Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Trailer Watch: Ryan Koo’s Amateur
Filmmaker and No Film School founder Ryan Koo — one of our 2008 25 New Faces of Independent Film — has been working on his debut feature for years. His extremely successful Kickstarter (over $140,000!) launched in 2011, and in a series of updates — and one 2013 Filmmaker interview — he’s been transparent about the long road that developing and making a first feature can become. Well, Netflix ultimately came on board to finance the film, and now there’s a first trailer, with the feature itself set to drop on April 6. You can read more about the film […]
-
At SXSW, Sundance Shares Columbus Distribution Figures and Offers DIY Distribution Tips
Sundance Institute’s Creative Distribution Initiative released today a case study for one of its inaugural films that premiered at Sundance last year: Columbus, from :: kogonada, who appeared on Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list. Opening to strong critical acclaim and grossing over $1 million at the U.S. box office, the film is centered around a Korean-born man who finds himself stuck in Columbus, Indiana, where his father is in a coma. In two weeks, an additional case study for Jennifer Brea’s Oscar short-listed doc Unrest will be released. Established in May 2017, the initiative is aimed at […]
-
Cash Back: How Film Tax Incentives Work
Let’s assume you got into filmmaking because you wanted nothing to do with business school. Well, tough. Movies are the most expensive art form; even ones they call “no-budget” aren’t. You need to learn about business eventually, and in today’s world, even independent filmmakers need to understand terms like “transferable rebates,” “soft money” and “100 percent deductibility.” In fact, there’s one financing term both Hollywood and independent producers must know: “tax credits.” The studio world is continually on the lookout for states offering production rebates that will reduce the cost of their movies and TV shows, while independent producers scout […]
-
At Bydgoszcz, Bigger Was Better — A Glimpse at Our 8K Future
DPs, not directors, are the rock stars at Camerimage, the film festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, devoted to the foundational art of the motion picture camera. The world’s best cinematographers, if not working, flock there each autumn.The 25th edition, which wrapped several months ago in November 2017, proved no exception. The festival hub is a modernist opera house, perched above The Brda, the narrow river that bisects picturesque Bydgoszcz (once known as “Little Berlin”). Centrally located, Opera Nova hosts two theaters, including the festival’s main venue. A long, ground-floor lobby and second-floor hallway, curved thanks to the building’s cylindrical shape, house […]
-
It’s Really About You and Your Friends: Alex Henning on Creating Social Virtual Reality and Coco VR
With the release of Coco last year Pixar created yet another film that won over critics and audiences with rich visuals and a compelling story; it’s earned over $200 million so far and just took home the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Pixar wanted to use the property to push forward into new territory, though, and thus used Coco as the vehicle for its first virtual reality experience. To do so they tapped Magnopus, a Los Angeles-based VR/AR company that had previously produced Moana‘s virtual reality product for Disney. The result is Coco VR, a visually arresting gaming experience that also constitutes Oculus’s largest foray into social VR thus far. […]
-
What Does it Really Take to Make a Film (When You’re Not on Studio Payroll)?
For the past six years I’ve been curating content about filmmaking and the creative process at large. I’ve found a lot, and there’s a lot more to uncover, but the one thing that I have always found frustrating was how fragmented all the information remains. It takes an average of five to seven years to make an indie feature. What happens during that time? How do people make a living, juggle other aspects of their lives, and overcome doubt, blocks, debts during those five to seven years? We know so little about the current indie film industry landscape that UCLA is […]
-
Airing the Dirty Laundry: Three Documentarians on Making a Film About Their Own Families
Ben Stillerman — director of Taking Stock, a new film about his father’s South African family business — talks with two other documentary filmmakers about the particular joys and challenges of making films about family. Leah Warshawski is the director of Big Sonia, about her inspiring Holocaust survivor grandmother; Kate Dandel’s Gold Balls is about professional senior tennis and features her father-in-law. Stillerman: I came up with the idea for doing a film about my father and our family business partly because I knew I would have unfettered access to a very interesting person and story. I also knew that […]
-
Inexplicable Traces: On the Beautiful Epiphanies of Mark Pellington’s Nostalgia
Mark Pellington, along with David Fincher and Mark Romanek, began his filmmaking career in what might be called MTV’s heroic age. After a series of music videos, which include Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” U2’s “One” and R.E.M.’s “Drive,” he made two skillful, flashy, mid-sized star-driven studio thrillers — Arlington Road and Mothman Prophecies. Over the last ten years, a succession of his indie films have all dealt in sometimes comic, sometimes melodramatic terms with people trying to manage death. Alex Ross Perry, perhaps at one point associated with the mumblecore movement, whatever that exactly was, has for the last eight years, […]
-
What is Producing? A Group of Sundance Producers Share Insights on Financing, Selecting Projects and Making a Career out of Making Movies
What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to […]
-
It’s Time for Stunt Work to be Recognized by The Academy
I’m fortunate to work in action and with stunts, behind the camera. The stunt community is comprised of all kinds of talent — drivers, motorcycle riders, gymnasts, fighters, parkour, Cirque du Soleil acrobats and much more. They are the best of the best! I’ve been even more fortunate to train and work with the best stunt coordinators, innovators, riggers and performers in Hollywood. Most audiences, and even film critics, aren’t aware that action sequences are created by a separate team of technicians and performers. On Hollywood films, action is shot by a second-unit crew, with its own director and sometimes […]
