Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo on VICE’s Every Woman
More often than not, filmmakers undertake the odd job to get by — not unlike, as Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo argue in their VICE series Every Woman, the storied “second sex.” “We started thinking about the most stigmatized, mysterious and hardest jobs women do,” Roxo narrates in the opening sequence. And so, the Brooklyn filmmaking team trekked across the country to slip inside the well-worn shoes (lucite heels) of a truckstop stripper, as captured in the New Mexico-set pilot of Every Woman. Filmmaker spoke with Leite and Roxo about the series, the dangers of overstepping exploitative bounds and the foibles of simultaneously acting […]
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Sundance MVP Alex Bickel on the Role of the Colorist
The post-production process is an often underestimated one, both in the amount of work it necessitates and in its shaping of the final product. From an outside perspective, viewers may assume that a film’s visuals are simply captured on-set, in camera, and transferred to screen without much alteration. In reality, color grading the camera’s images is an art form unto itself. Over at Hammer to Nail, Chad Hartigan, director of last year’s Sundance NEXT inclusion This is Martin Bonner, interviews his colorist Alex Bickel, whose fingerprints were on a whopping six titles in Park City earlier this month: Blue Ruin; Camp X-Ray; Kumiko, The […]
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Mark Cuban Blasts Patent Troll’s Movie Download Lawsuit
The absurdities of the U.S. patent system were brought into focus yesterday by Mark Cuban, whose Magnolia Pictures, along with Amazon, Apple and the Weinstein Company, has been hit by a bizarre lawsuit involving movie downloads. The title of Cuban’s blog post summarizes the suit: “So I Got Sued By A Patent Troll Who Thinks They Own Downloading Movies (only before they are released in theaters) over Cellular.” The suit has been filed in Illinois Northern District Court by Red Pine Point, a so-called patent troll, which is a company that files, holds but does not base its business around […]
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The NC-17 Rating Needs to Be Abolished (We Should Know, We Made an NC-17 Movie.)
We are the writers and executive producers of Lucky Bastard, which Robert directed, a “found footage” thriller about a porn shoot gone horribly wrong. While not featuring actual sex, Lucky Bastard has nudity, strong language, sexual situations and disturbing violence. Concerned about our film’s intense content, we submitted it for an MPAA rating. We accepted “NC-17 for explicit sexual content” because, in all honesty, it is the correct rating. Nonetheless, the NC-17 rating is fundamentally flawed and needs to be abolished. NC-17 is a charade, for all intents and purposes dying on the vine. It is a deterrent to ensure […]
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Shooting in Africa with A Most Wanted Man Producer Andrea Calderwood
I recently met Andrea Calderwood at the Trinidad + Tobago Film Festival where she was in town to support Half of a Yellow Sun, helmed by Nigerian director Biyi Bandele. Originally from Scotland, the London-based Calderwood has long been a formidable presence in the U.K. film world, a BAFTA-award winner for Kevin MacDonald’s The Last King of Scotland, who even made Scottish news herself last year when The Herald named her to its list of the top 50 most influential women in the country. This year she’s busy as always. Our Kind of Traitor, an adaptation of the John le […]
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Show-Focus: The Future of Pulling Focus
Guillaume Couche, a Masters student at the Royal College of Art in London with a background in mechanical engineering, has created a prototype for what he calls “Show-Focus.” Designed to facilitate the duties of the on-set focus-puller, Show-Focus renders a physical representation of the invisible plane of focus so that the precise focal point can be deduced, and captured, at any time. The model is compromised of two components, communicable through a wireless connection: the camera module and the controller. The camera module, which is attached to the body of the shooting camera, provides a real-time 3D map of what […]
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Balancing the Autobiographical Documentary: Jason DaSilva on When I Walk
I remember the first time I saw Sherman’s March and realized how revealing autobiographical documentary could be. Filmmakers who turn the camera on themselves run a high risk of self-indulgence, but when done right their films can intimately show the resilience of the human spirit, especially when their challenges appear insurmountable, whether in situations as grandiose as in Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley’s South or as ostensibly mundane as Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan’s Troublesome Creek. The process of making autobiographical films can even be beneficial for the filmmakers, psychologically or otherwise, provided they place therapy on a backseat to […]
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How Drafthouse Films Used BitTorrent to Up The Act of Killing’s Profile
Ask an independent filmmaker his or her stance on torrents, and you’re likely to get an impassioned response – one that’s not necessarily negative. I’ve spoken with handfuls of filmmakers who regard the brand of piracy as a beneficial, near audience-building exercise. In an article from 2011, Filmmaker contributor Anthony Kaufman suggested that torrents, “should be considered [as] just one more element in a hybrid distribution strategy.” Weighing in on the issue, New School professor and filmmaker Vladan Nikolic noted that, “Viewers don’t overlap that much. Those who watch iTunes and cable don’t use BitTorrents.” A couple years later, Drafthouse […]
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Cassian Elwes and Producers Discuss Economics of Independent Film Financing
Kudos to my Twitter feed for brushing the dust off this nearly year old video of Cassian Elwes and other producers covering the basic economics of film financing. For every experiential tidbit acquired by aspiring filmmakers on sets, in the classroom, or at home, there is a disproportionate amount of information available on the first step towards making one’s film: securing the money, and making the most of it. Elwes touches upon pre-sales and credits, though the independent film industry standard for debut directors is proven to lie within private equity. In the informational short clip, the producers discuss why the […]
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Did George Lucas Mastermind an Illegal Wage-Fixing Conspiracy?
A class action lawsuit alleging that a group of Silicon Valley companies, including Google, Apple, Pixar, Intuit and Intel, conspired to fix the wages of computer engineers has been cleared to proceed by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Writes Mark Ames at Pandodaily, “…Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.” The suit is the result of a 2010 Obama Department of Justice anti-trust investigation. Pando has extensive details and has also […]
