Shia LaBeouf’s short film HowardCantour.com — and internet film culture — has had a strange 24 hours. Yesterday, Short of the Week posted a short by the actor-turned-director about a bitter online film critic meeting a famous director at a film junket. Various sites, including Filmmaker, embedded it, and LaBeouf himself reached out to press through his Twitter account. About the short, LaBeouf told Short of the Week: I know something about the gulf between critical acclaim and blockbuster business. I have been crushed by critics (especially during my Transformers run), and in trying to come to terms with my […]
Michael Capodiferro, a student at Hampshire College, has written the script for Even The Dogs Know and is planning to direct the short film as his senior project. The film is about the lengths someone will go to find someone to talk to. In a description of the project Capodiferro briefly outlined the process of developing the script: The script work for Even The Dogs Know began almost a year ago in January. It was a much darker, in-your-face, louder story than it is now. It’s taken me many drafts to build up the story and tear it down again and […]
My entire life, all I’ve ever wanted to do was to make movies. After a speedy ten-day shoot, recasting our lead actors 24 hours before principal photography, and the usual financier-disappearing-mid-way-through-the-schedule craziness, my feature debut #STUCK was finally realized… And that was the easy part. The hardest part was still ahead of me: distribution. Thus was born getSTUCKintheaters.com — #STUCK’s unique crowd-funding website to raise $150,000 for #STUCK’s theatrical and VOD distribution. Why go on your own? Why not Kickstarter, and the like? Originally we planned for a more traditional campaign, using an established crowdfunding site. One site actually contacted us […]
Fans of Michel Gondry and his latest Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? may enjoy this peak inside his home studio, courtesy of The Creators Project. From his cluttered Brooklyn brownstone, Gondry demonstrates his hand-drawn animation technique with Sharpies and a 16mm Arriflex, which allow him to create “a texture that [he] feels is cinematic.” It is a rather time-consuming, detail-oriented trade that Gondry admits to wielding during his casting courtship of Audrey Tautou for Mood Indigo. He also speaks about his creative decisions behind Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?, and why animation was the necessary format for Noam Chomsky: “It was […]
In the latest video in our Craft Truck series, Sal Totino, who was the cinematographer on features like Frost/Nixon, Cinderella Man and The Da Vinci Code, advocates knowing the rules but only in order to break them. Using an apt metaphor of cooking, he says that one could follow a recipe step-by-step or break away and “put a little bit of your soul into it.” Nothing is guaranteed, as Totino cautions, especially not when straying from convention, but you have to know where the edge is — and sometimes fall off — to learn your limits. Watch the full interview here.
“Anything that happens in front of the camera is some kind of performance,” said experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs at the top of Tuesday’s “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking” panel. Sachs, along with Caveh Zahedi, Josephine Decker, Keith Miller and moderator Nathan Silver, spent an hour debating the division between narrative and documentary forms at DCTV. The evening was chockfull of quotable quotes as the participants reflected on their own work with equal doses of humor and candor. Zahedi, for starters, admitted that he initially considered documentaries to be “the autistic younger brother of cinema,” and only labels his […]
In 1988, VideoFilmFest launched as part of the Berlinale. It gradually evolved until it was rechristened the transmediale in 1998, and today it’s one of the premier festivals for film, art, video, and digital work. Kristoffer Gansing has been the festival’s artistic director since 2011, and for this year’s theme he’s selected the “afterglow,” an exploration of how media technologies and practices are turned into trash. As the festival’s website explains, “As media technologies have now become completely integrated into everyday life, they function similarly to natural resources, producing physical and immaterial waste products that get appropriated in such diverse contexts […]
Yesterday, it was announced that Calvary, the new film from The Guard writer/director John Michael McDonagh, will make its world premiere at Sundance next month. Sooner than expected, the trailer for the movie has emerged, and it’s immediately apparent that this is a more somber and understated affair than The Guard, which was irreverent and caustic, much in the manner of the work of McDonagh’s older brother, Martin. Brendan Gleeson, also the star of The Guard, here plays a priest facing his last days in a small Irish town after being told by someone whose confession he is taking that […]
Back in October, Filmmaker spoke with a few of the driving forces behind Dogfish Pictures’ Accelerator Program, which seeks to bring the start-up financing model to independent film production. I’m pleased to report that James Belfer and Company’s months of hard work culminated in a successful Demo Day at the Microsoft Technology Center in midtown Manhattan last Friday. For myself, and a few others in the audience who aren’t necessarily of the tech-ilk, it was our first brush with this sort of presentation marathon, where one or two representatives from each team take to the floor for with a Powerpoint pitch before […]
When I made my first short film in 2011, the idea was to set a goal for myself and let that drive my process. The short ended up being Mr. Fitzpatrick, and my goal was simply to present a character and show a day in his life. That’s it. No story or anything complicated. I didn’t even want to get to know him very well–just get an impression. I’m pretty happy with the way the film came out, but the one thing people always comment on is its sound design. We shot the film completely MOS (with the FGV-PL7D and […]