Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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LAURA KENNEDY, R.I.P.
Laura Kennedy, bass player for the iconic New York punk/funk band Bush Tetras, died yesterday in Minneapolis of complications from Hep C. From Marc Campbell at Dangerous Minds: Kennedy was in the center of the musical vortex that thrived in downtown Manhattan through the 1970s and into the early 80s. It was a time in which rock and roll was stretching its wings while simultaneously banging its head against the walls and sidewalks of a city both bleak and beautiful. The Bush Tetras pulled uptown downtown and showed the Studio 54 crowd that there was some tribal thunder brewing below […]
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Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd Talks The Hurt Locker
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd has shot almost 50 features with numerous directors, but when it comes time to discuss his work on Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, his collaborations with two other helmers need to be referenced. The first is Ken Loach, the director Ackroyd is most associated with. The Manchester, England-born d.p. has shot many of Loach’s films, including Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird, Land and Freedom, the Palme d’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and his upcoming Looking for Eric. In these films he developed an unadorned, naturalistic camera and lighting style that gave them an almost doc-like verisimilitude. […]
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Storaro Talks Shop
Originally published in our Web Exclusives section on June 8, 2007. It is entirely without hyperbole to introduce Vittorio Storaro as one of the most singular and influential cinematographers in the progression of modern motion pictures. His color palette on films such as The Conformist and Apocalypse Now is without peer, and long-lasting collaborations with directors Bernardo Bertolucci, Francis Ford Coppola and Warren Beatty have been recognized with three Oscars for Best Cinematography (Apocalypse Now (1979), Reds (1981) and The Last Emperor (1987)). Storaro’s latest film is Caravaggio, screening this week as part of Lincoln Center’s series “Open Roads: New […]
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BUILDING COMMUNITY… ONE PROJECT AT A TIME
As the practice of ‘crowd-funding’ has come of age over the past couple years, so has the wide array of opinion about it. Some have called it a ‘game-changer’, especially when it comes to funding films, others seem to think of it as a magical place where free money simply appears from thin air, and yet others are wholly unconvinced, if not fully disdainful, of this practice of ‘organized-begging’. I can sympathize with the latter, seeing how crowd-funding has contributed to the advent of incessant self-promotion via social media sites, and the fact that you feel like everywhere you turn […]
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Reaction To The Canon C300 And Red-Scarlet-X: Part Two
In my previous blog post I interviewed several directors of photography who are shooting material for web and television to get their reactions to the recent Canon and RED announcements. You might sum up their reactions as, “We wanted to like the Canon, but it’s too expensive!” To complete the picture, I talked to a couple of people who have worked on a number of indie films, and have worked extensively with cameras like the RED and Arri Alexa. Finishing Artist and VFX Supervisor Dermot Shane is based in Vancouver and routinely works with material from REDs, and Arri’s (both […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #42
Second #1974, 32:54 What does it mean to speak of the cinematic image in the age of cinematic images? This frame, captured from the 2002 DVD edition of Blue Velvet, isn’t really even a frame; its relationship to the 35 mm source film is ambiguously fraught with the complications of digital coding. For one thing, if the film has been MPEG-2 compressed, what has been lost? The information in the frame leaks in and out, depending on our viewing medium of choice, so that we experience the digital image not so much through presence, but through absence. Spatial and temporal […]
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THREE CLIPS FROM JASON REITMAN’S “YOUNG ADULT”
One of the award contenders I’m most looking forward to checking out is Young Adult, the Charlize Theron dark comedy that reteams Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody. From the looks of the trailer, and these three clips below, this certainly isn’t Juno, but I’m interested to see Theron try out her comedic chops with Cody’s material. The film has been making its rounds across the country doing surprise screenings and when it played at the New Beverly in LA earlier this month reaction seemed to be positive, according to In Contention. The awards blog also gave high marks to Patton […]
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New Super 35 Digital Motion Picture Cameras from Canon and Red – What They Are and Aren’t
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DARREN ARONOFSKY’S UNSETTLING ANTI-DRUG ADS
Likely thanks to his work on the still-disturbing Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky was recently tapped to direct a series of anti-drug commercials for non-profit organization The Meth Project. The use of scare tactics in anti-drug campaigns is no new innovation (remember what happened to Rachel Leigh Cook’s brain?), but one has to wonder if the people responsible for commissioning these ads, which are set to air during an upcoming episode of Gossip Girl, would turn out quite so unsettling. Watch all four ads below. This one takes the cake for 30-second spot that you’d least expect to see […]
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Werner Herzog on Into the Abyss
In his films, Werner Herzog has traveled the Amazon, journeyed to Antarctica and, most recently, descended through time into the caves of France to uncover centuries-old cave paintings. So, his trip to a small town in Texas awaiting the capital punishment of a young murderer might have been less epic were it not for the moral dilemmas, lingering anguish and genuine strangeness he finds there. Eschewing the tropes of typical capital punishment documentaries, Herzog, with his German-accented voice jutting from behind the camera, lends an empathetic ear to the words of not only the killer but his accomplice, the victims’ […]
