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Disc Security: How to Care for Physical Media
There has been no shortage of articles recently regarding the premature death of physical media and, most specifically, physical home video. While vinyl LPs have had a well-publicized resurgence in recent years, with much ink spilled about Taylor Swift’s assistance… Read more
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Striking Film Prints in a Digital World: Laser Printing, CRT Screens and a One-Stop Film Recorder from Norway
In 2006, Rune Bjerkestrand was on the Universal lot in Hollywood, far away from his home country of Norway. His brand-new invention, the Cinevator, could create a film negative from a digital file in real time—a vast improvement over other recorders that could take 10 days or more to craft a negative for a 90-minute film. But was the quality there? Technicolor set up a blind test to find out. “We didn’t really have a clue about film, about film technology, about the film industry, about film machines—nothing,” Bjerkestrand says. After the split-screen test footage ran, everyone in the theater […]
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My Hot Librarian Summer: Libraries and Independent Film Distribution Strategies
It can take two or more years for independent films to progress through festival, theatrical, VOD, streaming and maybe airline releases, after which their discoverability fades. For filmmakers, the question then becomes, “How will people discover my movie now?” For many, the answer revolves around libraries. Across public, college and university libraries, there are estimates that up to 30 percent of library checkouts are movies, not books. Filled with DVDs, libraries have become the new Blockbuster—but, increasingly reliant on library-specific streaming services, they’re also becoming the new Netflix. Many of us independent filmmakers are so excited to sign a distribution […]
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On the Way to the Cutting Room: How to Be an Assistant Editor
If you’ve ever wondered, “What even is an assistant editor, and what do they do?,” you’re not alone. I find myself explaining my job repeatedly to my perplexed but well-meaning family members and even to other people in the film and TV industry. The job varies from project to project, but mostly an assistant editor deals with various technical aspects of post-production so the editor can focus on the creative work of editing. That said, it’s not an entirely technical role. Sometimes, an assistant gets the chance to help the editor creatively through assembling scenes or working on sound design; […]
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The Editor’s Signature
Alex Saks remembers the process of producing Thoroughbreds, the dark suburban teen thriller written and directed by Cory Finley, as a whirlwind. At the time, Finley was a hot up-and-coming playwright making his first foray into filmmaking, and he didn’t have an established team of collaborators. With a limited window of actor availability, production launched shortly after Finley delivered a script, which meant there was a tight window to hire key crew. Among the most important decisions the team had to make was who would edit the movie. “[An editor] really is the department head on the movie, other than […]
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AI Is Already Changing Filmmaking: How Filmmakers Are Using These New Tools in Production and Post
When Sora, OpenAI’s video generator model, hit the internet in February, realistic-looking demo videos flooded social media, usually accompanied by some form of “RIP Hollywood” commentary. While Sora still isn’t publicly available, between Runway, Pika and a slew of other video and image generators there have been many questions about what the future of filmmaking will look like—and whether humans will even be the ones making movies in the future. Right now, generative AI is still far away from creating consistent characters and the exact, carefully crafted images that industry professionals require. Maybe a movie will be entirely generated with […]
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True Crime Schedules and Teams
The Alliance of Documentary Editors published scheduling guidelines that suggest one month per ten minutes of finished content as a reasonable editing timeline for the “average” documentary, with adjustments based on quantity of footage, team members’ experience levels and so on. For a single episode of a miniseries, the guide recommends “20 to 24 weeks for a full hour (60 min)” as a starting point. (I am a member of the organization but had no involvement in this paper.) True crime editors report that, increasingly, edits are falling well short of those benchmarks, for reasons that are complex and reflect […]
