Amazon continues its adventures in moviemaking. Amazon Studios, which began as an effort in crowdsourced content is moving towards content produced by professionals, but they still seem to be interested in moviemaking by the masses. They’ve already released a free storyboarding tool, and now they have Amazon Storyboarder, a tool for outlining stories using a corkboard metaphor. It’s free – you just need to create an Amazon Studios account – and it’s reasonably full-featured; you can add cards and move them around, and you can even share your projects with others and get their input. While the formatting of cards […]
Michael Capodiferro, a student at Hampshire College, has written the script for Even The Dogs Know and is planning to direct the short film as his senior project. The film is about the lengths someone will go to find someone to talk to. In a description of the project Capodiferro briefly outlined the process of developing the script: The script work for Even The Dogs Know began almost a year ago in January. It was a much darker, in-your-face, louder story than it is now. It’s taken me many drafts to build up the story and tear it down again and […]
The following piece on TV writers’ interactions with their agents is excerpted from Chad Gervich’s just-released How to Manage Your Agent: A Writer’s Guide to Hollywood Representation. It can be purchased on Amazon at the link above. How much should I talk to my agent during staffing season? I know they’re superbusy, and super-stressed, so I don’t want to bug them, but I also want to know what’s going on. Should I call once a day? Once an hour? Once a week? What?! “It’s not about how frequently you call,” says Verve agent Amy Retzinger, “although please do not call […]
“I don’t even really understand the second act,” a filmmaker said to me just last week. He obviously hadn’t read Syd Field’s Screenplay, which is nothing if not about act structure: the first, second and third acts, but also the inciting incident, pinch one, plot point one, midpoint, pinch two, plot point two and resolution. When I started reading scripts — both as a professional gig and as a producer — Field’s was the book to have on your shelf, and, setting aside Aristotle, was the one that ratified a storytelling paradigm that exists to this day. As a script […]
In this second part of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we cover script development, locations and the difficulty of casting a small ensemble feature. AfterDeath is a psychological thriller/horror movie currently in post-production and was co-directed by Medinger and Robin Schmidt. While Medinger and Schmidt have both been working in video and film for the past decade, this is their first feature film. The first part of the interview, which covers the journey to find the story for the movie, can be read here: Finding the Right Story to Tell: The Making of AfterDeath (Part 1) AfterDeath […]
The psychological thriller/horror movie AfterDeath is the first feature film of directors Gez Medinger and Robin Schmidt. Shot on a tight budget and a tight schedule, the development and shooting of AfterDeath offers a lesson to anyone looking to make their first feature. AfterDeath is currently in post-production and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker spoke to Medinger about the project shortly after shooting wrapped. Medinger and Schmidt met at Oxford University in the late ’90s. Schmidt was studying English and Medinger was studying engineering. After leaving university, Schmidt became interested in film and video and learned […]
12 Years a Slave — the title of Steve McQueen’s latest, taken from its source material, the Solomon Northup memoir — is one of the most direct and descriptive of recent cinema history. But consider further the subtitle of Northup’s 1853 book: “Narrative of Solomon Northup, a citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington city in 1841, and rescued in 1853, from a cotton plantation near the Red River in Louisiana.” It’s one of the film’s extraordinary achievements that, as it lands in theaters nationwide with the headwinds of an Oscar frontrunner, it tells, on its most basic level, that story. […]
Kyle Patrick Alvarez has carved out an unusual niche for himself within American independent cinema; as he himself comments, “Everyone keeps on joking I have This American Life authors named David cornered now.” Alvarez made his feature debut in 2009 with Easier with Practice, a poignant, heartfelt drama about a young man who begins a phone relationship, initially sexual and then later also romantic, with a woman (or is it?) who randomly calls a motel room he’s staying in. Based on an autobiographical essay, “What Are You Wearing?”, written for GQ by This American Life contributor Davy Rothbart, the film debuted at CineVegas, had a small theatrical […]
Filmmaker is sponsoring this week’s pitch panels at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference. Tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM will be The Art of the Narrative Pitch, Monday the 16th at 11:00AM will be Wild Card New Media pitches, Thursday the 19th at 11:00 AM will be the Art of the Documentary Pitch,. In each session, filmmakers will present short, two-minute pitches, and a panel of experts will dissect them, giving you, the audience, a master class in how to present your material to funders and producers. I’ll be introducing tomorrow’s session, and Nick Dawson will do Monday’s. Thinking about the art of […]
Playwright, film director and now novelist Peter Mattei (The Deep Whatsis) was the guest recently on Brad Listi’s Other People podcast, where he told a surprising tale about contemporary Hollywood screenplay sales. Matthei, whose feature Love in the Time of Money was a La Ronde-inspired social X-ray of the early aughts, talks with Listi about working in the dotcom world and advertising, about the empowering nature of fiction writing and then this: I heard a story about a really well established screenwriter who had a great sci-fi script he couldn’t sell. So he finally just went into a comic book […]