Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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THE RETURN OF MARCEL THE SHELL
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On is the totally winning animated short that placed writer/director Dean Fleischer Camp and writer/actress Jenny Slate on Filmmaker‘s 2011 25 New Faces list. (Read their profile here.) Now, the couple — and Marcel, the Montaigne of animated seashells — returns in a new short. He seems slightly cheerier than last time, and the production values are a smidgen better while not betraying the short’s lo-fi origins. There is no better way to start your morning.
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The Blue Velvet Project, #43
Second #2021, 33:41 The tension in this sequence—as Jeffrey sneaks around alone in Dorothy’s apartment while half-listening for Sandy’s warning car horn—is sustained by carefully modulated shifts in what we as the audience know in comparison to what Jeffrey knows. While our knowledge of what is happening sometimes equals Jeffrey’s (those moments when we know nothing more or less than he does), at other times we are suddenly thrust ahead of his limited omniscience. In the previous scene, as Jeffrey explores the darkness of Dorothy’s apartment, we know what he knows, and nothing more. But once the film cuts to […]
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TRAILER: DE NIRO AND DANO IN “BEING FLYNN”
Talk about a frame grab to use as the trailer image! Here’s the first trailer from Paul Weitz’s Being Flynn, an adaptation of memoir writer Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. It stars Robert DeNiro, Paul Dano, Julianne Moore and Olivia Thirlby and will be released by Focus Features this coming Spring.
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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 […]
