Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Anatahan, Woman of the Year, Baby Boom and La La Land: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations of the Week
Director Josef von Sternberg’s last film, Anatahan (1953), represents one of those rare cases where a director got to go out on the absolute perfect note: it sums up many of his philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations while also starkly departing from the kinds of lavish Hollywood productions that made him famous. Loosely based on a true story, it follows ten Japanese soldiers who are stranded on an island during World War II and remain there for years, reduced to their primal instincts by their surroundings as well as the lone woman they discover inhabiting the island. Von Sternberg shot the […]
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Oregon Doc Camp Now Accepting Applications
Now in its fourth year, Oregon Doc Camp invites experienced documentary filmmakers to a four-day documentary retreat May 18-21, 2017 at Silver Falls State Park in central Oregon. Developed by Women in Film Portland, Oregon Doc Camp gives working documentary filmmakers an opportunity to gather in an informal setting, learn from each other and build community in an ever-changing industry. This year, Kate Amend, editor of the Academy Award-winning documentaries Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport and The Long Way Home, as well as The Case Against 8, and many other films, will present the keynote speech. Currently on the faculty […]
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“She Knew Then That She was Going to Die of Her Femininity”: The Making of the Ayahuasca Drama Icaros: A Vision
In November 2012 Leonor Caraballo travelled to a healing center in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, with her friend and fellow artist Matteo Norzi. At the center Caraballo and Norzi drank ayahuasca together in ceremonies led by a shaman from the local Shipibo-Conibo people. During the first night’s ceremony, under the influence of the hallucinogen Caraballo had a dream vision that she later recounted to Norzi. It was a memory from her adolescence of horse riding with her uncle on a beach in Argentina. At some point during the vision she found herself laying belly down on the beach trying […]
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“The Future of Content”
[The following guest post is from director John Wilson. Click here to watch his short film Escape from Park City.] I was recently editing a commercial for a popular footwear company and my client kept referring to “the future of content” to his colleague. I had a hard time telling if this was just another bit of ad jargon or a sinister prophecy about the future of media. When I finally asked him what he thought “the future of content” was, he delivered a flippant “you are!” and asked me to reposition their logo. The advertiser’s role in culture reminds me […]
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DP Sherry McCracken on Cinematography vs Photography, Pre-Visualization and the Growing Ease of Equipment for Female Crew Members
In part two of this interview, DP of American Gothic Sherry McCracken discusses moving from photography to cinematography, what she’d do differently, and how lighter cameras make it possible for more women to work as cinematographers. You can read the first part of the interview here. Filmmaker: How did you find it going from photography to cinematography? McCracken: There are as many similar things as there are different things. I felt right at home with lens choice, ISO, aperture choice, sensor size, memory card speeds, etc. I was used to framing shots and lighting them for the best dynamic range and composition. But […]
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The Art of the Possible: Charles B. Pierce’s Arkansas Cinema
Remembering her filmmaker father Charles B. Pierce, Dallas designer Amanda Squitiero first mentions the place he called home. “Arkansas claims him and he claimed Arkansas,” she says, having recently marked the seventh anniversary of his passing. Emerging regional filmmakers now see more opportunity than ever to achieve the most ambitious of visions on skid-row budgets. Before the digital revolution, one might strain to remember a time when independent cinema could exist outside of the New York and Hollywood ecosystems. In this regard, Pierce realized cinema as the art of the possible, which could exist and even thrive in a place like […]
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DP Sherry McCracken on Shooting the Low-Budget Independent Feature, American Gothic
Sherry McCracken, DP for the upcoming independent feature American Gothic, came to cinematography later in life. She grew up taking photographs, operated her own portrait business and worked in local television, but then she turned to IT because she felt she could make a better living. She remained an active still photographer and was asked by a friend to shoot location stills for a movie project. After working on that, and a second picture, she gained experience in film and ended up being asked to DP a project. In this interview she talks about how she made the switch to […]
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Multiple Maniacs, Dead or Alive, House and House II: The Second Story: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Shock value in cinema is a tricky thing, especially when it comes to posterity; what scandalizes one generation often seems mild to the next, while images and dialogue that might have seemed innocuous in another era – particularly when it comes to attitudes about race, gender, and sex – can come across as abhorrent to audiences discovering them in a different cultural context. Two genuinely transgressive films, movies that were shocking when they came out and are shocking now, are newly available in generously appointed Blu-ray editions: John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (1999). Waters […]
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Safeguarding the Vision
The role of the digital imaging technician has become perhaps the most controversial and least understood in modern filmmaking. Some directors of photography refuse to work without a DIT, while others wave the DIT off as an extravagance. Many producers understand the DIT to be an efficient and cost-reducing asset, but some refuse to approve even a single day of prep for an entire season of network television (or cut them loose after the pilot is in the can). What’s going on here? Nobody gets this worked up about the best-boy grip. The DIT position emerged during the painful Great […]
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The F Word: Five Reasons Film Is Still Relevant in a Digital World
I’ll be honest. I’d all but written film off, except for the few rolls that live in my Pen-F and my Mamiya RB67. In the days of the original RED, the Viper and VariCam, sure, video was a compromise. Those Kodak ads made sense. But now shooting a movie or a commercial on an ALEXA Mini shooting in ARRIRAW — I don’t feel that way anymore. The images are great. Better than great — they’re hard to break, and they grade well. And as film has faded from the independent-moviemaking scene, I can’t emphatically say I feel like I’ve lost something […]
