Columns
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Filmmaker‘s Fall Issue, with Laura Poitras Cover Shot by Jacob Appelbaum, Online Now
Activist, hacker and computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, a subject in Laura Poitras’s riveting and important CITIZENFOUR, shot Filmmaker‘s Fall issue cover — an eerie portrait of Poitras at home in Berlin, filmed on discontinued Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) film. Here, via email, is Appelbaum on the photograph: I have been shooting with Kodak Color Infrared (EIR) film for the better part of a decade thanks to a kind introduction to the medium by Canadian artist Kate Young. Sadly shortly after discovery of the film, I learned that it was discontinued by Kodak. The film was given an extra lease […]
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Filmmaker Announces Curated Indiegogo Partner Page
With our friends at Indiegogo Filmmaker has just launched a new partner page on the crowdfunding site. Featuring our curated selection of film (and possibly other) projects you should be taking a look at, the page will be updated frequently with new picks. If you have an Indiegogo project you’d like us to consider, you can email me at scott AT filmmakermagazine.com, and please put the words “Indiegogo Project” in the subject line. Currently up on the site are three projects we’ve supported, one of which just launched. That film is Jake Mahaffy’s Free in Deed, currently in post. Published […]
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Camera Moves with the Freefly Tero
Freefly made a splash with their MōVI brushless gimbals, and now they have a remote controlled car. The Tero is a remote controlled car that has had a “full overhaul.” This includes run flat wheels, larger shocks, and wire rope isolators between the mounting cheeseplate and the car to further reduce vibration. At the recent Massachusetts Media Expo, Dylan Law, the in-house Freefly MōVI tech at Rule Boston Camera, talked about the car and even did a short demo. The car can reach speeds of up to 55 miles per hour and is literally plug-in and go. The car was fitted […]
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Sony 4K News and ARRI ALEXA 3.2K ProRes Recording
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 […]
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Introverts, James Joyce, the Islamic State, Unlikeable Characters and Stalkers: Sunday Links
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 […]
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What’s in the Summer Issue of Filmmaker?
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 […]
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R.I.P. James Garner
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 […]
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The Rumpus Launches Manual Typewriter iPad App, Typing Writer
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 […]
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Seeing in the Dark with the Sony a7S
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 […]
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The Language of Motion: At Vincent Laforet’s Directing Motion Tour
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 […]
