Filmmaking

BLUE VALENTINE EDITOR JIM HELTON CHECKS INTO THE ACE HOTEL

While going back through old emails I came across one from filmmaker Jim Helton, who made this cool video detailing artist Chris Rubio’s process making four paintings for New York’s Ace hotel. As Helton edited Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine, one of Sundance’s most hotly anticipated films, it seems like a good idea to post this for all of you to check out. Ace Hotel x Chris Rubino from Jim Helton on Vimeo.

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2010 Filmmaking
SUNDANCE, LONELY SUNDANCE

Before we all head off to the Sundance Film Festival, I think it’s useful to remember that there can be a dark and lonely undercurrent to the Park City experience, one perfectly captured by Jamie Stuart in the video he made for us at the 2007 festival. Here, with a guest appearance by Sienna Miller, is “White Plastic Flower.”

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2010 Filmmaking
D.P. ED LACHMAN ON THE MAKING OF HOWL

Here’s the great director of photography Ed Lachman on the roots of his career and the making of Sundance’s Opening Night film, Howl.

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2010 Filmmaking
BRADEN KING SENDS A POSTCARD FROM HERE

One independent film I’m especially looking forward to in 2010 is Braden King’s Here, shot in Armenia by Ballast‘s Lol Crawley and starring Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal. Braden’s film is ambitiously conceived, a story of a romance between a cartographer sent to map the Eastern European country and a local art photographer that will blend King’s striking images and moody drama with interstitial material by a number of great experimental filmmakers. Braden has launched a blog about the making of his film. Here’s an excerpt: It was an adventure. It was magnificent. It was terrible. It was hard. We […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2010 Filmmaking
BRENT GREEN DEBUTS SCENES FROM HIS NEW FEATURE

One of the most creative and fascinating young filmmakers working today is Brent Green, the Pennsylvania-based animator whose work we first brought to our readers’ attention in 2005 when we selected him as one of our “25 New Faces.” His new film, Gravity, a feature, is his most ambitious film yet, and at the Andrew Edlin Gallery site he has posted a preview that makes me psyched to see the whole film. You can check it out here. Gravity promises to be an amazing blend of live action, narrative, and puppet stop-motion animation in a fantastically constructed set built on […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2010 Filmmaking
KENTUCKER AUDLEY DEBUTS SCENES FROM OPEN FIVE

I’ll post a bit later about all the stuff in the new Filmmaker magazine that’s not online. It’s a particularly good issue, I think, and one of the things which is print-only is Alicia Van Couvering’s look at five films that found their money and went into production in 2010. We decided to do a financing-oriented corrective to all the doom-and-gloom stories out there, and this one is full of practical tips for filmmakers looking to crowdsource and raise money through other unconventional means. One of the films she writes about is Kentucker Audley’s Open Five, which is our 25 […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2010 Filmmaking
TED HOPE’S 10 SCRIPT SUBMISSION TIPS

Ted Hope has an excellent blog post today, one of those print-this-out-and-post-it-above-your-computer lists to guide you through your work as a screenwriter. It’s entitled “Ten Things to Do Before You Submit a Script,” and it’s not about getting an agent or using two brads, not three. It’s about the final stage of a writer’s own in-house (i.e., in brain) development. There are a few that really resonated with me. One is: “Know what the historical precedents are for your story and how you differ from them in how you have chosen to tell it.” This is crucial. If a producer […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2010 Filmmaking
FREDERIC JAMESON AND JACQUES ATTALI ON DIY

Well, not really but sort of… While researching an article I’m writing, I came across this trenchant passage by critical theorist Frederic Jameson in the foreword to the U.S. edition of Jacques Attali’s 1977 music manifesto Noise: The Political Economy of Music: “Not the least challenging challenging of Attali’s thought lies in his tough-minded insistence on the ambiguity, or better still, the profound ambivalence, of the new social, economic and organizational possibilities, which he often describes in terms of autosurveillance. From one perspective, autosurveillance marks the penetration of information technology within the body and the psyche of the individual subject: […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2010 Filmmaking
WINTER ISSUE ONLINE

Click here to read select stories from the Winter issue. Terry Gilliam talks about his new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; Tom Ford discusses his debut feature, A Single Man; Don Argott highlights what’s considered the heist of the century in The Art of the Steal. Also, Esther B. Robinson weights risk vs. responsibility while making your films; Shari Carpenter highlights a software for script supervisors, ScriptE; Jon Reiss tells us how to choose a fulfillment house and the need for awareness about digital archiving. Plus, Anthony Kaufman‘s Industry Beat & Lance Weiler‘s Culture Hacker columns.

By Jason Guerrasio on Jan 17, 2010 Filmmaking
A Recipe for No-Budget Filmmaking

A recipe for no-budget filmmaking might go something like this: gather no more than a baker’s dozen of crew members, a half dozen actors, a large helping of friends and family, and a lighting/camera/sound equipment package smaller than half the size of a cargo van. Fill the other half with set dressing, props, wardrobe, unit supplies, and craft service and load into a smattering of free locations of varying shapes and sizes. Roll camera, repeat up to 1,000 times or until you run out of time, money and hard drive space. Total prep time – 4 weeks. Total shooting time […]

By Karin Chien on Jan 17, 2010 Filmmaking

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