Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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The Changing Aatsinki Season
For us in North America, Winter formally arrives this Saturday, December 21. But the season has already changed — online, at least, and to Fall — for the arctic cowboys of Aatsinki Season, the hypnotic online collaboration between director Jessica Oreck and transmedia developers Murmur. For the last nine months, an online extension of Oreck’s documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, has been streaming and scrolling online, with each quarter bringing a new set of meditative observations. When the project premiered, Oreck discussed the difference between the film and the site: The film is very pure, direct cinema—an immersive […]
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The Top 10 Scenes of 2013 (From One Woman’s Perspective)
Tis the season of the Top 10 list. In what I figured was an out-of-the-box alternative, I decided to compile not necessarily my favorite films of the year, but the scenes that have resonated with me most. Then, Nicholas Rombes had to go and prove that the “great minds” adage is alive and well. Perhaps fortuitously, our lists have nothing in common. Though Upstream Color would likely crack my phantom Top 10, there is no one individual moment from the film that begged my memory for recognition. The same can be said for Inside Llewyn Davis, Bastards, Viola, Like Someone […]
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Nymphomaniac: Lars von Trier Up to His Old Tricks
This review of Nymphomaniac is based on seeing both films back-to-back with a 25-minute interval, whereas it will be released theatrically in the U.S. in two parts, Volume 1 in March, and Volume 2 in April. As such, this review will try to take the two films as separate entities. I have tried to write them without containing spoilers, but some I fear, are inevitable. Nymphomaniac: Volume 1 Nymphomaniac arrives on the back of one of the best marketing campaigns in years. The first “() Opening Soon” poster was on its own pretty special, but it was trumped by the series of posters […]
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12 Years a Slave D.P. Sean Bobbitt on Handheld Cinematography
“You always have to question when a director says, ‘Let’s go handheld.’” At Poland’s Camerimage International Film Festival a few weeks back, d.p. Sean Bobbitt gave an ARRI workshop keynote on the role of handheld cinematography in filmmaking. Far too often, directors, according to Bobbitt, resort to the use of handheld simply because they have no other ideas: “If we do handheld, it will feel kinetic!” and the like. But a knee-jerk instinct is not good enough — Bobbitt believes you should be able to justify every technical decision in the script: “The first and most important consideration is, does […]
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Shia LaBeouf Tweets Apology for his Daniel Clowes Plagiarism
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 […]
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Revising Your Script: The Evolution of Even The Dogs Know
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 […]
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Personalizing Crowdfunding to Get #STUCK in Theaters
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 […]
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Inside Michel Gondry’s Home Studio
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 […]
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D.P. Sal Totino on Finding the Edge, and Falling Off
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.
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“The Line Blurs:” Morals of Filmmaking
“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 […]
