Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Landon Van Soest Crowdfunding for Artificial Retina Documentary Light Darkness Light
Landon Van Soest, a founder of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, is nearing the end of a Crimso campaign to fund his latest documentary Light Darkness Light, an intimate portrait of a candidate for artificial retina implants. Plotting the move from blindness to sight both narratively and visually, Light Darkness Light promises to be a revelatory examination of science and human nature. Filmmaker spoke with Van Soest about his technical plans, and how this documentary could serve legions of would-be patients in the future. Light Darkness Light‘s campaign ends in two days, on Thanksgiving, so please consider donating sooner rather than later. Filmmaker: Before we get to the film, I wanted to ask about the […]
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Eight Agent Questions Every TV Writer Wants Answered… Right Now
The following piece on TV writers’ interactions with their agents is excerpted from Chad Gervich’s just-released How to Manage Your Agent: A Writer’s Guide to Hollywood Representation. It can be purchased on Amazon at the link above. How much should I talk to my agent during staffing season? I know they’re superbusy, and super-stressed, so I don’t want to bug them, but I also want to know what’s going on. Should I call once a day? Once an hour? Once a week? What?! “It’s not about how frequently you call,” says Verve agent Amy Retzinger, “although please do not call […]
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On Missing 99% of What You Need: Lucy Walker’s Advice to Documentary Filmmakers
The following is an extract from Jessica Edwards‘ book Tell Me Something, which collects together advice on non-fiction filmmaking from 50 of the world’s most prominent documentarians, in which two-time Oscar nominee Lucy Wakler shares her wisdom. Tell Me Something is also available as an e-book. This piece of advice has been my lifeline, my mantra, my toehold on sanity and encouragement, the bandage for when I am kicking myself so hard I can’t stand up. It was told to me by Barbara Kopple, the legendary two-time Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker. One of my greatest strokes of luck in life was that she came to […]
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MIT Open Documentary Lab Launches _docubase
As a consumer of new media – to say nothing of its makers – how does one go about keeping abreast of the emerging form’s constant developments? MIT Open Documentary Lab hopes to keep interested parties up to speed with _docubase, a new project that was launched yesterday at IDFA. A curated platform, _docubase will maintain an open dialogue on the “new documentary,” the fledging form that draws from interactive and community-created fact-based storytelling. “No longer must we look back at those unconstrained moments of creativity from a nostalgia-tinged distance,” reads the _docubase manifesto, referring to the unchecked and experimental early years […]
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Cinema Eye Honors Announces Heterodox Award Nominees
In partnership with Filmmaker, Cinema Eye Honors announces the nominees for this year’s Heterodox Award, its fourth annual recognition of a narrative film that successfully and imaginatively weaves documentary strategies, content, and/or modes of production into its fabric. The five nominees are Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess; Randy Moore’s Escape From Tomorrow; James Franco and Travis Mathews’ Interior. Leather Bar.; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds and Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. These selected films are intended to demonstrate the formal possibilities of non-fiction filmmaking, in addition to probing the ever-tenuous boundary between reality and its embellished analogue. “The 2014 Cinema Eye Honors Heterodox nominees prove once again that […]
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DaVinci Resolve 10 Adds Editing to its Toolset
DaVinci Resolve began life as a high-end grading tool found in expensive color suites. Its purchase by Blackmagic hasn’t lessened its sophistication – they’ve continued to expand its tool set – but it has seen the software’s price lowered substantially, a free “lite” version released, and a redesign of its UI that has made it a lot friendlier to new users. Resolve is still a complicated and sophisticated tool, and color grading is a skill that can take a lot of study to master, but if you’re doing any image manipulation to your footage you shouldn’t ignore the functionality Resolve […]
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“Theatrical is Still the Event that Brands a Property for Decades of Downstream Consumption”: The Business of Media Distribution Author Jeff Ulin
Jeff Ulin, a former executive at Lucasfilm and Paramount, has spent a big chunk of his career thinking about one of the most vexing issues facing filmmakers and other media professionals today: the problem of media distribution. Ulin has recently revamped the first edition of his classic text, The Business of Media Distribution (published in 2009) with a second edition that addresses many of the radical changes to the media industries that have taken place since two significant events — the economic crash of 2008 and the widespread adoption of digital delivery tools — upset traditional models of distribution, changing […]
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Hal Hartley Offers Ned Rifle Distribution Rights as Kickstarter Rewards
Please see important update at the bottom of this post. Plenty of tech vendors use Kickstarter as a pre-sale market, so why not filmmakers? In a letter to backers of his film Ned Rifle — reprinted here with permission — director Hal Hartley announces the inclusion of territorial theatrical rights as Kickstarter rewards. Pledge $3,000 and take Hungary. $5,000 gets you Finland. And a cool $9,000 gets you Spanish-speaking Latin America. Of course, these numbers are for theatrical only. Hartley is retaining home video and electronic distribution. But, as he notes in his letter, the asking prices are low, enabling […]
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Kickstarter: Heidi Saman on Her Debut Feature, Namour
Three weeks weeks ago, I began a Kickstarter campaign for my first feature film, Namour, and it is not an overstatement to say that I feel like a changed person. I’ve never done a Kickstarter campaign and, to be totally frank, never thought I would. Something about it felt like it was too much about me. I’m a writer and director, and like most of members of that tribe, I inherently prefer to be behind the camera, not in the spotlight, explaining myself. I thought I would find the money to make my film in a more traditional way, by […]
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Detroit Unleaded Director Rola Nashef on the Road to Distribution
“We were getting great feedback, and we thought, ‘Okay, it’s just a couple weeks now until we sell the film! It’s going to sell any second!’” Rola Nashef’s reflection on the waiting period that followed the world premiere of Detroit Unleaded at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival is likely an all too familiar affair. For her feature debut, Nashef and her team thought they had hit the jackpot: acceptance to a prestigious festival, attended by buyers aplenty, and rapturous responses from sold-out audiences. However, the realities of selling the film, a romantic comedy with an Arab-American ensemble cast, set […]
