Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Click Here Lifts the Curtain on the Development Process
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 […]
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East of Eden: In the Name of
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 […]
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So You Want to Make a Horror Film? On Jump Scares and Other Basics of Fright
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. […]
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Team-Building, Data Science and the Business Plan: Dogfish Accelerator’s New Film Financing Model
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 […]
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Blue Is The Warmest Color: Beyond the Media Circus
Enough ink has been spilled over the on- and off-screen controversies encumbering Blue Is The Warmest Color that any moviegoer should find herself beholden to a stance before the film even begins. Subconscious or otherwise, the effects of a months-long media onslaught are almost inescapable. As a woman, I’ve been instructed by some grandes dames of criticism that I ought to take issue with the fact that a man has made such a liberal exploration of female sexuality. As a consumer, I’ve learned that the man in question is tortured, torturous and arguably unhinged for threatening to sue one of […]
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Shooting with 18 Cameras: The Making of The Short Game
With a background in comedy shorts, you’d be forgiven if you thought Josh Greenbaum’s first feature, a documentary that follows the 7 and 8-year old competitors in the World Championships of Junior Golf, would be a dark look at another group of driven parents. But that’s not what Greenbaum was interested in doing. Instead, he focuses on the children, these pre-teens who can, at turns, appear tremendously adult, or just like any other 7-year old. The Short Game follows eight competitors through last year’s championships, though production actually started a year before at the previous championships. That was where they […]
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Producing a Low-Budget Short Film and Pitching a Movie: Run Like Hell
Red Giant has unveiled their latest low-budget, effects-rich short; Run Like Hell. It’s billed as a short film, but it’s really intended to be a teaser for a full-length movie director Stu Maschwitz hopes to make. Maschwitz is a visual effects wizard who worked at Industrial Light & Magic before co-founding effects house The Orphanage. He is also the author of The DV Rebels Guide, but that doesn’t mean Hollywood is beating down his door to make a movie. Meanwhile, Red Giant, the makers and sellers of products such as Colorista, Magic Bullet and BulletProof, have been pursuing an interesting […]
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The Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera: A Review
The Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera is pretty much the perfect post-DSLR camera. I spent a month with it, shooting a short film around the New York Film Festival, running around guerrilla-style, putting it through its paces, and I had a lot of fun. I liked the size and the touch screen functionality. And I liked the DaVinci Resolve 10 workflow. The BMDCC is a camera that introduces itself from a distance. Everywhere I went with it, people either knew what it was and wanted to ask me about it, or they didn’t know what it was and wanted to ask […]
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Autodesk Smoke 2013 – Super NLE?
Once life was simple. NLEs were NLEs. They did offline editing of conspicuously compressed picture with unmixed audio tracks and limited titling. Maybe it started with the MiniDV revolution 15 years ago, but over time low-end NLEs competed with high-end NLEs in tools and feature sets, becoming today’s desktop online systems and sealing the fate of many midlevel post facilities. Along the way several NLEs became suites of applications called “studios.” Back in 2005, for instance, Final Cut Studio arrived as FCP bundled with DVD Studio Pro, Motion, LiveType, SoundTrack Pro, Cinema Tools and Compressor. Two years later, Color, for […]
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A Fresh Look at Apple’s Final Cut Pro X
Hard to believe, but FCP X is well over two years old and already into its ninth iteration. Its popular multicam tool arrived with version three in January of last year. In the past 12 months alone, no less than four new versions have been released, bringing dual viewers, a unified import window, support for native REDCODE RAW, MXF, Sony XAVC (up to 4K) and optional Rec. 709 display of ARRI ALEXA ProRes captured in Log C. Recent improvements also include a handy freeze-frame tool, chapter markers for QuickTimes and DVDs, better audio channel editing tools, and FCPXML 1.2 to […]
