You might not recognize the name Douglas Trumbull, but you will certainly recognize his work. He is the man behind the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and also the director of Silent Running and Brainstorm. In recent years, he has dedicated himself to “figuring out the future of cinema.” The result: Magi cinema, a means of shooting and projecting films in 4K 3-D at 120 frames-per-second (fps). In the beginning films were shot at around 16 fps before becoming standardized at 24fps, which has remained unchanged since. Many aspects […]

The production designer Kelly McGehee called me one afternoon. I had been a production PA on a film we had both worked on. She told me she was starting a new movie and asked if I knew any art department coordinators. I didn’t — in fact, I didn’t even know what one was. But like any ambitious young person I did what you do in that situation: I said, “I can do it.” Not knowing what Google was yet, I hung up and did what you used to do when facing questions such as this one: call an actual human […]

In the past decade, I have screened thousands of documentary festival submissions. That amounts to countless hours of observing — or, more often than not, being told about — the horrifying effects of war, discrimination, depression, censorship, animal slaughter, plastic bottles, shoddy reporting, asbestos and mountaintop removal. Befitting this past decade of “hope,” I have also been given the tools to fix those problems: a program I can donate to, a message to spread to my community, a website I can visit to learn more. Nearly every one of these films has failed to leave an impression. They don’t make […]

I’m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I approach and pull away from objects. […] I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, maneuvering in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them […]

Jackie, Fox Searchlight’s best hope for 2016 Oscar glory, will be improperly projected throughout the world. There will be the usual projection mistakes and corporate carelessness that have become the norm in today’s multiplexes, but Jackie’s 1.66 aspect ratio will be presented keystoned more often than not: instead of a narrow rectangle that is 1.66 times longer than tall, the tops of the image will either curve inward or outward in relation to the screen. It’s an easily corrected mistake that is being ignored because of laziness. Since most projection booths are devoid of projectionists who can fix the problem, […]