Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Don’t Read This! 5 Things I Learned about Directing and Shooting a No-Budget Feature Film in an African Village
I’m not writing this for the careerists. For the ones just looking for an edge, for a way in, who think they have an idea that can sell and are poking for a soft spot in the walled city. If that’s you, you can stop reading now. Hell, just stop. I’m writing for the hopeless lot who scramble for meaning. Who care about what’s in the box, not the pretty package. Who care about result, impact, and why people and societies do the things they do. This is why we shot a movie over four months in a remote Ghanaian […]
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The Cost of Being an Independent Filmmaker
Scrolling through Twitter yesterday, I came across an interesting bit of data from the programmer-critic Miriam Bale that extended beyond the usual 140 characters. Linking to an external app, Bale drew up a breakdown of what she calls “the cost to have an indie film career.” Stipulating that most independent filmmakers finance at least a portion of their work, in addition to their basic living expenses, it would take about $119,112 to sustain four years of a “career.” Bale also postulates that working a full time gig at $12/hour, you could save around $3,072 a year, for the next 39 years, before […]
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IFFBoston: How Do You Interview Subjects?
At this year’s Independent Film Festival Boston, the panel “The Art of Documentary Film Editing: Case Studies” featured moderator Jim Hession, editor of Rich Hill, Lucia Small, director and editor of One Cut, One Life and Bryan Storkel, editor of Fight Church. An audience member asked the panel how they interviewed people and whether they prepped them beforehand, adding “Whenever I interview people, they’re always really bad talking to the camera.” Storkel: I try and do as little prep as possible. I try to show up and just start talking and get to know them on camera. I’ll have my questions […]
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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 […]
