Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Two Big Camera Announcements at NAB – AJA’s CION and Blackmagic’s URSA
There were two big camera announcements at NAB yesterday. First up AJA is entering the camera market with CION. This is a 4K camera with global shutter that has the ergonomics and connections of a more traditional camera. It’s priced at just under $9000 for the body and a power adapter. However there’s some things to keep in mind. It’s PL mount only so the lens options will be pricier. It also only takes AJA PAk Drives which run about $700 for 256 GB and $1300 for 512 GB, so media will not be cheap. And you’ll need to get […]
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NAB 2014: The Year of Unusual Cameras
It was clear that this would be the year of 4K, but perhaps more surprising is who plans to ship 4K cameras this year. Sony, who actually bought out two new 4K cameras last year – the F5 and F55 – clearly decided they didn’t need to roll out new cameras this year. Instead, they announced ProRes and DNXHD recording options, and a new ENG-style base for these cameras. They also announced that the F5 will be upgradeable to the F55. Perhaps feeling they needed to show something new, Sony invited their consumer camera unit on stage to show off […]
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DJI’s Ronin Hits Camera Stabilizer Arena at NAB – Big Features, Low Price
While today is the official day the exhibition halls open their doors at NAB, last night some companies got to release a sneak peek of some do their new products. Definitely the most exciting in the production field is Ronin, a new handheld gimbal stabilizing system that’s a direct competitor to the MoVI. Like MoVI’s manufacturer, Freefly Systems, Ronin comes from a company with a background in making aerial drones with gyrostabilizers, DJI. They’re probably best known for the Phantom, the GoPro aerial drone that’s made high altitude shots available to just about anyone. While Ronin and MoVI look pretty […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2014: The Next Chapter
Welcome to Filmmaker Magazine’s fourth annual digital cinema camera round-up. Each year for reasons of publishing schedule, this overview is written on the brink of the big NAB show in Las Vegas. By the time some of you read this, journalists and bloggers will have breathlessly uploaded each and every scrap of breaking news from the frenzied show floor, saving you the airfare, sore feet, and those Vegas cab fares calibrated to expense accounts. But what do these splashy product introductions mean? Do we need to trade up our cameras? How soon? Are more resolution, bit depth, frame rates, color […]
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She Said, She Said: The Galapagos Affair, Satan Came to Eden
Suffering is something to endure and learn from, the compact, muscular German expat physician Friedrich Ritter tells his MS-afflicted mistress and fellow exile Dore Strauch in Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller’s painstakingly executed, strangely fascinating documentary The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden. The silent scene is taken from old footage left by a handful of German and Germanic settlers who attempted to eke out an existence far outside their comfort zones on the tiny, inhospitable Galapagos island of Floreana during the period of 1929-34. Strauch had dared to complain that the DIY lifestyle was too tough for her to […]
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Born Out Of Necessity: Monica Peña on Ectotherms and its Immediate Post-Fest Streaming Launch
For most filmmakers, having a feature on the festival circuit is bookended by anticipation. There’s the nervous feeling that no one will ever agree to show the film, then the nervous feeling that the screening will go over terribly, followed by the anxiety-addled wait to hear from a distributor that your film will make it out of the enclave and into the public. For her debut feature, Ectotherms, a no-budget take on four Miami teenagers ambling across their sun-blasted landscape on the way to a black metal concert, Monica Peña decided not to make waiting an option. After the film’s […]
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R.I.P., Richard Brick, 1945 – 2014
Richard Brick — producer, Columbia University film professor and the first ever Commissioner of New York City’s Office of Film, Television and Broadcasting — died yesterday at his New York home of cancer. A longtime member of the independent film community, Brick began his career in the early 1970s, when he worked in various capacities, including as director and sound recordist, on documentary shorts. He production managed a number of documentaries, television productions and feature films, including Silkwood, Places in the Heart and Sweet and Lowdown. In the ’80s and ’90s he became an active producer, with such producing and […]
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The Limits of Supernatural Subversions: Under The Skin and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
The following essay contains spoilers. As far as premises go, Under The Skin’s most alluring intimation of Scarlett Johansson rolling around the slick Glasgow streets, seducing men left and right, is actually not as titillating as it sounds – unless you’re one for inverted gender plays (not for nothing is she perched behind the wheel of a predatorial white van). Each would-be sex scene instead succumbs to alien interpretation. As smoothly as she rolls down the car window, inquiring after irrelevant directions, Johansson’s Laura takes the man in question not to bed, but to another dimension. She moves backward on […]
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“Groundbreaking Work Often Sits at the Boundaries of Technology”: Sound Designer Johnnie Burn on Under The Skin
It’s unlikely many films released this year will lean as heavily on sound design for their overall impact as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name. The director’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth is a warped, haunting melange of sci-fi and cinema vérité which reinvents Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson as a blank-eyed, cold-hearted alien with a cut-glass English accent. The alien shores up in the Scottish highlands and embarks on an implacable quest which involves cruising around in a white van, looking for hapless local men to “seduce.” Under The […]
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The Lost Children Experience at FilmGateMiami 2014
This is a brief post-mortem on my last interactive live event at a small interactive festival in Miami called FilmGate 2014. Over the past year, I have been focusing on a few core principles in my work. These are not rules, but questions I return to when making a piece of immersive/interactive work. Rules/audience agency. When we go to a movie, we know the rules. Sit in the dark, eat our popcorn, watch. When designing a new experience, it’s important to communicate the rules to your audience so they can let go of their minds and get immersed. Along with this, […]
