There’s a trend in actor-turned-director helmed films at Cannes this year, an impeccable direction of the people on screen. You can tell there’s a sense of trust and cohesive goal to create something great. One of the clearest examples of this is James Franco’s new feature film, As I Lay Dying, based on the great American classic by William Faulkner, the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family’s quest to honor her wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson. The vivid characters have come to life on the big screen through Franco’s split-screen filmmaking, led by […]
Transmedia producers in Canada already have ways to network with and benefit from each other through organizations like the Toronto-based group Transmedia 101. But those specifically interested in creating web series just received an additional resource with the formation of the Independent Webseries Creators of Canada (or IWCC; CIWC in French). Serendipitously coinciding with the announcement of the Vancouver Web Fest, the IWCC is a nonprofit professional association that sees today’s web producers like the television pioneers of the 1940s and 50s: building a new branch of the entertainment industry in uncharted waters, but this time doing so in a […]
Made quickly and on the cheap, prolific South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta, is an often disturbing revenge tale, moody and morally challenging, where redemption for one of recent cinema’s most dark-hearted anti-heroes seems just out of grasp. Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin) is a pitiless and anger-fueled debt collector for a equally brutal moneylender who specializes in forcing his often destitute debtors to commit insurance fraud in order to pay back what they owe him. Living a comfortless and filthy existence in the same slum as many of his victim, Kang-do has not a friend or a care in the […]
Over the past few months it’s been hard to miss the green icons showing up on Twitter and other social media in support of the FX Protest, an event that happened at this year’s Oscar ceremony to protest ongoing problems in the VFX industry. While movies continue to make great use of visual effects, the companies that create these effects are being financially stressed and are going out of business. To find out more about what’s been going on in the VFX industry, we spoke to Michael Scott, a VFX compositor who has been working in the industry for the […]
With all the discussion about the future of Kickstarter in recent weeks, it may be appropriate that a film that began its campaign at the beginning of the crowdfunding movement is finally coming out this Saturday. The Cosmonaut — a Spanish-made English-language film directed by Nicolás Alcalá and produced by Carola Rodriguez and Bruno Teixidor — raised over €300,000 from 5,000 contributors. It was the first crowdfunded film in Spain and helped pave the way for the foundation of Lánzanos, Spain’s Kickstarter equivalent. The Cosmonaut will be available to watch for free on Saturday on the film’s website; the DVD, theatrical […]
“I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over.” Guess who said these memorable words? In November 2007, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama uttered this now all-but-forgotten campaign promise. The president recently announced his plan to appoint Tom Wheeler (above), a true industry insider, to head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Wheeler is a career water carrier for corporate interests. He served as head of the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1979 and 1984, and ran the Cellular Telecom and Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 through 2004. […]
In the penultimate part of Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab’s interview project with prominent transmedia figures, D. Fox Harrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Digital Media in the Comparative Media Studies Program and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, answers our questions. Harrell’s research explores the relationship between imaginative cognition and computation. He develops new forms of social media, gaming, computational narrative, and related computational media systems based in computer science, cognitive science, and digital media arts. The National Science Foundation has recognized Harrell with an NSF CAREER Award for his project “Computing for Advanced Identity Representation.” He has worked […]
Gabe Klinger is currently running a Kickstarter campaign for his documentary on directing legends James Benning and Richard Linklater. Below he talks about the experience of working on the project. My first encounter with Richard Linklater was through his Dazed and Confused. The film was of meteoric importance to me and my junior high peers. The soundtrack, which revived forgotten tunes by War and Foghat, got more play on our boomboxes than the Dr. Dre, Nirvana and Mariah Carey hits of the day. When a friend’s mom busted me for stealing her pack of smokes, I told her Dazed and […]
Call me crazy, but I have a feeling that I am sitting on a niche documentary goldmine. It’s titled Nuts: The Best Damn Fans In The Land. It will be about Buckeye Nation, which is the cultish fandom of The Ohio State University. I’ve never been more certain of a project’s potential success than this one. However, my past attempts at trying to get it funded tell a much different story. For almost a decade I failed to obtain funding for this golden project. Then a miracle happened, which I will get to in a moment. Buckeye Nation is the […]
Get together for drinks with a group of people who work in film, and soon the memories will flow. And they are usually linked to films these people have worked on. Film titles become markers of memory. It was on that film that this electrician met his future wife. On this one a P.A. adopted her dog. The sound guy was going through a divorce on this other one. The films may have faded from our collective memory, but the days on those sets are still ripe for the people who were involved. In reading this letter from Michael Lew, […]