This is the first of a three-part series on the independent horror film AfterDeath, which is currently in post-production. The first part is an interview with writer Andrew Ellard, while the following parts will feature an interview with producer and co-director Gez Medinger. In school, Andrew Ellard thought he wanted to be a cartoonist, but it took a long time and a “not very successful A-level art” for him to realize that he actually couldn’t draw. This led him to a second revelation; that he wanted to tell stories — he’d just picked the wrong medium. After finishing school, Ellard […]
Writer Nick Antosca was a guest recently on the Other People podcast, and, along with discussion of his literary practice and new short story collection The Girlfriend Game, he talked about screenwriting. Antosca writes film and television scripts with writing partner Ned Vizzini (It’s Kind of a Funny Story), and offers good advice on transitioning from fiction to screenwriting and breaking into television. Towards the end of the conversation Antosca, currently a writer on the NBC show Believe, speaks about how his fiction has changed as a result of screenwriting, citing one specific screenplay maxim: get into scenes late and […]
Director and cinematographer Mark Toia at the RED User Forum has his hands on the new 6K RED Epic Dragon, and he calls it “the real deal,” writing, “It’s the first camera ever that I have used that captures exactly what I see with my own eye. Never have I seen this before!” From Toia’s post: The Red Dragon sensor has 3 F STOPS more than before. 1 in the hight lights which rolls over wonderfully !, 2 solid extra stops in the darks…. maybe 3 once the colour science has been perfected. But there is still noise, but nothing […]
When making a documentary the following question tends to arise: what should happen to those extra 238.5 hours of material? After a 90-minute (give or take) cut is locked, what does one do with the pile left on the floor? Do you pick up five or so scenes you’re particularly fond of and put them on a DVD as “extras”? What if you grabbed — or carefully selected, depending on your level of intensity of need to control — a handful of material and constructed an interactive online video explorer or choose-your-own-adventure, allowing people to navigate as they wish, depending […]
A new, occasional column here at Filmmaker, “The Shooting Schedule” looks at film production through the prism of a single shoot day. I peruse a film’s call sheet and production report and ask the director questions solely based on what I see there. To launch the column, I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to than my friend James Ponsoldt, whose third feature, The Spectacular Now, opens today. A contributor to Filmmaker — and a director whose first feature, Off the Black, Robin O’Hara and I produced — Ponsoldt has made with The Spectacular Now an indelible teen romance […]
“Hey Ryan, can we talk about the scene we’re shooting tomorrow?” Casey Wilson, the director of photography, was sitting off to the side of the football field when he called me over. We were waiting for the sun to go down so we could get a shot of a football game at magic hour for the opening of my new movie, Colorless Green. It was the first moment all day we’d had to talk about the next day’s work. “What do you think about doing it all in one shot?” I could feel my eyes narrow. For the next two […]
Starting this week, every Thursday the Filmmaker website will be hosting exclusive videos courtesy of Craft Truck, a new website which hosts “conversations with the world’s best cinematographers, editors, technology companies and more from the world of film and television.” To kick off this series, acclaimed d.p. Andrij Parekh talks about his approach to lighting and how this impacts on the performances of actors, such as Ryan Gosling, who he shot in Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson and Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines.
Filmmaker Braden King has made a hauntingly beautiful, web-only “interactive music video” for “Stitches,” the new single from Califone. In real time, the video pulls and sequences images from a curated selection of Tumblrs, sidescrolling them across your monitor in sync to the song’s elegant melancholy. Black-and-white photos and animated GIFs drift by, and by highlighting one with your cursor color bleeds back in. Click and the image flips over, allowing you to write a caption that is then sent to the band (and included on the “Stitches” home page) or, if you want, reblogged. Califone’s Tim Rutili and King are […]
Plenty of us independent filmmakers claim to be as environmentally friendly as can be, but beyond a few minor lifestyle tweaks (like claiming we just watched Gasland 2 while bemoaning Hollywood’s reliance on sequels), are we really as green as we’d like to think we are? Sadly, probably not. But one way we can help make a small difference to our planet is to take a page from the food movement and become locavore filmmakers — making movies close to home, in order to reduce our carbon footprints. I tried this strategy on my new film (Between Us, starring Julia […]
Top L to R: Lauren Wissot, Michael Tully, Laura Blum; Bottom L to R: Mark Bell, Dusty Wright Part I. Five Film Reviewers on Screening Films Part II. Five Film Reviewers Advise Filmmakers In Baal – the BBC’s 1982 cinematic adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1918/1923 dramatic play – Ekart is broke and unable to pay his bar bill. In a grimy tavern, he explains: “If I had money to pay, it would undermine my sense of self.” Paying a bar bill can be a bitch, but living as a drunken-pauper doesn’t sound better. Unlike Ekart in Baal*, I doubt today’s bohemians would be […]