Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Trailer Watch: Yance Ford’s Strong Island
Yance Ford, a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face, premiered his feature documentary debut Strong Island at Sundance this year, and the film’s new trailer has just dropped from Netflix. One of this year’s essential docs, Strong Island is a formally assured, highly thoughtful examination of racial injustice, family tragedy and the complexities of memory and grief. Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris wrote about the film earlier this year at The New Yorker: In the annals of cinematic memoir, there are very few films like Yance Ford’s Strong Island, a stylish and wrenching rumination on familial grief that had its première […]
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Bull, Season One, Duel in the Sun and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
The best new television series of the 2016-2017 season arrived on DVD last week in the form of CBS/Paramount’s Bull: Season One package. A smart, stylish and very funny drama with a killer pedigree – Donnie Brasco and Quiz Show writer Paul Attanasio is one of the show’s creators, Steven Spielberg is an executive producer, and indie auteur Rodrigo Garcia directed the pilot – Bull reinvents and reinvigorates both the procedural and the courtroom drama with consistent verbal wit, visual elegance and one of the most compelling protagonists in the history of television. The show focuses on Jason Bull (Michael […]
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So You Can’t Afford a Wardrobe Designer: Costume Design for Independent Film on a $500 Budget
“Microbudget filmmaking” is a bit of a misnomer considering the broad spectrum “microbudget” entails — one producer’s $5,000 line item is another’s entire operating budget. In a perfect world, we’d all have sufficient funds to hire the best and brightest among us and no project would be too scrappy. Unfortunately, when it comes to independent productions, sometimes that old chestnut still applies: if you want something done, you have to do it yourself. I learned this lesson the (somewhat hard) way when I directed my first feature, A Feast of Man. With an operating budget of $15,000 – a combination of […]
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Twin Peaks: The Return: Last Looks Before the End
I took a break from writing about Twin Peaks: The Return to let things shake down a bit, but now seems like a good time to make a few more notes before the end. The first 2.25 of 18 parts were almost total abstraction, and it seemed a matter of necessity to largely abandon that mode for extended stretches before increasingly reintegrating it. We seemed, for a long time, very far from where we started, but The Return has allowed for increasing interventions of the abstract and fantastical alongside its rising dramatic arcs, which have finally run long enough to allow nearly […]
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Reed Morano on Successfully Pitching for and Directing the Intense Dystopian Drama, The Handmaid’s Tale
Reed Morano was told she wouldn’t get to pitch on The Handmaid’s Tale: “Don’t get too excited about it.” Someone showed her the pilot just so she had an idea of what Hulu was up to, but there was already a “very big male director” they were out to, as Morano discussed at an IFP Q&A earlier this year. When Morano heard that her long time collaborator and friend Elisabeth Moss was attached as the lead of the show, she reached out — not taking no for an answer. “A week and a half later, I got a call: ‘The producers […]
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Through You: Stopping and Feeling Through Dance and VR
Although dance and virtual reality seemingly lay at polar ends of the creative spectrum, they can come together to make incredibly moving artistic experiences. That, at least, holds true for co-directors Lily Baldwin and Saschka Unseld in their new piece Through You, a VR film heavy on physical choreography that premiered at Sundance earlier this year and on August 1 was released on Samsung Gear VR via the Oculus Video app. The piece features a couple as their relationship evolves over the course of decades through discovery, fulfillment, loss and rejuvenation. It uses handheld camera movement to create a very visceral […]
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Shooting From Dock to Dish with the New Canon C200
For the launch of the C200, Canon hired producer Andrew Fried of Boardwalk Pictures to create a short introduction video, From Dock to Dish. Boardwalk Pictures specializes in nonfiction programming, most notably producing the Chef’s Table series for Netflix. The team, including DP Bryant Fisher, shot From Dock To Dish over the course of two days using pre-production units loaned from Canon. In this interview producer Fried and DP Fisher talk about the camera and their experience shooting the video. Filmmaker: How did you become involved in this project? Fried: Canon approached me to see if I had any ideas for a short […]
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Cinematographer Lucas Alvarado-Farrar on Shooting Whose Streets?
Opening today in theaters is Sabaah Folayan’s Whose Streets?, co-directed by Damon Davis. Both visceral and thoughtful, it looks back at the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO in September, 2014, capturing all the turbulence and outcry of the moment before moving forward and following the activist energies ignited by the event. There’s archival and citizen-shot material, most only on cell phones, in the movie, but also expertly-captured footage of the original protests and following actions shot by the film’s DP, Lucas Alvarado-Farrar. Here, in an interview conducted just prior to the film’s premiere at the 2017 Sundance Film […]
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Color Grading with the Blackmagic Micro Panel
I’m a video editor, not a color grader, but for most projects I have to do my own color adjustments, and I’ve been using three-way color correction tools to manipulate video color since the days of Final Cut Pro 5. When you first start playing with a three-way color corrector it can be both fun and very disorienting. Small adjustments in color can look right at first, then look horribly wrong when compared to another scene. It can be easy to know what you want, but very hard sometimes to get “there.” In short, color correction is hard. It’s part […]
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“Think About Baldwin’s Words”: DP Henry Adebonojo on I Am Not Your Negro
Begun as a recollection of Medger Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House tells the story of race in America. Director Raoul Peck used this manuscript as the basis for his film I Am Not Your Negro, currently available on Amazon Prime. Though primarily composed of archival film and still images, it also includes several sequences specifically shot for the film. Director of photography Henry Adebonojo talks about the sequences he shot for the film. Filmmaker: How did you get involved with this project? Adebonojo: Raul’s brother Ebert contacted me. He set up a meeting […]
