Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Diamond Brothers Dissect the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K
Award-winning producer/directors Josh and Jason Diamond, aka The Diamond Brothers, reviewed the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K yesterday at an event hosted by Adorama Rental Company in downtown Manhattan. The co-directors of 2012 documentary Bring on the Mountain and executive producers of features including Light and the Sufferer, starring Paul Dano, and Exploding Girl, starring Zoe Kazan, talked about some of the pros and cons of using the Production Camera 4K, which is available now for preorder for the reduced price of $2,995. Josh and Jason, who recently completed a 13-part series for FILA and a launch spot for Sony’s PS4, […]
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Go Down Death Acquired by Factory 25
An IFP lab film from a couple years back, Go Down Death is having a rather busy week. The near-apocalyptic tale of a crumbling village, haunted by illnesses and the supernatural, was announced as the first (and only?) theatrical run at Williamsburg’s repertory Spectacle Theater, and, as of today, is yet another prime addition to Factory 25’s slate. I’ll have more on the film’s unique distribution path from writer-director Aaron Schimberg and Spectacle programmer Jon Dieringer when the time comes, but till then, the rest of the country can expect a July VOD and iTunes release, with a theatrical rollout to follow.
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Loving Vincent: Animation in Oil
In an age when everything has already been done, it’s a rare feat to devise a way to make a film that no one has ever tried before. But that’s what the team behind Loving Vincent did when they decided to make their film about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh’s life by animating with actual oil paintings, each one executed by a professional artist on a full-sized canvas — in the style of Van Gogh himself, of course. As anyone who remembers the Van Gogh sequence in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams knows, the effect of the master’s artwork on […]
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Digital or Bust: The Brooklyn Heights Cinema’s Indiegogo Campaign
The phasing out of film prints by the Hollywood studio system is more than just a nightmare for the cinephile who disdains DCPs: it’s a living hell for the arthouse theater whose projection materials are suddenly obsolete, and its doors, in danger of closing. The Brooklyn Heights Cinema is one of those pleasurable, old timey theaters that still has a matinee ticket price, charm to spare, and just so happens to be dangerously close to becoming past-tense. Owner Kenn Lowy has started an Indiegogo campaign to raise the funds needed to convert his cinema to the digital age. Their prizes […]
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Antonioni and Robbe-Grillet on Modernism, L’Avventura and Blow-Up
There’s a case to be made for viewing any old film in the theater, but few seem to demand the widescreen format like the work of Michelangelo Antonioni. Every frame of L’Avventura, the first entry in his monumental early 60s trilogy, is unusual and breathtaking in its construction. In the above video, fellow filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad) discusses how Antonioni’s rejection of meaning and a closed-circuit narrative defined the Modernist aesthetic. Positioning him against the plot heavy Hitchcock, Robbe-Grillet notes the elusiveness of Antonioni’s intentions: “What you see is very clear, but the meaning of the images in constantly […]
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Visitors’ Godfrey Reggio on 4K, Black and White Cinematography, Long Cuts and Philip Glass
For our Winter issue, experimental documentarian Godfrey Reggio, along with his producer Jon Kane and d.p. Trish Govani, explored the significance of selected stills from his latest film Visitors. A revealing exercise for any filmmaker, Reggio’s excerpts carry far more weight than they would for most: the eight shots account for more than 10% of the film. Comprised of only 74, 4K black and white shots, the Philip Glass-scored Visitors is a meditation on the act of spectatorship, as the viewer unflinchingly gazes at 70+ second takes of faces, swamplands, disembodied hands and the moon. In the above video for The Creators Project, Reggio extols […]
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The Future of Compression: Google Attempts to Replace H.26X… Again
For a second time, Google is attempting to pitch a compression format as the replacement for an H.26X compressor. They tried to do it three years ago for HD video when they pitched VP8 as a replacement for H.264 and had little success. Now they’re back with a new angle: VP9 is the format for 4K, and they are putting it up against H.265, the new 4K compressor that is also referred to as HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding). Should you care? Compression codecs can be fascinating, frustrating and their naming confusing. For example, everyone’s heard of H.264 and AVCHD, […]
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The Pirate Cinema: A Real Time Collage of File Sharing
Ever wonder what a data visualization of every file transfer bouncing around the internet airwaves might look like? The Pirate Cinema, from artist Nicolas Maigret, has rendered something close to it. Described as a “cinematic collage generated by peer-to-peer network activity,” the project is comprised of arbitrary clips from real time BitTorrent file sharing. Users IP addresses and countries are displayed in the upper corners, turning purportedly private transactions public. For Maigret, “this horizontal network architecture…recalls the utopian vision of openness and free appropriation that arose in the early days of the Internet.”
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Steven Soderbergh Mashes Up the Hitchcock and Gus Van Sant Versions of Psycho
This is kinda brilliant: a mashup by Steven Soderbergh of Hitchcock’s original Psycho and (now rendered in black and white) Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake from 1998. Soderbergh is retired from feature filmmaking, but his Cinemax miniseries The Knick is coming soon and, well, this is presumably something he just threw together in his spare time to stave off boredom!
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The Shape of Something Squashed Director Tom Noonan on How Jennifer Lawrence Inspired His New Play
Playwright, actor, director and screenwriter Tom Noonan is currently debuting his latest play, The Shape of Something Squashed, at New York’s Paradise Factory, but it might never have been written if it weren’t for an invitation to meet with Jennifer Lawrence one day. I’ll let Noonan tell the story below, but suffice to say that the bent emotions and darkly comic introspection that near-encounter produced are the stuff Noonan has memorably mined in his writing and directing work for years. Noonan’s film roles include singular turns in Heat, Mystery Train, Manhunter, Synecdoche, New York, and House of the Devil, to […]
