Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Trailer Watch: Justin Simien’s Dear White People
Dear White People was unsurprisingly divisive at Sundance, where some viewers questioned what they saw as its muddled provocations. Sight unseen, however, this just released trailer makes the film’s aims and strategies rather apparent. Directed by Justin Simien, the satire follows the experiences of four Black students at a predominately White university. With only a few shorts to his name, Simien’s brilliant concept trailer — whose opening is quoted almost verbatim in the above trailer — went viral, sparking a widespread debate and healthy Indiegogo campaign. It’s an exemplary instance of pre-production marketing, and Simien was able to follow through on its promise. Dear White People will […]
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Teasers, Extras, & Deluxe Editions: Protips from Indie Game Director Lisanne Pajot
The following guest post by Indie Game director Lisanne Pajot was supplied by VHX. — Editor VHX is an internet distribution platform built for premium video that empowers artists to sell their work from their own websites. The company has enlisted Lisanne Pajot, co-director of Indie Game: The Movie, as their first Filmmaker Ambassador, providing guidance and tips for filmmakers for selling their films online directly to audiences. In the following post, Lisanne discusses the importance of deluxe editions. As a VHX Filmmaker Ambassador, I talk to creators everyday. I am often asked: “What should I use as a teaser?” “How many minutes of extras should I include?” “What kind of content should be in my Deluxe […]
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Jordana Spiro at the Sundance Directors Lab
A little while ago I was sent an email asking me to write this blog sharing my experience at the Sundance Directors Lab. I pretended I didn’t receive it. Communicating in first person without a script is not fun for me. As an actress, I am comfortable doing things in front of a crowd, and I ventured into writing/directing because my longing to express myself is strong. However, to do so without it being through something like the mechanism of film can turn me into a jumble of over-thinking nerves and desire to be liked. Fearlessness is a sexy, powerful […]
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Johnny Ma at the Sundance Directors Lab
It’s Sunday morning, a rare day off during the Sundance Directors Lab to sleep in. Yet once again as the sunlight fills my room at the crack of dawn, I’m wide awake and my mind is ready to go. Back home, whether it is LA, NY, or Shanghai, I am rarely up before 10 am unless it’s a shoot day or I have to meet someone in the real world. However, up here on the mountain, I found a version of myself that didn’t need to check my emails and Facebook or keep up with the latest Buzzfeed post to […]
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Information Overload: Kevin B. Lee’s Transformers: The Premake
Kevin Lee (a longtime friend, full disclosure) has earned a heady reputation online and in academic circles for video essays like his much-circulated dossier on “The Spielberg Face” that rearrange film history’s visual building blocks and understood components. His latest film views the forthcoming Transformers: Age Of Extinction from every angle but head-on. The starting premise of this “premake” is a new phenomenon I hadn’t considered: if everyone has a smartphone, then a counter-promotional EPK can be easily assembled from the variety of surplus (ancillary?) documentation available online. With its wide spread of locales and very public filming, Transformers generated […]
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Sound Design and Silence in the Work of Martin Scorsese
This effectively concise visual essay from Tony Zhou examines the significance of silence in the films of Martin Scorsese and modern cinema at large. From Raging Bull, in which Scorsese combines a dolly zoom with a hollowing “numbing effect, as if you’re hit in the ear too many times,” to the iconic Goodfellas scene where Joe Pesci comically dupes Ray Liotta, Zhou considers how silence is consistently “derived from character…[which] lets the director build a full cinematic structure around sound.” Sound, for Scorsese, is no mere secondary player but rather a device to develop thematic and situational texture, like how the violence in Raging Bull‘s ring is […]
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Watch: 45 Minutes of Jean-Luc Godard on Goodbye to Language
Canon Europe recently conducted a 45 minute interview with Jean-Luc Godard on Goodbye to Language and the resulting conversation is pretty incredible. One could parse through the exchange for hours, but it’s best to watch for yourself and hear Godard on the everything from the melancholic underpinnings of “SMS,” the boundary-less nature of 3D, the fickle ways of language (“montage” vs. “editing”) and exploiting spatial imbalances (the creation of reverse shots). The interview also features a few short clips from Goodbye to Language and the following comment on its title: “When I say ‘farewell’ to language, it really means ‘farewell,’ meaning to say goodbye to […]
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Scenes of a Crime Subject Adrian Thomas Found Not Guilty, Released From Jail
In the activist vein of The Thin Blue Line and the Paradise Lost trilogy, documentarians Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh’s Scenes of a Crime investigated the coerced confession of Adrian Thomas, a father convicted of killing his infant son after ten hours of rough interrogation. The evidence pointed to the baby dying of sepsis (a full-body bacterial blood infection), but Thomas was convicted and incarcerated regardless. The film played in theaters in 2012 after winning the Filmmaker-sponsored Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You IFP Gotham Award. “We’ve all heard stories about false confessions and those triggered us […]
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Give the People What They Want: Niche Web Series as Sustainable Filmmaking
Like many filmmakers, early in our career we were seduced by dreams of showing our first feature at Sundance or SXSW; rubbing elbows with Debra Granik, Lena Dunham, or maybe even Michel Gondry; and, soon after, signing on for our very own series with HBO (or a three-picture deal with Magnolia…we weren’t picky). But while waiting for the acceptance letters that would change our lives forever, we decided to dive into Web 2.0 and became our own homegrown social media marketing machine, the digital version of a mom-n-pop gas station, complete with the perfect snacks, a foreboding bathroom with surprisingly […]
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Five Questions for Recommended by Enrique‘s Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia
Director Rania Attieh was born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and her partner Daniel Garcia grew up in South Texas. Their first feature together, Okay, Enough, Goodbye crisscrossed Attieh’s hometown, canvassing 30 locations in 40 days to create a story, they say, that is a “love/hate relationship with the city itself.” So, after that feature won plaudits on the festival circuit — and landed the two on Filmmaker‘s 2011 25 New Faces list — it seems only appropriate that they head to Texas for their follow-up. Premiering tonight at the Los Angeles Film Festival, Recommended by Enrique is described as “a tale […]
