The following is a guest post by writer/director Deb Shoval, whose debut feature AWOL participated in the 2013 IFP Narrative Labs. Nine months ago, I sat down with the endlessly generous Stacie Passon, the writer/director of Concussion, for some words of wisdom on making the low budget, indie first feature. Her biggest piece of advice? Get AWOL into the IFP Narrative Labs. Fast forward to Part 2 of 3 of the yearlong lab fellowship: IFP Week. Stacie, now an IFP Narrative Lab mentor, gets into more detail. Passon: Now if my son comes in during this interview and starts whining, […]
The psychological thriller/horror movie AfterDeath is the first feature film of directors Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt. Shot on a tight budget and a tight schedule, the development and shooting of AfterDeath offers a lesson to anyone looking to make their first feature. AfterDeath is currently in post-production and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker spoke to Medinger about the project shortly after shooting wrapped. Medinger and Schmidt met at Oxford University in the late ’90s. Schmidt was studying English and Medinger was studying engineering. After leaving university, Schmidt became interested in film and video and learned […]
As the producer of films like The Ring and Mulholland Drive, Neal Edelstein is no stranger to horror films and thrillers. And with his new project, Haunting Melissa, he’s moved beyond traditional pictures with his first immersive production for iPad and iPhone. Available for free in the App Store, Haunting Melissa centers around the search for a girl who vanished from the farmhouse where her mother had earlier gone insane, but this story is told in a succession of videos released to the viewer in seemingly random bursts. The temporal extension – and unexpected timing – of the narrative through these push notifications […]
Before there was Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, an upcoming documentary about the first female filmmaker and her suspicious erasure from early film history, there was the Women Film Pioneers Project (WFPP). The Columbia University Libraries recently launched this online anthology of essays about women in the early days of the film industry. The site houses overview essays to give context to the jobs women performed in early cinema — from editors to “cranks” to colorists — and several essays on the different roles they played in national cinemas, from the absence of women in the Canadian […]
Aiming to give independent artists and arts organizations the same marketing power as their bigwig counterparts, the non-profit Fractured Atlas recently unveiled Artful.ly, a web-based software system that streamlines audience interactions. Among the service’s offerings is a MailChimp integration that directly manages and catalogues email outreach, and a ticketing and fundraising apparatus that can be embedded onto websites. There are no sign-up fees or contracts, however, in the interest of an event, ticket buyers will be charged $2 per purchase in addition to credit card processing. Filmmaker spoke with Selena Juneau-Vogel, program director for Artful.ly, about how filmmakers can make […]
As the first in what is to become a weekly, unprecedented occurrence, Cinetic Media released the VOD and theatrical gross of Escape From Tomorrow over at its sister site, Film Buff. Utilizing the Producers Distribution Agency catalogue, John Sloss and company will post an aggregate number every Monday that represents revenues from the divergent platforms, before hopefully moving on to films outside their network. “We call upon those distributors who have been pioneers of the day-and-date evolution to supply Cinetic with their cable and broadband VOD gross numbers so we can post a comprehensive snapshot of the distribution industry each week,” Sloss said in a […]
Any filmmaker knows that the script is but the first brick in a winding pathway to production. The feature documentary Click Here: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Making Movies takes this fact to heart, training the lens on the action that transpires before the camera even rolls. For Pete Chatmon and Candice Sanchez McFarlane, the development process effectively began at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, where their screenplay $FREE.99 debuted in competition, netting Chatmon TFI’s Creative Promise Narrative Award. While they found their fair share of industry champions, raising production funds proved to be another story altogether. Five years […]
Toward the end of the potent In the Name of by Polish director Malgoska Szumowska (Elles, 33 Scenes From Life), about a country priest’s desperate efforts to repress the love that dare not speak its name, a glorious procession snakes through an empty meadow. All the residents of a nearby isolated provincial community participate, many holding icons in their hands or tall embroidered banners aloft, the pageantry proudly announcing the devout Catholicism that is their passion. Accompanied by what sounds like mellow English folk music, the lengthy sequence is more a holy entr’acte than a chunk of in-progress narrative. In […]
If you’re looking to make a horror film simply because you think it might be an easy road to notoriety, you’d be dead wrong. This is a dish that’s best served cold by filmmakers who are fans — those who have long loved being chilled to the bone — so it should be in your blood. If you’re a filmmaker who’s new to horror, immerse yourself in the classics and study their techniques before you set out to try to create a monster of your own. The potential pitfalls you face when making a horror film are what’s really frightening. […]
Not long after he founded Dogfish Pictures in 2009, producer James Belfer sensed an industry-wide disconnect between content creation and return on investment. Filmmakers, he gleaned, were concerned with short-term assets, agreeing to sell their film to distributors for a fixed sum that was a mere fraction of the eventual profit. In order to capture the full value of their content, filmmakers would need a new set of marketing tools and a fair bit of elbow grease. Belfer felt that any of these strategies would not be found in the traditional film industry at all, but rather, in the tangential […]