Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“Who the Hell is From Maine?”: Director Lance Edmands on Bluebird and Regional Specificity
I still have a Maine driver’s license, even though I’ve lived in Brooklyn for more than a decade now. When it comes up for renewal every few years, I travel back to the DMV in the town where I grew up and dutifully pose for a new photograph. People think this is crazy (and illegal) and I suppose they’re right, but it means a lot to me to be identified as a Mainer. When I get carded at a bar, the bouncer will take one look at my ID and inevitably say something like, “Maine? Who the hell is from […]
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Behind-the-Scenes of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’s Digital Restoration
In conjunction with the release of The Essential Jacques Demy box set, Criterion has offered up a supplemental look inside the 2013 digital restoration of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Above, Agnès Varda, the couple’s children, Mathieu and Rosalie, and technical specialists discuss the intricacies of upgrading the film’s sound, color, and image for the modern viewer. It’s depressingly easy to see why so many films fall by the wayside as prints run obsolete, and digital projection cements its spot as the industry standard. The attention to detail is, as Criterion notes, painstaking, to say nothing of the expense.
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Lauren Wolkstein Talks Stony Brook Southampton and Killer Films’ 20/20/20 Filmmaking Intensive
Stony Brook Southampton’s 20/20/20 intensive filmmaking course offers participating students an opportunity to learn the practical and technical tricks of the trade from Killer Films’ Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler. Over the course of 20 weeks, the graduate-level program pairs lecture-style master classes from Killer and visiting filmmakers like Todd Haynes with development and production workshops so that each writer-director walks away with her own completed short at the end of a 20-day boot camp. Lauren Wolkstein, one of our 2013 25 New Faces of Film, reprises her role this summer as a 20/20/20 mentor for the workshop phase, and spoke […]
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Sympathy, Said the Shark: Shooting in POV
Writer, director and editor Devin Lawrence says that when he set out to make Sympathy, Said the Shark he’d already gone through two projects which had stalled out due to lack of financing, so he decided he had to come up with something where “money can no longer be the ultimate road block.” The resulting project was shot in 14 days and primarily in one location, but it was by no means a simple project to make as much of it was shot using a POV rig built around the Blackmagic Pocket Camera. Lawrence, who works in LA primarily as […]
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(T)ERROR Co-Directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe at the Sundance Labs
[Below, co-directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe share their experiences at the Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Labs. For more background on the team, read our 25 New Faces profile from last year.] Lyric: I have closely known the main character of our film for 12 years, and have witnessed, firsthand, many of the salient moments of his lengthy career as an FBI counterterrorism informant. We met while he was active in two separate international and domestic sting operations, and our trusting relationship has always been complicated by both government surveillance and the turbulence of his past. Because of his […]
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25 New Faces of Film 2014
Click here to see Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Film 2014.
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“It’s Just a General”: How to Take a General Meeting
At some point in your career, things are going to break your way — you’ll be lucky enough to have your crowdfunded labor of love generate some heat at a big festival. Or your short film will go viral. Or maybe you’ll sell a hot spec or make the Black List. Whatever happens, you’ll land managers and agents, and people in L.A. will want to meet you — and not a minute too soon, because you’re four months behind on rent and need to pay for T-shirts for all your backers. It’s time to meet studio execs looking to hire […]
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Super 8
1 Blockchain If a group of computer scientists and financial technicians are right, the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto’s most-celebrated creation may not be a peer-to-peer technology that lets you buy online contraband — Bitcoin — but rather its underlying invention. The blockchain is a shared transaction database that permits verification without a centralized authority, and VC funds such as Union Square Ventures are already predicting the computer science breakthrough will revolutionize everything from banking to voting to the law. 2 You Won’t Remember Dying Recorded in a single day in 1971, this under-known deep cut from the psych-rock vaults was the […]
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Note This! How to Successfully — and Thankfully — Receive Notes on Your Film or Screenplay
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times — once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.” – Bernard Malamud “Relax and take notes, while I take tokes.” – Notorious B.I.G. I was once at a work-in-progress screening of an independent film for which we were asked to give notes. It was a long cut, and we’d all come out in the rain. After the screening, the director sat by himself near us. When someone addressed him directly, he […]
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Tall Enough and The Short Films of Barry Jenkins
In an article by Esther Robinson in our upcoming Summer issue, Barry Jenkins speaks to the delicate work-work balance incurred by many a filmmaker — that is to say, what he does to financially support his filmmaking career, and how that job tends to detract from passion projects. Jenkins is fortunate enough that his particular day job, as ringleader of the production company Strike Anywhere, allows him to regularly create content, even if of the branded and not feature-length variety. Over at Fandor, resident video essayist Kevin Lee takes a look at Strike Anywhere’s catalogue, and the work Jenkins has produced in the six […]
