It’s been another interesting week for 4K video, and all the news may not be out yet! New Sony E-Mount 4K? Rumors have been swelling the last few days about a new Sony 4K E-Mount camera that may be announced prior too – or at – IBC. There’s even talk that it will be called the FS700 II, though that seems odd given that the camera in the picture looks very, very different to the current FS700. Of course, there could be two cameras… but I’ve been wrong before when I’ve tried to make sense of Sony product naming and […]
Here, for your Sunday reading pleasure, are a number of artices and videos I took note of this week. Novelist Helen DeWitt retreats to a family-owned cabin in the woods to make an important writing deadline. She winds up, as she describes in the London Review of Books, being stalked: One neighbour says if she saw him by the road at night she would run him down. Others tell me to get a gun and shoot on sight. Look at it this way: if there were a high risk of attack I wouldn’t be staying in a cottage in 11 […]
What’s in the summer issue of Filmmaker? Well, first of all, our 2014 25 New Faces, but you already knew that. (If you didn’t, click here and find out who they are.) But there’s a lot more to be found in our print edition. On the cover is Rick Linklater’s chrono-masterpiece, Boyhood. My interview is 5,000 words or so, and maybe the best things about it are just the rhythms of Linklater’s voice and the little bits of filmmaking — and life — wisdom he departs along the way. Our Managing Editor, Vadim Rizov, has been obsessively checking out all […]
Good is the man who inspires the words “persuasively ambivalent” in a New York Times obituary. Actor James Garner died last night in his California home of natural causes. Long before I’d discover as a suburban teenager Elmore Leonard or Altman’s The Long Goodbye there was Jim Rockford, the Malibu p.i. with his trailer home on the beach, troublemaking ex-con pal, on-again, off-again lawyer girlfriend. It seemed like a way to live. From the Times: “Maverick” had been in part a send-up of the conventional western drama, and “The Rockford Files” similarly made fun of the standard television detective, the […]
I grew up on a manual typewriter, the same one my mom used to write articles for Life Magazine in the ’50s and ’60s. It was a small portable in a beat-up canvas case, and you had to hit the keys hard. Later, my dad outfitted his basement home office with an IBM Selectric. I loved that typewriter. It was a brick, a giant slab of molded something, and once you gave the keys a little push the thing would explode. The violence of it was kind of thrilling. Still, I don’t fetishize old-school typewriters, manual or electric. I can’t […]
When Sony announced the a7S mirrorless camera at NAB everyone was interested in its 4K capabilities, but it’s the low-light power of this camera that may be the true selling point. With the “S” standing for sensitivity, the a7S is the third a7 camera to be released. The a7 and a7R were announced in October of last year and started shipping in December. Those two models record HD video and stills at much higher resolutions than the a7S; the a7 has a 24.3 megapixel sensor capable of 6,000 x 4,000 pixel stills, while the a7R has a 36.4MP sensor capable […]
On a wet Saturday in May, about 100 people gathered in a hotel ballroom for the Boston stop of Vincent Laforet’s Directing Motion tour. This daylong event, with an optional evening session, promised to teach all levels of filmmakers the cinematic language of motion. Laforet started by saying that he was going to ruin cinema for us, and proceeded to show a clip without audio. “It’s never, ever moving the camera because the camera should move,” he said. The event is structured in two parts: a daytime workshop that runs from 9:00 am to 4 pm, and an evening seminar […]
Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week for your Sunday perusing pleasure. At Vulture, producer Gavin Polone has developed into an excellent essayist. Here he is discussing the emotional complexities of a particularly Hollywood-type of relationship, the paid friendship: While I’m sure that paid friends exist in many walks of life, I doubt they are as common anywhere else as they are in the entertainment industry. I’ve encountered many big-deal stars and directors with an entourage of assistants and development executives who have crossed the business-personal line. Some were friends before they were employees. Others drifted the other […]
For your Sunday morning, here’s some of what I’ve been reading this past week. At the Rumpus, filmmaker (and 25 New Face) Astra Taylor is interviewed about her book The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which I can’t wait to read. An excerpt: Also, after Examined Life was finished I found myself thinking about the way creative opportunities and distribution channels were shifting. Should I be showing my films in theaters or just think about getting them out online? There were other issues, too. For example, instead of being asked to write an article, […]
After almost two years of experimenting with an iPad-only edition in Apple’s Newsstand, we have decided to discontinue this version of Filmmaker. The reason? Relatively few of you are reading it compared to our print magazine and website, and the cost of its production runs us a substantial loss. And that’s money we’ve decided would be better spent on additional editorial content as well as new digital properties serving a platform-agnostic audience. (Meaning, something that can be read by you Android and Kindle readers too.) With this announcement we want to make clear that all Filmmaker content is still available […]