Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Top Gun: Maverick: What If Colin Powell Wasn’t Lying to the UN?
Held back even longer than No Time to Die, Top Gun: Maverick is the last major film repeatedly delayed by the pandemic to see release. In that time, it’s already taken on multiple unintended resonances, like the irony of this sequel to an uber-patriotic property getting denounced for appeasing communism by Ted Cruz. In December 2020, Cruz took to the Senate floor to decry, among other films proving Hollywood’s unseemly deferral to China, Maverick. Referring—accurately in terms of enrollment rates—to the original as “maybe the greatest Navy recruiting film ever made,” he noted that the Taiwanese flag had been removed from […]
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Ozu on Wheels: DP Florian Hoffmeister on Shooting Kogonada’s Half of Pachinko
The pilot of a series is typically its true north, the aesthetic guiding light of all that follows. However, in the new Apple TV+ series Pachinko, two very different director/cinematographer teams have both been given their own creative compass. Based on the 2017 bestseller, the familial epic unfolds over 70 years, tracing the story of four generations of a Korean immigrant family that settles in Japan following an oppressive occupation. The season’s eight episodes were split evenly between directors Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang) and Justin Chon (Blue Bayou). The filmmakers shared the same crew, camera, sets, costumes and locations, yet […]
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“Eat to Remember”: Audrey Ewell on Her Fiction Series, The Black Seed
In filmmaker Audrey Ewell’s The Black Seed, a woman wakes up in an anonymous corporate-style apartment with no memory of how she got there. Examining her body, it feels somewhat alien to her, as if she’s still suffering the effects of some night-before dissociative drug. Looking out the window, the city below looks peaceful, serene, but also completely depopulated. Where is she? Who is she? The only clue is a note taped to the refrigerator: “THE WORLD ENDED. IT’S NOT SAFE. EAT TO REMEMBER.” With that launches Ewell’s inventive and surprising “fiction series,” which blends a kind of existentialist mystery […]
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On The Making Of 8 Winds: How I Turned An Ancient Buddhist Parable Into A Contemporary No-Budget Political Thriller
How and why What started it all was the 2016 election. I was at the Napa Valley Film Festival showing my documentary The Lost City of Cecil B DeMille, and I remember sitting in my hotel room watching the results come in and being devastated. While in Napa it dawned on me that I had worked on many other people’s films and it was almost two decades since I had made a film of my own. I’d spent much of this time trying to get one particular project made and was not successful. It felt like I was running out […]
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Full Sail University: A Talent Pipeline for the Virtual Production Industry (Sponsored Post)
Following the filming of The Mandalorian, accelerated interest grew in the emerging technologies utilized to create this visually stunning epic. Outside of the creation of the green screen, the virtual production technology behind The Mandalorian is one the most cutting-edge recent creations impacting the industry. In fact, according to Technavio, 46% of the projected USD $1.85B global growth, is expected to come from North America exclusively. The recent popularity and capabilities of virtual production technology could not have come at a more opportune time. Virtual production technology permits film crews and productions to be anywhere in the world with the […]
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Words with Friends: On Writing Accountability Partnerships
When I was in college, my best friend and closest collaborator, Brandon Colvin, told me that most writer-directors make their first feature between the ages of 24 and 36, and that if he didn’t make one before then, he would off himself. Harsh as it is to say, when we were 22 that felt like a world away, and I didn’t fret for him. Brandon has since made three microbudgeted features, all willed into existence with student loans, credit card debt, crowdfunds and a few incredible friends and family angels. Two years ago, I turned 34. While I didn’t take […]
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How Alex Ross Perry and DP Robert Kolodny Made a New Video for Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes”
In 2017, the formerly obscure Pavement B-side “Harness Your Hopes” became their number one track on Spotify. It currently has 70 million plays, over twice the amount of “Cut Your Hair,” the group’s highest charting and arguably most popular song during their original run. At Stereogum, Nate Rogers looked into why exactly “Harness Your Hopes” became as prevalent as it had and all signs point to Spotify’s Autoplay feature, which “cues up music that ‘resembles’ what you’ve just been listening to, based on a series of sonic signifiers too complex to describe.” At this point, “Harness Your Hopes” has crossed […]
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Filmustage, the First AI-Based Automatic Script Breakdown Service, Revolutionizes VFX Industry (Sponsored Post)
Filmustage’s automatic AI-driven web service uses neural networks to speed up script breakdown routine from weeks to minutes. What comes next? Every film project starts with a piece of paper and a script breakdown. Professionals still have to manually go word by word, scene by scene, to break down all the necessary elements for shooting: props, costumes, talents, locations, sound, visual effects. That’s exactly where Filmustage comes into play, with a revolutionary, AI-powered solution that helps filmmakers reduce manual work through the power of modern text processing technology. Filmustage’s neural networks were trained on hundreds of existing, well-formatted scripts to […]
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Written on the Wind, The Devil Strikes at Night, and Dexter: New Blood: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
When German director Douglas Sirk fled the Nazis in 1937 and planted his flag in Hollywood, he quickly became a reliable studio craftsman equally adept at war films (Hitler’s Madman, Mystery Submarine), musicals (Slightly French), comedies (No Room for the Groom, Has Anybody Seen My Gal?) and Westerns (Taza, Son of Cochise). Nevertheless, today his reputation rests almost entirely on the melodramas made in the last five years of his career: movies like Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows, and The Tarnished Angels, whose heightened emotions justify Sirk’s most delirious flights of visual fancy. A brilliant smuggler, Sirk had it […]
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Red Rocket, The Bad News Bears in Basic Training and Claude Chabrol: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
My first recommendations this week are two Blu-rays that are worth picking up not just because they’re terrific movies, but because they come with superb audio commentaries packed with useful information. They’re both comedies, though the first, Sean Baker’s Red Rocket, leaves a bit of a rough aftertaste thanks to the sly way in which Simon Rex’s revelatory performance sneaks up on the viewer. His recent Independent Spirit Award win was well-deserved, as I can’t think of many actors who could have so skillfully walked the line between playfulness and predation; as fading porn star Mikey, Rex beautifully projects an […]
