Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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IFP Announces Documentary Projects For its Annual IFP Labs
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), announced yesterday the ten documentaries selected for the 2017 IFP Filmmaker Labs, IFP’s annual yearlong fellowship for first-time feature directors. The creative teams of the selected films are currently attending the first week’s sessions – The Time Warner Foundation Completion Labs – taking place through May 26 at the Made in New York Media Center by IFP in DUMBO, Brooklyn. “The wide and continuing success of documentaries on multiple platforms demonstrate they are no longer for niche audiences nor uniform in style or format,” says Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in NY Media […]
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Five Questions for Nobody’s Watching Director Julia Solomonoff
In Julia Solomonoff’s third narrative feature, Nobody’s Watching, Guillermo Pfening plays Nico, an established Argentine actor in New York who has overstayed his visa in hopes of a promised film role and a new chance at life. But the idea of making it as an actor in New York is even harder for the blond Nico, who is told both that he is too white to play Hispanic and that his accent is too strong to play American. He falls back on odd jobs and light shoplifting, living under the radar until his past in Argentina comes back to haunt […]
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Twin Peaks, Season 3, Episodes 1-4: Sculpting in Time
(Spoilers follow.) It’s not surprising that David Lynch has a lot to get out of his artistic system after, effectively, 11 years of dormancy on the moving-image front. In interviews, Lynch has said that he thinks of this new “season” as an 18-hour movie “shown not in a big theater, but it’s shown as cinema on television.” Having slammed through four episodes in one night, I’d take him at his word: the tonal transition he accomplishes in that time is amplified when absorbed as one unit, and I suspect the final unveiled product will benefit from being viewed in as close to one […]
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After Letting Go: How Walking Away from My First Film Led to Distribution and then Development on my Next
Last November I wrote a piece for Filmmaker about walking away from my debut film. “Just Let Go Already! 12 Takeaways After Making the Microbudget Feature, The Purple Onion” chronicles the five-year process of making my first feature film and sums up whatever wisdom I can impart to anyone making a film. Filmmaking can be likened to many things. It’s rewarding on so many levels. And yet the truth is that what began as a labor of love was becoming a growing burden with no end in sight. Now I’m here to prove why you should keep going anyway. After […]
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Violet: How They Achieved This Stunning 4:3 Film’s Most Stunning Shots
Floating in an ocean of equals parts uncertainty and obscurity after winning the Grand Prix of the Generation 14plus International Jury in 2014, Bas Devos’s feature debut Violet didn’t reach American shores, beyond a handful of festivals, until new distributor Altered Innocence took a chance and set a theatrical date and announced a subsequent physical release. Saved from being forgotten, the film is one of the most striking and pure cinematic works to arrive stateside this year, and exemplifies the importance of betting on unorthodox voices that aim to challenge the medium’s formal conventions. Shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio […]
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Our Man in Havana, Edge of Eternity and Streets of Fire: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Given the (justly) hallowed place that Carol Reed’s 1949 thriller The Third Man occupies in the hearts and minds of most cineastes, I’ve always been a little mystified by the comparative obscurity of his subsequent collaboration with screenwriter Graham Greene, the delightful satire Our Man in Havana (1959). I can only assume that the bleak, wintry setting of postwar Vienna that gives The Third Man its haunting effects also gives it a slight edge in the critical consciousness over Havana’s sunny, tropical effervescence. Yet in Reed and Greene’s skilled hands, the breezy charm of Havana just before the revolution only […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2017: New Images for the 21st Century
As my seventh annual camera round-up for Filmmaker goes to press and online, NAB 2017 has just wrapped, and one major take-away is clear: the march towards full-on realism — visual sensations so real that images appear palpable — is in its infancy. [Author’s note: this deep dive into camera tech was written for the Spring 2017 issue of Filmmaker. Despite arriving online at a later date, it remains timely and informative. Stay tuned for my Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2018 in Filmmaker, coming soon!] Call it hyper, call it immersive, call it virtual, the fact is that display […]
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A Message From Your Composer: Lock Your Picture, Please!
It’s a fraught moment for any director — “locking picture,” with all the finality the term signifies. But, as a panel on “Scoring for Television & Film” at the recent Independent Film Festival Boston (IFFBOSTON) revealed, for composers it’s a vital stage in their process of scoring a film. The panel was moderated by filmmaker and musician Tim Jackson, and the panelists were composers Mason Daring, John Kusiak and Sheldon Mirowitz. The discussion covered how they got into the business, how they write music, the differences between drama and documentary and much more, but Daring’s fairly lengthy exhortation on locking […]
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Now What? How to Move Forward in the World of Serialized Content
On April 27 at the Made in New York Media Center, IFP hosted a panel on serialized content moderated by Kuye Youngblood, Head of Development and Production at BRIC TV, a public access station in Brooklyn. BRIC’s mission is to present and incubate work by artists and mediamakers who reflect the diversity of its borough, and it presents numerous shows via its cable and digital network. At the event, Youngblood was joined onstage by two web series creators, Rae Leone Allen and Christopher Poindexter, who shared the challenges and opportunities they each encountered while making the first season of their […]
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The Handmaid’s Tale, Donnie Darko and The Mephisto Waltz: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Picks
Last month saw the premiere of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel documenting a future America in which women are oppressed by religious fundamentalists. The series has been garnering a lot of attention and acclaim, but it isn’t the first time filmmakers have tried their hands at Atwood’s dystopian classic; German director Volker Schlöndorff, working from a script by Harold Pinter, brought the book to the screen in 1990. His version of the story was considerably less well received at the time than Hulu’s, but it’s a compelling, distinctive film – one in which […]
