When we last checked in with 25 New Face filmmaker Jessica Oreck, she was attending the POV Hackathon, a two-day event at which the documentary television series paired filmmakers with web developers. There Oreck met Mike Knowlton and Hal Siegel of the hybrid studio/technology company Murmur, and in just over three months the team has created The Aatsinki Season, an online counterpart to Oreck’s forthcoming feature documentary, Aatsinki: The Story Of Arctic Cowboys. Launching today, the work is both hypnotic and thoughtful, comprising text, film and flow charts, and allowing the viewer to initiate debate over the ecological issues facing […]
At his excellent filmmaking blog Coffee and Celluloid, Joey Daoud posted this short video review of the just-released Panasonic GH3. From the sounds of it, this seems like a great next version of the camera, with better controls, sturdier construction, Quicktime recording instead of just AVCHD, and a better bit rate. You can read Daoud’s quick thoughts on the camera here and watch the video above.
At Filmmaker we continuously cover the struggles of first-time directors to make their debut pictures. But the second film comes with its own set of unique challenges, issues that will be explored in this five-part series by Kishori Rajan. Below is the first installment, chronicling Filmmaker 25 New Face Tze Chun’s move from the microbudget character drama Children of Invention to a thriller with stars like Bryan Cranston. Look for further articles in the weeks ahead. — SM The late producer Laura Ziskin once remarked that movies “aren’t made, but forced into existence,” an expression never more apt than when […]
Last month we added Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby to our curated Kickstarter page and ran here one of his daily Rumpus newsletters where he discussed the film and the goals for his campaign. Now, with hours left, he is tantalizingly within reach of his ambitious $85,000 goal. (You can put him over the top here and score an imaginative reward in the process.) As his campaign nears its close, I thought I’d run with permission today’s newsletter, in which he discusses what will hopefully be his successful “800 backers” strategy. — SM We’re almost at our Kickstarter goal for the […]
As one of the three journalists contacted by documentary film programmer Thom Powers last Spring about Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I, I wanted to weigh in on the controversy that erupted this week following Zahedi’s accusation that Powers has “blacklisted” his picture, which opens today from Factory 25. After watching Zahedi’s YouTube video and then reading Powers’ response, I decided to talk to both men to explore the situation in more detail. Then, in the midst of writing this, I noticed Eric Kohn’s post at Indiewire this morning, which exhaustively discusses the film, the timeline of Powers and Zahedi’s […]
Indefatigable in their desire to find larger and larger audiences for their film, Adam Bhala Lough (Bomb the System, Weapons) and and his co-director Ethan Higbee have been self-distributing The Upsetter: The Life & Music of Lee “Scratch” Perry for what feels like an eternity. The film had its world premiere at SXSW in 2008 and bounced around the festival circuit for the next year and a half, picking up Benicio Del Toro as an executive producer and narrator along the way, while winning generally positive notices in most of its stops. When Lough (one of 2003’s “25 New Faces of Independent […]
It’s been more than a week since IDFA, but I can’t stop thinking about their DocLab program, a competition section showcasing “new and unexpected forms of digital documentary storytelling.” This program presents new non-fiction transmedia projects, each allowing the viewer to interact with the reality the filmmakers have documented and constructed. Most of the projects were presented in screenings or in talks at the excellent DocLab Interactive Documentary Conference. In addition, each was presented on their own computer monitors in the DocLab’s gallery space. What makes most of these mostly web-based projects different from a “normal” documentary is that the […]
At a recent filmmaking panel hosted by the Massachusetts Production Coalition, filmmaker Chico Colvard offered the following advice to those getting started in moviemaking: read the credits first. The credits of other movies. “I’m fascinated by end credits,” said Colvard. “They’re so revealing. They’re fascinating in that filmmakers use them to continue the story….there’s so much more information there.” The credits can provide you with not just a list of potential cast and crew members. They can also give you the names of accountants and lawyers. More importantly, they can give you the names of possible investors. Other filmmakers might […]
Capturing the subtle ache of youth on screen has never been an easy task – as evidenced by the long tradition of idiosyncratic, auteur-driven “coming of age” features like American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show, and Dazed and Confused. So it’s quite an impressive feat that those same emotions and aesthetics are so naturally evoked in the real-life stories of three adrift youth in the new documentary Only the Young. Following the quiet travails of evangelical skate punk best friends Garrison, Kevin and Skye, this debut feature from filmmaking team Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims is one of the year’s […]
Today is St. Nicholas’ Day, and very fittingly David Lowery’s debut feature, St. Nick, is available to watch for free on the NoBudge website. In advance of the world premiere of Lowery’s second film, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, at Sundance in January, it’s also a great time to revisit this film — or watch it for the first time. You can watch St. Nick here from today until December 13.