: a successful film requires beginning with the end in mind. What is your film about, and who is your audience? How can you start building your audience at the ideas phase, and how can you continue to engage that audience throughout the process of making and distributing your film? In developing a project, producer Lisa Cortés (Precious, The Woodsman) said it’s important for producers to ask themselves, […]
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Watch: Jodie Mack’s Glistening Thrills
Now online is Glistening Thrills, a short from 25 New Face Jodie Mack, which was selected for this year’s Rotterdam and New York Film Festivals. Scored to the tones of Elliot Cole and shot on 16mm, Glistening Thrills is an textural interrogation of holographic foil, in all its mass produced, nostalgic glory. In an extensive overview of Mack’s oeuvre, Calum Marsh at Fandor writes “in aesthetic terms alone, Glistening Thrills ranks as perhaps her most exhilarating found-object work; its interplay of light and color, often totally hypnotic, produces an effect unlike anything I’ve ever seen.” Watch above.
