Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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PowerPoint Transmedia: Choose Your Own Documentary
The Storyscapes section of the Tribeca Film Festival this year was a bit like an oversized playground. Housed in multiple stories of a lofty Tribeca building, the transmedia installations were interspersed with Bombay toting waiters and bars. The majority of the exhibitions I took part in involved Oculus Rift: if you angled your head just so, the “camera” would pan accordingly to reveal another person, object, space, et cetera, much like a video game. One selection that I was sad to miss was Choose Your Own Documentary, which was slotted four times during Storyscapes, since it was not just a transmedia documentary but also a live, interactive show. 1566 variations of Chose Your Own […]
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“25 New Face” Ian Clark Streams MMXIII and Talks its Online Distribution
Last February, Filmmaker exclusively streamed for several days the latest feature from 25 New Face Ian Clark, MMXIII. For what is an experimental film, streaming here and, in the following weeks, on other sites was also an experiment in distribution. As he now reposts MMXIII online for viewing by all, Clark submitted the below comments when we asked him for a post mortem on his internet distribution endeavor. Watch the film above and visit Clark at his website here. I think its fair to say that this has been the most fulfilling project I’ve completed to date, both in terms […]
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“Muscle Memory without Emotion”: The Rise of the Action DP
Shifts in technology and global film production over the last several years have greatly impacted action films. Technology like the Canon 5D changed the game. More affordable and smaller HD cameras, as well as cheaper editing systems, have enabled many stunt performers and cinematographers to collaborate on and innovate new images together. This in turn has created a recent hybrid in action movies — the action DP, someone who specializes in shooting action, with a background in cinematography and stunts or action of some sort. I came to shooting action through my own personal background. For me, it was a […]
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Trailer Watch: Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs
Venice Grand Jury Prize winner and all around critical favorite Stray Dogs will be making its way into American theaters sometime this year, courtesy of Cinema Guild. Here’s an early look at the film, via a Unifrance trailer, which centers on a homeless family in Taipei. There’s little plot to tell of, as director Tsai Ming-liang prefers to relate his characters’ circumstance through series of unbroken, often excruciating takes: a scene in which the father, ashamed at his inability to provide, role plays caregiver and destroyer with a head of cabbage is particularly striking. As a Cinema-Scope review noted, Ming-liang’s austerity can […]
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Shame and Strippers: A Guest Post from Dallas Project Director Poppy de Villeneuve
The Dallas Project is a film by Poppy de Villeneuve and Chloe Hall. It explores the vast and consuming strip club world of Dallas, Texas and the paradoxical lives of the people that make it turn. Below is a guest blog by female director Poppy de Villeneuve on making a film about women in an underrepresented and highly gendered industry. The Dallas Project is raising production and finishing funds for their film through Indiegogo. I am in a moment in my life where I question what it means to be a woman at work. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone […]
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Watch: Projection Mapping and Creating the “Beam of Light” Illusion from Metropolis
Shanks FX’s latest instructional video centers on the in-camera effect of projection mapping. Beginning with the “beam of light ” effect, created by cinematographer and VFX artist Eugen Schüfftan (Metropolis, Eyes Without a Face), Joey Shanks demonstrates how with a camera, a one way mirror, a projector and a computer at the controls, you can create the illusion of a three-dimensional conic light. Shanks also explains how to render a light tunnel on an one-dimensional black board. Good low-budget techniques to keep in your backpocket for sci-fi, dream sequences and the like.
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Lodge Kerrigan, Amy Seimetz to Direct Starz Series Based on Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience
Independent filmmakers Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz will write and direct a Starz cable series, The Girlfriend Experience, based on Steven Soderbergh’s 2009 film. The two also executive produce along with Soderbergh and Philip Fleishman. In Soderbergh’s feature, Sasha Grey starred as a high-priced escort providing a “GFE” — emotional intimacy along with sex. The new series will consist of 13 half-hour scripted episodes. Soderbergh and Kerrigan have worked together before, with the former producing the latter’s Keane. And Seimetz, director of Sun Don’t Shine, was one of four filmmakers cited by Soderbergh at his 2013 San Francisco Film Society […]
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Test Footage from the ARRI AMIRA
Last September, ARRI introduced the AMIRA, a relatively inexpensive cousin (at $40,000+) to the manufacturer’s near industry standard, ALEXA. Though the resolution is 2K, the AMIRA shares the same sensor as the ALEXA, so its footage maintains some filmic consistency. Designed for documentary and television work, Cinema 5D notes in their review that the AMIRA may be best suited to small crews with mostly handheld cinematography. And, as suspected, it’s far heavier and larger than its competitors in Canon’s C100/C300/C500 series, or any DSLR. The images nevertheless speak for themselves.
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Cool Sounds from the Vault: A Cinematic Detective Story
Editor’s note: We originally ran this story about the resurrection of Sidney J. Furie’s Canadian independent feature film A Cool Sound from Hell (1959) in June 2014. Now, as Daniel Kremer‘s biography Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films finally hits the book stands, we are rerunning the article in a slightly updated and revised form. Kremer‘s book, the first ever written about Sidney J. Furie, features never-before-recorded stories about working with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Peter O’Toole, Robert Redford, and many others. Having a “Scorsese moment” could mean many things. If you walk into a bar feeling like the flurry of activity around […]
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Coherence: Puzzles and Feelings in Los Angeles
Eight friends gather for a dinner party. They interrupt each other with trivial anecdotes and laugh ceaselessly while refilling their wine glasses, their would-be long-established intimacy coming off as desperate collusion to pretend all concerned are having a grand time even though anxiety is the dominant undertone. Coherence first plays like an especially annoying slice of Los Angeles life about glossy, well-groomed people getting on each other’s nerves, both in relation to their romantic partners and in a sexually neutral-ish social context — i.e., it looks like jobbing but lesser-known professional actors (mostly) pretending, not all that successfully, that they’re […]
