This list of 2013 top posts is broken in two — the first contains the top ten posts here at Filmmaker published during this calendar year. The second are the top ten older posts, the ones that keep on bubbling to the top of our Google Analytics. (A true 2013 top ten would be a mixture of these two lists.) So, to close out the year, here is what you read most at our site. 10. 13 Steps to Directing Famous Actors on a Microbudget Film. Director and Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish has two articles on this year’s list. In […]
Our top ten posts of 2013 will follow, but, before we get to that, here are Filmmaker‘s top posts of December, 2013. 10. Film vs. Digital: The Canon 5D and 7E. Sarah Salovaara’s post of a video A-B’ing two Canon still cameras as a way of comparing film and digital was next on the list. 9. Christine Vachon in Wroclaw. Another November post is in the #9 slot — a synopsis by Ashley Green of producer Christine Vachon’s talk about the producing business at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland. 8. How Many Films Does the Average Low-Budget Filmmaker […]
Wishing all of our readers a very happy holiday season!
Filmmaker‘s popular once-a-year holiday sale is now live, with 40% discounts on subscriptions to our print, digital and iPad editions, as well as bonus gifts — some of our favorite books and DVDS of the year — given away to randomly selected new and returning subscribers. Our regular subscription, which includes the quarterly print and digital editions plus our iPad edition — is discounted from $18 to $10. If you’d just like to buy our flip-book style digital edition, which includes all back issues to 2007 and allows for PDF downloading, that’s only $6 during the sale. And, if you’d […]
Who says you have to wait until NAB for new cameras? In the past month alone there have been several new cameras, upgrades and other devices announced. Here’s a quick look at some of the most interesting ones: Canon C100 Autofocus upgrade Early in the month Canon announced a paid upgrade to the C100, the Dual Pixel CMOS AF Upgrade. This upgrade adds a new autofocus technology that first appeared in the EOS 70D DSLR. The dual-pixel AF upgrade will provide faster and smoother autofocus that can be particularly useful for documentary, sports, event and wildlife shooting. Focusing speed […]
Here, via Google Analytics, are Filmmaker‘s top ten posts of November, 2013. 1. Number one, by a long shot, is a post that both fascinated and struck fear in filmmakers everywhere: Kaleem Aftab’s “Introducing 8K: The Final Frontier?” Reporting from the Tokyo International Film Festival, where Japanese broadcaster NHK commissioned filmmakers to make shorts in 8K, Aftab sat down with the channel’s engineers to hear plans for introducing the high-resolution images to sporting events as well as cinema. 2. Reporting from Poland’s American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Ashley Clark wrote our second highest-trafficked post of the month, an account of […]
This fifth and final installment of Time Frames draws on The Media History Digital Library, a reservoir of information about early cinema that includes the sorts of magazines, journals, and trade publications that, in the pre-digital era, had only been available to those able to travel to research libraries. At over 800,000 scanned pages and growing, the collection is daunting. In Time Frames I’ll cull through and select a series of images and text from the collection to highlight key transformative moments in the film culture and industry, as well as other oddities and obscure artifacts. For this final installment I’ve focused on the remainders, those […]
(Nebraska world premiered in competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where Bruce Dern took home the Best Actor prize. Distributed by Paramount Vantage, it opens theatrically on Friday, November 15th. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) After seeing Nebraska at this year’s New York Film Festival, I struggled to articulate what about it I found so moving. For days after the screening I could picture it in my mind’s eye: those hard, bright Midwestern landscapes in silver and black. With previous Alexander Payne films what I remembered was dialogue, barbed explorations of character. Literary stuff. But with Nebraska, […]
A near-perfectly imperfect burst of present-tense poetry, Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick’s These Birds Walk is messy with life and lyricism, a searching, empathetic piece of cinematic nonfiction that holds a close-up on a misunderstood part of the world and heralds the arrival of two new powerful voices in documentary. What begins as a portrait of Pakistani humanitarian Abdul Satar Edhi and his orphanage transforms into a deeply poignant study of youth under pressure and a potent reminder of the affecting possibilities of observation. The opening shot is a pure jolt of youthful, free cinema, as good a beginning to […]
Filmmaker‘s Fall issue is now live, arriving on newsstands, in mailboxes and online, both as a digital issue and in Apple’s Newsstand. (The iPad edition can be bought here) and you can subscribe here. I like this issue. It’s got an old-school Filmmaker flavor to it, in a way. By that I mean it’s got an eclectic mix of articles, each with its own voice, covering topics ranging from practical filmmaking concerns to theory. Our Line Items section, consisting of long-form articles, is particularly robust, which I think is appropriate. These days when you buy an individual copy of a […]