Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Nicholas Rombes, Grace Krilanovich Discuss their Microbudget The Removals
The Indiegogo campaign for Two Dollar Radio’s microbudget film division continues, with screenwriter (and Filmmaker contributor) Nicholas Rombes and author and now director Grace Krilanovich posting videos explaining their approach to the first production, The Removals. Check out the videos below. Read more about Two Dollar Radio at Filmmaker here.
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Review: Audio Scanning Tool Boris Soundbite
Boris Soundbite is a handy tool that scans the audio in your media files and lets you search for words or phrases. Useful for documentary filmmakers, supercut editors, and anyone needing to search an archive of media. Best of all – it actually works. This is an idea that’s been around for a while. I was skeptical at first as I’ve tried other solutions like this before with less than favorable results (like Premiere’s transcribe feature), but where Soundbite succeeds is it only returns hits for a search, not a verbatim transcription. It matches the audio based on words or […]
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Adapt or Die: 13 Steps to Adapting a Film from Something Else
“We’re not special. We’re not brilliant. We never were.” So says David Harbour’s character in my film Between Us. And he’s right. Most of us probably started as writer-directors by necessity, but at a certain point in a filmmaker’s career (and of course, if you have an actual “career,” you will eventually cease to be a filmmaker, and become instead a “filmSmaker”), you will realize you’re probably not as brilliant or talented as you once thought you were. If you were indeed a genius screenwriter, you’re probably better off writing scripts for Hollywood and actually getting paid to write anyway. […]
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How Big a Team Do You Need to Drive Box Office? A Talk with Gathr’s Richard Matson
In the past, films that don’t have a large distributor behind them had only a couple of distribution options: they could go straight to the internet and DVD, or the filmmakers could travel around the country arranging screenings at festivals. Now Gather Films offers a third option: on-demand theatrical performance. With Gathr, a screening of a film can be requested at a local theater, and if enough people buy tickets the screening happens. Gathr handles independent movies, as well as larger movies that are being distributed and promoted, but may only have organized theater runs in a few cities. Richard […]
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DIY Multiplatform Storytelling: Kal on the Tokyo Sally Film and App
Tokyo Sally is the second narrative feature by director-cinematographer-editor Kal, after his 2010 debut Superhero in the Rain. He’s also a prolific producer of music videos, documentaries, and spots for companies like the Food Network. The Tokyo Sally project, which features Anna Adams, consists of one 60-minute film and a related app, Tokyo Sally: Lost Highway, both of which are nearing completion. Kal envisions the film as the first in a series of ten pictures that will explore different aspects of horror and suspense films; each will be self-contained but, when seen together, will relate to a larger story. The film […]
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The Censors: Short-Haired Women and Long-Haired Men (and a Note on Hegemony)
This third installment of Time Frames draws on The Media History Digital Library, a reservoir of information about early cinema that includes the sorts of magazines, journals, and trade publications that, in the pre-digital era, had only been available to those able to travel to research libraries. At over 800,000 scanned pages and growing, the collection is daunting. In Time Frames I’ll cull through and select a series of images and text from the collection to highlight key transformative moments in the film culture and industry, as well as other oddities and obscure artifacts. Note: click on images to enlarge. Prior to the publication of the […]
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Distributing Films In The Internet Age: Interviews with Pivotshare and Fandor
The Film, TV & Digital Session at the recent Hacking Arts event focused on film distribution, with panelists Richard Matson from Gathr Films, Adam Mosam from Pivotshare and Albert Reinhardt from Fandor. The panel was moderated by Elle Schneider of Digital Bolex. All three firms are involved with distribution. Pivotshare offers tools to help the filmmaker sell their videos online. Fandor is an online subscription platform that pays its filmmakers a share of its subscription fees. Gathr Films provides an on-demand theatrical experience; a screening of a film can be requested at a local theater, and if enough people buy […]
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“Making a Film is Like Climbing a Mountain”: Director Nick Ryan on the Staggering Logistics of Making K2 Documentary The Summit
Plenty of documentaries share stories worth telling, and play just fine resting on the strengths of those stories, incorporating requisite elements like talking-head interviews, news headlines, and archival footage. Filmmaker Nick Ryan’s The Summit, which meticulously explores the 2008 K2 disaster that claimed 11 lives, has all of these elements. But what it also has is a stunning abundance of visceral reenactments, which placed Ryan and his crew on an actual mountainside, where the intimate (and tragic) moments that the climbers’ own cameras missed were recreated. A veteran director of short films like The German and A Lonely Sky, for which he also served […]
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The Interactive Mic: Etienne Paquette & Alexandre Lupien on Mégaphone
Mégaphone, an interactive project currently running in Montreal, is designed for a world that’s forgetting that the word social doesn’t necessarily have to precede media. The project seeks to remove the fiber optic interface that currently connects so many of us and move public discourse back into a public space–that is, somewhere outdoors with plenty of foot traffic. Thus it’s built around a pre-Industrial Era public speaking model like Hyde Park’s Speaker’s Corner in London: anyone can take to the mic to discuss any topic they like (though there is an MC and suggested time slots for certain subjects to […]
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On James Schamus and Focus Features
Yesterday’s sad news that James Schamus is leaving Focus Features, the company he co-founded 11 years ago, and that the New York office is being shut down is a blow — a blow to not only the filmmakers supported by Focus and the company’s employees but also our broader independent film community. Schamus is unique and irreplaceable, and his particular strengths are ones we have needed and relied upon. These strengths include his defining concept of what a 21st-century specialty distributor could be, one that demonstrated smart-minded business practices while cracking its door open to allow outsider voices, subversive points […]
