Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Five Questions with Bully Director Lee Hirsch
Far more insidious than strep or the flu, Lee Hirsch’s Bully investigates a different sort of contagion infiltrating classrooms across the country. Centering on the South and Midwest — Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Mississippi, and Oklahoma — Hirsch and his crew peer into the lives of families and children that are dismantled and uprooted by relentless acts of bullying. While most surrender to the cyclical ostracizing, downplaying the shame before their parents and superiors, others seek solace in suicidal measures. Following its premiere at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, Bully shocked and educated audiences with its frank portrayal of the ramifications […]
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Five Questions with I Send You This Place Directors Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson
The debut film from husband and wife team Peter Ohs and Andrea Sisson (also known collectively as Lauren Edward, a composite of their middle names), I Send You This Place is a very unconventional documentary which tackles themes of mental health, creativity and the natural world through the prism of the couple’s trip to Iceland. Gorgeously shot and made with genuine invention by Ohs and Sisson — whose backgrounds in science and design bring a fresh approach to their interpretation of the non-fiction form — I Send You This Place establishes the pair as directors with a bright future. Filmmaker spoke to the […]
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Free the Mind Launches Distro Campaign via Indiegogo
Wanna give the finger to Big Pharma and maybe meet the Dalai Lama? Danish director Phie Ambo’s Free the Mind was one of my big discoveries at IDFA 2012. The film’s a truly revelatory exploration of the mindfulness movement, led here in the States by the University of Wisconsin’s Richard Davidson (who made Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world back in 2006), an expert in “contemplative neuroscience” who moved into the field after being asked by none other than the Dalai Lama why modern neuroscience didn’t study kindness and compassion. Ambo’s doc is a […]
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Interview Show Rambling On Now at Filmmaker
Rambling On, an independent film interview show, is landing at Filmmaker. Produced by filmmakers Russell Costanzo and Melissa B. Miller (The Tested), the show gathers, roundtable style, producers, directors and actors to discuss their working practices. Here’s an excerpt from the duo’s previous episode, a roundtable with producers Sophia Lin (Compliance), Josh Mond (Simon Killer), Riva Marker (What Maisie Knew), Jared Goldman (The Magic of Belle Isle), and Michelle Ann Small (Gun Hill Road). The moderator here is Matt Patches from Hollywood.com, and this clip addresses a skill every producer needs to learn how to master: How — and when […]
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Canon C100 Does 4:2:2 with the Ninja Video Recorder
In yesterday’s article “Canon C100 or C300: Which One to Get?” I wrote about the ability to attach an external recorder to the C100 and record 4:2:2 video, but added: Is 4:2:2 out of the C100 exactly the same as 4:2:2 from the C300? That’s a question I haven’t yet seen a definitive answer to, though a lot of people are assuming it is, or it’s very close. Today, I’m at least a step closer to answering that question. Paul Antico of Anticipate Media, and host of the NeedCreative Podcast, sent me some sample frames taken from Atomos Ninja 2 […]
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Canon C100 or C300: Which One to Get?
For many, the release of the Canon C100 has prompted one question: Which one do I get? Or, in other words, is the C300 really worth $9,500 more than the C100? These cameras have the same sensor and very similar bodies, and Canon even includes C-Log on both, but there are a lot of differences. Perhaps the most notable: C300 records internally 4:2:2 MPEG-2, while the C100 records 4:2:0 AVCHD 60p recording (at 720p) is available on the C300 but not the C100 C300 has HD-SDI & Genlock, C100 just has HDMI C100 is smaller There are other differences: The […]
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Matt Boyd on A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument (+ Exclusive Teaser)
In the quickly gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint during the mid-aughts, Walter Baker — a collector of sound, a street musician, a man of many talents and eccentricities — lives with his wife Andrea, a poet, and their adolescent son Sidney. Baker spends his days rummaging through barren lots and decaying Greenpoint docks recording sound, or lurking in the subway, using an extra large rubber band to make unearthly yet remarkably compelling quasi-music. Baker’s skills on the rubber band improve throughout Matt Boyd’s singularly self-possessed, unforgettable doc-narrative hybrid A Rubberband is an Unlikely Instrument, while his home life becomes more […]
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Festival Cinematography Notes – At Sundance, Alexa Rising
The day Sundance began, Daily Variety’s lead article kicked off with: “In this brave new indie world of VOD, shifting release windows, RED cameras [italics mine] and social media marketing…” I was struck by how little any of this has to do with indie filmmaking alone. As a token of digital revolution, RED cameras are so five years ago. It’s hard to storm the ramparts when last year’s #5 and #7 box office hits were shot with RED Epics (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Amazing Spider-Man). In fact, not only were last year’s #1 and #4 hits filmed with […]
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Director Cate Shortland on Lore
In telling the story of Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), a 14-year-old daughter of Nazi parents who travels across a devastated Germany in 1945, Cate Shortland’s Lore, adapted from Rachel Seiffert’s novel The Dark Room, plays with fire. As the director acknowledges, it could easily be misread as a statement that (Gentile) Germans were also victims of World War II. Instead, the film suggests what it’s like to fall from great privilege. Without fully understanding what it means to be a Nazi and what responsibility for evil her parents hold, Lore goes from being rich and well cared for to being treated […]
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Using a Home Projector for Rear Projection
Rear projection, a technique that involves projecting a background image onto a screen behind your actors, is a technique that was popular in the 40s and 50s, particularly for shooting vehicle interiors. It wasn’t perfect; the image can seem washed out compared to the foreground actors making it easy to spot the technique, and rear projection requires a fairly large studio space. Rear projection has been mostly replaced, first by front projection, and by blue- and green-screen techniques. Even low-budget NLEs now include very good green-screen filters that produce excellent results; though it’s your technique when shooting the footage that […]
