Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Tempest Tossed: Life’s a Breeze
Life’s a Breeze has nothing to do with an illusory sense of existential ease and simplicity. It is in fact a brand name that is heavily embossed on the exterior of a small plastic room deodorizer, which screws into a door jamb — or several, like in the revamped two-story flat of 79-year-old Nan (Fionnula Flanagan), an ornery but soft-spoken hoarder. In the first of several badly calculated surprises, her loving but smilingly mercenary middle-aged children throw out piles of moldy papers and replace unsalvageable furnishings and tchotchkes with up-to-date Ikea and such: recognizable brands. The idiom is itself ironic, […]
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Welcome to the Future: Adrienne Becker on the Business of Social Art
The following is the text of a Blitz Week speech given by Adrienne Becker at the Filmmaker Conference at Independent Film Week, presented by the Made in NY Media Center by IFP. IFP is Filmmaker‘s parent organization. Welcome to the future. I’m Adrienne Becker and I’ll be your Blitz for the next 15 minutes. Feel free to have your devices ready — anything I say or do is an invitation to jump right in and make my story your own. In fact, go ahead and do that. Take this tablet, pass it around, change the title of this talk as […]
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Watch: 17 TIFF Shorts Available on Vimeo
The distribution rollout for short form work remains a tenuous enterprise, at best. Aside from throwing it up on Vimeo or YouTube, and hoping it catches the eye of a curated site like Short of the Week, many filmmakers end up sitting on their shorts for months after their festival premiere. Vimeo is shaking up that paradigm by offering 17 shorts from the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts program — which the streaming site sponsors — online through September 19. These include the Jury Prize winning A Single Body, which offers insight into an earnest male friendship; the Shane Carruth-starring everything & everything & everything; the sci-fi Entangled, from […]
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Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on The Illumination Experience and the Keys to the City
In the second part of this interview with cinematographer Shane Hurlbut, we cover his upcoming “Illumination Experience Educational Tour“; why he’s undertaken this project, and the format and objective of the classes. Hurlbut also reveals what he calls “the keys to the city”: how he conducts lighting tests with actors before production starts. Filmmaker: How did the “The Illumination Experience” come about? Hurlbut: Five years ago I started on this mission of sharing. I felt like mentoring was dead in this business. I wanted to educate and inspire, and use the passion for what I love to do to energize and […]
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Five Lessons from a Ten-Year Film School
The following is a guest post from 25 New Face filmmaker Jake Mahaffy on his new project, Free in Deed, currently fundraising post-production at Indiegogo. Check out the film’s campaign here, and also see Filmmaker‘s new partner page of curated Indiegogo projects. “How could a man crush a child for over two hours, the entire time believing that he was helping him?” That was a question that formed in my mind as I read mainstream news stories back in 2003 of a failed faith healing. But as time went on, I did more research. I met with the actual man and […]
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POV Launches Interactive Shorts Including Empire:Cradle
POV, America’s longest running television showcase for non-fiction films, is wading into interactive waters. Yesterday, the doc powerhouse launched an online, short-form transmedia section, with six projects, four of which were created by Hackathon alumni, and three of which will be premiering at NYFF’s Convergence sidebar in the ensuing weeks. The works are driven by timelines, geography, and photography, but my hands down favorite, Empire:Cradle, is fueled by a transcendent moral code. One in a series of four shorts that probes the ramifications of Dutch colonialism, Cradle is shot on location at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. Pairing clusters of bystanders who watch the takeoffs and […]
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Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on Camera Tests and the Joy of Older Lenses
I first saw cinematographer Shane Hurlbut speaking at a trade show held in New York City in 2010 hosted by Canon. Hurlbut had just finished shooting Act of Valor, shot predominately using the Canon 5D Mark II, and he burst on stage with enough energy to power the building. At the time I wrote that he was “loud, in your face, cracking jokes while dashing about the stage,” but it was also clear he had a passion both for the gear and for sharing information. Since then Hurlbut has lensed the pictures Deadfall, Need for Speed, and the currently in […]
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Euro-Pudding and Look Books: Takeaways from Day One at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference
After sitting through the majority of the New Narratives presentations on day one of the Filmmaker Conference at IFP Film Week, my brain is almost too awash with content to compile anything but a listicle. From conversations with cinematographers like Reed Morano and producers like Mynette Louie to an Obvious Child case study and Kevin B. Lee’s mini-keynote, here is a handful of the major takeaways I gleaned from yesterday’s Conference. 1. For co-productions, don’t assume hiring local crew is the cheapest option. Arriving to the Icelandic set of Land Ho!, producers Mynette Louie and Sara Murphy realized they were sharing ground with a slightly larger production: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. […]
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IBC 2014: A Big Show for Sony and Blackmagic
IBC is the European equivalent of NAB, and one of the few times lots of manufacturers are announcing and updating products. This show has seen some big news, particularly from Sony and Blackmagic. Sony PXW-FS7 Sony made a huge splash with the PXW-FS7. This camera slots in between their NEX-FS700 and the PMW-F5, and while it has the same E-mount as the NEX-FS700 it is a very different camera. Sony has almost completely rethought their design, intending this one for the documentary and news shooter, and focusing on making it shoulder useable without the addition of a rig. The key […]
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The “Internet Slowdown” and Net Neutrality Update
Wednesday afternoon, I clicked on a Vimeo link and was greeted by an airtight pop-up. In order to pass on to the video, I had to enter my cell phone number and zip code. I complied, and not a second later, I received a call briefing me on talking points of the FCC’s revision to the Open Internet Order — which would allow broadband providers to charge sites for guaranteed service — and was then connected to senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Wednesday, September 10, marked the technical end to the public comment period of the FCC’s detrimental potential amendments to the net neutrality act. To mobilize […]
