Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Movies Without Cuts: A Scientist’s Experiments to Expand Cinema’s Language
A few days ago at Pacific Standard, Jennifer Ouellette profiled Sergei Gepshtein, a neuroscientist with a dream: to eliminate cutting from movies as much as possible. Gephstein studies human perception and the window of visibility. What Gephstein’s doing is tracking how human eyes respond to basic images: the visual example you can see in the profile concerns a series of lines forming the shape of a cube. The brain has to sort out whether it’s “seeing” the cube from above or below. “Either orientation can be discerned in the original image, but the brain cannot see both at once,” Oullette […]
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Visual Mixtape: Elisabeth Holm on the Kickstarter Film Festival
The crowdfunding boom has proved an altogether blessing for entrepreneurism, artists and consumers alike, with the role of sites like Kickstarter now extending beyond a helpful platform and into the campaign afterlife. While some competitors are adopting distribution pathways, Kickstarter culls their most prized projects into a festival lineup for added exposure. Submissions are currently open (through May 14) for the Kickstarter Film Festival’s fourth iteration, for which any successfully funded, recently completed projects are eligible. And not just films. Last year’s fest featured several food options, music and artwork, in addition to notable docs like 12 O’Clock Boys, Everybody Street and Flex is Kings. Filmmaker spoke to […]
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Video: Michael Douglas Hails Saul Zaentz for the “Make Your Mark” Producer Competition
Actor Michael Douglas pays tribute to legendary producer Saul Zaentz (The English Patient, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), who passed away earlier this year, in a video presented last week at the New York launch event for “Make Your Mark,” a short film competition for emerging film producers by the Producers Guild of America and Cadillac. Douglas serves as one of the competition’s judges and will help select the winning short film, an excerpt of which will be screened in a :30 Cadillac spot appearing on next year’s Academy Awards broadcast. Douglas made the video statement for the event, […]
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Five Questions with Güeros Director Alonso Ruizpalacios
Much like the counter-movement it depicts, Alonso Ruizpalacios’ Güeros is built upon a series of elements that slyly double back on one another. Smartphones in 1999, remnants of behind the scenes footage to break the third wall, a road trip through town, and handheld camerawork to counteract otherwise formal rigor all comprise this tale of three young men in the midst of a Mexico City National University upheaval. Troublemaker Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre) is sent South by his mother to live with his dissident, often lackadaisical brother Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) and his best friend Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris). Wasting the days away in their concrete compound, the three become […]
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A Conversation with Mentor Director Alix Lambert
“It’s Better in Mentor.” A shot of that roadside sign offers an early irony in director Alix Lambert’s new documentary, named after the Ohio town — and high school — where five students committed suicide between 2005 and 2010. Focusing on two families who brought lawsuits against Mentor High, alleging that its administration ignored a clear pattern of student bullying that led to the deaths of their children, Mentor is both heartbreaking and soberly resolute in its inquiry into the institutional forces and “culture of conformity” that fail young members of our communities. As she has done in her previous […]
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Moebius Unravelled: Magic Words (Breaking a Spell)
Inside out … Upside down … And round and round “Upside Down” (1980), Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards The wildly suggestive lyrics are sexy all right, but they also suit the vertiginous push and pull (sorry) of Mercedes Moncada’s intense cinematic duel between a) the history and legacy of the Sandinista movement in her native Nicaragua; and b) her recollection of the heavy emotional baggage she has carried since its inception. The description of a political event or a collective mood may trigger remembrance; inversely, affective recall might precipitate concrete reconstruction. The logic of memory rules, so that the order […]
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The One-Cam: Under the Skin’s Customized CCD Camera
Eventually we’ll stop posting about Under The Skin but today is not that day. Last month, I ran a featurette from A24 about the film’s guerrilla style execution. The production rigged Johansson’s vehicle with eight hidden cameras, recording her improvised interactions with any given passerby in real time and with maximum coverage. Now, we have yet another featurette that gets into the specifications of said cameras, called “One-Cams,” which were developed especially for the occasion. For the van sequences, the VFX studio One of Us rigged a CCD camera (about the size of a GoPro) with anamorphic super 16 lenses. Though the rest of the […]
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IFFBoston: Five Questions for Fight Church Director and Editor Bryan Storkel
The documentary Fight Church looks at the intersection of Christianity and mixed martial arts, and how pastors training fighters can reconcile their faith with a violent sport. The film premiered at IFFBoston. Co-director and editor Bryan Storkel previously directed and edited Holy Rollers: The True Story of Card Counting Christians, which examined a devout blackjack team. Filmmaker: How did you get into filmmaking? Storkel: I went to school for media, but I never made my own stuff until after I really became a fan of documentaries. I started watching documentaries and going to film festivals. I think I went to […]
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4 Observations from a First Time NAB Experience
This was my first year at the gear-head mecca of NAB. It definitely did not disappoint, and I had a blast attending, checking out new gear (which you can see a list of here) and finally meeting some people I’ve only had contact with in the online world. Here are some of my overall impressions about what I saw (or didn’t see) on the showroom floor and the conference itself. Very Few Surprises and Not a Whole Lot of New 4K The #1 question I keep getting asked is, “What was the best thing you saw?” And I really don’t […]
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DJ /Rupture Releases a Mixtape Tied to Harvard Friend Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing
Yesterday Pitchfork Media posted a downloadable mixtape created as a “musical response” to Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing by the rightly well-regarded DJ /Rupture. Stage Boundary Songs is a terrific 53 minutes and 50 seconds of (largely) Indonesian music old and new interspersed with poetry by Wiji Thukul, a poet believed to have been “disappeared” by the Suharto regime in 1998. Last December, Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) wrote a brief blog post cheering on Killing, noting that acclaim for the film was “particularly delightful” because “Josh and I went to college together, and for a year or two we […]
