Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
The Independent Screenwriter: Larry Gross
“The independent screenwriter” — is the term a tautology or oxymoron? While the word “independent” is often applied to directors and sometimes producers, it’s rarely seen appended to the job title of screenwriter. Is that because so many independent directors write their own scripts? Because screenwriters-for-hire are inevitably drawn to the world of Hollywood? Or, perhaps, because the term means little when applied to the craft of screenwriting? After all, while a director is reliant on others to provide financing and labor, a writer can always sit down with pen, paper or word processor. In this new, occasional column, we […]
-
Solving Storytelling Problems at Tribeca Hacks
Technology-centered hackathons identify real-world problems and then attempt to solve them through rapid prototyping. Artistic hackathons — 48-Hour Playwriting contests and the like — use compressed time periods to stave off creators’ perennial demons (procrastination, usually manifested by a compulsive desire to clean one’s apartment). But hackathons that merge the creative with the artistic pose unique challenges. There’s the artistic element, the technology element and then also the fusion of the two, which is actually a third thing entirely. Storytelling craft, choice of content but also appropriateness and originality of UI and methods of engagement all become the criteria by […]
-
Letters from Blocked Filmmakers: Jessica Vale
Although the title of this column may make you think of “writer’s block,” filmmakers can be blocked by external forces as well as internal ones. In last week’s post, Drew Whitmire wrote about the internal factors — a relentless perfectionism and self-questioning — that have prevented him from finishing his first film. In today’s post, Jessica Vale writes about a series of events that brought her to Liberia to shoot footage about a medical mission there, a trip that led her to then embark on a larger feature documentary. But a number of factors stopped that feature in its tracks […]
-
Big Data and the 25 Best Film Schools
Big Data — the term is everywhere right now. Sometimes used as a shorthand for the companies that are in the business of collecting, aggregating and sifting through large data sets (often comprised of personal info), it more properly refers to the data sets themselves — collections of information so gigantic they require advanced technologies to interpret. There’s much creepy potential in Big Data, but it is here to stay. The question, then, is whether the technologies of Big Data can be marshaled for progressive and creative goals. At Arts Fwd, Erinn Roos-Brown argues that arts organizations can learn from […]
-
Ted Hope Offers 17 Facts About the Film Business
At his Hope for Film blog, producer and San Francisco Film Society executive director identifies and speculates on 17 current conditions of the film business, prompting us to consider how we’ll consequently evolve our own practices to take them into account. The post accompanies the launch of the SFFS’s A2E (Artist 2 Entrepreneur) program, a new pilot program “designed to give filmmakers the necessary entrepreneurial skills to achieve a sustainable creative life amidst this changing paradigm.” (It was this weekend, but you can read the schedule here.) I’m particularly interested in Hope’s point number four, below, in which he writes […]
-
The Kids from Kids, Savages, the Internet, Screenwriting, Soderbergh, Mellow Pages and More: Sunday Links
For Narratively, Carolyn Rothstein revisits the kids from Kids, 20 years later, in “Legends Never Die.” Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are stars, Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter have passed away, and the others are living their lives in diverse and at times unexpected ways. As her interviewees tell it, Kids was not just about people but a city: The kids say the film was accurate, except for the most fantastical stuff. There’s no denying they weren’t sober during filming. Even the scene with Javier Nunez, at fourteen, by far the youngest of the skate crew, and three other little […]
-
Jared Moshe on Dead Man’s Burden
Sumptuous and evocative, Jared Moshe’s Dead Man’s Burden is the rarest of species in specialty film, a Western. More importantly, it is a fine addition to the genre, a complex meditation on the wages of sin and the burdens of family, a chamber drama with more than a hint of noir. Set during the years after the Civil War in and around a rural New Mexican ranch, the film initially focuses on a young couple, Martha (Clare Bowen) and Heck (David Call). They plan to sell the ranch after the death of her father, a struggling farmer, and use the money […]
-
Talking with Michael Di Jiacomo and John Turturro about 1-900-Tonight
One of the most frustrating things about covering film festivals is making discoveries that few movie lovers will ever see. Filmmaking is an industry after all, and as such, artistry will always play second fiddle to marketability. Even so, I was quite surprised to learn that one of my favorite films from the 2011 edition of the prestigious Karlovy Vary International Film Festival never found U.S. theatrical distribution. Surely someone could have figured a way to sell a John Turturro-starring, NYC-set story about two lost souls on opposite ends of an adult chat line? (Especially considering Turturro last year appeared […]
-
Beyond: Two Souls at the Tribeca Film Festival
The distance between video games and cinema has been shrinking for years. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the presentation of Beyond: Two Souls last Saturday during the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend, an event billed as the first time a video game has ever been shown in a film festival. Certainly in the packed SVA theater, past the red carpet for actors like Elliot Page and after the enthusiastic introduction by Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Gilmore, it felt like a convergence of the two media that we haven’t seen before. This isn’t a game based on a […]
-
Five Questions for Unmade in China Directors Gil Kofman and Tanner King Barklow
Screenwriter George Richards wrote Case Sensitive as “an American thriller with American actors for an American audience.” Director Gil Kofman (The Memory Thief) brought the script to producer Seth Scher, who had connections to a Chinese investor who was making films for the Chinese market. The film was greenlit and Kofman, who does not speak Chinese, traveled to Xiamen, China, to direct his second narrative feature. Soon afterward his friend, documentary filmmaker Tanner King Barklow, joined him and began documenting Kofman’s travails as he tried to navigate a colossal language barrier, bureaucracy, corruption, and cultural differences. Early in the documentary […]
