Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Is Twin Peaks Season Three a Movie or a TV Show? Well…
I’m always up for an endless debate that paralyzes my Twitter feed into repetitive stasis for 12+ hours at a time, and accordingly braced for one last night upon seeing that Twin Peaks: The Return had landed at number two on Sight & Sound‘s annual year-end poll. (Minutes after I published this, it popped up at number one on Cahiers du Cinema‘s list as well.) Pedantic disputes about Category Fraud — i.e., if a performance is lead or supporting for awards purposes — have never been my favorite, and I can’t imagine a topic to get less exercised about than whether a TV […]
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Watch: Walter Murch Talks Music, The Conversation and “Nodal Editing”
Starting off with a discussion of classic Hollywood vs. Soviet editing styles (continuity editing vs. Soviet montage’s dialectic approach), famous editor and sound designer Walter Murch goes on to discuss a third way that he dubs “nodal editing.” Drawing examples from The Conversation, the first film he sound edited, to The Godfather to his work in documentary, Murch offers an incisive, history-laden master class in editing theory at this year’s Sheffield Doc Fest.
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“Speaking to a New World”: Addison O’Dea on the Virtual Reality Series Discovery TRVLR
Last month Discovery Communications, Google, and Here Be Dragons released one of the most ambitious virtual reality documentary series yet produced, Discovery TRVLR. Writer-director Addison O’Dea and his team created 38 episodes on all seven continents, going to as remote locations as possible and focusing on the universality of the people who live there. Available on DiscoveryVR.com, the Discovery VR app, and YouTube, the series marks the next step, after works like Felix & Paul Studios’ Nomads series, to push VR into the field of ethnographic nonfiction. But as O’Dea emphasizes in our conversation below, TRVLR is first and foremost a travel show, not an anthropological […]
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Lessons Learned: One Podcaster’s Education
Adam Schartoff’s Filmwax Radio is one of the longest-running independent film podcasts as well as one with the deepest roots in the independent community. After dozens of episodes, Schartoff is in the final week of a Kickstarter to raise funds for new equipment and expanded production. He’s written a guest post below about the evolution of the podcast. Please consider supporting him at his Kickstarter page. — SM Years ago when I started hosting the first iteration of Filmwax Radio, back when it was part of the BBox Radio internet radio platform, I got some good advice from the producer […]
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What Makes A Great Interview? Filmmakers Share Tips on Securing Great On-Screen Dialogues
At “What Makes a Great Interview,” a November 12 panel at DOC NYC, moderator Sandi DuBowski (Trembling Before G-D) offered his reflections on interviews: “People want to have a cathartic experience, a soul journey… to take a breath out of the everyday rush and really sink into their life. I think interviews are very holy and they are gorgeous and there is something about life in them that is special.” Three filmmakers joined DuBowski on the stage to reflect on their process for conducting great interviews, from their personal theories to little tricks in the tool bag (like dropping a […]
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“Don’t Judge Your Footage in the Field”: Tips on Doc Verite Shooting From the Camerafolk Behind One of Us, The Judge, and E-Team
Vérité cinema is frequently tossed about as a term, and likely most of us know the broader strokes of the genre: an observational camera whose team aims not to interfere with the subjects or action; a film frequently built on intimate access, shunning sit down interviews or use of archival footage. At a November 12 DOC NYC PRO panel dubbed “Observational Camera,” five respected filmmakers reflected on the specifics of how they go about shooting direct cinema. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s One of Us follows three individuals who leave an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, and on the panel were cinematographers Jenni […]
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Desert Hearts, Wild Bill, Pretty Little Liars and More: Jim Hemphill’s Year-End Home Video Recommendations
For my final home video column of the year, I’d like to round up the most interesting and enjoyable Blu-ray and DVD titles I’ve encountered in recent months — not necessarily a “ten best” list, but a compendium of highly recommended releases that rank among 2017’s home viewing highlights (and that make great gifts for cinephiles as the holiday shopping season approaches). Here goes: Desert Hearts. Director Donna Deitch embarked on her narrative feature debut with a simple goal — to tell a love story between two women that didn’t end with either of them dying or in a bisexual […]
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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 […]
