Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Here Comes the ARRI AMIRA
ARRI has met with some success in digital filmmaking with their ALEXA camera. As just one indication of their dominance, the ALEXA was used on three-quarters of this year’s Best Picture nominees. It’s been praised for its image quality, ease of use and ruggedness. But it’s not cheap, and it’s not light. ARRI last year announced the AMIRA, and described it as a documentary camera. It’s smaller and lighter than the ALEXA, but if you were hoping for a significantly cheaper camera, you’ll be disappointed; the base AMIRA is $39,999. For those on a budget, renting the camera remains the […]
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Watch David Lynch’s Animated 2002 Series Dumbland
Shortly after the release of his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, David Lynch took a little downtime to create an early incarnation of the webseries: the aptly titled Dumbland. A profane series of vignettes centered around an irascible man, the bizarrely hilarious episodes feature Lynch’s own chicken scratch and characteristically strong sound design. You can watch all eight of them above, and be sure to stick around for the dancing ants featured in the final episode.
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“Constraint as Liberation”: Nicholas Rombes Publishes 10/40/70
Nicholas Rombes’s “10/40/70” series is one of the freshest, most boundary-pushing bouts of film criticism in years, a collection of essays on films analyzing only the content of single frames occurring at the ten, 40 and 70-minute marks. Originally published, at The Rumpus, they are now published in 10/40/70: Constraint as Liberation in the Era of Digital Film Theory, an essential collection from Zero Books. The book is prefaced with an apt quote from Jean Baudrillard: “As for ideas, everyone has them. What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis.” That singularity is here in ample supply, as Rombes’s […]
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How To Sell Your Movie at AFM: Unconventional Tips From the Moonshine Kingdom Team
If making a movie seems like a Herculean task, selling it can be even harder. You have to work festivals, industry contacts and many other avenues in the hope of finding a buyer. When Mooshine Kingdom‘s director Milton Horowitz and cinematographer Ryan Forte went to American Film Market (AFM), they decided to take a slightly different approach by going as exhibitors rather than as filmmakers. “I noticed that it said if you go as an exhibitor, you get access to the buyers list,” Horowitz says. “We thought, ‘That’s what we need, we need the buyers list.’” Though it was more […]
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Finding Teaching Jobs: A Few Thoughts about Teaching Work for Independent Filmmakers
I’ve been teaching film at different southern California colleges for the past nine years, and it has occurred to me recently that the landscape has changed. It has always been competitive, but it has become even more so. When I first started, finding work as an adjunct was difficult but possible, especially if you had relationships at film schools that needed part-time help. One of the dirty little secrets of higher education is that colleges are often DESPERATE for adjunct faculty, and will madly scramble for any warm body at the beginning of a semester. However, like everything else, when […]
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Reviews and an NSFW Trailer for Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York
Abel Ferrara’s Welcome to New York is set to screen in the Cannes market on the 17th — the same day it will be released on VOD in France. No word yet on the date of the U.S. IFC release, but our appetite is whetted by a new, very NSFW trailer found on Italian television that beats the rather prosaic one that dropped online a few days ago. Watch it below. The trade reviews are out too, which suggest the film revisits the intensity of Ferrara’s classic Bad Lieutenant even as it also explores the actor/role psychodrama of Dangerous Game. […]
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Sound Bleed and Trailers From Hell: Five New(ish) Aspects of the Multiplex Experience
The onset of summer movie season traditionally regularly journalistic notes on the current state of multiplex moviegoing, with a heavy emphasis on the incivility of unrepentant talkers and wielders of mobile devices. Serious consideration of the changing experiential aspects of normal multiplex visits are few and far-between; though my perspective is skewed by the particulars of mostly attending NYC’s multiplexes, some newish norms seem worth noting. Special screenings and parallel tracks are unignorable, even if not attending them According to Dealflicks (a sort of Priceline for discounted movie tickets), 88% of movie theaters are empty. High ticket prices and worry […]
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Economical Storytelling at the MINY Media Center by IFP Demo Day
Given the bullpen of entrepreneurial ventures populating its space, it seemed only fitting that the MINY Media Center by IFP would have an inaugural demo day. At their campus in Dumbo, Brooklyn last Thursday, four of the Media Center’s “incubators” offered a ten-minute pitch before fielding questions from a panel of experts — a first from all two of the demo days I’ve attended, that proved a welcome inclusion. The central undercurrent running across the four startups’ presentations was economical storytelling, or, how to tell stories in the most effective manner possible. Blank on Blank, the brainchild of media producer David Gerlach, […]
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Distributing the Cause of Dam Removal: Patagonia’s Push for DamNation
Arriving in theaters this weekend following its SXSW premiere is DamNation, Ben Knight and Travis Rummel’s ecological advocacy documentary supporting the removal of obsolete dams. Funded and distributed by Patagonia — and the winner of SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight Audience Award — DamNation and its release are a study, says Sub-Genre’s Brian Newman, in “how a brand can use film to create impact.” Newman is the film’s marketing and distribution consultant, and along with the company and other partners he’s implementing an innovative campaign employing Patagonia’s customer base, collapsed release windows, partnerships with affinity groups and the old-fashioned hustling of DVDs. […]
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Share Your Life with a Stranger… for 20 Days
Anonymity is hot at the moment, with Secret gaining followers while anonymity fails — like Snapchat’s recent troubles — make front page news. As always, the key to catching a trend wave is to work the interstices and margins — to find the subtleties that will result in something new. With a particular storytelling flair, MIT Media Lab’s Playful Systems Group appears to have done that with a new app, 20 Day Stranger. Currently seeking beta testers, the app tells a personal story that places you in your own version of films like Hank and Asha or even The Double […]
