Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Freezing Filmgoing in Tromsø and the Phenomenon of Site-Specific Cinema
The Tromsø International Film Festival has always pushed the boundary when it comes to open-air cinema. The only international film festival that takes place in the Arctic Circle has a Winter Cinema, an open-air cinema with sofas positioned on top of the snow in front of a large screen with picturesque hilltops on the horizon. Most of the program is made up of short films made for children that play in the dark afternoons, but this year Festival Director Martha Otto put on a late-night screening of Dead Snow to boot. It added a new challenge for the audience, to […]
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The Radiant Godfather’s Trusty Sarcophagus: A Requiem for René Ricard
Lipstick Traces René Ricard, Massachussets-born poet, painter, art critic and Warhol superstar, died February 1 after a battle with cancer, and the Botticellian angels quarrel, seeking revery as trumpets blare in heavenly jubilee for a luminous child. Ricard was published as a teen in the Paris Review in 1967. During the ’70s and ’80s, his articles for Artforum magazine helped launch the careers of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel and Francesco Clemente. Upon meeting the pop artist Andy Warhol and his protégée, Edie Sedgwick, Ricard found his feral adopted family and went on to appear in the 1965 film […]
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SXSW Announces Midnighters and Shorts Lineups
Coming off the heels of last week’s announcement, SXSW rounds out their lineup with the Midnighters and Shorts sections. As was the case with the bulk of the festival’s Features, there’s not a huge carry over from Sundance, beyond Adam Wingard’s The Guest and Jonathan’s Chest, Person to Person, Notes on Blindness, Funnel, Dig, Verbatim and Marilyn Myller in the Shorts section. Also of note are 25 New Faces Mohammad Gorjestani and ornana’s Danny Madden, who will screen Refuge and Confusion Through Sand, respectively. Check out the full list of Midnighters; Narrative, Documentary, Animated, Midnight, Texas and Texas High School Shorts; and Music Videos below. MIDNIGHTERS Scary, funny, sexy, controversial – […]
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The Paragon of Audience Outreach? Robbie Bryan Talks Black Hat
Any panel, roundtable or seminar that concerns technological advancements in film is bound to hit upon the issue of audience engagement. How we can best make use of the embarrassment of riches the internet affords us in finding the right people to watch our film. Filmmaker Robbie Bryan has managed to collect (at the time of this writing) 235,427 Facebook likes for his upcoming film Black Hat, that’s still only in the development stage. He’s leveraged his fan base into an ambitious Seed & Spark campaign, interacting with them along the way and soliciting their input in the shaping of his […]
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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 […]
