Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Blackmagic Does Manhattan
On August 13 the disruptive Australian company Blackmagic Design took over the Grand Ballroom at the historic New Yorker Hotel at 8th & 34th to showcase their growing stable of switchers, signal converters, encoders, routers, and test equipment along with their latest unorthodox production products: cameras, monitors, disk recorders, and grading/NLE software. Plus a new scanner for film transfer. Call it a make-up day for Northeast media makers who missed out on Blackmagic’s crowded NAB booth this year. Since few companies boast the range of products Blackmagic now produces, no less their erosive pricing, it made good marketing sense to also […]
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ARRI AMIRA To Do 4K, New GoPro Tutorials, and a New 50mm Cine Lens from Samyang
In a move that says a lot about the unrelenting pressure to move to 4K, ARRI has announced that they will release a 4K UHD upgrade for the AMIRA by the end of the year. This upgrade will provide in-camera recording of 3840 x 2160 UHD video at up to 60 fps to CFast cards in ProRes, as well as live uncompressed UHD output through 6G-SDI. For the past year, ARRI has been discouraging the move to 4K, stressing that image quality is more important than the total resolution of the image, and with this announcement they continue this message: […]
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Watch: Gina Telaroli on Smaller Cinema as an Extracurricular
Ricky D’Ambrose consistently runs some of the most revealing, worthwhile video interviews over at MUBI Notebook, and his latest is no exception. This go around, Ambrose converses with Gina Telaroli, one of our brand new 25 New Faces, about her process, the “classic Hollywood system,” and the potential drawbacks of having your hand in too many of the industry’s depleted honeypots. Most significant are Telaroli’s opening remarks: “I think there’s really a lot of people who still have this idea, either filmmakers or film writers, that they will be the person that somehow makes it, that somehow is the genius. […]
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Kickstarter: How to Disappear Completely in 28 Days
Filmmaker regularly offers crowdfunding filmmakers on our curated Kickstarter page the opportunity to write a guest essay about their campaign. Here’s Sasha Solodukhina on the struggles of funding a first-time work, How to Disappear Completely. To learn more about her 30-minute film, visit its Kickstarter page, where the campaign is in its final three days. Unlike Spike Lee, or Charlie Kaufman, or The Coolest Cooler, even unlike the potato salad – I am not yet a product. I have no brand to articulate me, or any kind of large body of work to stand behind. At this point, you have […]
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The 20 Best Non-Fiction Films on Netflix Instant
Netflix’s ever-shifting catalog is subject to sudden deletions and additions, the latter skewed far more to recent fare than a balanced sampling of all film history. Still, careful mining reveals a decent selection of titles to catch up on if you’re one of the company’s 35 million+ U.S. subscribers, including some relatively slept-on films. I cleared away the underwhelming underbrush to find (in alphabetical order) a semi-idiosyncratic selection of the 20 best non-fiction films available for current streaming on Instant. The Act of Killing (2012) Joshua Oppenheimer’s elegantly disturbing investigation into the determinedly suppressed legacy of Indonesia’s 1965-66 mass killings […]
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Should Documentary Films Strive For Social Change?
It’s a widely recognized fact that today’s low-budget independent filmmaker can no longer delight in the luxury of simply getting from development through post. She may be the writer-director, but chances are, she also has a hand in the film’s grassroots publicity efforts and even its release. In the case of documentary film, some are tacking ‘public advocate’ onto their ever-expanding CVs. Aggregate, a Seattle-based policy firm that aims to promote social change, partnered with the True/False Film Festival to survey the 2014 filmmakers on how they saw their films in relation to public policy and advocacy. 56% of participants said they had no plans to conduct […]
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Made in NY Media by IFP Center Announces New Managing Director and Promotions
IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced yesterday that Gordon Ampel, most recently vice president of worldwide operations at Focus Features, has been hired as the Managing Director of the Made in NY Media Center. Ampel’s prior experience includes positions at USA Films and October Films. As the new Managing Director, Ampel will oversee programming, education, marketing, communications, community engagement, creative operations, rentals and hospitality teams at the Center. In its nine months of operation, the Media Center has opened its 20,000 square-foot-space in downtown DUMBO — including co-working spaces, talent incubator, 72-seat screening room, art gallery and café — to more […]
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A Series of Visitations: Alexander Sokurov’s Days of Eclipse
The Strugatsky brothers novel upon which Alexander Sokurov’s 1988 Days of Eclipse is based has the following fairly mind-blowing premise: a group of scientists in Moscow find their research in various fields frustrated by inexplicable events, and conclude that the universe is deliberately sabotaging them in an attempt to preserve its mysteries. Sokurov’s film has plenty of the inexplicable but none of this throughline — it’s parsable only with difficulty and guidance from external sources — and relocates the settting from St. Petersburg to Krasnovodsk, Turkmenistan. Krasnovodsk is now Türkmenbaşy, having reclaimed an indigenous name in the post-Soviet era. This […]
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Stray Links, 8/18-8/21: Orson Welles’ First Film is Online and Chinese Film History
This week’s round-up of suggested reading is all film-related for a change: • The China Digital Times conducts a long, fascinating interview with Paul Pickowicz, an authority on Chinese cinema who talks about studying film in China from 1982-83 as an “unwelcome guest,” shifting trends in national anxieties as expressed on-screen through the decades, how long-dead political affiliations shape the government’s choice of which films from pre-1949 to promote as canonical, and much more. It may be the most interesting film-related thing I’ve read all week. • Kurmanzhan Datka: Queen of the Mountains, a Kyrgyzstani epic about a 19th-century hero, […]
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Watch: Martin Scorsese on The Films of Rossellini, Cassavetes, Minnelli and More
More than any other American director working today, Martin Scorsese retains perhaps the most encyclopedic set of knowledge when it comes to his cinematic forbearers. Two years ago, Fast Company distilled 85 references made throughout the course of a four hour interview on Hugo, and dubbed it “Martin Scorsese’s Film School.” Flavorpill went ahead and paired the majority of those titles with pre-existing commentary from the filmmaker’s documentaries, A Personal Journey Through American Movies and My Voyage to Italy, to create a comprehensive video essay. Watch above for Scorsese’s insight into everything from Two Weeks in Another Town to Faces, Italian Neo-Realism (Rossellini) to pre-noir gangster films (Walsh), and much more.
