Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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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 […]
