Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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True/False Film Fest Announces Innovative “Pay the Artists!” Program
Today, the True/False Film Fest‘s Paul Sturtz and David Wilson announced the launch of their organization’s innovative (and highly laudable) “Pay the Artists!” program. The heads of the 10-year-old Columbia, MO-based festival (which runs February 27 – March 2), initiated the patronage program as a way of helping to sustain the documentary film ecosystem, and this year will be offering $450 to the filmmaking teams who attend the festival. (T/F already covers travel, accommodation and food expenses.) It is Sturtz and Wilson’s hope that in the next few years, this amount will increase to $1,000. There has long been a […]
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Commissioning Music for Short Films – 10 Questions a Director Might Ask
The following is a guest post written by composer Kim Halliday, a U.K.-based composer who has written music for shorts, features, documentary and fiction. You can find his work at www.kimhalliday.com, under “Kim Halliday – Music” on Facebook, and @hallidayk on Twitter. Many film composers learn their trade by scoring short films. Many continue to score short films, and many never get an opportunity to score a full feature. The truth is that there are many challenges for a composer with a short – how do you get coherent themes into so few cues, for example, and how do you […]
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HBO Launches HBOAccess, A Short-Form Program for Diverse Filmmakers
HBO has launched a four-week program designed to provide project development, master classes and mentoring for diverse, emerging filmmakers, who identify as Asian Pacific American, Sub-Continent Asian American, African American, Hispanic American, Native American, or as a woman. Dubbed “HBOAccess,” the program will invite four finalists to Los Angeles (though housing and travel are not included) for the month of June to craft a budget and blueprint for short-form content – either a webisode or a 10-15 minute film. Upon completion of the program, HBO will consider each proposal for production and an eventual airing spot on HBO platforms including HBO […]
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“The Minute You Walk Out the Door You’re Risking Something”: Philip Seymour Hoffman on the Challenge of Acting
In a free-flowing interview with June Stein in the Spring, 2008 issue of BOMB Magazine, Philip Seymour Hoffman discusses the insights into acting he gleaned from his experience as a director. Early on there is the following remarkable exchange, in which Hoffman says that acting is not about embracing one’s first instincts: PS: … Actors’ first instinct is to make themselves feel comfortable, to do things to make themselves feel like they’re in it, they’re truthful; I’m moving over here and that feels right, blah, blah, blah…. That’s what I do; so when I see another actor doing that, I […]
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Caveh Zahedi’s CineMart Diary
Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi attended the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam CineMart with a film seeking financing: The Sky is Blue Like an Orange, about the artist Joseph Cornell. For three days he and screenwriter Arnold Barkus met with assorted financiers. Zahedi’s diary is below. December 10, 2013 I receive an email informing us that our project about the artist Joseph Cornell’s relationship with a waitress in the early ’60s, has been accepted to Cinemart. January 21, 2014 We receive our list of meeting requests. We have 37 meetings scheduled over a three-day period. The last time I was at Cinemart […]
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The Davey Foundation’s Short Film Grant
Created in honor of actor David Ross Fetzer, The Davey Foundation strives to promote emerging artists under the age of 35 in both theater and film. Submissions recently opened for the Foundation’s Short Film Grant, which awards a U.S. filmmaker $3500 for the production of a short-length script. Dustin Guy Defa, a board member of the Davey Foundation and a frequent collaborator of the late Mr. Fetzer (who AD-ed Bad Fever), generously shed some light on the inaugural competition: “We’ve elected to support the short format as opposed to the feature because of the Foundation’s intent to support new voices in […]
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Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo on VICE’s Every Woman
More often than not, filmmakers undertake the odd job to get by — not unlike, as Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo argue in their VICE series Every Woman, the storied “second sex.” “We started thinking about the most stigmatized, mysterious and hardest jobs women do,” Roxo narrates in the opening sequence. And so, the Brooklyn filmmaking team trekked across the country to slip inside the well-worn shoes (lucite heels) of a truckstop stripper, as captured in the New Mexico-set pilot of Every Woman. Filmmaker spoke with Leite and Roxo about the series, the dangers of overstepping exploitative bounds and the foibles of simultaneously acting […]
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Sundance MVP Alex Bickel on the Role of the Colorist
The post-production process is an often underestimated one, both in the amount of work it necessitates and in its shaping of the final product. From an outside perspective, viewers may assume that a film’s visuals are simply captured on-set, in camera, and transferred to screen without much alteration. In reality, color grading the camera’s images is an art form unto itself. Over at Hammer to Nail, Chad Hartigan, director of last year’s Sundance NEXT inclusion This is Martin Bonner, interviews his colorist Alex Bickel, whose fingerprints were on a whopping six titles in Park City earlier this month: Blue Ruin; Camp X-Ray; Kumiko, The […]
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Mark Cuban Blasts Patent Troll’s Movie Download Lawsuit
The absurdities of the U.S. patent system were brought into focus yesterday by Mark Cuban, whose Magnolia Pictures, along with Amazon, Apple and the Weinstein Company, has been hit by a bizarre lawsuit involving movie downloads. The title of Cuban’s blog post summarizes the suit: “So I Got Sued By A Patent Troll Who Thinks They Own Downloading Movies (only before they are released in theaters) over Cellular.” The suit has been filed in Illinois Northern District Court by Red Pine Point, a so-called patent troll, which is a company that files, holds but does not base its business around […]
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The NC-17 Rating Needs to Be Abolished (We Should Know, We Made an NC-17 Movie.)
We are the writers and executive producers of Lucky Bastard, which Robert directed, a “found footage” thriller about a porn shoot gone horribly wrong. While not featuring actual sex, Lucky Bastard has nudity, strong language, sexual situations and disturbing violence. Concerned about our film’s intense content, we submitted it for an MPAA rating. We accepted “NC-17 for explicit sexual content” because, in all honesty, it is the correct rating. Nonetheless, the NC-17 rating is fundamentally flawed and needs to be abolished. NC-17 is a charade, for all intents and purposes dying on the vine. It is a deterrent to ensure […]
