Production
Filmmaking - Production
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How Halloween Production Designer Richard Wright Shot the Film’s Opening Credits with a Few Hundred Dollars, an Old Bolex and a Fridge Full of Rotting Pumpkins
While the new Halloween ignores the plots of the many sequels that followed John Carpenter’s 1978 original, it doesn’t spurn the movies themselves. The film is crammed with loving homages to the franchise — even the Michael Myers-less Halloween III: Season of the Witch gets a brief shout-out. The latest Halloween installment establishes its fondness for its predecessors in the opening credits, which pay tribute to Carpenter’s progenitor with a slow push-in to a rotting pumpkin that magically restores itself to health as the camera creeps closer. Though the sequel’s production budget was a reported $10 million, only a few […]
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I Just Finished Directing My First Feature Film, Why Do I Feel Like I Have Post-Partum Depression?
Actress, activist and blogger Lynn Chen has just wrapped production on her directorial debut, I Will Make You Mine. Below, she contributes this guest essay on the common but rarely discussed post-partum blues that directors can feel after wrapping any film, but particularly their first. To learn more and donate, visit the project’s Kickstarter page. — Editor The post-wrap blues. The first time I felt them, I was eight. I was in a production of Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges, a one-act opera where a bratty kid gets sent to his room, and a bunch of inanimate objects come […]
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What Makes a Good Production Designer?
As a kid, the first and only thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an artist. I never got bored or minded being sent to my room as long as I could draw. I wasn’t the “good artist” at school—I couldn’t draw a superhero, or a realistic Snoopy. But I was often told (only by adults, so it didn’t mean much to me) that I had a great imagination. I had a pretty rich fantasy life and drew pages and pages of imaginary interiors, collections of objects and fashion wardrobes. If I had known what a […]
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How a Baby Bucket List Lead Us to Make Our First Feature Film
They say that making your first feature is a lot like having your first child. My wife, Allyssa, and I have not taken the plunge into childrearing yet but instead we created a “baby bucket list.” It included diving the Great Barrier Reef, petting a Koloa bear, seeing the Sagrada Familia in Spain, attending a rodeo in Hawaii, running a marathon and last but not least making a feature film. At the time I proposed this idea it didn’t seem far-fetched as we met in the film industry. I was working as an associate producer on Scott Pendergrast’s first feature, […]
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A Sense of Place: The Job of the Location Manager
The following article appeared in Filmmaker’s Spring, 2018 print issue. Like many departments on a film set, the locations department has duties that are a mixture of artistic and practical, a blend of orchestrating creative epiphanies and managing tedious logistics. Location managers might jaunt off to explore tropical beaches or spend the day sharing their favorite secret enclave of New York with an esteemed director, but they also might toil for weeks figuring out where the crew will park, eat and go to the bathroom. And if you’ve ever worked on a low-budget movie without the cash for a fancy […]
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~31 Films Shot on 35mm Released in 2017
This is my fourth time rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases shot, either partly or in full, on 35mm, and it increasingly feels like I’m asking the wrong question. If the number of films originating on 35 has remained more or less consistent the last three years, they fall into an increasingly limited number of categories: auteur films by directors too old or stubborn to change and with the clout to follow through on that; period pieces; and enormous blockbusters. (To these we can now add the return of 70mm-originated and released films with Dunkirk and Murder on the […]
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What is Producing? A Group of Sundance Producers Share Insights on Financing, Selecting Projects and Making a Career out of Making Movies
What is producing? I ask myself this question a lot, and the title on my business card literally reads “Producer.” I’m staff at a rad women-run studio in Brooklyn while also producing my own films as well as a handful of others. I say all this to reiterate just how amorphous the craft of producing can be. Because of its fluidity, it can also be a challenge to learn how to be better at it. Plus, producers rarely get interviewed in the industry articles that offer insights into filmmaking process. When they are featured, producing technique can be difficult to […]
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It’s Time for Stunt Work to be Recognized by The Academy
I’m fortunate to work in action and with stunts, behind the camera. The stunt community is comprised of all kinds of talent — drivers, motorcycle riders, gymnasts, fighters, parkour, Cirque du Soleil acrobats and much more. They are the best of the best! I’ve been even more fortunate to train and work with the best stunt coordinators, innovators, riggers and performers in Hollywood. Most audiences, and even film critics, aren’t aware that action sequences are created by a separate team of technicians and performers. On Hollywood films, action is shot by a second-unit crew, with its own director and sometimes […]
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“When the Design is Really Part of the Whole of a Film, the Film is Well Designed”: Production Designer Thérèse DePrez
The following profile of production designer Thérèse DePrez was written by producer Ted Hope for Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1994 issue, and is being rerun on the sad occasion of DePrez’s passing this week in New York. After the standard art school stint, and the pay-your dues PA/grip/electric rigmarole, Thérèse DePrez nabbed her first designer gig on Tony Jacobs’s low-budget consumer/horror send-up, The Refrigerator, which sent her further down the blood-spewed path to art direct three straight-to-video horror pics. The creepy crawlers allowed DePrez to hone the “specialty prop” and set design skills she would later call on for Tom Kalin’s Swoon, […]
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10 Tips on Scoring Great Locations when Producing a Microbudget Movie
Winner of the Best American Indie at the Ft. Lauderdale Film Festival, Tomorrow Ever After, a time-travel tale directed by and starring Ela Thier, is available on iTunes and Amazon beginning Friday, December 22. Thier plays Shaina, “a historian who lives 600 years in the future, and is accidentally sent back in time to current-day America. War, poverty, pollution, greed, exploitation, depression, loneliness: these are things that she’s read about in history books. And while she studied this dark period of history (in which we are currently living) when money is viewed as more important than people, she has never, […]
