Fitting an interview into a cinematographer’s schedule can be daunting, especially a DP working on a television show that shoots nine months out of the year. You often end up chatting after a long shoot day or during a mid-day tech scout break. Orm in the case of Gotham cinematographer Crescenzo Notarile, you talk a few hours before their name is read at the 68th Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards. Notarile earned his Emmy nomination for his work on Gotham, Fox’s origin story tracing the early days of cop Jim Gordon and the various heroes and villains that reside in […]
Back in June, Netflix’s VP of Product Innovation Carlos A. Gomez-Uribe and Chief Product Officer Neil Hunt co-published a paper entitled, “The Netflix Recommender System: Algorithms, Business Value, and Innovation.” It’s a fascinating read, and if you care at all about the future of film as an artform, a fairly troubling one. With their 19-page paper, Gomez-Uribe and Hunt provide a rare peek under the hood of Netflix’s inner-workings and technological developments, and go on to discuss the company’s business priorities and philosophy. The basic takeaway? Netflix has built an insanely complex and powerful recommendation system. This sucker has algorithms […]
The term “TV coverage” used to be a pejorative, a reference to the mechanical nature of the medium’s visual language. It was shorthand for artlessly cranking out master, two shot, and close-up in order to churn through the high page counts necessary to produce a new episode of television each week. To behold the degree to which the medium’s aesthetics have evolved, look no further than HBO’s The Night Of. Every set-up has purpose. Every composition is storytelling. The details of each frame – where the people are placed, the amount of negative space, the portion in shadow, the plane […]
Canon has announced two new cameras, one expected, the other a bit of a surprise: the Canon 5D Mark IV and the Canon C700 Cinema Camera. Ever since the amazing success of the Canon 5D Mark II, the announcement of new cameras from Canon has tended to provoke a fairly standard response from bloggers and social media; in their still cameras, the video functions are always considered hobbled in some way, and their video cameras are always too expensive and don’t have the features found in some of the latest cameras. And then Canon sells a boatload of the cameras, […]
Barring lapse or conversion, how do you spurn religion? For centuries, Catholics have had a formal means to renounce the Church: apostasy. The tedious process, sometimes ritualized with a walk backwards from the altar to the front entrance, aims to remove all official documents pertaining to one’s baptism. Upon entering adulthood, some practicing laypeople begin to see it as involuntary. They want to own it by revising the past, in spite of the fact that, according to Revelations, a stigma accompanies disavowal: an indelible stain of apostasy, aka the mark of the beast. A de-baptism movement has been under way […]
Part I: Notes on the Footnote “Woe to details! Posterity neglects them all; they are a kind of vermin that undermines large works.” –Voltaire About a year or so ago I began to think about footnotes. First I wondered if I should write footnotes for the film (NUTS!) I was in the final stages of completing. Then I wondered if footnotes might be useful to the field of nonfiction cinema more generally. What purposes might such a practice serve? This question excited me tremendously. It felt unmistakably like an idea whose time had come. I started blabbing ignorantly about footnotes […]
Made for just $50,000, Joe Begos’ feature debut Almost Human (2013) landed a slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, secured distribution, and earned a bit of critical praise for its Carpenter-influenced chills. For his follow-up The Mind’s Eye, the multi-hyphenate (Begos wrote, directed, produced, and photographed) had six times the budget at his disposal. That money brought a few changes – such as paying the crew and expanding the shooting schedule to a robust 37 days. Other things stayed the same, like shooting in Begos’ home state of Rhode Island. Like using practical effects. Like leaving enough blood stains […]
There’s something comforting about TV show opening credit sequences. In the era of the binge watch, we don’t necessarily need them every single episode. (I mean, we all know what we’re about to watch, don’t we?) But a great credit sequence can serve as a palette cleanser. The cue that we’re about to see something familiar, something we trust. It’s almost Pavlovian. And few opening credit sequences are as comforting as The Simpsons. Sure, that show, which is about to enter its 28th season, is about two decades past its prime. But when we hear Danny Elfman’s theme music, when […]
In the opening scene of The Land, an unseen guidance counselor lays out possible futures for the film’s four high school protagonists. It’s lives as mechanics and welders, blue-collar jobs that once promised entrance into a thriving middle class that no longer exists. With dreams of escaping the urban decay of Cleveland as sponsored skateboarders, the boys instead chose a less legal path. And anyone familiar with the “at-risk youth” movies of the 1990s – from Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society to Kids, Hurricane Streets, Juice, and Straight Out of Brooklyn – knows that path doesn’t end […]
A blond, fair-skinned Swedish actor playing a petit-bourgeois Swede of the old school who resurfaces in the Norway of the overnight economic miracle, the ubiquitous Stellan Skarsgard looks as blank in Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s determinedly revisionist In Order of Disappearance as the snow-covered swaths atop the rural roadwork his Nils Dickman rips through at the helm of his commanding danger-signal-yellow snow plough. The 2014 masterwork is only now making its long-awaited U.S. debut. The color matches the baggy waterproof overalls that keep Nils’s sizable frame dry, and is just about the only hue outside of white visible during […]