For the past 14 years Montreal’s Moment Factory has been bucking the online trend to create larger-than-life, physical reality (PR?) experiences that force folks to come together in the flesh-and-blood world. With over 300 multimedia projects in wide-ranging locations under their belt — from the LAX international terminal, to the Atlantic City Boardwalk, to Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia cathedral — the studio is still perhaps best known to Americans for designing Madonna’s halftime spectacle at the 2012 Super Bowl. Filmmaker was fortunate enough to speak with co-founder and creative director Sakchin Bessette about the profession of experience designing, and whether the […]

Receiving its U.S. premiere at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier section is Loic Suty’s The Unknown Photographer, the sole work that blew my mind just a couple of months earlier at Montreal’s RIDM. It’s an incredible, immersive Oculus Rift project inspired by the discovery of a photo album in the Laurentians north of Montreal. Suty’s piece takes us on a WWI photographer’s journey both familiar and foreign, equal parts timely and timeless. Filmmaker spoke with the Montreal-based “experience designer” prior to the piece’s Park City premiere. Filmmaker: So I believe this project originated with an actual […]

Photo credit Freedom, created by Josh Kline for the 2015 New Museum Triennial.

Tribeca Film Institute (TFI), in partnership with Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative, has announced the grant recipients of the 2015/2016 TFI New Media Fund. Grantees were selected by an advisory board comprised of Just Vision’s Julia Bacha, director Malika Zouhali-Worrall (Call Me Kuchu), director-producer Sandi Dubowski (Trembling Before G-d), Google’s Lisa Steiman and Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Jenni Wolfson. The fund provides monetary grants and support to nonfiction, transmedia projects which tackle a social issue. Each of the three selected projects will receive $50,000 in funding as well as expert mentorship for producers to help them develop their projects and build engagement with audiences. You […]

From classical Hollywood continuity editing to Eisensteinian montage, from the quick jump cuts of the French New Wave to the even more accelerated and spatially destabilized editing of the Hollywood blockbuster, filmmakers from the dawn of cinema have had to embrace, even if only on a subconscious level, some theory of editing. What, then, of today’s nascent medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Some are calling VR the next phase of cinema, but many VR works are more akin to video games, where cuts are hidden within approaching horizon lines. Or where, inelegantly, an edit is simply a transition from one […]

With backing from Google, Andreessen Horowitz, Qualcom and movie studio Legendary Entertainment — and an on-staff Chief Futurist in the form of science-fiction author Neal Stephenson — the somewhat mysterious Magic Leap is one of the most fascinating tech start-ups around. For the vision — not virtual reality but augmented reality — the company is going for, check out their startling home-page. For the current reality, check out the video above, which is a real-world demo of some galaxy clusters hovering over an ordinary workspace. For an explanation of why this simple video is more impressive than the rigged concept […]

The Creative>>Founder Lab is the newest offering from the Made in New York Media Center by IFP, a eight-week program intended to help creative professionals develop the business skills required to see their projects to fruition. Design thinking, monetization, rapid prototyping, how to speak with developers, gamification and systems thinking will all be taught by a team of leaders in their fields. (Note: IFP is Filmmaker‘s parent organization.) The fee for the program is $1,200, and only 20 spots are available. Deadline is June 18 at 11:59PM. More information can be found here at the link. Below, we ask Sabrina […]

Katerina Cizek is an innovative documentary storyteller who works across many media platforms. She’s currently the director of the National Film Board of Canada’s multi-year project entitled HIGHRISE, which examines life inside residential skyscrapers in suburbs around the world. Since it launched in 2009, HIGHRISE has generated interactive documentaries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films that have garnered Emmys, a Peabody, Webby Awards and recognition from the World Press Photo and IDFA Doc Lab, among others. On June 2, 2015, Kat and the NFB released the latest and final HIGHRISE project, “Universe Within,” that explores people’s digital lives online. […]

The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all. It was, instead, a lovely piece of conceptual counterprogramming in Tribeca’s Storyscapes section, Door into the Dark. An immersive theater piece by May Abdalla and Amy Rose of the U.K.-based company Anagram, Door into the Dark wasn’t positioned by curator Ingrid Kopp against the films in the festival. Rather, by including Door into the Dark within a program largely dominated by Oculus Rift VR work, Kopp used Door in the Dark‘s simply generated yet expansive mindscapes as a way of setting a high bar […]

One useful maxim in the ever-changing world of theatrical distribution is that transforming your cinematic screenings into a one-time events will help drive people to your film. Likewise, theaters are searching for ways to make their products stand out in a world flooded with easily available content. Among the many solutions to these dual problems is the live broadcast of events to theaters — plays, concerts, and any other type of live performances. Stage productions are obviously among the top purveyors of these broadcasts: the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the National Theatre in London both regularly show their productions in cinemas, […]