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It’s Not Always About the Money
There’s been a great deal of talk recently in our film community about the concept of sustainability. There hasn’t, however, been a great deal of precision. Take the word itself — “sustainable.” It’s most often defined by its absence. But by the time we ask, “What is a sustainable career?” the answer comes back, and it’s usually simply: “Not this.” We’ve adopted the idea of sustainability from the environmental movement, where it describes the quest to make an ecosystem stable and long-lasting. Sustainability’s myriad definitions range from the utopian (“all systems in dynamic balance”) to the terse, harsh pragmatism of its Latin root, […]
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The Big Transition: How to Break into TV Writing, Part One
Maybe you’ve had some success writing features. You’ve sold a spec, landed an assignment, made the Black List or wrote and directed your own indie feature. Maybe you’re a playwright, or you’ve got a web series, or you’ve made a few shorts, or even written a few good features. Or maybe you’re simply an emerging writer working toward that first sale or produced credit. No matter — in today’s film business, you can be any one of the above and still be thinking about one thing: moving into television. If you’re thinking about trying a TV staffing job, or even […]
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How a DCP Gets Made
“I was once Inside Llewyn Davis. Now I am Mad Max: Fury Road.” I came up with that Instagram caption while working a festival in suburban New Jersey last spring. Toward the end of the festival, UPS made a delivery of a couple of battered Deluxe/Technicolor cases that had seen better days. The label on the box read Tina’s Heroes, which was the secret title that Warner Brothers shipped Mad Max to theaters as. I chuckled at the reference to the hit song from Beyond Thunderdome, and then I looked at all of the other labels. There was a large piece of […]
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Weather Advisory: How Climate Change is Changing Location-Based Film Shooting
Throughout the history of cinema, from It’s a Wonderful Life and Doctor Zhivago to Fargo and The Ice Storm, filmmakers have relied on snow to create authentic settings and magical worlds. But in the age of climate change, capturing snow on film has become a serious challenge for filmmakers no longer able to count on the real thing, as was the case with last year’s The Hateful Eight and The Revenant. Of course, filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Alejandro Iñárritu have the financial resources to enable them to wait for snowfall, generate artificial snow, create CGI snow, or any combination […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2016: New Horizons
In this, my sixth annual camera round-up for Filmmaker, I’ll explore the latest developments and trends associated with cameras — as I have each year — which taken together continue to define new directions in digital cinema. I’ll highlight cameras that exemplify these trends. Those seeking an end-in-sight to a decade’s worth of profound change in camera technology might want to stop reading here. In my 2015 camera round-up, I touched on issues of design including modularity, new materials, a return to ergonomics; the birth of camera apps; wirelessness and the dawn of camera IP connectivity; the mirrorless revolution with […]
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Act Naturally: Working with Caveh Zahedi on the Web Series, The Show about the Show
Caveh Zahedi played the same edit over and over, one too many times. “I think I’m gonna go, man,” I grumbled. I’d reached my breaking point. The idea of a rough cut that gets whittled down doesn’t work for Zahedi. He needs to sand, polish and lacquer each piece of wood before deciding if he even wants to use that wood. Basically, he fine-cuts each take. Why, I’ve asked countless times, can’t we just choose the best take and work it in? His answer: how can we tell what the best take is unless we see them all working at […]
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Long-Term Care: How to Archive Your Film
Your film is done. Audiences have laughed and cried while watching it. You got a week-long run in New York and Los Angeles. Soon your aunt in Springfield will be able to watch it on Netflix and have a strained telephone conversation about how “interesting” it is. On to the next project! Not so fast. You need to archive your film now. Put down your storyboard for your next picture and help preserve your old one first. The Film Foundation estimates that “one half of all films made before 1950, and over 80 percent made before 1929 are lost forever.” […]
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With an Eye on the Finish Line
We shot most of Channel B over a weekend, but it was only two weeks later, during an evening of pickups, that the aesthetic of the movie really started to come together. This probably happens a lot, especially on little rinky-dink shoots like ours. We were about to do a third take of one of our last setups, shooting in a public park, a few benches down from some drunks. I asked Cory Popp, our director of photography, to shift the first part of a camera movement just a little bit, and when I watched the playback on our one […]
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How to Deliver Your Film to a Festival
Note (May 2018): the updated version of this article can be found here. Format. Codec. Audio. DCP. You’ve worked on your movie now for some time and have been eagerly waiting for acceptance emails from festivals. One lands in your inbox, and you excitedly read through the letter until, when you get to the festival’s technical requirements, you develop a sense of dread. The tersely worded communication from the technical director (glad we could finally meet) would put you to sleep if it didn’t terrify you. But don’t panic. Instead, phone your editor, and read this guide. Caveat emptor, though: […]
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Pacing Myself: Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party Director Stephen Cone on Being His Own Editor
“Don’t you ever want an objective pair of eyes?” “Have you ever thought about working with an editor?” “Yes” and “yes” are the answers to questions asked of me and other filmmaker/editors over the years about this dual position, which, for either budgetary or artistic reasons, usually extends into self-music and postproduction supervision. Much like that against playwrights directing their own work, there is often a stigma against directors editing their own films, even as, in our ever-overcrowded filmmaking landscape, there are inevitably more filmmaker/editors, each with a mindset and motive different from the next. For some, it’s an easily […]
