Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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AI Is Already Changing Filmmaking: How Filmmakers Are Using These New Tools in Production and Post
When Sora, OpenAI’s video generator model, hit the internet in February, realistic-looking demo videos flooded social media, usually accompanied by some form of “RIP Hollywood” commentary. While Sora still isn’t publicly available, between Runway, Pika and a slew of other video and image generators there have been many questions about what the future of filmmaking will look like—and whether humans will even be the ones making movies in the future. Right now, generative AI is still far away from creating consistent characters and the exact, carefully crafted images that industry professionals require. Maybe a movie will be entirely generated with […]
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A Crisis of Faith: Have Funders Lost Faith that Art Films Can Make an Impact?
In April, the collapse of Participant Media sent shockwaves through the film industry. How could a 20-year-old company—with box office hits such as An Inconvenient Truth and The Help and 21 Oscars, including two Best Picture winners (Spotlight, Green Book)—close its doors without warning? But earlier that same month, another nearly two-decade-old indie film company made a surprising move that offers potential answers to what happened, how the film industry is changing and how well-meaning financiers are reacting to it. Cinereach, a longstanding nonprofit that has supported hundreds of indie films through grants, financing and mentorship, announced a major shift […]
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Cine Gear Expo 2024: 17 Cameras, LED (and Traditional) Lights, Lenses and Remote Camera Controls We Loved
Every start of summer, the Cine Gear Expo comes to Los Angeles. Initially held on the Paramount lot, the Expo had a short stint at the LA Convention Center for two pandemic years before landing this yearat the Warner Brothers lot in Burbank. The movie lot aspect assists greatly with vibes: While its chief competitor, NAB Show—held a few months earlier in the Las Vegas Convention Center—feels like a traditional trade show, at Cine Gear you can peruse the latest lenses as the iconic Animaniacs water tower looms in the distance, just visible behind a camera crane which swings around […]
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“I Was Trying to Illustrate What It Was Like to Lose My Mind”: Elizabeth Sankey on Her Tribeca-Premiering Essay Doc Witches
Witches, the sophomore feature from English filmmaker Elizabeth Sankey, poses an interesting hypothesis concerning the link between the English witch trials and maternal mental health. Sankey illustrates this correlation by utilizing filmic portrayals of sorceresses (from Häxan to The Craft) and “psychotic women” (from Rosemary’s Baby to Unsane), their historical accuracy and cultural relevance buttressed by insight from doctors, historians and those who’ve been diagnosed with postpartum mental illnesses. Sankey is perfectly poised to tackle the topic given that she spent several months in a mother and baby psychiatric unit after experiencing severe postpartum anxiety and depression that made her […]
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“The Fact That It’s Thermal Imagery, It Hits Memory in a Different Way”: EDGLRD Creative Director Joao Rosa on Harmony Korine’s Visionary AggroDr1ft
Harmony Korine’s AggroDr1ft unfurls through sheets of kaleidoscopic color — neon shades of gold, aqua and red — that ripple and pulse, achieving almost an intelligence of their own as they add expressionistic textures to the film’s Miami-set tale of a melancholy hitman out for a demonic Final Boss. And while the narrative recalls, at times, Robert E. Howard, Michael Mann and Grand Theft Auto, the film’s genuinely unique method of production allows its hallucinatory vibe — aided by an insidious AraabMuzik score — to reign supreme. Working with his team at new production outfit EDGLRD, including creative director Joao […]
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MEMORY Announces Summer Theatrical and Digital Release Dates for Microbudget Pandemic Comedy New Strains
MEMORY, the L.A.-based production and now distribution company featured in Filmmaker‘s 2016 25 New Faces list announced today the release plans for New Strains, a microbudget, camcorder-shot pandemic comedy from a pair of filmmakers, Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan, also featured on our list. The film will screen at the Roxy Cinema in New York (June 13), Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg (June 15 & 16), and Los Angeles’ Now Instant Image Hall (June 21 & 22), with a North American digital release to follow on Friday, July 19. In New Strains, a pandemic — not necessarily COVID-19 — strands a couple, Kallia […]
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“It’s About the Energy You Bring to the Life of Your Movie, Not Just About the Movie Itself”: Al Warren on Dogleg’s Six-Year Journey
“I love the feeling of the room in a packed house watching a good movie,” says writer, director and actor Al Warren on the phone from Los Angeles. “I want to model my career on that. It’s become a priority for how I approach my work. How will it be shown to an audience in-person? When I see a friend who has put their soul into the making and completion of their movie and then they don’t really have any plans on how they want to show it, I am confused.” At this moment, when the future of independent film […]
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Sundance Institute Announces Fellows for the 2024 Directors, Screenwriters, and Native Labs
The Sundance Institute announced today the the fellows selected for its 2024 Directors, Screenwriters, and Native Labs. The Native Lab in New Mexico will support four fellows and two artists in residence, and the Directors Lab in Colorado will support the development of eight projects with nine fellows, with an additional three fellows also joining for the online Screenwriters Lab held immediately after. For the first time the Directors Lab will be held at the Stanley Hotel in Estes, Colorado — Stephen King’s inspiration for The Shining — while the Native Lab will be returning to Santa Fe, New Mexico, […]
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“We Wanted To Show a Teacher with All His Weaknesses, Who Doesn’t Know Everything, Who Sometimes Makes Big Mistakes…”: Laurent Cantet on The Class
French director Laurent Cantet, whose films include Human Resources, Heading South, The Workshop and his Palme d’Or-winning The Class, died today at the age of 63. With this sad news we are reposting Brandon Harris’s interview with Cantet about The Class from our Spring, 2008 print edition. — Editor Starting with 1999’s Human Resources, Laurent Cantet has quickly built an international reputation as France’s most socially engaged narrative filmmaker, crafting films that highlight the ever lingering issues of race and class in both France and, as in the case of his 2006 film Heading South, its former colony of Haiti. With […]
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Represent Justice Announces New Speakers Bureau, Strategic Plan and Impact Campaign Around Clemency for Women Impacted by Mandatory Minimum Sentences
Represent Justice, the organization that began as an impact campaign for Destin Daniel Cretton’s wrongful-conviction drama, Just Mercy, announced today via press release a three-year strategic plan, “a roadmap for building narrative power and infrastructure around people impacted by incarceration and creating a justice system that is focused on healing, rather than punishment.” New this year is the Speakers Bureau, which will represent “the extraordinary ecosystem of system-impacted movement leaders, exonerees, artists, campaign leaders, filmmakers, and film participants who work in partnership with Represent Justice to transform the legal system. The Represent Justice Speakers Bureau will be a full-service bureau […]
