Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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CARSON MELL AT THE SUNDANCE DIRECTORS LAB, PART ONE
The Sundance June Directors Lab is underway, and blogging here at Filmmaker from the Sundance Resort in Utah will be two of the Lab’s filmmakers. First up, Carson Mell, attending with his dark comedy, Ajax, about “a band of alcoholic astronauts and a young woman adrift in outer space [who] become at odds with one another after discovering the purpose of their mysterious mission.” I remember when I was first moving from a community college to a “legitimate” film/art school my dad told me that the best part about it would be how intimidated I would be by the other […]
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The Oregonian — A Hammer to Nail Review
(The Oregonian world premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. It is being distributed by Cinemad Presents and opens theatrically in NYC at the reRun Gastropub on Friday, June 8, 2012. Factory 25 is releasing the DVD (and currently taking pre-orders for the Limited Edition DVD). It is also currently available for streaming on Netflix and Hulu. If you are not able to see it in the theater, just make sure you play it loud at home!) Calvin Lee Reeder’s The Oregonian is a horrifying film, if not what is commonly perceived as a “horror” film. It is deeply and fundamentally […]
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THE 2012 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL
The strength of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is also its weakness. This year’s 23rd edition boasts 16 doc and fiction flicks from 12 countries – yet most fall firmly in the category of solid ITVS fare (in fact, only three are narrative features). Like with the agribusiness detailed in Micha X. Peled’s Bitter Seeds, about the epidemic of farmer suicides in India, variety is often an illusion – especially when U.S. or U.S. co-productions are in the majority. This is another way of saying that, yes, the chances of seeing a stinker at HRWFF are slim, but there’s […]
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TRAILER WATCH: QUENTIN TARANTINO’S “DJANGO UNCHAINED”
Footage screened in Cannes for Tarantino’s massively over-the-radar Western, but this is the first time we’ve had a trailer to sink our teeth into. Enjoy!
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Five Questions with Safety Not Guaranteed Actor Mark Duplass
Mark Duplass is certainly having a banner year. The independent filmmaker’s work ethic is that of a rabid squirrel, frenetically jumping in between the lanes of acting and directing over the years, without ever getting hit with a dud. Since the 2005 indie hit The Puffy Chair, co-directed with his older brother, Jay, Duplass has managed to position himself in front of the camera as well as behind it. This year he has acted in a string of films: Your Sister’s Sister, Darling Companion, the upcoming People Like Us, and Safety Not Guaranteed, a recent hit on the festival circuit. […]
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DARK DAYS: SCI-FI DYSTOPIA IN FILM
During the writing of this article, Ray Bradbury, one of the great founding fathers of sci-fi dystopia, passed away. With his seminal book, Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Bradbury gained recognition as an important figure not only in the science fiction community but the literary world in general. Recently, The New Yorker published a touching essay by the author in which he shared the origin of his love for science fiction. It is a beautiful ode to childhood and the discovery of one’s true passion. The essay will prove to future generations that, even in his last days, Bradbury’s ability to move […]
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FILMAID MUSIC VIDEO: “A HEAVY ABACUS,” DIRECTED BY PAOLA MENDOZA AND TOPAZ ADIZES
Filmmaker Paola Mendoza (Entre Nos, and one of our 25 New Faces) just forwarded this video she directed with filmmaker Topaz Adizes for FilmAid. It’s the organization’s first video, in support of World Refugee Day on June 20, and the music is The Joy Formidable’s “A Heavy Abacus.” While volunteering as Visiting Teaching Artists for FilmAid, Mendoza and Adizes shot this piece featuring Sudanese refugees in the Kakuma refugee camp in Northern Kenya. It was shot with a Canon 7D using two bounce boards and an iPhone as a monitor for the kids to lip sync to. For more information […]
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ALRICK BROWN: BREAKING IN IS HARD TO DO
Last night I moderated an IFP panel at DCTV, co-sponsored by the New York Television Festival, on transitioning from film to TV. It consisted of two TV execs — Colleen Conway (VP of Reality and Alternative Programming, Lifetime Networks) and Erin Keating (Director of Development & Production, IFC TV) — and one filmmaker, Alrick Brown. Filmmaker readers will be familiar with Brown as he was one of our 2011 25 New Faces and won an Audience Award at Sundance for his debut feature, Kinyarwanda. Brown recently broke into television by directing an episode of the upcoming ABC documentary crime series, […]
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The Blue Velvet Project: Detour Into a Dissolve
A frame from between posts 120 and 121. By the 1830s, he [Henry Langdon Childe] had developed and perfected the [magic lantern] technique of ‘dissolving views,’ in which one picture faded out as the next one faded in. The images were aligned on the screen and the light remained a constant intensity, creating a smooth, gradual transition. This permitted a wide variety of effects that had not previously been possible. (From The Emergence of Cinema, by Charles Musser, University of California Press, 1990.) A dissolve is the superimposition of a fade-out onto a fade-in, achieved by reversing and them re-filming […]
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AARON HILLIS RAISES INDIEGOGO FUNDS FOR HIS NEW VIDEO STORE
Last week I posted my interview with Aaron Hillis in which the Brooklyn-based curator and critic announced his purchase of Video Free Brooklyn, a Cobble Hill video rental store. In the interview he spoke of the fundraising campaign he needs to do to make the store viable again… and here it is. Check out the well-choreographed video and also the rewards he’s offering to his Indiegogo supporters. There are some hefty offerings here, including the entire Oscilloscope catalog and dinner with director Robert Downey, Sr., a private screening with actor David Cross, and Bobcat Goldthwait performing stand-up in your living […]
