It’s unlikely many films released this year will lean as heavily on sound design for their overall impact as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name. The director’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth is a warped, haunting melange of sci-fi and cinema vérité which reinvents Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson as a blank-eyed, cold-hearted alien with a cut-glass English accent. The alien shores up in the Scottish highlands and embarks on an implacable quest which involves cruising around in a white van, looking for hapless local men to “seduce.” Under The […]
This is a brief post-mortem on my last interactive live event at a small interactive festival in Miami called FilmGate 2014. Over the past year, I have been focusing on a few core principles in my work. These are not rules, but questions I return to when making a piece of immersive/interactive work. Rules/audience agency. When we go to a movie, we know the rules. Sit in the dark, eat our popcorn, watch. When designing a new experience, it’s important to communicate the rules to your audience so they can let go of their minds and get immersed. Along with this, […]
Emmanuel Lubezki, Christopher Doyle, Bruno Delbonnel, Roger Deakins, Robert Richardson, Janusz Kaminski all in one place? This video, strewn together by editor Erick Lee, features clips from the work of internationally illustrious cinematographers over the past decade. Interestingly, there is very little handheld to be had, with most of the stylized shots achieved on a dolly.
Beginning today, scores of movies are threatened with removal from digital download and streaming sites, including iTunes, due to new FCC closed captioning regulations. The rules, mandated in a January, 2012 revision of 2010’s Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act, require newly acquired movie and other content shown on the internet to be closed captioned if this content was shown on television with closed captioning after September 30, 2012. The rule also affects library titles that are currently or will be shown on television with captions as well as new acquisitions that will be captioned on television in the […]
So you say you’re an artist, but you’re not publishing your stuff? You’re a photographer, but you’re not on Instagram? You’re a writer, but you’re not on Twitter? Well look out buddy, because that just won’t stand. There’s gonna be a documentary about you. I mean what kind of person doesn’t throw themselves at the feet of fame? What kinda weirdo does art for the sake of art and not public adoration? This is too baffling, too inscrutable, too foreign a concept. Not only are we gonna make a movie about you, but we’re also going to dredge up every […]
Last month, I wrote an article about the rise in live supplements to theatrical screenings. Turns out, this is hardly a novel idea. Coolidge Corner, an arthouse theater smack dab in the Boston suburb of Brookline, has been merging the two formats for nine years running. With the help of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Coolidge spearheaded the Science on Screen series, in which selected films are programmed alongside specialists who contextualize the narrative within science and technology, which is not necessarily as straightforward as it sounds. Take, for instance, a recent screening of 8 Mile, which was followed by professors […]
Red Giant has today announced updates to two of their filmmaking software tools. Magic Bullet Looks has become popular with filmmakers who want to do a quick color grade for a project but don’t have the time – or the skill – to use a tool like DaVinci Resolve. This update adds several features, but perhaps of most interest to those who already have the tool is the promise of speed increases of up to 95% on Windows, and 25% on Macs. According to Red Giant, this release was entirely rewritten on their new development platform Universe, which provides GPU accelerated […]
I’m a writer-director/producer with a couple of features under my belt. Since the last one was released (Burning Annie), the world’s economy collapsed, half of the studios’ arthouse labels folded, and the audiences for music, books, and film splintered into a million fragments. At the same time, smartphones and app-culture rose to dominance. My new film Laundry Day is in post. As I warily eye the world that I will be releasing my baby into, I’m somewhat alarmed by the large and growing divide between modern audiences and modern distributors, and how inadequate the trends of the moment are for […]
Yesterday IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced that an annual lab for web series will be added to its existing programs for narrative and documentary films. The Web Storytellers Sidebar, part of IFP’s RBC Emerging Storytellers program, is designed to promote web series through an in-depth consultation during Independent Film Week in September, with additional logistical support extending beyond. Up to five series–in any stage of development, production, or post–will be selected to participate in the conference, which constitutes the largest meetings-based film forum in the United States. As part of their acceptance, the projects also will have exclusive access to additional IFP web series […]
Short films are a peculiar enterprise. They are well regarded as an investment vortex, with nearly zero prospects for return and lots of prospects for expense. Many are made and vanish after a run on the festival circuit, if they are even seen at all. But they are also an essential tool for honing one’s craft, and, given the bitesized format, ripe for cultivating an audience. I was impressed by the intelligence and honesty Jim Cummings displayed in his talk on the digital recession at SXSW, so I asked if he’d be interested in doing a quasi-followup for Filmmaker. Given ornana’s […]