Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“I Love Just Using a New Language”: Robert Rodriguez and STXSurreal’s Rick Rey and Andy Vick on the Virtual Reality Film The Limit
Since 1895 films have had at least two distinct advantages over live theater: the ability to be reproduced and watched at times and in places where the action did not actually take place, and the ability to direct the audience’s attention to precisely what the filmmakers desired. Conversely, after more than a century of cinema’s evolution, these have become precisely the reason that theater remains vibrant: it’s live and it’s present, and audiences can look wherever they want. Now virtual reality is mixing these experiences in a new way. While still prerecorded and edited (generally), it expands the audience’s range […]
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Sundance Institute Announces Its 2019 Screenwriter Intensive Fellows
The Sundance Institute announced the eleven screenwriters who will take part in their seventh annual Screenwriters Intensive. Taking place in Los Angeles tomorrow and Friday, the Intensive is “a two-day workshop for writers or writer/directors from underrepresented communities developing their first fiction feature. Fellows at the Intensive will advance the art and craft of their work under the guidance of experienced filmmakers and in collaboration with Institute’s Feature Film Program.” Advisors are Andrew Ahn, Kyle Patrick Alvarez, Patricia Cardoso, Deena Goldstone, Tanya Hamilton, Elgin James, So Yong Kim, Sarah Koskoff, Tracy Oliver, Joan Tewkesbury, and Andy Wolk. The program is […]
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The Making of an Ecosexual Adventure: Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle on Water Makes Us Wet
Water Makes Us Wet – An Ecosexual Adventure is Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle’s ecstatic exploration of the pleasure and politics of water. Premiering tonight at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, the doc is part road movie, part experimental film, part activist project. Water Makes Us Wet combines the allure of sex and environmental justice as it takes viewers on a trip through California, a state recently ravaged by drought and wildfires linked to climate change. Moving from San Francisco’s wastewater treatment plants to Sprinkle’s childhood house to the shrinking, toxic Salton Sea, the queer couple and artistic duo create a vivid […]
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Where are the Girl-Wonders? Everywhere—But Who Noticed?
Since the late 1990s, Gas Food Lodging filmmaker Allison Anders frequently lamented the pitiful media attention around women directors. “There are no girl-wonders, especially in this business,” she told BOMB Magazine in 1994. “But men all think they’re the next boy-wonder.” In the wake of bombshell reports on gender pay inequity and the #TimesUp movement, the media and entertainment industries are now certainly well aware of the “boy wonder syndrome,” as it’s been called. But bias is still glaringly with us, sometimes in subtle ways. Not only were no women directors nominated for Oscars this year, as has been widely […]
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Over 100 Cast Members and No Permits: How I Shot Ham on Rye in Los Angeles
The following guest essay on the making of Ham on Rye is from cinematographer Carson Lund. The film premieres at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival this week, and the official site is here. For independent filmmakers, Los Angeles is a city of contradictions: it’s both an ideal place to congregate with likeminded artists and craftspeople, and a truly daunting place to actualize on-location productions if you’re low on cash. Between inflated permitting fees, hefty fines for unlawful shooting, and a police force with plenty of experience enforcing these standards, there’s no shortage of ways in which the city formally discourages guerrilla […]
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“Cramming Remote Focus and Remote Iris Control Onto Those Tiny Lenses was Quite a Challenge”: DP Amanda Treyz on Bootstrapped
Screening as part of this year’s Indie Episodic at Sundance, the pilot for Bootstrapped draws upon star/writer Danielle Uhlarik’s background working at Google and Twitter. Uhlarik stars alongside Maribeth Monroe, playing two developers trying to get their fashion app (bitchthatwouldlookbetteronme.com) launched from Kansas City out into the world. Via email, DP Amanda Treyz spoke to staging comedy in two-shots, mixing color temperatures and getting away from the zoom lens mode of television production. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? […]
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IFP-Blackhouse Multicultural Producers Lab, With Seven Inaugural Female Fellows, Announced at Sundance
The Independent Filmmaker Project, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced Friday a partnership with The Blackhouse Foundation, a non-profit organization that works to expand opportunities for black multi-platform content creators, to launch the IFP-Blackhouse Multicultural Producers Lab, sponsored by HBO Corporate Social Responsibility Department, beginning in January 2019. From the press release: A cohort of seven (7) producers of innovative fiction and nonfiction projects (film, television, and digital media) were selected by IFP, Blackhouse, and HBO. These Fellows will participate in this year-long, collaborative program to expand the number of multicultural production companies; to increase their pipeline of content; and to support the sustainability of mid-career independent producers and the scale […]
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Sundance Notebook: Videogame Vibes, Cell Phones in Movies, and the Change Agency of Share
“You have an Oscar-nominated movie, what more do you want?” An assistant assured another assistant that he did not say this out loud to their boss but that he definitely thought it. Heavily. That is a rhetorical question I never thought I would hear at 9:00 AM while drinking coffee, but I also never thought I’d walk past Boots Riley at 9:00 AM for two consecutive years in a row either. He looks dressed for the weather this year at least. After a missed flight due to snow in Denver and a midnight wandering around a labyrinthine condo complex, I’m […]
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If Stanley Kubrick Was a Young Filmmaker Today…. A Hypothetical Festival Journey
In celebrating 25 years of Slamdance, I’m reflecting on the journey of first-time filmmakers. Many have passed through the hallways and screening rooms of Slamdance’s long-standing headquarters at Treasure Mountain Inn, through Sundance’s theaters, and many other new festivals over the past couple of decades. Yet from Stanley Kubrick’s coming of age as a filmmaker in the 1950s to the new digital technologies of today, it’s been an endeavor “against all odds,” through hurdles of financing, casting, scheduling, production and distribution. I have always been fascinated by Stanley Kubrick’s early career, specifically his first three feature films: Fear and Desire, […]
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RIP Jonas Mekas (1922-2019)
I only met Jonas Mekas once, briefly, in the most technical and unimpressive sense of “met”: I was coming out of Anthology Film Archives, emerging from a press screening and grimly proceeding to the nearest USPS branch. He asked why I wasn’t smiling, for which I didn’t have a good or succinct answer, and turned tail. I blew it! He didn’t identify himself and didn’t need to: Mekas’s status as an East Village institution and NYC film legend was imprinted on me long before I moved to the city. Artforum‘s obit puts it succinctly: “His output, which spans seven decades […]
