By now you must have heard about Peter Jackson’s “controversial” restoration of 100-year-old 35mm newsreel footage from WWI, taken from the archive of London’s Imperial War Museum. A splendid profile by Mekado Murphy occupied #1 in the New York Times Trending section for several days after it appeared Dec. 16, joined by coverage by Chris O’Falt in IndieWire and David Sims in The Atlantic. Unfortunately, in a highly unusual release pattern, distributor Warner Bros. Pictures is screening this groundbreaking film on two dates only: Dec. 17 and Dec. 27 at select theaters across the U.S. (check local listings if you […]

I know, it’s maddening. People watch 10-hour series that take five hours to get good, but your 101-minute comedy is too long. Michael Bay makes three-hour Transformers movies, but your 95-minute drama is too long. Critics love seven hours of Sátántangó, but your 18-minute short is too long. Sorry, but it’s probably true. I learned this the hard way on my first feature film, Jake. After our initial 118-minute cut, we proudly got it down to 104 minutes. We couldn’t cut a frame more! We locked picture and sent out our perfectly formed film to festivals. Final runtime? 88 minutes. […]

Sound, sadly, is not an area of filmmaking most people think of first, if at all. A new program may change that. SFFILM and the Dolby Institute have teamed up to create a fellowship that will help filmmakers all the way from development through post-production. The help will come in many ways, from providing artistic and industry guidance to negotiating introductions to key independent film players. Because Dolby is involved, it will also provide a cash grant that allows them to speak with sound designers as early as the screenwriting phase, on top of post-production support that includes a Dolby […]

After neglecting the pro market in recent years, Apple is out with the first of two new machines this Thursday, the iMac Pro. (The redesigned Mac Pro is expected sometime in 2018). The ultra-high-end 18 Xeon core processor version won’t be available until next year, but the 10-core version seeded to reviewers this week is receiving very high marks for power and speed. Over at MKBHD, Marcus Brownlee posts a seven-minute video with his thoughts, including how Final Cut Pro on the machine has handled 8K RAW files with simultaneous color correct and use of plug-ins. Regarding Final Cut use, […]

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.

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 […]