Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Love Song: Marie Losier on The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
With Marie Losier’s retrospective, Just a Million Dreams, now running at New York’s MoMA through November 11, we’re reposting our interview with Losier from our Winter, 2012 print issue. The film discussed here, The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, screens tomorrow, November 3. What should one expect when one artist turns their camera on another? Although the “portrait of the artist” doc is one of nonfiction filmmaking’s most durable sub-genres, audiences often expect the least from it. In the presence of a great painter, musician or author, directors are frequently expected to sublimate their own styles in favor of […]
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Game Changers Part 3: Camera and Lighting
In this third part of the series about the production of the low-budget indie movie Game Changers, filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer) discuss shooting with the Sony PMW-F3, shooting in S-Log, lighting issues, and the lenses used to shoot the movie. Filmmaker: Ben, you already owned the Sony PMW-F3, was the decision simply to use the camera you had? Eckstein: I’ve been fortunate that I own almost all the gear that I use on a day-to-day basis. From the beginning when talking to Rob, it was not really a discussion of “Are you trying to get the […]
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Five Questions with 28 Hotel Rooms Director Matt Ross
Matt Ross’s directorial debut is an inventive look at an affair between a married account (Marin Ireland) and a novelist (Chris Messina) that unfurls within the walls of 28 hotel rooms across the country. Dictated by checkout times and the call of the “real world,” their truncated encounters are marked by a growing sense of urgency, as their physical connection turns emotional. Ireland and Messina shoulder the challenge of being the sole recipients of Doug Emmett’s lens with magnetic grace, crafting their characters’ dimensions in varying increments of restraint and ebullition. 28 Hotel Rooms, currently streaming on iTunes and VOD, […]
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A Kickstarter Launch for Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby
Author Stephen Elliott (The Adderall Diaries) founded the culture website The Rumpus and recently directed his first feature, About Cherry. He’s launched a Kickstarter campaign for his second, Happy Baby, an adaptation of his 2004 autobiographical novel. The below is excerpted from Elliott’s Daily Rumpus newsletter, which, as a newsletter writer myself, I highly recommend. — SM Someone asked yesterday why I was doing a Kickstarter for my movie. He said he would donate $5, he doesn’t have very much money (which is fine), but he wanted to know why I needed you (he said, “Why do you need us?”). […]
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Phillip Van’s Amazing Post-Sandy Blackout Photos
Filmmaker and former 25 New Face Phillip Van took his camera out during the New York blackout and came away with a beautiful series of long-exposure shots capturing the city’s architecture and workers without their customary nocturnal illumination. Here’s what he had to say via email: I shot the photos on a regular old Canon 5D. One night I had a tripod. Another I went handheld so I could travel more. The city was pitch black and ominous. Buildings felt like mausoleums. But if you stayed out long enough, your eyes adjusted to candles and shadows behind curtains and you […]
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RZA on The Man with the Iron Fists
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
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Factory 25 Acquires Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I
Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I, the filmmaker’s uber-controversial follow-up to his Gotham Award-winning I Am a Sex Addict, was today picked up by Factory 25. Matt Grady’s Brooklyn-based boutique distribution company will give the film a simultaneous digital and theatrical release in December, which will qualify the doc for awards consideration. The film, in which Zahedi gleefully pokes fun at the Middle Eastern benefactor who is bankrolling his movie, had its world premiere at SXSW earlier this year — and has been banned in the United Arab Emirates for blasphemy. From today’s press release: Brooklyn, NY (November 6, 2012) […]
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VOD for Indies
As indie makers know all too well, movie distribution is undergoing a major restructuring. The shift from analog media to digital production, post-production and distribution technologies not only changes how movies are made and distributed, but how people view them. Theatrical moviegoing is declining; since 2002, ticket sales have declined by nearly 20 percent. Making matters worse, DVD sales are shrinking. And video streaming revenues, while growing, are doing so at a rate insufficient to make up the difference. Readers of Filmmaker are urged to check out a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, “Now playing at a living […]
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The Week in Cameras: The Empire and the Rebellion
This week saw Sony announce two new cameras, the PMW-F5 and PMW-F55, as well as some details about 4K recording for the NEX-FS700. Unfortunately, they didn’t announce many pricing details, other than the $2,000 price for the interface unit for the NEX-FS700. The cameras are expected in January, and pricing information will probably come sometime in December, but we have been left to depend on whispers from those who say they have been told numbers, even though Sony continues to say that they haven’t told anyone the prices. That said, it appears that the PMW-F5 will be under $20,000 and […]
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Checking Out Sony’s New NEX-EA50H at Abel Cine Tech: Ergonomics and Low Cost Too
October 30 has come and gone, and with it Sony’s splashy announcement of two 4K additions to their CineAlta “F” series of Super35 cameras — F3, F35, F65 — namely, the F5 and F55. At a moment when Sony’s FS700 uses a Super35 4K sensor to capture low-cost AVCHD, it should have startled no one that Sony’s October surprise would be all about expanding their 4K line-up. But lost in the social media buildup to the F5/F55 announcement has been the recent introduction of another large-sensor Sony HD camcorder, the NEX-EA50H, a design that tackles, at last, the issue of […]
