Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Vivian Kubrick, Stanley’s Daughter, Posts Photos of Her Young Life on the Set
As detailed at Dangerous Minds — and originally in this Reddit thread — Stanley Kubrick’s reclusive and estranged daughter Vivian has posted via Twitter a series of photos detailing her childhood in and around her father’s films. As Paul Gallagher at Dangerous Minds speculates, “The pictures may be viewed as a possible attempt at some form of reconciliation as Vivian has been allegedly out of touch with her family since joining the Church of Scientology in 1999.” Gallagher links to a Raw Story article, which has more: In fact, some knowledgeable folks have theorized that some of the pain that […]
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Five Questions With Evaporating Borders Director Iva Radivojevic
In recent years, the island of Cyprus has become something of an unforgiving melting pot. The often life-threatening emigration of Iranians and Syrians to the once predominately Greco-Turkish enclave presents a tense social fabric that is poetically probed in Iva Radivojevic’s debut documentary Evaporating Borders. Radivojevic adopts an aesthetically meandering and unique approach to the film, which is almost paradoxically structured into character-based chapters. Filmmaker spoke with the Yugoslavian-born Radivojevic about her personal connection to Cyprus, the process of voicing the film’s narrator and other traditionally fiction form elements at work in the film. Evaporating Borders premieres today in the Visions section at […]
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It Came From Inside the House: Community, Criticism and The Act of Killing
For much of the past decade, one constant gripe within the world of documentary has been a need for more writing and better criticism about the craft of the filmmaking (as opposed to summaries of the plot or lionizations of the subject). So why have two recent, very critical op-ed pieces about The Act of Killing drawn such heat? The answer lies in both the source of the criticism and the method. It’s certainly not uncommon for there to be debate about documentaries, and often that debate is most animated amongst members of the oft-mentioned documentary community: an alternately loose […]
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The Women of SXSW: Home Executive Producer Gina Resnick
Following “The Women of Sundance” article in our print and online additions, Danielle Lurie continues her coverage of female filmmakers with a series of pieces highlighting women directors at SXSW. In this email interview, she talks with the executive producer of the Midnighter selection, Home. Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Resnick: I had long been interested in working on an intelligent genre film that pushed the boundaries and elevates the genre especially one with a fundamentally all female leading cast. I also had a relationship with the producer/financier and wanted to do […]
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POV and The New York Times Launch New Documentary Film Initiative
Yesterday the PBS documentary series POV and The New York Times announced a collaborative effort to simultaneously show documentary films on the organizations’ individual websites. Later today the first film, Dan Barry and Kassie Bracken’s half-hour The Men of Atalissa, which was produced by the Times, kicks off the effort, with a full series of films following throughout the year. Along with the film, which is about a group of mentally disabled men who endured decades of abuse in the bunkhouse they lived in in Atalissa, Iowa, the Times will run an article about the men by Barry and the POV […]
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Five Questions With The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Director Brian Knappenberger
In a time of endlessly self-spawning bio-docs about the rich and prominent, Brian Knappenberger’s The Internet’s Own Boy carries a legitimate current-day charge. The film is both a dogged investigation in the tradition of Errol Morris or Josh Fox, and a hugely emotional oral history of Swartz’s life — which ended when the activist committed suicide in January 2013. Swartz was facing a federal investigation after he downloaded a cache of academic journals (including, but by no means limited to, JSTOR) from the main computer network at MIT, with a possible penalty of up to 35 years in prison. Indicted […]
