Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Brent Bonacorso
When asked to cite their influences, many filmmakers reference icons. Brent Bonacorso avoids that tendency. True to his spectacularly distinctive style, Bonacorso suggests his sensibility is innate. “I’ve always been interested in telling visual stories,” says the Los Angeles-based filmmaker, whose surreal short film West of the Moon supports that claim. “As far back as I can remember, I’ve been creating narratives, whether they were drawings, photographs or films. Honestly, I think it’s just something I was born with.” Bonacorso has been directing commercials and other short projects for nearly a decade, but West of the Moon is unquestionably his […]
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Sophia Takal
Sophia Takal is engaged to filmmaker Lawrence Michael Lavine and their roommate is actress Kate Lyn Sheil. After the three worked on Lavine’s debut feature, Gabi on the Roof in July (Takal played the eponymous lead, and Sheil co-starred), Takal decided to make her own movie, which would explore the theme of jealousy. She cast rising star Sheil as an insecure bookstore clerk, Genevieve; Lavine as Sebastian, her intellectually patronizing boyfriend; and herself as Robin, the offbeat, emotionally hungry local girl the couple meet when they rent a country cabin where Sebastian will document for his blog the planting of […]
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Panos Cosmatos
When Panos Cosmatos was growing up on Vancouver Island, his parents wouldn’t let him watch scary movies. He’d go to his local video store and, he says, “spend hours looking at the box covers of the horror and science fiction films, just imagining my own versions of them.” One of the first R-rated films he was able to see was Alien. “My parents were watching it in the living room,” he explains, “and I was supposed to be in bed. But I snuck into this other room where I could see the film reflected on a framed print that was […]
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Everynone
If you listen to the radio, then you may have seen the short documentary essay films of the New York collaborative, Everynone. For the last two years, the three filmmakers — Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante and Julius Metoyer III — have been creating witty and allusive short films to accompany the popular WNYC radio program Radiolab, heard on more than 300 public radio stations around the country. Radiolab explores science and philosophy in the guise of radio theater, mixing music and sound effects into presentations that thrillingly veer from the pedagogical to the personal. And if you listen to Radiolab […]
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Laura Israel
Laura Israel cut her teeth editing experimental works, commercials and music videos while still a film student at NYU. She shifted her focus from directing to editing, and from cinema to video. By the time she graduated she had formed her own New York City company, Assemblage. Her client list reads like a hipper-than-hip door list: John Lurie, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Keith Richards, Sonic Youth, New Order, Ed Lachman and especially over the last two decades, her good friend Robert Frank with whom she has been archiving and preserving his film and video work over the past two years. […]
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Yance Ford
Yance Ford was a sophomore at Hamilton College 19 years ago when her brother was murdered. “My brother’s death picked up my life and put it down somewhere else,” Ford says. “I had an image of myself in my mind as a working artist, and when he died, all of that changed.” By her senior year, Ford, who made images as a photographer, decided she wanted to make a film about her brother’s death. She moved back to her hometown New York, worked as a p.a. and took a Third World Newsreel production workshop. Then in 2002 she became series […]
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Eddie Alcazar
From the outside it looked like Eddie Alcazar had it all figured out. With only a year under his belt at the Academy of Art University where he studied visual effects and animation film theory, Electronic Arts plucked him in 2004 to work in its game design division on the Medal of Honor series. A year and a half later he started the digital content creation boutique Alcazar Entertainment, where he did the video game design and 3D modeling for more than 30 commercials and games, including The Matrix: Path of Neo, James Bond: From Russia with Love and Oddworld: […]
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David Lowery
In the middle of writing the follow up to his 2009 feature, St. Nick, David Lowery was stuck. “I reached a point in the script where it became very difficult,” Lowery remembers. “I was trying to make it an action movie, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to make the story. So I did what I always do when I’m fed up, which is go for a run.” While jogging, Lowery plucked the seed of a scene from his script — a father talking to his daughter one night — and spun it out into something a little different: […]
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Kitao Sakurai
A typical route for an archetypal, coastal-based independent filmmaker might look something like this. First, one goes to film school, hopefully at either one of the well-known private universities in New York or Los Angeles (Columbia, NYU, USC) with large alumni networks, or at one of the big state schools with laudable programs (Texas at Austin, UCLA). Ideally one makes a killer short that catches the attention and gains the respect of the gatekeepers. These individuals, whether they are agents, sales reps, festival programmers or writers for Filmmaker, may help a new filmmaker get the recognition and reputation within the […]
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Andrew S Allen & Jason Sondhi
By the time Andrew S Allen and Jason Sondhi posted their latest short, The Thomas Beale Cipher, on the Internet, they had it all figured out. “There’s a myth about online video that you can just put it up and the masses will discover it, that it’s a meritocracy,” Allen says. “But that doesn’t always happen. There are great films online that only have 200 views.” Allen wrote and directed the animated film, Sondhi produced, and they both knew to do things like post it on multiple platforms at once and to immediately mobilize a community of video bloggers to […]
