Production
Filmmaking - Production
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Day 1 of 25: James Ponsoldt and The Spectacular Now
A new, occasional column here at Filmmaker, “The Shooting Schedule” looks at film production through the prism of a single shoot day. I peruse a film’s call sheet and production report and ask the director questions solely based on what I see there. To launch the column, I couldn’t think of anyone better to talk to than my friend James Ponsoldt, whose third feature, The Spectacular Now, opens today. A contributor to Filmmaker — and a director whose first feature, Off the Black, Robin O’Hara and I produced — Ponsoldt has made with The Spectacular Now an indelible teen romance […]
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Doing It in One on Colorless Green
“Hey Ryan, can we talk about the scene we’re shooting tomorrow?” Casey Wilson, the director of photography, was sitting off to the side of the football field when he called me over. We were waiting for the sun to go down so we could get a shot of a football game at magic hour for the opening of my new movie, Colorless Green. It was the first moment all day we’d had to talk about the next day’s work. “What do you think about doing it all in one shot?” I could feel my eyes narrow. For the next two […]
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8 Rules on Being a Locavore Filmmaker
Plenty of us independent filmmakers claim to be as environmentally friendly as can be, but beyond a few minor lifestyle tweaks (like claiming we just watched Gasland 2 while bemoaning Hollywood’s reliance on sequels), are we really as green as we’d like to think we are? Sadly, probably not. But one way we can help make a small difference to our planet is to take a page from the food movement and become locavore filmmakers — making movies close to home, in order to reduce our carbon footprints. I tried this strategy on my new film (Between Us, starring Julia […]
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“The Past is Never Past,” but the Faulkner/Midnight in Paris Lawsuit Is.
One of the most vexing and unanticipated problems facing independent filmmakers involves realizing that brief, seemingly incidental references — a song lyric, the quoting of a movie character, or referencing a line from a novel — are actually copyrighted materials requiring clearance. Yes, there is what’s known as Fair Use — a doctrine allowing selective quotation of copyrighted works. But Fair Use is most often used in documentary and less so in fiction works. But a recent court ruling involving a William Faulkner line quoted in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris offers hope to filmmakers. This problem of quote clearance […]
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Jessica Oreck on her new Web Series, This Working Man
Less than three months since she premiered her documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, at the Tribeca Film Festival, Jessica Oreck is both on the road and back with new work. This Working Man is a web project combining video portraiture, travel, and crowdsourced curation. From the project’s website: This Working Man is a series of short portraits of men at work. It is about practiced motion, kinetic movement, bodies, and forms. It is about a particular type of man: exceedingly capable, strong, confident, and diligent. The project is a search for humble masculinity and an unapologetic admittance of […]
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16 and Pregnant: Behind the Scenes of Simian, a Tragic Comedy
Nathan Silver’s second feature Exit Elena opens at the reRun Theater this coming Friday, but the prolific Silver has already premiered his third feature, Soft in the Head, on the festival circuit and has just wrapped production on his fourth, entitled Simian. Below is a photo blog written by Silver, Simian‘s producer and co-writer Chloe Domont and Cody Stokes, the film’s co-writer, cinematographer and editor. We just finished shooting Simian, a narrative feature that follows Robbie, a Norman Mailer wannabe who takes refuge at a makeshift home for pregnant teens. The idyllic backdrop of the Hudson Valley seems to be […]
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Canon Announces a New DSLR, the EOS 70D. Should We Care?
This week Canon announced a new mid-level DSLR, the EOS 70D. The latest in their series of black, semi-pro DSLRs, the 70D has a 20.2 megapixel sensor, a DIGIC 5+ image processor and built-in wi-fi support. Expected to ship in September with an estimated retail price of $1,199, you’d be forgiven if you assumed this latest DSLR will have little impact on the video production field. You might be wrong. Canon remade the video industry with the 5D Mark II, but for the last two or three years their DSLR updates have offered virtually no improvement in video capability or […]
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Production, Post-Production and Lessons Learned: Shooting the Low-Budget Horror Movie Dark Feed, Part Two
In part two of our interview with brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, the writers and directors of Dark Feed, they talk about the lessons learned during the production and post-production of a low-budget movie. Filmmaker: How large was the crew for the Dark Feed shoot, and how many days of shooting were there? Michael: There was Shawn and I, and we had two sound people – one to hold the boom and one to work the recorder – and a d.p. to also run camera. We had people come in and do other jobs like set building, but on a […]
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Amazon Studios Ups the Ante in the Content Wars
Amazon is upping the ante in the original content wars. On June 27, the giant online retailer’s movie group, Amazon Studios, started accepting 2- to 15-minute sizzle reels or pitches for feature-length films. Its Hollywonk blog said it was seeking projects that “express an idea that’s begging to be seen on the big-screen, in full-length, full-budget form.” Amazon’s current development slate includes a mixed bag of movies: the horror flick, ZvG: Zombies Vs Gladiators, a thriller, Burma Rising, a sci-fi, Hiber, and a family comedy, It Came in the Mail. “Amazon Studios wants to discover great talent and produce programming […]
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Adobe Software Moves to the Cloud: What Users Need to Know
Adobe Creative Cloud, the latest update to the Adobe application suite of programs, was released last week. This release marks a major change for Adobe away from a “purchase” model to a subscription model; if you want the latest versions of their applications you must now pay a monthly fee to use the software. You can license an individual application for $20 a month, or the whole suite for $50 a month. Clearly, even if you think you only need After Effects and Premiere Pro, you might as well spring for the whole set, and if you have a previous […]
