Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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SUNDANCE EXPECTATIONS: A PROGRAMMER’S PERSPECTIVE
This is my first year covering Sundance for Filmmaker Magazine, and the assignment has me thinking about things a little bit differently. As someone who has attended this festival in various capacities since 1998, I have a deep affection for the event itself, its geographic and organizational consistency and the persistence of its vision of a vital American independent filmmaking community. You’d be hard pressed to find a person who enjoys film who has never heard of Sundance; the festival’s identity is, for all intents and purposes, a brand, associated with certain types of films — low-budget American indies, socially conscious documentaries, formally […]
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CASPAR NEWBOLT SHARES HIS THREE RULES FOR WATCHING MOVIES
Over at IFP’s blog, Version Industries co-founder Caspar Newbolt has a provocative new opinion piece in which he shares his three rules for watching movies. Arguing against the near-automated saturation of opinions that the internet has spawned, Newbolt reasons that its best to simply go into a movie cold. As he writes: “I once got into an argument with someone at a party about a film, which I was insisting was good and he was arguing wasn’t. In the end it turned out he’d not actually seen the film but was basing his opinion on what he’d read on Rotten Tomatoes, […]
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Inside the Canon C300
When Senior Director of Professional Engineering and Solutions at Canon, Larry Thorpe spoke recently about the Canon C300, he talked quite a bit about the sensor in the camera. His explanation of why they developed an HD camera rather than a 4K sensor, and how the image is processed, is especially interesting. The following is an edited transcript of that part of his talk [You can see a video of his full talk here: Canon EOS C300 Pub Night with Larry Thorpe on 1.5.11 Vimeo] There’s also a Canon white paper, written by Larry, that covers this and other aspects […]
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Director Terence Nance on An Oversimplification Of Her Beauty
Watching Terence Nance’s Oversimplification Of Her Beauty is like being talked through the contents of a shoebox, each item another memento of The One That Got Away. Live action, animation, claymation reenactments, direct-to-camera address by him, on-camera interviews of her by him, blurry, amateur footage shot by her of him, all guided by a formally written voice over, delivered with somber, staccato clarity by an anonymous older man. Descriptions and depictions of other girls slide in and out of the narrative, intercut with shots of The One, whose name is Namik. One animation of a long-distance affair depicts a hand-drawn […]
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Scalene — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Scalene opens in New York City at the reRun Gastropub for a one-week run beginning Friday, January 20, 2012. Visit the official website of Along the Tracks Productions for more information about the film.) If you’ve seen Zack Parker’s Scalene, then you might understand why I feel weird describing the experience of watching it as “a pleasant surprise.” But it’s true. Even though this film is comprised of scenes and plot twists that are as disturbing as any that are likely to appear on screen this year, what struck me most loudly was the realization that I was in the […]
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AT SUNDANCE, YOU CAN TAKE THIS MAGAZINE AND…
After you get your condo keys, stock up at Albertson’s, and pick up your badge, you’ll also want to grab the new issue of Filmmaker Magazine once you get to Sundance. Oh, wait, you do that every year? Well, this year especially don’t forget to stuff that Filmmaker in your bag because you’ll need it to get the most out of Bear 71, a piece showing at the festival as part of its always-exciting New Frontiers section. About Bear 71 from the Sundance catalog: Jeremy Mendes and Leanne Allison’s poignant interactive documentary about a bear in the Canadian Rockies illuminates […]
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12 SUNDANCE FILMS I’M EXCITED TO SEE
Five years after finishing his wonderfully wacked-out debut, The Guataealan Handshake, Todd Rohal, frustrated by the time it was taking to set up a new movie, jumpstarted a micro-budget comedy about a priest. Called The Catechism Cataclysm, the movie was made for $50,000, and it got into Sundance, playing in last year’s midnight section. IFC bought the film for its Midnight label, releasing it to a scant $897 on a single screen. Rohal didn’t sweat it; the movie did what it needed to do for him (read Megan Holloway’s consideration here), and he went on to his next film. And […]
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SUNDANCE: MISTAKES WERE MADE
In the interest of community-building and vulnerability, I have decided to share some of my most humbling Sundance mistakes and the subsequent lessons learned in the five years I have attended the festival as an assistant, journalist, lab fellow and producer. 1. SNOW Through either sloth or lack of funds, I have always found myself on a connecting flight into Salt Lake City in the middle of winter. This has been a lucky break in some ways (the time I had to share that hotel room in Chicago with the nice lady who worked in biochemical fuel systems; the time […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #68
Second #3196, 53:16 At the hardware store (in a scene that doesn’t appear in an earlier draft of the script) a moment of frontier humor staged so fundamentally close to truth as to approach the surreal. A customer (as if a future character from Twin Peaks who has slipped back in time four years) holds an axe up to Double Ed, who reads the number to the blind Double Ed: “New axe, 48721.” It’s a welcome bit of humor in light of the previous scenes in Dorothy’s apartment, right down to the awkward stance of the axe man (pipe in […]
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An Innovative Launch for Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
For the past four months, my company Hybrid Cinema has been working on the release of Bob Hercules’s new film Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance, about the history of the Joffrey ballet. I will be writing a number of posts outlining the unique path that I and my partner on this release, Sheri Candler, have taken to release this documentary about the history of the groundbreaking dance company, The Joffrey Ballet. In my book Think Outside the Box Office and in subsequent blog posts, I have written about the advantages and challenges of launching a film after its world premiere […]
