Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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13 Steps to Directing Famous Actors in a Microbudget Film
As I wind up my festival and theatrical run of my film Between Us, it’s gratifying to see the amazing reviews for our four-person ensemble cast, with critics using blurb-ready adjectives like “brilliant,” “razor-sharp” and “career-best” to describe the performances of Julia Stiles, Taye Diggs and Melissa George. David Harbour, in particular, just won the Best Actor prize at the Woods Hole Film Fest, and many reviews agree that he steals the movie in his breakthrough film performance. Naturally, all credit is due to the actors themselves. But a couple people nicely said that I couldn’t have screwed up the […]
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What Elmore Leonard Can Teach You About Editing
Kylee Wall at Creative Cow has posted a good piece in which quotes from three writers (Elmore Leonard, Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palanhiuk) are applied to the film editing process. This first one, from the ace, and recently deceased, crime writer Elmore Leonard, touches on a pet peeve of mine: gratuitous, montage-y, B-roll-driven establishing sequences: “Don’t go into great detail describing places or things.” – Elmore Leonard In unscripted stuff particularly, I’ve seen a tendency for editors to use a whole bunch of b-roll at the beginning to describe a place. It’s kind of like the editorial equivalent of four […]
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iOS 7 at the One-Month Mark: 18 Picks and Pans
Apple’s “polarizing” mobile operating system iOS 7, an update which stripped away the skeuomorphism (i.e., the fake leather and other real-world metaphors found in apps like Calendar and Game Center) of previous versions in favor of a “flat” design style, was unveiled by the company on June 10 at its WWDC keynote and pushed to users on September 18. And for the most of this year, the Apple media universe — the parade of blogs and podcasts that have made a mini-industry of commenting upon the Cupertino company — have spoken of little else. But now that the OS is […]
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Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman to Direct TFI/Rockefeller-Funded Sandy Doc
It’s been less than a year since Hurricane Sandy blasted New York and the TriState area, but already it has had a number of representations in film and transmedia, from Sandy Storylines to the narrative Stand Clear of the Closing Doors and the upcoming Sandy relief concert 12-12-12. Now to that list can be added a new title — and arguably the most definitive work about Sandy yet — This Time Next Year, directed by Remote Area Medical‘s Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman. (Full disclosure: Zaman is a regular Filmmaker contributor.) Uniquely, the project, which “tracks the resilience of Long […]
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Introducing Screen X, Cinema in 270 Degrees
The Busan International Film Festival saw the launch of Screen X, a cinema technology that promises to offer audiences an immersive cinematic experience without the need to wear glasses. The South Korean company behind the technology, CJ CGV Screen X, owns the CGV cinema chain and currently operates one American location in Los Angeles. To showcase the technology, CJ CGV Screen X commissioned The Good, The Bad, The Weird director Kim Jee-Woon to make The X. Ostensibly a spy thriller, it’s really just an excuse to show off the technology that augments the action on screen, by projecting images onto […]
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Your Disney Video on the Escape from Tomorrow DVD?
Want to see your own Disney fan or parody video on the DVD for Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow? The film’s distributor, PDA, announces today that the winner of its current fan video contest, in which homemade videos are uploaded by applicants to Vine or Instagram and hashtagged #DisneyEscapeExperience, will be included as a special feature on the Escape from Tomorrow DVD. In addition, winners will receive Disney gift cards, signed posters and more. (See details below.) For the filmmakers and distributor behind Escape from Tomorrow, Disney’s Magic Kingdom is the gift that keeps on giving. In addition to being […]
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My Crowdfunding Crash Course: 14 Tips from The Royal Road
After my very successful crowdfunding campaign this summer I’ve been asked repeatedly for tips and advice by numerous other filmmakers. In the spirit of helpful guidance (and to make it easier to deal with as people keep asking me to share this info) here are my tips and guidelines. I did my campaign on Kickstarter but these guidelines are equally applicable on Indiegogo and other platforms. 1) Make sure your description is compelling, as concise as possible and conveys urgency. Click the link to see mine — you can decide whether you think it’s compelling, but in any case it […]
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A Dream Made Real: Magical Cinema at the Empire Drive-In
This past Sunday, artists Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark gave me the honor of curating an evening of live cinema at their month-long experiential installation Empire Drive-In at the New York Hall of Science in Flushing Meadows Park, Queens. Composer Michael Krassner and Boxhead Ensemble accompanied Artavazd Pelechian’s experimental masterpiece Our Century, which was preceded by Kelly Sears’ absolutely stunning short, The Drift and additional shorts and music. We were excited to take part in the series but none of us were fully prepared for the amazing experience that Todd, Jeff and their collaborators have created in the shadow of […]
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Screenwriter John Ridley Talks 12 Years a Slave
12 Years a Slave — the title of Steve McQueen’s latest, taken from its source material, the Solomon Northup memoir — is one of the most direct and descriptive of recent cinema history. But consider further the subtitle of Northup’s 1853 book: “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana.” It’s one of the film’s extraordinary achievements that, as it lands in theaters nationwide with the headwinds of an Oscar frontrunner, it tells, on its most basic level, that story. […]
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Cinematographer Zach Zamboni on Creativity and Shooting with Just Two Primes
Zach Zamboni, a cinematographer on Anthony Bourdain’s series Parts Unknown, recently spoke about his philosophy of shooting and being creative at an event in Boston. Particularly intriguing was his description of shooting an episode using just two prime lenses and his interest in shooting with Super 16 lenses on the Sony F55. About cameras, Zamboni said that he doesn’t believe one camera is “right or wrong” for a job. “The choice of camera will inform the lenses I’m going to put on that camera,” he remarked. “Those lenses will inform my behavior with that camera, and that will start to […]
