Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Reaction To The Canon C300 And Red Scarlet-X: Part One
The dust is still settling from the recent announcements from Canon and RED, and many of us are trying to figure out what it all means: is the Canon too expensive? The Scarlet too complicated? Will they have a big impact, or are these cameras outside the reach of most indie filmmakers? Ultimately, we won’t know their impact until these cameras start shipping in quantity, but I asked some DP/Editors to share their initial reactions to the cameras. Max Esposito is a DSLR shooter who is looking to upgrade from the Canon 5D Mark II, but says he doesn’t think […]
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BEHIND THE SCENES OF DAVID LYNCH’S DOM PERIGNON SHOOT
David Lynch’s vexing new album, Crazy Clown Town, releases worldwide today, but that’s not the only project the iconic director has been keeping busy with. Lynch recently traveled to the Abbey of Hautviller in northern France to shoot an ad for Champaign brand Dom Pérignon. Filmmaker Gavin Elder was along for the trip, and shot an accompanying behind the scenes portrait of Lynch for Nowness.com. The Power of Creation: David Lynch for Dom Pérignon is a suitably fractured look into Lynch’s creative process, beginning with the Blue Velvet director espousing on his passion for experimentation, then disintegrating into a collection […]
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COLOR ENHANCEMENTS: A CLOSER LOOK AT DI
Originally published in our Fall 2010 issue, we look at why digital intermediate has become an essential tool for DPs. From the story: Aside from discussing the look of the film with the DI house early on for both aesthetic reasons and very practical ones like deciding what kind of camera to use, these meetings can also help a producer or director determine what their actual budget is going to be. A process house can walk everyone through all the different camera and workflow options and show them actual finished footage of what these options will look like. Thinking of […]
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Director Jarred Alterman on Convento
Since I spend part of my year in Amsterdam I’m always on the lookout for interesting Dutch folks to write about. Kinetic artist Christiaan Zwanikken fit the bill and then some. Zwanikken lives most months at his family’s retreat in Portugal, which was once a monastery but now serves as the laboratory for his Frankenstein creations, robots crafted from servomotors and the remains of wildlife he finds on the ancient grounds. American filmmaker Jarred Alterman is also fascinated by Zwanikken’s work – so much so that he crafted Convento, an “art/doc” that follows not just the Dutch artist and his […]
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DAVID LOWERY ON STORY STRUCTURE IN “MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE” & “SLEEPING BEAUTY”
Filmmaker David Lowery (Pioneer, St. Nick) has an interesting piece on his blog today comparing the storytelling engines in Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene and Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty. Martha, he argues, deliberately builds tension by withholding key information, while Sleeping Beauty lays everything on the table up front in an attempt to diffuse tension and focus deeper on story, theme, and character. In the article, Lowery also defends Martha against Richard Brody’s recent New Yorker blog post (a response in itself to Anthony Lane’s review of the film) in which Brody argued that the film’s flashback-heavy narrative […]
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SYRIAN FILMMAKER NIDAL HASSAN DETAINED ON WAY TO CPH:DOX
While the excellent DOC NYC is nearing its midpoint, I have decamped to Copenhagen, returning to the equally excellent CPH:DOX, which is devoted to adventurous and radical forays into non-fiction filmmaking. The selection here is huge and ambitious, mixing new work with several retrospectives, guest curations and special events. I’m just settling in today, but here are some things I’m looking forward to and hope to write about as the week goes on: The Prophet, Gary Tarn’s world premiering follow-up to Black Sun, for my money one of the most important docs of recent years; Michael Madsen’s 3D The Average […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #39
Second #1833, 30:33 1. Jeffrey: Can you drive this car? Sandy: Yeah, but . . . Jeffrey: Leave it in front of my house for me, okay? 2. In Haruki Murakami’s novel IQ84, a group of characters discuss the implications of an act they have committed: You throw a stone into a deep pond. Splash. The sound is big, and it reverberates around the surrounding area. What comes out of the pond after that? All we can do is stare at the pond, holding our breath. 3. One month after Blue Velvet’s U.S. release, another David’s movie was released, David […]
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Director Jesse Baget on Cellmates
Jesse Baget’s Cellmates (originally titled White Knight) was one of my top picks at this year’s Arizona Underground Film Festival – and the biggest surprise of the fest simply because when I read the feature’s synopsis in the program my first thought was there’s no way this film would work. When one sees the phrase “buddy comedy” the names Tom Sizemore and Stacy Keach just don’t come to mind. Add in Héctor Jiménez of Nacho Libre and we might be getting closer…but still. Sizemore as a former Klansman meets Keach as a potato-obsessed warden meets Jiménez as an activist immigrant […]
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“LETTERS FROM THE BIG MAN”: THE RETURN OF CHRISTOPHER MUNCH
Movie lovers with a prolonged case of the Munchies could soon be sated. Indie-pure director Christopher Munch is back, in fine form, with his latest film, Letters From the Big Man. Munch imbues his works with a distinct nostalgic longing. The Germans have a precise word for it: Sehnsucht. He explores that chaotic region where two forms of desire butt up against each other: the wish for a more perfect world, for one, usually depicted as majestic nature and whatever beauty man might have put into it (the old, deserted railroad in Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day) — […]
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Cave Dwellers: 127 Hours DPs Anthony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak
This piece was originally printed in the Fall 2010 issue. 127 Hours is nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (James Franco), Best Adapted Screenplay (Danny Boyle & Simon Beaufoy), Best Editing (Jon Harris), Best Original Score (A.R. Rahman) and Best Original Song. When director Danny Boyle first got in touch with d.p. Anthony Dod Mantle about 127 Hours, the film following their Academy Award-winning collaboration Slumdog Millionaire, Dod Mantle remembers him saying that “he was convinced that the only way to get through this [movie] would be to subject an actor to a pretty extraordinary physical experience in as intense […]
