Filmmaking

IFP ANNOUNCES 10 PROJECTS FOR NARRATIVE LAB

Today IFP announced the projects selected for this year’s Independent Filmmaker Lab, taking place next week. In it’s 5th year, the Lab is a highly immersive, free mentorship program for low-budget ($1 million) first feature films that have shot all or a substantial amount of footage but have not completed post-production. The goal of the program is to connect mentors with projects before they are submitted to film festivals. Past participants include The New Year Parade (2008 Slamdance Grand Jury Narrative Prize winner) and Half-Life (2008 Sundance Film Festival and Tokyo International Film Festival). The 2009 Narrative Lab leaders are […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Jun 1, 2009 Filmmaking
RETHINKING STORY FROM FILM TO GAMES

Ben Fritz has an interesting interview with Gore Verbinski up at the L.A. Times in which the director, whose film adaptation of Bioshock is stalled over budgetary issues, discusses his company’s foray into game development. He’s hired game designer Will Stahl to work on staff, is in development on five titles, and seems dedicated to rethinking Hollywood’s traditional relationship to the game space: It’s a mistake for Hollywood to impose themselves on the gaming space. Not only is it arrogant, but it hasn’t really worked. The presumption that we have a better understanding of narrative that we can bring to […]

By Scott Macaulay on Jun 1, 2009 Filmmaking
47 SHORT FILMS ABOUT CANNES

You could read all the blogs, all the coverage… or you might just watch the 47 delightful micro-shorts that Red Bucket Films (Go Get Some Rosemary filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie and colleague Alex Kalman) made while attending the Cannes Film Festival this year. By way of introduction, they write, “With these small observations from a place and time where most of the humanity exists on a screen in a dark room, we (Alex, Benny and Josh) thought we’d find comfort in our pocket sized cameras. The little bits of people, moments, absurdity, glamor, humor and mistakes are for our […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2009 Filmmaking
WRITE YOUR BUSINESS PLAN FOR THE FUTURE, NOT THE PAST

On his 401st Blow blog, Noah Harlan unfurls a lengthy and detailed (charts and all!) post entitled “This is the Right Time to Make Movies.”. He’s not referring to creative issues, like the wealth of things in the world that contemporary filmmakers can be reacting to or be inspired by, but rather the evolving media economy and how viewer trends, monetization potential, and distribution efficiencies may make this moment a good one for sharp-eyed movie investors. I particularly liked these two paragraphs: In a business plan for a traditional company you will have sections that deal with barriers to entry […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 31, 2009 Filmmaking
WHAT IF EMAIL WERE INVENTED TODAY?

That’s the question two developers from Google, Lars and Jens Rasumussen (creators of Google Maps) asked themselves, and their answer is Google Wave, the one-hour, twenty-minute demo of which is generating talk all over the web. The first 38 minutes are the meat of the demo, and if you want to see the near-future of web communication, check it out. In brief, Wave is an open source protocol that rolls email, chat, blog publishing, forums, photo sharing, wiki contributing and document collaboration into a single “shared object” that is accessed through the browser. Blogger Andy Wibbels says “Google Wave completely […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 30, 2009 Filmmaking
FILMMAKING AS LIFE MANAGEMENT

Ted Hope gave a talk at the New York Foundation for the Arts that ties together a lot of things he’s been talking about at his Truly Free Film blog. The section up front that pulls together some statistics about the state of our arthouse cinema is pretty sobering. I won’t summarize it here — just go to the link to read it — but I especially liked a paragraph near the end in which he urges people to get out of the single-picture mindset and to see their activites as a film artist as part of a continuum of […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 29, 2009 Filmmaking
MAN OR EVERYMAN?

In Bookforum, novelist Richard Ford discusses his method for writing his acclaimed “Frank Bascombe” trilogy of novels, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. Along the way he references some useful theories about art, literature and character creation. An excerpt: To my mind, and faithful to Frost, these three Frank Bascombe novels, along with everything else I’ve ever written, have been largely born out of fortuity. First, I fortuitously decided I wanted to write a book. I then collected a lot of seemingly random and what seemed like significant things out of the world, things I wanted […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 29, 2009 Filmmaking
WATCH. LEARN. MEET.

Internet Week New York kicks off next week and social fundraising site IndieGoGo will bookend the event with a screening of Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman‘s Pressure Cooker on Monday night at the IFC Center (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, moderated by yours truly), then on Sunday they will host a panel discussion on film funding, promotion and distribution on the Internet at the Apple Store in SoHo (panelists include filmmaker Lance Weiler, Christopher Roberts, and CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner will moderate) ending with a party in the evening. Details for all events are here.

By Jason Guerrasio on May 28, 2009 Filmmaking
SHOOT THE HARMONICA PLAYER

The music, the make-up… I dunno. Maybe it’s time for Abel Ferrara to retire his vendetta against producer Ed Pressman and director Werner Herzog for their remake/reboot/Southern-gumbo-laced reimagining of Bad Lieutenant. Or maybe it’s just a lousy showreel cut to make the film seem more generic to foreign buyers than it really is. You decide.

By Scott Macaulay on May 27, 2009 Filmmaking
A TRIP TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL’S ATELIER

Producer Noah Harlan posted earlier on this blog about his first few days in Cannes attending the Atelier with Jake Mahaffy’s Free in Deed, and his report below, cross-posted at his own 401st Blow blog, is a great intro to the world of co-production finance for U.S. indie producers. Read it and take notes. I’ve been attending the Cannes Film Festival for nearly 10 years now (which, admittedly, makes me a Johnny-Come-Lately) and each experience of the week on the Croisette takes on it’s own qualities. Where you are staying, what you are trying to accomplish (premiering, selling, financing), the […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 26, 2009 Filmmaking

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