Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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From All Angles: The Groundbreaking Volumetric Filmmaking of Scatter
“If you look at any discipline through the lens of emerging technology, you’ll find a group of people who are exploring what’s next for that discipline,” said James George, cofounder/CEO of Scatter, sitting across from me in its Bushwick studios. “For us, it’s filmmaking.” George and his eventual Scatter cofounder and CPO, Alexander Porter, whose background is in photography and documentary film, began collaborating—hacking and modifying cameras—back in 2010. “I reached this place of feeling constrained with those [conventional filmmaking] tools,” Porter told me. The third cofounder and CMO, Yasmin Elayat, a trained computer scientist and artist, joined the team […]
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Lens Flair
Bradford Young and Neil Fanthom first forayed into edgier glass during their collaboration on Solo: A Star Wars Story. Fanthom, Arri’s director of technology at the time, worked with Young, the acclaimed cinematographer of Arrival, Selma and A Most Violent Year, to develop a set of Arri Prime DNA lenses personally tailored to his needs. The DNAs are essentially rehoused vintage glass meant to cover the Alexa 65 sensor, fine-tuned and developed from the ground up for the specific needs of a cinematographer on a particular film. While testing the lenses for Solo, Fanthom called in Young to look at […]
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Bigger, Shorter, More Expensive
One would think that in this era of superabundance—with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple TV+, Pluto TV, Criterion Channel, OVID.tv, Kanopy and more than 300 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every minute—the last thing we need is another viewing option. But nearly every day a new platform seems to launch, and many are investing heavily in “original content.” New platforms spending money should be good for filmmakers, right? Well, the answer seems a qualified maybe. The boom isn’t just occurring with platforms focusing on features and episodic content. There’s a new rise in outlets focusing on short-form work. […]
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Day For Night on The Dead Don’t Die: Director Of Photography Frederick Elmes Shoots Jarmusch’s Zombies
Fred Elmes invited me to a DI Theater at Harbor Picture Company, a post-house bustling around the corner from Film Forum, to talk about his work on Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die. There was just an hour left of the allotted time to finish the HDR version of the film when I arrived at the DI suite, but Fred retained his cool as he lulled us to the finish line. In my time there, he liked to vignette the edges more or less, and bring faces up or down a level or two. Usually down. Our meeting there was […]
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Le Cinéma Club Relaunches With Claire Denis’s Very Rare Keep It for Yourself
Founded in 2015 by Marie-Louise Khondji, the streaming site Le Cinéma Club relaunches today with an exciting offering: Claire Denis’s long-lost 1991 40-minute short Keep It for Yourself. The only film she’s ever made in the states, it stars Vincent Gallo and Sara Driver, has a John Lurie score and was shot in New York City. After years of unavailability, a copy was found on a Japanese VHS being sold on Australian eBay. (For more on that story, click here.) From the official press release: The opening weeks of programming are completed with other streaming premieres, rarities and films by new […]
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Toy Story 4: Woody and Buzz Embrace the Gig Economy
A few weeks ago, Apple dropped a staggeringly ill-advised promoted tweet into my timeline: “With the longest battery life in an iPhone ever, you’ll lose power before your iPhone XR will.” I enjoy thinking about death even less than the average person, so my first reaction was that I’m not particularly cheered by a poorly worded suggestion that I’ll probably exit before my technology. My next thought was that Apple had inadvertently provided a solid metaphor for the eternal franchise era: assuming all goes as planned, it is not inconceivable that there will be Star Wars movies coming out after my […]
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Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese: Tangled Up in Tanner
On a scale of one to ten, I’m probably about a 6.5 when it comes to Bob Dylan. Define one as “Dylan is the single most visible/still living manifestation of hyper-steroidal Boomer nostalgia and must be destroyed,” ten as the level of obsessiveness practiced by the singer-songwriter’s personal scourge A.J. Weberman, who literally coined the term “Dylanology” and famously dug through Robert Zimmerman’s trash for clues. Dylan wasn’t having it; in Weberman’s indelible telling: I’d agreed not to hassle Dylan anymore, but I was a publicity-hungry motherfucker… I went to MacDougal Street, and Dylan’s wife comes out and starts screaming […]
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“Reality Isn’t Given — You Have to Take It”: Writer/Director Donal Foreman on His Fictional Memoir, The Image You Missed
“I’ve been able to develop more of a sense of being from somewhere by not being there…. Your nationality starts to feel like a more important part of you when you’re away from home.” Writer, director, and editor Donal Foreman splits his time between his native Dublin and Brooklyn, his home for close to a decade. Debuting in 2017, The Image You Missed is his first feature documentary, a fictional memoir of Donal’s complex relationship with his filmmaker father, Arthur MacCaig. MacCaig, the son of Irish immigrants, was a documentary filmmaker born in New Jersey in 1948. He made his […]
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Cutting on the Bias: Abel Ferrara Collaborator Frank DeCurtis
With a storied, diverse career, Frank DeCurtis has been a journeyman in the arts for over four decades. His background in performance, casting, fashion, props, set decoration and production design led him to collaborate with Abel Ferrara as a producing and creative partner for a dozen projects spanning more than 18 years. While much has been made of their sojourn abroad in the wake of 9/11, DeCurtis’s perspective has rarely been articulated in print. Filmmaker spoke to DeCurtis in downtown Manhattan about his trajectory, how an artist can effect an impact in many fields, and the inherent challenges to creating […]
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Sundance Institute Announces Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees
The Sundance Institute today announced the 25 nonfiction films that will receive Documentary Fund and Stories of Change grants. The grants span all the way from initial project development to audience building, and the list includes custom grants from The Kendeda Fund, which supports projects dealing with environmental themes as well as gun violence. Stories of Change grants, a creative partnership with The Skoll Foundation, support social entrepreneurs and independent storytellers. Reports the Sundance Institute, “the supported projects come from Canada, Chile, China, Estonia, Hungary, Iran, Israel, Kenya, Mexico, Poland, South Africa and the United States. 21 projects, or 84%, […]
