On Sunday I attended two editing-focused events at DOC NYC PRO. The “Morning Manifesto” was delivered by Matthew Hamachek, editor of films including Cartel Land and Amanda Knox. Later that afternoon, veteran editor Geof Bartz, Supervising Editor at HBO and a three-time Oscar winner, gave a masterclass on what to do when the pieces don’t fit. Having recently taken the Edit Center’s six-week Art of Editing Course at the IFP Made in New York Media Center, and currently assisting on the edit of a feature doc with a lot of moving parts, this seemed like a good way to spend […]
Sitting in the audience at a DOC NYC Pro Masterclass just days after the election, I found it impossible to separate the discussions and stories from the story of our country at this moment. Everything going on in film seems so important and relevant to how we see ourselves and the world, and nowhere do we see this as directly as in documentary. This was brought home by producer, director and archivist Sierra Pettengill (director, Town Hall; archival producer, Kate Plays Christine) in a panel taking place Sunday, November 13 called “Getting Creative With Archives.” Pettengill showed a clip from […]
As the photo above indicates, Camden, Maine in the fall is a pretty idyllic place to get one’s head out of an urban edit room and gain perspective on one’s project. Apropos of that, the newly formed Points North Institute — a year-round organization that will produce the Camden International Film Festival as well as other events in Maine — has made its first major announcement: a new shortform editing residency. The week-long residency takes place during the Camden International Film Festival (September 15 – 18) and brings four selected filmmakers and/or journalists to Maine to work on their doc […]
The Horatio Alger myth for the Golden Age of Hollywood’s studio system involved a bright, ambitious lad working his way up from the mailroom or his post as a clapper boy. By the time Bryan McMahan entered the movie business in the late ’70s, that studio system had long crumbled, but his beginnings were every bit as humble. McMahan’s first gig was as a film lab janitor. Thirty-odd years later he’s Terrence Malick’s colorist of choice, having worked as either the digital intermediate colorist or the mastering colorist on The Thin Red Line, The New World, The Tree of Life, […]
Contemporary Color follows ten color guard troupes from across the country as they perform in multiple concerts put on by David Byrne in Toronto and Brooklyn. Crafted to appear to take place over one night at the Barclays Center in New York, the Ross brothers’ documentary places as much emphasis on the process of the show as it does the concert itself. Swiftly moving through the interior of the arena, into the stands, onto the stage, and even away from the arena entirely, Contemporary Color creates a visual landscape that sometimes moves into the abstract to recreate the environment of the performance. […]
Released this week, Hedge is an OS X app for streamlining the process of importing camera footage and making backups. Hedge will transfer multiple disks at the same time and verify each copy. Paul Matthijs Lombert came up with the idea for Hedge, and is CEO of the developer, The Sync Factory. He answered the following questions via email. Filmmaker: Where did the idea for Hedge come from? Matthijs Lombert: I’ve been an acoustician and mastering engineer for over ten years. I originally came up with the idea for Hedge when working on a Dutch multicam documentary. I designed the audio […]
The 2016 Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship has been awarded to film editor Eileen Meyer, best known for her work on the award-winning documentary Best of Enemies. In announcing the news, the awards committee said, “Eileen impressed us with her confident spirit, strong work ethic, and the ways in which she has been pushing herself to new professional heights. We also loved her playful and insightful editorial style in her work as an editor of Best of Enemies.” Meyer will receive the fellowship on Tuesday, March 15, 2016 at the SXSW Film Festival Awards Ceremony in Austin, Texas. In addition to a […]
Magnetic Dreams is an effects house based in Nashville Tennessee. With experience in both 2D and 3D animation, they did most of the compositing for the film Yellow Day using Blackmagic Design’s Fusion. Fusion is a compositing program that, since its acquisition by Blackmagic Design in 2014, has seen a significant price drop – you can get a version for free — and the release of a Mac version. We spoke with compositing supervisor Joel Gibbs and one of the owners of Magnetic Dreams, Don Culwell, about working on Yellow Day, what it’s like to learn and use Fusion, and […]
One of the earliest challenges in making Uncle Howard was figuring out how to tell a story around a main character who is essentially absent. My uncle, Howard Brookner, was a fairly obscure director, whose work went missing to varying degrees, and who had died some 25 years ago. Yet, to me and others around him, he left a very strong memory and spirit. How to show this? For inspiration, my producer, Paula Vaccaro, and I turned to Howard’s friend and former film subject, William S. Burroughs (Burroughs: The Movie, 1983), whose book, The Western Lands, was the last he wrote before dedicating himself […]
The director Ruben Östlund shoots wide in 4K, composing the individual shots for films like Force Majeure by, in post-production, pushing in and moving from side to side. Now, Disney Research has developed a new tool, Face Director, that offers directors even greater possibilities; it crosses the final frontier in post-production manipulation: actors’ performances. Whereas, previously, directors would shape a performance by using multiple takes or, in post, skillful editing and music, with Face Director directors can alter performance by modulating them between two extremes. From Disney’s page: We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of […]