Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Top 18 Ways to Become a TV Director
Some filmmakers spend their summer vacations on a Greek island, lounging with their Peloponnesian lover while watching old VHS bootlegs of Cassevetes films. I, on the other hand, spent my summer vacation going to an average of one meeting a day in order to become a TV director. Mind you, I’m not giving up on indie film, but we all know the drill by now: TV is the new indie film. It pays well, it’s more creative, it’s more instantly gratifying and all the cool kids are doing TV now. Hell, the Amazon pilot list alone has more Sundance alumni […]
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43 Takeaways from Sundance Artist Services Day at the IFP Filmmaker Conference
“The most important task is to make great movies,” said Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam at the start of Thursday’s Artist Services Workshop at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference. “All this talk about audiences is meaningless unless you have something in your heart you want to get out there.” However, Putnam’s comments were not to construe that filmmakers shouldn’t think about the rapidly changing world of distribution, marketing and audience building. As Putnam went on to say, it is “easier, less expensive to make a movie, but no easier to find an audience. There is a volume of movies and a […]
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Come See 25 New Faces Screen and Talk at the IFC Center on Monday Night
Filmmaker‘s annual 25 New Face screening night at the IFC Center takes place next Monday, September 22 at 8:00 PM in New York City. We’ve got an especially strong line-up this year, including never-before-seen short films, and four filmmakers will join me after for a panel discussion on the art, economics and distribution of short film filmmaking. Here’s the program: Charlotte Glynn’s Immaculate Reception. “Rarely have the complexities and disappointments of young masculine sexuality been so deftly portrayed,” wrote Brandon Harris in his 25 New Face write-up of Glynn and her Rust Belt-set, coming-of-age tale that turns on Franco Harris’s […]
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Eleanor Burke Receives IFP Durga Entertainment Filmmaker Grant
Last Sunday evening at Lincoln Center, Eleanor Burke was awarded the first ever IFP Durga Entertainment Filmmaker Grant, which offers a $20,000 prize to an IFP alum who juggles filmmaking and parenting. Burke attended the 2009 IFP Filmmaker Labs with her debut Stranger Things, and the 2012 No Borders Co-Production Market with Bright as Day, which Burke says is “about an aging anti-social wanderer and a teenage truant who band together to save an abandoned horse.” The script also took part in the Sundance Producing Lab and the Hamptons Screenwriting Lab. Concurrently, Burke is prepping Through and Through, which will participate in the Venice Biennale College Cinema in […]
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Trailer Watch: J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year
J.C. Chandor is a filmmaker who looks to be carving a rather eclectic oeuvre. The near dialogue-less All is Lost was made in direct contrast to the motormouthed Wall Street floors of Margin Call, and his latest, A Most Violent Year, sees Chandor wading into genre waters. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, the film, which is due from A24 in December, tracks a year in the life of an immigrant couple in crime-addled 1981 New York. Your first look is above.
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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 […]
