Post-Production
Filmmaking - Post-Production
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2013 IFP Narrative Lab Projects Unveiled
Today the 2013 IFP Narrative Labs got under way, and the participants in this year’s program have just been announced. All are the films selected are debut features first-time directors and have budgets under $1 million, and the teams behind each project are provided with an immersive mentorship experience that helps them navigate from post-production through to the festival circuit and distribution. Among the films selected for the 2013 Labs include two by former alumni of Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces”: Gary Huggins, director of Kick Me, appeared on the list in 2006, and Paul Harrill (Something, Anything) featured in in 2001. Other notable participants include Aron […]
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Walter Murch on Editing and His Translations of Curzio Malaparte
While editing The Unbearable Lightness of Being in France, Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch came across a reference to Italian writer Curzio Malaparte’s description of horses being suddenly flash frozen in Lake Ladoga during the siege of Leningrad. He became intrigued by the startling image, and tracked down Malaparte’s 1944 novel Kaputt, the book the image came from. Over time Murch, best known for his work on films such as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, read all of the obscure Italian writer’s translated writings, then brushed up on his Italian to read untranslated work. He eventually […]
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Turning the Internet Green: The FX Protest
Over the past few months it’s been hard to miss the green icons showing up on Twitter and other social media in support of the FX Protest, an event that happened at this year’s Oscar ceremony to protest ongoing problems in the VFX industry. While movies continue to make great use of visual effects, the companies that create these effects are being financially stressed and are going out of business. To find out more about what’s been going on in the VFX industry, we spoke to Michael Scott, a VFX compositor who has been working in the industry for the […]
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The Opportunist on the Road to Cannes
My name is David Lassiter, I’m the writer and director of a short film called The Opportunist, and over the next few weeks, my team and I will be documenting our adventures on the road to Critics Week at Cannes where our film will have its world premiere. We are big fans of Filmmaker so we’re super excited to share our experiences. To begin! It’s only been two weeks since the Critics’ Week line-up was announced and already it feels like we’ve lived a lifetime. First things first: the film’s not even finished! We submitted a work in progress to Critics’ […]
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2013 IFP Documentary Lab Projects Announced
This morning the 10 projects selected for the 2013 IFP Documentary Labs were announced. All are works by first-time directors and have budgets of less than $1 million, and filmmakers are provided with an immersive mentorship experience to guide them through post-production and looking ahead to the festival circuit and beyond. The films selected include Sara Dosa’s doc on mushroom hunters, Roots and Webs, produced by Court 13’s Josh Penn, and David Thorpe’s Do I Sound Gay, which has How to Survive a Plague‘s Howard Gertler on board as producer. Spike Lee is the executive producer on Darius Clark Monroe’s Evolution of a […]
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The Druid City: Interview with Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito
Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011. Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]
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Teenage Riot: A Conversation with Matt Wolf, Jon Savage and Jason Schwartzman
Youth culture didn’t start in the ’60s. In the parlance of today’s teens, the appropriate response to this might be “duh.” Teenage, director Matt Wolf’s artful new non-fiction film, uncovers the “hidden history” of youth culture and locates its origins in various youth movements in the first half of the 20th century. From German Swing kids to American Victory Girls, the film offers a veritable lexicon of lost teen vocabulary (“teen canteen,” “buzz bucket,” “boogie in the strut hut”), and reminds us that the invention of teenager culture depended on the invention of a new language — and one that […]
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The New Digital Storytelling Series: Ingrid Kopp
In the seventh part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Ingrid Kopp, Director of Digital Initiatives at Tribeca Film Institute, answers our questions. Kopp oversees the TFI New Media Fund, runs Tribeca Hacks and produces TFI Interactive during the Tribeca Film Festival. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin. MIT Open Documentary Lab: How do you see people making the transition to digital interactive storytelling? Kopp: I think people have […]
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Why Filmmaking is Like Software Design
Before becoming a filmmaker I spent 15 years designing software. Started out as a Mac OS programmer and then moved to Microsoft Windows. My endeavors included all things visual—from icon design and screen layout, to the more abstract design patterns found in system architecture and coding. What I discovered along the way was that the most elegant solutions—the products that worked best, most reliably, and resonated strongly with their user base—were always the most simple and minimalist in design. And there was always room for improvement via testing, focus groups, and refactoring (a techie word for the iterative process of […]
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Back to the Future with 4K: Large-Sensor Motion Picture Cameras in 2013
A motion picture camera used to be a light-sealed box with a strip of film running through it. Was it easy to thread? Did it run quiet? How bright was the viewfinder? Today’s cameras are exponentially more complex. They are literal bundles of separate technologies, each lurching forward at a different rate. To understand today’s cameras, you must understand the parts to understand the whole. This is my third annual overview of digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker, and it is being written in the run-up to NAB 2013 in Las Vegas, the world’s largest trade show devoted to digital video […]
