In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be in Australia traveling the country with a small plush connected toy named Lyka. A robot scientist with a big heart, Lyka is from another planet decimated by climate change. Sent to Earth in a last desperate attempt to save her home, she relies on students to help her travel the globe. Together, the students and Lyka explore Earth as they search for insight that prevents her planet from dying. At its core, Lyka’s Adventure mixes purposeful storytelling and play. The project strives to teach 21st-century skills by utilizing collaborative problem solving, rapid prototyping, […]
There are too many movies, so says The New York Times, Salon.com and The Wrap. And that’s a bad thing. It’s that old law of supply and demand at work, they argue, with an abundance of titles over-saturating the marketplace and sabotaging the sustainability of the art film business. But some distribution professionals respond with a contrary and more nuanced view. There may be a lot of movies being made in the new millennium, but the ever-expanding entertainment universe is here to sort things out. “It’s like saying there are too many books or too many paintings or too much […]
At the annual Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, held in late March in Seattle, many of the conversations and panel discussions revolved around the disciplinary status of cinema, film, media, and screen studies. The cluster of terms jostling for territory in the conference’s program guide points to the crisis of identity sparked by the sweeping expansion of digital media, the emergence of the digital humanities, and the waning of actual film materials – 16mm film stock, film cameras, film editing systems – in “film” schools. “Film has died,” asserts the New School’s McKenzie Wark. “It’s decomposing. But […]
Like their counterparts in film and music, game designers love a good award show. This year the International Games Festival awards were swept by a game that had critics raving all year and will surely go down in history as the first game to make suspense and heartache out of pushing papers and cross-checking documents. Lucas Pope, who left blockbuster studio Naughty Dog to go it alone, calls Papers, Please, his first commercially released game, a “dystopian document thriller.” On first glance, documents may seem like an odd center for a thriller of any kind, but then again in this […]
As we shake off what has been a wretched New York winter, we’re delighted to have Jenny Slate, the brilliant actress, comedian and — for fans of subversive squeaky-voiced animation — the co-creator of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On grace our Spring cover. We picked Slate for our list in 2011, and at that time, one of her accomplishments was starring in a high-wire-act of a short, Obvious Child, by the young director Gillian Robespierre. Now that short has been expanded — brilliantly — into a feature that makes fantastic use of Slate’s ferocious stand-up chops. Made independently, produced […]
1. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace A former associate editor at n+1 whose politicized beat has included everything from localized Occupy movements to contemporary classical music, Nikil Saval turns his attention to office life in his first book. From the origins of corporate discontent in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” through Frederick “Speedy” Taylor’s turn-of-the-century efficiency innovations up to (inevitably) “The Office,” Saval takes on the white-collar workplace from a variety of angles: the changing workspaces themselves, the demographic makeup of the people within them and their pop culture representations. 2. Kimono Kimono scrapes selected information from websites directly, […]
Nicola Marsh was one of two cinematographers for Twenty Feet from Stardom, this year’s Oscar winner for Best Documentary. She’s worked with director Morgan Neville on a number of projects, including Troubadours and The Night James Brown Saved Boston as well as other directors including Cameron Crowe on Pearl Jam Twenty and The Union. Marsh, who has just finished shooting a reality show in the Caribbean, spoke to us about shooting Twenty Feet from Stardom, the different cameras used on the project and the hidden strengths of older lenses. Filmmaker: For Twenty Feet from Stardom you were shooting with […]
While Hollywood continues to generate three-dimensional spectacles, directors, industry pundits and audiences all continue to question the technology’s validity. In a recent story in The Hollywood Reporter highlighting the DVD release of The Wolverine, which includes a 3D Blu-ray, director James Mangold said, “The question is whether 3D will survive or not,” adding, “Is it more than a gimmick and can we make it more than a gimmick?” And after ESPN announced last June that it would shut down its three-year-old 3D sports channel by the end of 2013, Variety’s David S. Cohen explored both the predictions of total demise […]
I’m often surprised to meet filmmakers who ask about some so-called Golden Age of independent film, a time in the ‘90s or ‘80s or maybe even ‘70s when, they believe, financing was more plentiful, budgets were larger and the movies themselves maybe even felt a bit more meaningful. As a thought exercise, I ask, would you take a time machine back to those days? When pressed, people answer no for one simple reason: they don’t want to give up today’s tools. Desktop editing, cheap cameras, crowdfunding, social media and now, as Randy Astle exhaustively catalogues in this issue, we have […]
By the end of 2013, the most pressing question facing Hollywood was already old news for indies: multiplatform viewing is here, and particularly for independents, it’s here to stay. A significant source of revenue, in most cases, and a crucial method of finding an audience, the iTunes-Cable VOD and direct-to-consumer release has increasingly become an integral, if not principal, part of filmmakers’ distribution strategies. And yet, the irony of the past year in indie film is that much of the business was reliant on that hoary, old-fashioned, windowed release. For every VOD breakout surprise such as Drinking Buddies or Only […]