Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Interactivity Through Biology with many worlds
The words “interactive film” obviously evoke some kind of audience engagement, but what that actually means can — and does — change with every project. While there have been a lot of innovations with screenings in public venues, interactive films often tend to play best online or on mobile devices where viewers can input information and make narrative decisions. The new short film many worlds seeks to turn this on its head a little bit and redefine interactivity by, first, making it completely unconscious for viewers and, second, allowing it to take place in a traditional theater. Billed as “a […]
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Sibling Cinema: A Brother-Sister Perspective on Indie Film
Lumière, Cohen, Zucker, Farley, Duplass, and Polish. All siblings in cinema. Are siblings just genetically inclined to be good partners? My sister Eva and myself are not your garden-variety filmmaking partnership. We’re brother and sister, bound by shared nature and nurture. We formally joined professional forces in 2003 and founded Last Ditch Pictures, now a full-service production company spanning the gamut: commercials and industrials and shorts, editing and scoring and visual effects, and — closest to our hearts and common circuitry — features. I sat down with my sister over the weekend, having just completed post production on our fourth […]
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The Need for Speed: Tools to Help You Edit Faster
Anyone who’s joined the FCPX bandwagon will tell you one of the main draws is speed (or at least I will). FCPX let’s you do things quicker. But how we interact with the system (and computers in general) has its limitations. For years the standard of working with NLEs has been left fingers planted on J, K, L, right hand on mouse. It’s not a terribly bad way to edit. Doing it for years you build up a fast muscle memory, but there are still keyboard tasks that stretch the limit of what you can remember, along with the span […]
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“Don’t Go Through The System”: John Singleton Talks in Toronto
John Singleton was raised on silent movies. The 45-year-old director of Boyz in the Hood and the Shaft remake grew up next to the Century Drive-In in Inglewood, California. As a boy, he’d literally peek out his window and watch his heroes Bruce Lee and Billy Jack‘s Tom Laughlin battle on-screen without sound. “The first breast I saw was Pam Grier’s,” Singleton confessed to a rapt audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Tuesday night, hosted by director Clement Virgo as part of the city’s Black History Month celebrations. “Every time I see Pam Grier I tell her, ‘You made me want […]
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Lydia Antonini and Josh Feldman on Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn
At the beginning of the year, Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay pointed out again — like many others have as well — that features are no longer the default format-of-choice for indie filmmakers. And as forms like the web series mature, we’re seeing more of the kinks getting worked out and more filmmakers and others finding innovative ways to release and promote new work. Take Netflix’s high-profile series House of Cards, which was just released all at once instead of in spaced-out (i.e. weekly) increments; we’ve yet to see the show’s long tail, but its initial viewer data (that is, its engagement […]
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Hannah Fidell’s A Teacher Picked Up by Oscilloscope
Our current crop of “25 New Faces” are a busy bunch (I recently wrote an update on their exploits), and the latest alum to make headlines is Hannah Fidell, whose debut feature A Teacher has just been picked up by Oscilloscope. The film — produced by another of 2012’s 25, Kim Sherman — tells the story of a 20-something teacher (the excellent Lindsay Burdge) who has an affair with one of her students. It premiered at Sundance last month, and will play at SXSW in March. In a press release announcing the acquisition, Oscilloscope’s David Laub and Dan Berger said, […]
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In the Can: Days of Gray
Picking up from where we left off in our last article, we’re happy to announce that Days of Gray is in the can! So much has happened in the last six months, and here’s how we got there. We concluded an incredibly successful Kickstarter campaign in early June with a blow-out party at the Wooly (many thanks to all our backers who came out in droves and danced till the wee hours to the beats of Icelandic DJs!) We also held a very well-attended screening at the Scandinavia House showcasing previous works from Bicephaly Pictures as well as some of Hjaltalín’s music videos to give […]
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Sam Neave, Almost in Love
Director Sam Neave and his producer/star Marjan Neshat are both Iranian-born, but the films they tend to make together — including 2003’s Sundance entry Cry Funny Happy and their terrific new two shot high-wire act Almost in Love — focus on the romantic travails of upper-middle-class Westerners in ways that are as funny as they are earnest. Their newest film, despite its intentionally schematic, downright arty structural contrivance, is a surprisingly rich meditation on friendship, the difficulty of settling down and the importance of being earnest. Performed in humorous and melancholy shades by an odd assortment of performers, most notably Ms. Neshat, Gary Wilmes, Alan Cumming and Alex Karpovsky — who […]
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Conversations with Blocked Filmmakers
Independent films get made, and we cover them here at Filmmaker. But what about all the films that don’t get made? They have their own stories, and their stories can be as useful to other filmmakers as those of films that do actually hit the screen. After a brief Twitter poll, I’ve decided to invite several filmmakers who have been struggling, so far unsuccessfully, to make their films to discuss those projects here on the site. I’ll be interested in the films, the length of the development process, the avenues tried, and the possible reasons for the projects’ failure to […]
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Four Tips for Festival Rejectees
Your film didn’t get into the A-level fests so far? With Sundance, Berlin and SXSW having already been announced — or come and gone — for 2013, there are some disappointed filmmakers grappling with an official rejection and its impact on the life of their films. Not getting into a major festival is certainly not the end of the world, but being unprepared for anything except acceptance really can be the end if filmmakers haven’t planned and budgeted for the lack of a conventional distribution deal. Because it isn’t smart just to play the festival circuit and hope for a […]
