Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Neon Images and Dopamine-Devouring Aliens: Restoring Slava Tsukerman’s Cult Classic, Liquid Sky
For the past three decades, midnight movie staple Liquid Sky could only be seen during infrequent 35mm screenings and on out-of-print VHS and DVD editions. If a film fan actually saw Slava Tsukerman’s science fiction spectacle about downtown New York City residents coming into conflict with dopamine-devouring aliens, their experience of the film — known for its striking neon images and “electronic circus” soundtrack — was marred by aging film stock or subpar transfer. Enjoying the classic at the full audio-visual potency of its 1982 release was impossible with the options available. “Liquid Sky was kind of in the same […]
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Making VR that Matters: Johns Hopkins’ New Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies Program
In last summer’s print issue of Filmmaker I wrote about the ways that university film and computer science departments are adapting to teach virtual and augmented reality in their classrooms. In schools all over the world, students are finding ways to use VR and AR to create narrative films, documentaries, animation and games as aids in therapy, medicine, architecture and innumerable other fields. Now the newest school to launch a program is Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where a graduate level Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies Program is beginning in January. Headed by filmmaker Gabo Arora under the direction of Roberto Busó-García, the Director […]
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In Partnership with Westridge Foundation, SFFILM Announces New Grant Program for Narrative Filmmakers
There’s long been an imbalance between grants available to fiction filmmakers as opposed to documentarians, and today SFFILM, the Bay Area-based nonprofit, has announced in partnership with the Westridge Foundation new biannual grants and other resources for narrative filmmakers based across the U.S. Four to five grants of $20,000 – $25,000 will be given each spring and fall, and applications are now open for the first cycle, which runs through February, 2018. From the press release: The SFFILM / Westridge program is designed specifically to support the screenwriting and development phases of narrative feature projects whose stories focus on the […]
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The Story Women Have Been Trying to Tell for Years Now
Recently, I had to correct a friend of mine who referred to Thelma & Louise as an independent film. “Actually,” I said, “Thelma & Louise was 100% Hollywood, incredible as that may seem today.” It is not surprising that the Callie Khouri-penned story of two women escaping the law after killing a man for his attempted rape has developed an outlier reputation considering Hollywood’s response to it. Despite its critical and box office success, there were no copycat films made, no new genre emerged, no film movement was sparked. Since then, Hollywood has come nowhere close to producing another such […]
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DOC NYC 2017: Peter Braatz on Blue Velvet Revisited
The past year has proven to be a uniquely rewarding time for David Lynch obsessives, with the Showtime revival of Twin Peaks being the obvious highlight, but also marked by recent Criterion Collection Blu-ray/DVD special editions of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and the new documentary, David Lynch: the Art Life, focused on Lynch’s painting roots. However, one of the most fascinating Lynch-related features in recent memory has yet to receive the widespread U.S. exposure it richly deserves, and it reflects back to a more traditionally structured Lynch favorite (indeed, still the film that some cite as his key work) that those […]
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Five Questions with Night Night Director Guy Shelmerdine about the Future of Horror and VR
Earlier this month — and just in time for Halloween — the production company Dark Corner, known for its genre films and virtual reality projects, launched a new app that aims to become the go-to platform for horror, science-fiction and other genre VR. The app itself, named after the studio, is available for iOS and Android devices as well as Oculus Rift, Google Daydream and Samsung GearVR. It’s free to download, and offers individual titles as both free content and in-app purchases, generally for around a dollar each. The initially available projects include two past works from Dark Corner founder […]
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How the Numbers Add Up: The Director of 42 Seconds of Happiness and The Rainbow Experiment Explores the Numerology of Filmmaking
Christina Kallas’ tense ensemble drama 42 Seconds of Happiness received a number of awards last year in regional and international festivals in the U.S. and abroad, granting her, among other accolades, a nomination for the Emerging Director Award in St. Louis. The film will roll out on Amazon Prime in 15 countries tomorrow, while she has just completed her sophomore feature film, The Rainbow Experiment, which was one of five works-in-progress selected this year for the prestigious U.S. in Progress Paris program. Below, in a guest essay, the U.S. independent filmmaker and former Berlin-based screenwriter and producer — whose credits […]
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The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vacuum
Like many others who work in the film business, I find none (zero) of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s behavior even remotely surprising. His abusive work style was widely known, and, until two weeks ago, even admired by many of his male colleagues and/or competitors. And as is becoming increasingly clear, he was most definitely not alone. Pretty much everyone within a 1,000-mile radius of the biz is well aware that Sex-for-Work is Standard Operating Procedure in Hollywood. As Quentin Tarantino recently explained, in its treatment of women, Hollywood has been “operating under an almost Jim Crow-like system.” Precisely. Within […]
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Color Grading Film and Digital for Wonderstruck
Colorist Joe Gawler of Harbor Pictures has worked on a number of films and television shows over the years, including A Most Violent Year, Midnight in Paris and Arrival. For Wonderstruck, Gawler had to work with multiple film stocks. The story takes place in two time periods—the 1920s and the 1970s—and black & white and color film were used to convey the different time periods, while digital material was also shot for both periods. In this interview he talks about working with film and digital and how to become a better colorist. Filmmaker: How did you become involved in this project? Gawler: There’s […]
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Grappling with Qualms over A Gray State Before Moderating a Festival Q&A
As a film critic who also serves as a festival programmer I sometimes find myself in awkward positions. Such was the case recently at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival in October, where A Gray State screened, along with the film’s director Erik Nelson and its executive producer Werner Herzog in attendance. Though I’d seen the film on screener, I didn’t have a strong opinion about it one way or another (and as I was only helping out with the international features this year my indifference didn’t much matter). Of course, asked to moderate the post-screening Q&A I jumped at the […]
