Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Five Questions With Open Windows Director Nacho Vigalondo
Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo is criminally underappreciated in the States, dating back to his brilliantly circuitous 2007 debut Timecrimes. Hopefully that wrong rights itself with Open Windows, a film that manages to take place entirely within the screen of a consumer laptop. Elijah Wood stars as Nick, a sweet-cheeked fanboy who, through an online contest, wins a date with current It Girl Jill Goddard (Sasha Grey.) But she cancels. Instead, Nick gets a phone call from a fed-up admin for her website, who remotely connects Nick’s laptop to Jill’s cellphone, offering a bit of peep-show revenge as a consolation prize. This means […]
-
“That’s My Brain On Screen…”: Rachel Boynton on Her African Oil Exploration Documentary, Big Men
In a world of simplified, cable-news talking points, documentary filmmaker Rachel Boynton makes layered, complicated films exploring the nexus of politics and personality. With Our Brand is Crisis, Boynton — one of Filmmaker‘s 2005 25 New Faces — traveled to Bolivia to cover the 2002 election, embedding herself both within the campaigns of local candidates as well as the war room of hired-gun U.S. consultants Jim Carville and his GCS Associates team. Big Men, opening today, is her second feature, and it has similarly required an immersive, years-long process. She began the process of considering the film before its so-called […]
-
Five Questions With Last Hijack Directors Femke Wolting and Tommy Pallotta
Femke Wolting & Tommy Pallotta’s experimental doc Last Hijack sees the venn-diagramming of a rigorous interview style and breakout swatches of rotoscoped animation, ala Waking Life (which Pallotta produced.) In lieu of philosophical digressions or convoluted dream sequences, the filmmakers use animation to depict the unfilmable: nailbiting raids by Somali pirates, led by one Mohamed Nura, who casually recounts his adventures to the filmmakers between mouthfuls of khat. Never feeling doctrinaire, the film takes an earnest stab at correcting the way the West considers seaside piracy, delineating a cycle of corruption and violence starting with Mohamed’s father. Wolting and Pallotta […]
-
ornana’s Jim Cummings On How To Combat The Digital Recession and Lessons To Learn From “South Park”
“Our degrees cost us about $90,000 a piece, and in the last five years of making movies, the three of us together have made about $5,000 from our work.” That’s ornana producer Jim Cummings speaking at his Future 15s New Media talk at SXSW last Sunday. Drawing from his article series over at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film, Cummings gave a micro-keynote on what he calls “The Digital Recession,” the supersaturation of content and what can be done to effectively combat the glut. Cummings made the common observation that nowadays, any old person is encouraged by “camera companies, film festivals, and arts […]
-
Full Frame Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival today announced its lineup for the festival to be held April 3-6 in Durham. Along with the full list of feature and short documentaries are a Full Frame Tribute to veteran documentarian Steve James and the titles in the Thematic Program, which this year is called “Approaches to Character” and is under the curation of Lucy Walker. In a response to the honor of a retrospective, James said, “I’m excited to have so many of my films play again in front of the appreciative audiences at Full Frame. It will give me a rare opportunity […]
-
Adding Motion to “Stills” with Cinemagraph Pro
Cinemagraph Pro from Flixel adds motion to a still image. In essence you shoot a sequence of video, and then indicate the area of the image that you want to see in motion – perhaps just the hands of the subject of a portrait, or the water in the lake of a scenic picture. While the masked area remains in motion, the rest of the scene is totally still; the lack of motion draws the eye to the part of the image that is moving. It’s an interesting effect, and could be useful in video or film for dream sequences, […]
-
Red Giant’s New Effects Library and Community – Universe
Visual effects software developer Red Giant today announced the public beta of Red Giant Universe, a new environment for building as well as distributing filter and transition effects. The effects and transitions are GPU-accelerated, work on both Mac and Windows, and support After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X and Motion. Red Giant says they are releasing 50 new free and premium tools as part of Universe, but prior to release did not specify how many of them are free. Universe’s Premium option provides access to more tools as well as existing Red Giant tools that will be ported […]
-
The Women of SXSW: Fort Tilden Writer/Director/Editor Sarah-Violet Bliss
Following “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of interviews highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this interview, she talks with Sarah-Violet Bliss, who co-wrote and co-directed the SXSW Grand Jury Prize-winning narrative feature Fort Tilden with Charles Rogers. Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Bliss: I was excited to tell a story in response to the popular topic of discussion these days frequently labeled “millennial malaise.” I have many thoughts on this matter in hand that are enormously fun […]
-
Producer Jason Blum @SXSW: “If I Had to Make Kicking and Screaming Today, I’d Make It for $50,000…”
“If I had to make [Noah Baumbach’s 1995 pic] Kicking and Screaming today, I’d make it for $50,000, not $1 million,” said producer Jason Blum (The Purge, Insidious, Whiplash) at his SXSW keynote address on Sunday. In a conversation with the Los Angeles Times’ John Horn, Blum blended his own producer origin story with practical advice for filmmakers seeking to emulate his rise to top of Hollywood’s low-budget horror hierarchy. “Don’t wait for the industry to go forward,” he told the crowd, explaining that his own career was accelerated when he learned from a past error: passing on The Blair […]
-
How to Crowdsource a Film: Chris Jones on the Omnibus Movie, 50 Kisses
The Internet and digital filmmaking tools have opened up new possibilities of crowdsourcing material–Life in a Day, Declaration of Interdependence, One Day on Earth, even the interactive Star Wars Uncut–and given new life to the omnibus/anthology film format. The latest project to adopt the form is 50 Kisses, a film created by the London-based Chris Jones and hundreds of collaborators from around the world. The film, which includes 50 scenes built around a Valentine’s Day and a kiss, premiered on February 13–the day before Valentine’s–at the Genesis Cinema in London’s East End. Further distribution is now rolling out. Jones, a filmmaker […]
