Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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My Year Of DIY — The Good, The Bad And The Ugly
Gregory Bayne shoots Jens Pulver. Photo courtesy Alex Couey. A short collection of observations from my year of DIY. My name is Gregory Bayne, and in 2010 I stumbled into a full time “DIY” film career without a back up, without a net, and without, in many respects, a clue. And, though over the course of 2010 I ran two successful crowd-funding campaigns (http://bit.ly/drivenks, http://bit.ly/poiks), made a fully fan-funded documentary feature (that people really seem to love), and released, with my collaborator, a narrative feature…I made less than enough money to scrape by, and currently find myself about to start […]
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FILMMAKER MAGAZINE’S TOP TWELVE POSTS OF 2010
Via Google Analytics, here are the top ten traffic-getting posts on Filmmakermagazine.com for 2010. (The top traffic getter was actually the final post of 2009, our “Best American Independent Films of the Decade” list. But I’m restricting the ten below to posts that actually went up in 2010.) 1. 25 New Faces of 2010. Our 25 New Faces list is now regularly the mostly widely read piece each year. I was particularly happy to see some of the first-time filmmakers we selected — Victoria Mahoney, Rashaad Ernesto Green, Sean Durkin, Danfung Dennis, to name four — have their films accepted […]
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PLINKETT (AKA MIKE STOKLASA) ON STAR WARS: EPISODE 3 — REVENGE OF THE SITH
Mike Stoklasa made Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” list in 2010 with his brilliant feature-length critical vivisections of George Lucas’s Star Wars prequel series. First there was The Phantom Menace, and then Attack of the Clones, and now Stoklasa, in his “Mr. Plinkett” persona, tackles Revenge of the Sith. Watch, marvel and enjoy.
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HOW TO KEEP YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS
Earlier today I posted a top ten New Year’s Resolutions for filmmakers and encouraged readers to pick one for themselves. But if you’ve done that, how do you keep them? Writer, psychologist and researcher Richard Wiseman can help with a blog post entitled “Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions.” From his book 59 Seconds, which backs up self-help techniques with real science, are ten tips on making your resolutions stick. Here are a couple of good ones: 4. Be specific – Think through exactly what you are going to do, where you are going to do it, and at what time. […]
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New Year’s Resolutions for Filmmakers
Are you short a New Year’s resolution? Feel free to borrow one of the ones below. 1. Amplify your voice. You have a voice. Make it bigger in 2011. Spread it wider and connect it to more people. If you are working within your own little crew, spread out. If you’ve gotten into a pattern of relying on the same agents or producers or colleagues, enlarge the perimeter of that circle. If face-to-face is your preferred medium, get out more. Do you email or text too much? Call people more. (This one was suggested by Ira Deutchman via Twitter.) If […]
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JAMIE STUART DISCUSSES VIRAL SNOW SHORT ON TODAY SHOW ONLINE
Here’s Jamie Stuart discussing his Idiot with a Tripod on the Today Show online. Before watching, check out the short film itself here. Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
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OPENFILM COMPETITION DEADLINE — DECEMBER 31
The deadline for the second “Get it Made” contest from Openfilm, the online film community, is rapidly approaching. Filmmakers have until December 31 to submit a short film under 40 minutes in length that “could be produced into a compelling feature film.” The winner, who will be selected by Openfilm’s Advisory Board, will received $50,000 in cash and a financing contract of $450,000 to go towards the feature production. Read more about the contest here.
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DUBAI INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
It’s all in the mix. I’m going to borrow from the overly quoted urban sociologist Jane Jacobs, who maintained that for a city to be vital it requires a blending of old and new neighborhoods, cultural sites, and areas of commerce. For Jacobs, Lincoln Center was poisonous, a large, concentrated collection of arts facilities that is usually lifeless and could have worked better spread out around New York City. As far as I know, Jacobs never got to Dubai. Almost everything there is new, oversized, and sanitized; the scale is not human. After all, the Emirate boasts the world’s largest […]
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JAMIE STUART ON THE EAST COAST BLIZZARD
A lovely short directed, shot and edited by Jamie Stuart on his Canon 7D during the blizzard that covered New York and much of the East Coast. Updated: Roger Ebert fell in love with the short and writes: “This film deserves to win the Academy Award for best live-action short subject. (1) Because of its wonderful quality. (2) Because of its role as homage. It is directly inspired by Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent classic “Man With a Movie Camera.” (3) Because it represents an almost unbelievable technical proficiency. He conducts an email interview with Jamie, in which Stuart says: Technically, […]
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TRAILER WATCH: “FLY AWAY”
Janet Grillo, a producer (Autism: The Musical, Searching for Paradise), former New Line executive, and writer/director (the short, Flying Lessons), has directed her first feature, Fly Away. From the film’s website: Based on the award-winning short Flying Lessons, Fly Away tells the moving story of a single mother, Jeanne, grappling with the challenge of raising her autistic teenage daughter, Mandy. As Mandy becomes more and more unmanageable, so too does Jeanne?s life. Over the period of two weeks, Jeanne is confronted with the most difficult decision a parent can make: to let go, allowing her child to grow, but also […]
