Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Digital Fragments: Using NFTs and the Blockchain to Aid in the Creation of New Media Work
Origin Story The pilot announces that we’ll soon be pushing back on the tarmac, and I start to spread out. Just then, bursts of laughter cut through the air, and the expectation of a spacious flight to Los Angeles rapidly disappears. It’s 2018, and I watch as a pair of 20-somethings, who look as if they’ve just stepped out of a panel at Comic-Con, come bounding down the aisle. Both are wearing cat ears attached to a plastic arch that rests on their heads. Settling into the two empty seats by my side, they are animated, their chatter is infectious. […]
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Getting Started with NFTs on Hic Et Nunc
Hic Et Nunc (HEN) launched in March. The site and interface have been growing rapidly and are still evolving. Here is how to get started on the platform. Setting up a wallet Your wallet will hold your cryptocurrency and enable you to buy and sell. It’s also how you connect, or log in, to HEN. We’ll focus on the Temple and Kukai wallets, which at different points have been recommended by HEN. These options store your data locally on your computer. When setting up a wallet, you’ll be presented with an automatically generated 8- to 12-word seed phrase. You’ll need […]
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A Musuem of One’s Own: Jessica Oreck on Her Office of Collecting and Design
Drawers of marbles and buttons, a wall of picture frames with nothing in them, empty matchboxes, broken dice and a tray of antique doll eyes, irises fixed in hopeful stares beneath the swoop of their curled eyelashes. These are just a few of the uncanny items you’ll find in the Office of Collecting and Design, a museum full of, in the words of its creator, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, One Man Dies a Million Times), “lost and forgotten objects, things that people don’t think are valuable but have too much charm to throw away. These are things […]
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Full Frame Documentary Film Festival Presents “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors”
“If I could log in right now I would,” Dawn Porter raved in one of the many enthusiastic testimonials sprinkled throughout Full Frame’s engaging “The Creative Power of BIPOC Editors,” an online launch/celebration of the BIPOC Documentary Editors Database. Expertly edited (surprise surprise), the swift-moving event (approximately an hour long) took place on June 3rd but is still well worth checking out. Whether you’re a veteran producer looking to hire beyond the usual (white) suspects or a student just beginning to build your reel, this database instruction manual/guide to best BIPOC hiring practices/panel discussion/showcase of the diversity of BIPOC work […]
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New Paths Forward: The Immersive and Interactive Works at Tribeca 2021
As the first major festival to return in person as the pandemic recedes, Tribeca gave us one more sign that New York is coming back. In the Heights, which opened the festival at the United Palace on June 9, was a joyful celebration of community (even for those of us who watched at home), and even in a reduced capacity the festival was a wonderful opportunity to reconnect with the movies. It also seemed that after shuttering the 2020 festival, this year’s event was fairly bursting at the seams with new types of content—of course the short and feature films […]
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“Narrating Our Struggle”: Cherien Dabis on Palestinian Stories and Rejecting Censorship
“Dad, I want to be a filmmaker,” I pronounced at 12 years old, from our home in rural Ohio. “You can’t be a filmmaker,” my father responded. You’re Palestinian. No one will care what you have to say.” I was shocked. You’re wrong, I said to myself, rejecting his statement outright. Yet his words have continued to haunt me. My first memory of traveling to Palestine to visit our native village was when I was eight years old. Armed Israeli soldiers held my family at the border for 12 hours. They picked through the contents of our suitcases. My father […]
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Marlon Riggs: Signifying and Seeing
I realized that I was bisexual immediately before being dropped into a Long Island diocesan Catholic high school with a standardly devout administration where I didn’t know anyone. I stayed in the closet for about a year before I started to tell my new school friends. That said, the teachers and students were fairly liberal, if not particularly outspoken. I found a small sense of community in the school’s impressive theater department, although all the other guys were straight. It wasn’t until I took dance classes that I would interact with the only other queer male students I could find, […]
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Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: Last Train from Gun Hill, There was a crooked man…, Stranger on the Run and In the Line of Fire
Actor Kirk Douglas was at the top of his game when he reunited with producer Hal Wallis, director John Sturges and most of the rest of his Gunfight at the OK Corral team for Last Train from Gun Hill, a dark and absorbing 1959 Western that stands tall as a worthy companion to Douglas’s other great achievements of the era like Lust for Life, Paths of Glory, Strangers When We Meet and Spartacus. As those titles illustrate, this was a period when Douglas used his box office capital to make one interesting and ambitious picture after another, and Last Train […]
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“Can Jupiter Use his Powers and Wisdom to… Rectify Racial Injustice and Inequality?”: Ram Devineni and Yusef Komunyakaa on their Tribeca-Premiering AR Comic Book Jupiter Invincible
Jupiter Invincible, the latest augmented reality comic book from Ram Devineni and his NY-based Rattapallax media house, marks a bit of a departure for the doc filmmaker and technologist. Best known in the AR world for his comic book series Priya’s Shakti — starring India’s first female superhero and rape survivor (and UN Women-designated “gender equality champion”) — Devineni now travels both back to these shores and back in time, all the way to pre-Civil War Maryland. And he brings along an impressive trio of collaborators. Our superhero of this tale, the titular Jupiter, is the invention of the Pulitzer […]
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Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations: My Fair Lady, The President’s Analyst, The Hand
A glorious last gasp of the classical Hollywood studio system gets a reference quality upgrade with Paramount’s 4K disc of My Fair Lady, the best of the gargantuan musicals that would hit their commercial apex with The Sound of Music in 1965 and nearly sink the industry with Doctor Dolittle and Star! just a few years later. Released in 1964, My Fair Lady is an early entry in the cycle and an expertly modulated one thanks to the firm hand of director George Cukor, whose work was always characterized by a harmonious interaction between performance, composition, camera movement and cutting—Cukor […]
