Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Robert Herrera on the App and Distribution of the Basketball Documentary The Gray Seasons
It’s been two full decades since Hoop Dreams, but any basketball documentary is still bound to be compared to that iconic film. Still, technological changes over those 20 years beg the question of how Steve James and Kartemquin Film would handle distributing the film today. When director Robert Herrera was faced with the same challenge for his new film The Gray Seasons, about the women’s basketball team at St. Louis University, he struck upon a series of festival screenings, simultaneous cable PPV and VOD (via Vimeo on Demand) availability, and finally a DVD release and iOS app that encapsulates much of […]
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A 558-Day Timeline? Maxing out the New Mac Pro and Final Cut Pro X
The folks at FCP.co have detailed a series of tests designed to push their new Mac Pro hardware and Final Cut Pro X software to their breaking point. In one, they layer over 1,000 tracks in 4K. In another, they create a 500,000-pixel wide timeline. And in the final, they create and scroll through a 558-day timeline. Here, from FCP.co, are their conclusions: We pushed FCPX and the Mac Pro to silly limits, of course nobody will make a year long or a 500,000 pixel wide timeline, but it’s good to know the combination will go that far. It seems […]
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Why You Should Apply to the IFP Narrative Lab
The deadline to apply for the 2014 IFP Narrative Lab, April 4, is coming soon, and in advance of that deadline, I thought I’d write some words about my debut feature Something, Anything being selected for last year’s Lab, what happens in the first week of the Lab, and things to consider if you plan on applying. And let’s be clear: If you’re working on your first feature you should apply. * * * In Spring 2012, producer Ashley Maynor and I set our sights on applying to the IFP Lab when we were halfway through shooting Something, Anything, which […]
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Reimagining an ID: Sound & Vision
Television stations – like distribution and production companies – can have a lot invested in their IDs. They represent the brand in the mind of the consumer. In 1972, WGBH created a station ID with a logo sting by Gershon Kingsley. That sound has become closely associated with WGBH, and they’ve made several updated IDs using that original Moog synthesizer sound through the years. Paul Sanni, an editor for the Creative Services department and the Masterpiece series at WGBH has twice worked on revisions of the ID. Sanni has a background in audio and video and for the latest version […]
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Five Things Not To Do When Shooting a No-Budget Film By Yourself (And Why I Did Them Anyway)
D.P. Sean Porter’s credits include Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, Eden and, opening on Friday at the IFC Center, Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love. Here he contributes a guest blog post on the latter film, listing the five rules he made for himself that he wound up breaking when shooting this highly recommended micro-budget picture. 1. Use other movies as references in preproduction. When I sat down to prep It Felt Like Love with Eliza Hittman the first thing we did was talk about movies. It makes sense — it’s the most direct way discuss tone, lighting, framing and style. […]
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Leah Warshawski on Connecting the Rwandan Film Industry
Last Friday the African news site AllAfrica.com published a lengthy story on the growth and maturation of the Rwandan film industry since the Tutsi genocide of 1994. Coming from a place of inter-tribal distrust and decimated infrastructure, filmmakers, like others in the country, got to work rebuilding their country, their pride, and their national image. In the immediate aftermath of the genocide many films understandably dealt with it as subject matter (think Italian neorealism springing up in the wake of the Allied tanks), but in the ensuing 20 years filmmakers have created a space to tell other stories and redefine […]
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Supercut Shows the Evolution of the Movie Camera, from Hand-Cranked to Google Glass
For the Society of Camera Operators 2014 Lifetime Achievement Awards Bob Joyce edited this supercut showing, in just under four minutes, the evolution of the movie camera, from the box-y instruments used by the Lumiere Brothers through massive 70mm rigs to, more recently, tiny handheld and wearable devices. Indeed, what’s fascinating here are the alternations of large and small. For much of cinema’s lifetime, there was a push-pull going on, with larger units enabling better picture quality and resolution while, simultaneously, smaller cameras were developed enabling greater mobility. But, as the piece shows, with technological developments these two trendlines may […]
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In the Soup Director Alexandre Rockwell on Kickstarter, Creative Fundraising and the Return of Personal Filmmaking
This guest post by Alexandre Rockwell is published as his Kickstarter campaign to support finishing costs of his latest feature, Little Feet, launches. You can learn more and donate here at the link. “An old dog learning new tricks.” That’s what a pal of mine said to me the other day, and I could not disagree more. I never have seen myself as an old dog and “new tricks” are what I have had to constantly seek out to keep making handmade films over the years. Continuously reinventing oneself and jumping into the fire over and over is either insanity […]
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The Truth, The Horror: Eliza Hittman on It Felt Like Love
“If you happen to know a brave fifteen-year-old, that’s not too embarrassed to act in an emotional teenage role, that deals with things teenagers deal with — please have her contact me. Most of the kids I’ve been seeing can only handle a part that’s an idealized version of how they want to be perceived. It’s kind of incredible that parents would let their children perform in some totally exploitative slasher movie, but tense up at the opportunity to be a part of a fictional yet emotionally truthful coming-of-age film.” * * * Eliza Hittman posted the aforementioned on the […]
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WorkingIndie.com: A New Way to Network
When I was in film school in 2004, we spent a lot of time flipping through binders of head shots and reading resumes on sheets of paper. As the Internet revolutionized social networking and sites like Shooting People and Mandy.com got filmmakers’ and actors’ information online, the casting and crewing process was turned upside-down, and definitely for the better. But there are still limitations to what the Internet can do. The main problem is penetration, getting everyone on the same network; second to that is searchability, being able to find the right people who are on the network you’re already […]
