HieronyVision, an online platform that aims to “establish a new creative ecosystem across independent and alternative movies, music and art,” has announced the 30 filmmakers selected as part of a Film Independent partnership. The filmmakers, chosen from five film schools as well as an application process, will “get a chance to develop, fund and distribute their projects with HieronyVision and learn the HV ORIGINALS model.” Explains HieronyVision in a statement, “For film projects, our team describes it as ‘Y Combinator meets The French New Wave.’Creatively the projects have to provoke, inspire or entertain. On the business side HieronyVision follows a […]
Pittsburg-based director Charlotte Glynn, who made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in 2014, is now running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for her debut narrative feature, The Gymnast. The film, which was actually discussed at the end of Brandon Harris’s profile, is set in a former mill town and is about “a 14-year-old aspiring Olympic gymnast and her die-hard ‘gym dad’ [who] must reinvent themselves after a potentially career-ending injury.” Elaborates Glynn on the Kickstarter page: The Gymnast is a film about loss and perseverance in the face of extreme odds, and the making of the film has mirrored that […]
Full Sail University’s accelerated film degree programs provide student filmmakers with the classes, technology, and educators they need to make their way in the industry. Film students learn to balance creative storytelling with technical skills for a comprehensive filmmaking education. Full Sail’s Film Degree Programs Full Sail’s film degrees are hands-on programs that are focused on providing students a wide range of experience in their industry. In the Film bachelor’s program, students tackle every step of the filmmaking process, from scriptwriting and set-building to camera setup and post-production. Each student takes on a key role or a crew role during dedicated film days, where they work together on set and experience a […]
Over the past 15 years, British filmmaker Jeanie Finlay has earned a reputation for nuanced, sensitive and compelling documentary portraits. Her films have told many unlikely stories: the rise and fall of a reluctant Elvis lookalike in Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, two Scottish hip hop fraudsters in The Great Hip Hop Hoax, a pregnant transgender man in Seahorse. Her third feature film, Sound it Out, told the story of the last record shop in the Northeast of England and its owner, Tom Butchart, a school friend of Finlay’s. The morning after the world premiere of Finlay’s latest […]
This post is part of a series, Girlblogging. Read the introduction here. Also, in New York, American Psycho screens tonight at the Paris Theater with director Mary Harron present in a tribute to producer Ed Pressman. The orchestral sting slices through the opening credits; perfect drops of blood rain down like vinyl balloons or the forms in a photorealistic painting: taut and shiny, artificially self-contained. When they splatter, the punch line lands. It was a joke all along—not blood, not really, just a false appearance—an emulsion drizzled across bone china; the screen expands to reveal a chef’s knife descending upon […]
Girlblogging is the online expression of a certain kind of girlhood: a condition not strictly defined by youth or gender, but—per the French theory collective Tiqqun in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl—the quality of being “the model citizen as redefined by consumer society.” The lace and ribbons are just bells and whistles. At its core, girlhood is the aesthetic of the unequal power-relation. The Young-Girl who constructs reactions and critiques, the girlblogger, manages to be both the consummate consumer and the consummate consumer good. Though she is wounded by them, she derives a certain pleasure from the […]
Distribution strategist Peter Broderick, whose articles on microbudget filmmaking were foundational in the early days of this magazine, publishes a weekly newsletter that is a must-read for anyone tracking the independent film industry. A recent edition, his report on Sundance 2023 documentary sales, has prompted discussion and clarified important current trends in non-fiction acquisitions. This report is reprinted with his permission. Sign up for Broderick’s newsletter here. — Editor “Every independent filmmaker should learn the lessons of Sundance. This year’s festival revealed critically important developments in the indie ecosystem.” Let’s start with the same two sentences that began my Special Report […]
The poster for Sanctuary features a blonde Margaret Qualley whispering to a mysterious Christopher Abbott. Its imagery — a seeming femme fatale, an unknowing male prey and all the imagined chaos in between — evokes the height of the cinematic erotic thriller era. But the strength, elegance and wit of Micah Bloomberg’s (TV series Homecoming) script and Zachary Wigon’s (The Heart Machine) direction is their interest in subverting your (and the characters’s) expectations at every step. In Sanctuary, Abbott plays Hal, a hotel mogul’s son and heir. He has ordered a fancy meal to a decadently opulent hotel suite where […]
Fair use, a crucial right. Since 2005, when documentary filmmakers created their Documentary Filmmakers Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, fair use has become settled industry practice. Fair use is what lets people quote from their culture for free, in the right circumstances. Ring tone in the scene? Paintings in the background? Want to use news clips to highlight the importance of events in the film or a stanza of a song you’re talking about? Check first to see if fair use applies; it very well might. Insurers cover fair uses, too, because they know the risk is low. Fair […]
At NAB I had a mission: find out what new products are making virtual production more affordable, more accessible, and not require a master’s degree in Unreal. Fortunately, I found a few options. Plus some new tools that are blending generative AI with virtual production. Let’s dig into what’s new in VP from NAB. Budget-Friendly Virtual Production First is the VIVE Mars CamTrack—a complete package for creating an affordable virtual volume. HTC’s VIVE has been in the virtual reality space for a while, with some of the top VR headsets. They also make the VIVE Tracker, a palm-sized puck that can track […]