Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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BRENT HOFF EXPLORES THE SCIENCE OF LOVE
Screenwriter and director Brent Hoff, who we selected for this year’s 25 New Faces list, has a short out today that’s perfectly timed for Valentines Day. Called The Love Competition, it’s included as part of the next issue of Wholphin, will play at SXSW, but is now online courtesy of Wired and Wholphin. The Love Competition looks at the neurochemistry of romance, pitting a group of contestants against each other as their brains are scanned while they are thinking of their lovers, their ex-lovers, or perhaps just the concept of love itself. Hoff, who won a Tribeca Sloan Prize for […]
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THE BAD BOY ROMANCE OF “MOVING TAKAHASHI”
Jason Sondhi, along with Short of the Week partner Andrew Allen one of our “25 New Faces” this year, handpicked today’s Valentines Day selection, “Moving Takahashi.” Directed by Josh Soskin and well acted by rising star Boyd Holbrook and newcomer (at least to me) Kristin Malco, the Kickstarter-funded short is part of what Sondhi calls the “bad boy romance” genre. It’s about a young mover (Holbrook) who discovers that the daughter of the family whose house he’s moving has, in a suicide attempt, swallowed pills that will kill her in 20 minutes. What’s the bad-boy element? You’ll have to watch […]
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DEADLINE NEARS FOR THE 2012 VIMEO AWARDS
February 20 is the deadline for submitting to the 2012 Vimeo Awards, which will be presented during this year’s Vimeo Festival + Awards, June 7 – 9 in New York City. Filmmaker Magazine is a sponsor of the awards, which go to original works in 13 different categories that premiered July 31, 2010 and February 20, 2012, or which never premiered at all. For 2012, Vimeo has assembled a pretty amazing group of judges, including actor and director James Franco; Parks and Recreation Star Aziz Ansari, 2012 Oscar Nominee Lucy Walker; documentarian Steve James; Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood; Scott Pilgrim vs. […]
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SHORT WATCH: COLE SCHREIBER’S “REST”
Released just in time for Valentine’s Day, check out this beautiful new short from California-based filmmaker Cole Schreiber. A morbid and atmospheric story of love and mortality, it just might be the most romantic zombie tale I’ve seen since Return of the Living Dead 3. Per Cole’s Vimeo page: Rest, is the story of a young American solider who dies in WW1 and ninety years later unearths himself from a grave in the European countryside. Shot over the course of a week in Mendocino County, Morongo Valley and New York City, the film is a dark, but beautiful meditation on […]
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Test Version – What is Producing?
What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to understand […]
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From the Archives: Mike Kelley Interviews Harmony Korine
Mike Kelley, who passed away this month, contributed to Filmmaker once, in 1997, when he interviewed Harmony Korine about Korine’s debut feature, Gummo. From our archives, here is that interview. With a poetic, impressionistic take on film narrative, a visual style incorporating everything from elegantly framed 35mm to the skuzziest of home camcorder footage, and a startling mixture of teen tragedy, vaudeville humor, and sensationalist imagery, Harmony Korine’s first feature Gummo is perhaps the only recent film whose artistic strategies draw as much from visual art as the film world. (A gallery installation of work from Gummo opens at L.A.’s […]
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MEDIA CURRENT: BROADBAND FAILURE
Broadband in the U.S. sucks. In fact, the U.S. has become a second-rate telecommunications nation. This is especially evident with regard to two key indicators – broadband adoption and data speed. The degradation of broadband Internet service has significant consequences for the nation and for independent filmmakers. The latest findings from leading government and private source speak for itself: As of June 2011, Europe’s Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked the U.S. 15th in “broadband” subscribers; the consulting group, Strategy Analytics, is even more pessimistic, ranking the U.S. 20th with a “broadband” penetration rate of 67 percent compared to […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #79
Second #3713, 61:53 Jeffrey, having followed Frank to a building, sneaks inside at night to confirm that it is, indeed, where Frank lives. The shot only lasts a few seconds, and serves as a bridge between what has just come before (Jeffrey’s cloaked, nighttime pursuit of Frank) and what will come after (the scene at Arlene’s Diner with Sandy as he recalls to her witnessing the actions of the Yellow Man, the Well-Dressed Man, and Frank). The frame is pure Expressionism as Jeffrey finds himself searching for Frank’s name on the mailboxes in a low-angle shot whose shadows and lines […]
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Director Marius Van Neikerk on My Heart of Darkness
The journey of an international documentary to the United States is an uncertain one. Make its subject a lesser-known foreign war and the post-traumatic effects thereof, and you’ve got what an American agent calls a “hard sell.” My Heart of Darkness, a brooding foray into four veterans’ pasts, has been traveling the international festival circuit since premiering at IDFA in 2010. The years between then and now, where it’s having its U.S. premiere at L.A.’s Pan African Film Festival (PAFF), has been marked by all manner of revelations and misunderstandings—appropriate for a film about the reconciliation of four former enemies […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #78
Second #3666, 61:06 After Frank and his gang leave the Slow Club, Jeffrey follows them. He is a detective, now. The scene is bathed in hellish red. The slow rumble of thunder ratchets up the tension. There is no one for Jeffrey, neither Dorothy nor Sandy. Not now, in the silence of his car. In fact, the movie has carried itself forward without functional dialogue for a while; it’s become pure cinema, where the images and sounds render dialogue obsolete, because of what use is dialogue in the bloodlands? In 2666, by Roberto Bolaño, a character, Norton, repeated, in German, […]
