Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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On Indiegogo: Mitch McCabe’s Make Me Normal
The body and mind — filmmaker Mitch McCabe tackled the former in her excellent HBO documentary, Youth Knows No Pain, which looked at the plastic surgery industry and America’s fixation on staying young. Now, she says, she’s “pointing the camera in the opposite direction, at our internal selves.” Make Me Normal is her film about the mental health industry. From her website: MAKE ME NORMAL is a feature-length documentary film exploring recent controversies in the psychiatry field, the rise of diagnosed mental illness, psychopharmacology and our new definition of “normal”— all set against the backdrop of the filmmaker’s own roll-coaster […]
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Russell Harbaugh at the Sundance Directors Lab
Writer/director Russell Harbaugh is currently at the Sundance Directors Lab this month with his feature version of Rolling on the Floor Laughing, his short which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2012. (You can watch the short below.) The following is what Harbaugh wrote about his experiences at the Lab. Another round of advisors arrived to the mountain yesterday, Sunday, our “off” day, and now it’s Monday — Monday night — and our third week of production has begun and I’m feeling that feeling of, like, oh no, they are going to know. They are going to know. Someone in […]
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13 Ways to Cast A-List Actors in Microbudget Films
My film Between Us is about to come out in theaters and one of the questions I’ve been asked at some of the 22 festivals in seven countries I’ve been to (and yes, that sound you hear is my feet splashing on the beach when I won the Grand Jury Prize in the Bahamas) is how the hell I got a cast like Julia Stiles, Taye Diggs, Melissa George and David Harbour in a movie that according to Kickstarter only cost $10,000? So let me explain… 1. Choose Castable Material. One reason I chose to adapt an Off-Broadway play in […]
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This Film Was Made For You and Me: Thoughts from the IFP Narrative Lab
In my office hangs a blue and green woodblock poster that features an image of Woody Guthrie and a lot of hand-carved text. The text is a quote — an exhortation, really — adapted from Born To Win, Guthrie’s autobiography, about why he writes songs and who his audience is. I’ve had this poster as long as I’ve been making films, and — not coincidentally — that poster’s been on my mind for the last week while I had the honor of workshopping my debut feature, Something, Anything, through the first week of IFP’s Narrative Lab. Throughout the week, our […]
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Pamela Romanowsky at the Sundance Directors Lab
Writer/director Pamela Romanowsky is currently at the Sundance Directors Lab this month with her adaptation of Stephen Elliott’s memoir The Adderall Diaries. The following is what she wrote about her experiences at the Lab. It’s just after lunch, and we’re driving up the mountain road to the house we’ve been rehearsing in. My actors Luke Kirby and Megan Boone are in the back seat. Luke cracks a joke and we all laugh. I turn around to announce that I’m stealing that line for the next scene, and through the frame of the back window, a man in a denim jacket […]
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VOD Wars Heat Up
Intel, the giant computer chip manufacturer, is joining the growing roster of tech companies entering the web-delivered video jamboree. In addition to Google’s YouTube and Netflix, Apple and Microsoft are carving out space on the web to offer live and video-on-demand (VOD) TV programming. Web video distribution can be executed either as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) or as Over-the-Top (OTT). With IPTV, the digital signal is streamed and/or offered as VOD programming over a closed or proprietary network through a cable or telephone company. OTT refers to streaming and/or VOD programming distributed over an open or unmanaged video data stream […]
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10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Alejandro Jodorowsky
Alejandro Jodorowsky premiered his first directorial feature in 23 years at Cannes this year with the fictionalized autobiographical film The Dance of Reality. The man behind cult favorites El Topo and The Holy Mountain delighted audiences with his magic-realist account of growing up in Tocopilla, Chile. It was met with a standing ovation, and the director called the film’s reception in France one of the proudest moments of his life. The Dance of Reality is marked by fantastic, surreal characters, from an opera-singing mother to an overzealous anarchist to a painted religious guru. It is easy to see how Jodorowsky’s […]
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The Scent: Interview with D.P. Stefan Müller
What do you do when you get a new camera? Some people run out and shoot test footage, while others just gamble and use the camera on the next shoot they have lined up. When Stefan Müller, an Austrian freelance film director, d.p. and editor acquired a Canon C100, he went out and shot The Scent, a 12-minute short. One of the stars of this short is a black Labrador called Sky. Despite W.C. Fields’ admonition, “Never work with children or animals,” Müller captured a great performance from the dog, yet when asked if anything interesting or unusual happened during […]
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Casio Keyboards, Primped Hair and Tom Cruise: Growing Up on ’80s Movies
The sound of Casio keyboards float out of a Gap on Broadway and I’m transported. It’s 2013. I’ll be 35-years-old soon. But for a moment I’m back in 1986. I don’t know who the singer is. It’s a boy who sounds like a girl, could be anyone in the ’80s. But it could only be from the ’80s. The strange canned ignorance of it. The willful naiveté. As if the whole world got together and said — let’s be POP. And any emotion, any art, any death, any clarity — we’ll process through that pop. The ’80s. The one decade […]
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How to Create Work Non-Stop Despite the Odds
If you are an independent filmmaker who’s not a trust fund kid, most likely you are on that constant search for financing for your next project. As two filmmakers living in New York, attending indie film parties and groups, we are constantly hearing stories about the film that’s been five years in the making and counting… and to be honest, it’s a little depressing. We need more stories about “the little film that could!” to inspire optimism among indie filmmakers instead of the tired “Who’s financing your film?” conversations. We are no experts, but over the past year of collaborating […]
