Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Jessica Oreck on her new Web Series, This Working Man
Less than three months since she premiered her documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, at the Tribeca Film Festival, Jessica Oreck is both on the road and back with new work. This Working Man is a web project combining video portraiture, travel, and crowdsourced curation. From the project’s website: This Working Man is a series of short portraits of men at work. It is about practiced motion, kinetic movement, bodies, and forms. It is about a particular type of man: exceedingly capable, strong, confident, and diligent. The project is a search for humble masculinity and an unapologetic admittance of […]
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Ryan Coogler Talks with Ava DuVernay about Fruitvale Station
A year ago next week Filmmaker audiences met for the first time writer/director Ryan Coogler, as we featured him in our 2012 “25 New Faces” list. Here’s my profile: Ryan Coogler remembers the first moment it occurred to him to become a film director. Having grown up in Oakland, Coogler was on a football scholarship to Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, Calif., where he had to take a creative writing class. The assignment was to write about a personal experience, and Coogler wrote about the time his father almost bled to death in his arms. He handed it in, and […]
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Sundance Institute Announces 29 Documentary Grant Recipients
Yesterday, the Sundance Institute announced the 29 documentary projects that have been selected to receive in total $550,000 worth of grant money from its Documentary Film Program and Fund. A lot of these are for projects in development by emerging filmmakers, but in there are also some films by more established names such as Jesse Moss (Full Battle Rattle), Lucia Small and Ed Pincus (The Axe in the Attic) and Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, who received audience engagement money for their 2011 doc Girl Model. In a press release, Cara Mertes, the Director of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program […]
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Cullen Hoback on Terms and Conditions May Apply
Every mouse-stroke you make, every search query you use, is being recorded, one way or another, usually by powerful and insidious entities who have no incentive not to sell this information to the highest bidder. Its exchange for copious storage on your web-based email service, and cloud-empowered music players that allow you to play Gil Scott-Heron records, long out of print, night and day, comes a cost that is pervasive and hidden. Your privacy. Oh, and a tremendous amount of monetary value that you likely never knew you created. Shucks. Cullen Hoback’s thoughtful and, in the age of Snowden, all […]
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Summer Grant Deadlines for Independent Filmmakers
With all the recent focus on crowdfunding, filmmakers shouldn’t forget about more traditional sources of funding, such as grants. Over the course of the summer are a number of grant deadlines for filmmakers seeking all stages of financing. Chicken & Egg Pictures First up is the late deadline, this Friday, for Chicken and Egg Pictures’ 2013 Open Call. From the site: “Chicken & Egg Pictures is dedicated to supporting women nonfiction filmmakers whose diverse voices and dynamic storytelling have the power to catalyze change, at home and around the globe.” This year’s average grant will be between $10,000 and $15,000, […]
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16 and Pregnant: Behind the Scenes of Simian, a Tragic Comedy
Nathan Silver’s second feature Exit Elena opens at the reRun Theater this coming Friday, but the prolific Silver has already premiered his third feature, Soft in the Head, on the festival circuit and has just wrapped production on his fourth, entitled Simian. Below is a photo blog written by Silver, Simian‘s producer and co-writer Chloe Domont and Cody Stokes, the film’s co-writer, cinematographer and editor. We just finished shooting Simian, a narrative feature that follows Robbie, a Norman Mailer wannabe who takes refuge at a makeshift home for pregnant teens. The idyllic backdrop of the Hudson Valley seems to be […]
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Shooting With John: Knuckle Jack
On this special episode of Shooting With John we shoot shotguns in Los Angeles with John Adams and talk about the experience of family filmmaking. Knuckle Jack is a wonderful microbudget film made by the Adams family in the backwoods and backyards of upstate New York. Jack is a small-town, foul-mouthed drunk with an artistic gift for thievery. Haunted by a youthful tragedy, he passes through his days in a lonely haze, robbing wealthy weekenders’ homes only to score more drugs, booze and bitterness. When Jack is asked to care for his eight-year-old niece Frankie for one thick, hot Catskill […]
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U.S. in Progress Accepting Submissions for American Indie Post Funding
A joint program between the American Film Festival in Wroclaw and the Champs Elysées Film Festival in Paris, U.S. in Progress is a twice-yearly showcase for American independents that should be on the radar of all indies seeking post financing and services. The events present American independent works in progress to groups of European buyers, with two films each year winning post service packages. It’s the only European event devoted exclusively to American independents. The Wroclaw edition is upcoming, October 23 – 25, and has an August 15 deadline for submissions. (And, there’s no submission fee.) The Paris edition recently […]
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Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: David Rosfeld
Is it possible to be blocked even after you successfully complete your film? If you asked me at the start of this series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” I would have answered no. You could be frustrated, disappointed or even angry, perhaps, but the realization of an artistic goal should have transmuted that feeling of blockage into something else… Or, at least, that was the rationale behind this column. With “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” I wanted to create a space on this site for those whose films aren’t getting made but whose voices are still very much worth hearing. I also […]
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Should Crowdfunding Sites Ban Overfunding?
Tweets with an unusually high level of disgruntlement have begun to appear in my feed in the last few days. These tweets all have one thing in common: crowdfunded projects that have failed to deliver in one form or another. These projects range from film to gaming to industrial design, but they were all very successful campaigns that have since turned into projects that left a sour taste in the mouth. In observing these complaints and interacting with some of the frustrated individuals over Twitter I began to see a pattern in the projects that caused so much grief: they […]
