Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“Have You Been in Jail Recently?” Chris Doyle on How to Be a Cinematic Artist
The preacher in torn blue jeans and brown suede boots sipped his pint before delivering his sermon as video projections all around flashed clips of films. The church was the open-air foyer at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in downtown Toronto, and about 60 of the faithful gathered Saturday night to hear world-renowned d.p. Chris Doyle pontificate about cinematography, aesthetics, and his alter ego, Dù Kefeng. Last week, Dù Kefeng was one of the stars gathered to launch TIFF’s Century of Chinese Cinema summer program. The program will present the likes of action superstar Jackie Chan and heavyweight producer Nansun Shi, […]
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Amazon Storyteller: A Sort-of-Free Storyboard Tool
Last week, Amazon added a new tool to Amazon Studios called Amazon Storyteller. Storyteller is a free, easy to use storyboarding tool, but before you rush out to try it, you might want to know a little more about Amazon Studios. A little history Not content with creating a distribution mechanism for films and videos, Amazon began dabbling in the world of production with the launch of Amazon Studios in latter 2010. Amazon Studios invited screenwriters to submit movie and television scripts with the prospect of prizes and production deals. During the first few months the incentive was primarily cash […]
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Caveh Zahedi’s Hamptons Screenplay Lab Diary
May 9, 2012 My friend Arnold Barkus and I decide to collaborate on a script about the true-life relationship between outsider artist Joseph Cornell, a 59 year-old virgin who still lived at home with his mother and crippled younger brother, and Joyce Hunter, a 19 year-old waitress and teen runaway. January 17, 2013 Arnold and I submit a draft of our script, titled The Story of Joseph Cornell and Joyce Hunter, to the Hamptons Screenplay Lab. March 18, 2013 I receive a voicemail from David Nugent, the artistic director of the Hamptons International Film Festival. He informs me that our […]
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The Secret History of Blue-Tongue Films
Blue-Tongue Films’ name appears before such films as Animal Kingdom, Hesher, The Square and Kieran Darcy-Smith’s Wish You Were Here, released this week by eONE Films, but it’s not a production company. Rather, Blue-Tongue Films calls itself a “production collective,” with its members including one American and seven Australian filmmakers. It started in 1996 when a grainy black-and-white five-minute film introduced them to no one in particular, certainly not the world. Nash Edgerton was working as a stuntman — or at least trying to. The group’s first short film, Loaded, started as a chase sequence meant to be a show […]
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Filmmaker Laura Poitras Co-Authors Bombshell Domestic Spying Report
Like everyone, on Wednesday I read Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian report, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.” I was outraged, but I can’t say I was shocked. I’ve known for some time —- since I was a teenager — that the NSA routinely scoops up all international communications. More to the point, I’d already written this info myself, on this site. In covering filmmaker Laura Poitras’s event at the Whitney Biennial last year, I described the presentation of her guest speaker, Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower whose warnings have alarmed privacy advocates for years. I wrote: “Slides […]
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The Camera as Narrator: V/H/S/2
The new horror anthology film V/H/S/2–once you’ve shaken the blood from your hair–leaves behind some striking images and moments. Oh the lowly horror genre: the place where there is more cinematic risk-taking and experimentation happening than in the likes of “serious” films such as Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master or Terrence Malick’s pulseless To the Wonder. There is, in particular, one short sequence in V/H/S/2 where the experiments with camera narration are revealing not only in terms of the potential uses of narrative point of view but also in terms of how we process visual information. It’s easier to think […]
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City World Director Brent Chesanek
Among the discoveries at the 2012 edition of CPH:DOX was Brooklyn-based Brent Chesanek’s City World, which is part magic realist children’s adventure tale and part austere landscape documentary. Over precisely framed tableaux shot in his hometown of Orlando, FL — nearly all of them completely absent of people — Chesanek drapes the narration of a young boy mulling the breakup of his family and subsequent move, with his father, to this Southern city. As in another recent film, General Orders No. 9, contemporary landscape photography is presented as historical residue meant to be both meditated on and explicated. Drained of […]
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MoMA Launches “Harris Savides: Visual Poet” Series
Ten features shot by the late cinematographer Harris Savides are included in “Harris Savides: Visual Poet,” a series opening at MoMA today. Writes curator Anne Morra: A Savides shot is often characterized by a sensitivity to design and the striking mutability of light, and a special attention to the actor’s place in the composition. The films in this special tribute represent the wide range of his work, and the many directors who chose his camera to reflect their most personal stories. The series opens with Jonathan Glazer’s Birth, which was the film concentrated on by Zach Wigon in Filmmaker‘s remembrance […]
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Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: Gregory Austin McConnell
In the debut piece in this column, Letters from Blocked Filmmakers, Drew Whitmire described a relentless perfectionism that led to him continually begin and begin again what was meant to be his debut feature — a 14-year process that resulted in only 15 minutes of footage. In today’s installment, Gregory Austin McConnell describes a related behavior: a continual re-envisioning of his feature as he ages and his own life circumstances change. Characters, storylines and tone all mutate as McConnell’s teenage dreams give way to adult realities — realities that bring not only creative change but also family responsibilities that make […]
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Shooting in Snow and Ice with the Canon C100: Interview with Ben Pender-Cudlip
Ben Pender-Cudlip is a Boston-based documentary filmmaker who recently switched from shooting with a DSLR to the Canon C100. His first project shot on the C100 was a short that included a segment on ice climbing. In this second part of our interview with him about switching to the C100, Pender-Cudlip talks about the project and what it was like to use the camera in these conditions. Filmmaker: How did this project come about? Pender-Cudlip: It’s a film for a woman named Lauren Schaad. She approached me about shooting a TV pilot. She was looking to get into reality TV […]
