Issues
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Las Cruces Days: Making Sundance Grand Prize-Winner In the Summers Using New Mexico Tax Credits
Alessandra Lacorazza’s In the Summers is a film of moments spread across years—moments quiet and seemingly insignificant, as well as larger events whose significance is downplayed at the time only to be properly understood years later. It’s the story of two teenage girls who, each summer, are sent by their mom to spend a few weeks with their charismatic yet irresponsible father, whose ability to love and be a parent is continually undermined by his addictions to drugs and alcohol. Winner of the Grand Jury U.S. Dramatic Competition prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, In the Summers finds a […]
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Martini Shots
Lithuania-born filmmaker Robertas Nevecka was making short animated pictures and working as an assistant director when, on a location shoot, he began to draw. It was 2019 and “It was really hard,” Nevecka remembers. “We were shooting in a small village, living in trucks, and, during the off time, I started drawing stuff about the things that happened during the day. That was the start.” Five years later, Nevecka’s film-shoot pastime has grown into a much larger endeavor, a small business that finds his witty visual accounts of set life on t-shirts, playing cards and, most recently, collected in a […]
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Authentic Spaces
On the first shoot day of the TV series Reservation Dogs, the call sheet had a banner announcement for a “Blessing Ceremony at Call.” At 8:00 a.m., the parking lot of our Tulsa location, a strip mall clinic we had turned into an Indian Health Services Center, was filled with the usual trappings of a film set: trailers, catering tents, frayed nerves. But the entire cast and crew (both on- and off-set personnel) was also gathered, arranged in a loose circle around a smaller band of Indigenous community leaders, elders and Sterlin Harjo, the creator and show runner. Wotko Long, […]
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Notes from Inside the Ecosystem: Joanne McNeil on Apple Vision Pro
From the late aughts until pre-pandemic times, Apple’s presence in my life seemed concise and easy to recognize. It manufactured the phone in my pocket and the laptop I worked on. I picked an iPhone and a MacBook over the alternatives for the usual reasons: because Apple products were reliable and well-designed with intuitive user interfaces. The company, as a product manufacturer, appeared to have a vastly different purpose than the neighboring Silicon Valley empires extracting and monetizing data like Google and Facebook. Something changed in recent years. Now, when I think of Apple, I think of the AirTags I […]
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Editor’s Letter
A red flag when speaking with a first-time director of an independent film, I feel, is an overconcern with the market. There are directors who want to tell their stories and be uncompromising, but they worry the film won’t be market-friendly enough and won’t sell, and that their future career may be compromised. So, they make the changes preemptively: There’s the film the director really wanted to make, and maybe that will be the next film, but meanwhile they begin writing their debut under a cloud of internalized self-censorship. You know the outcome: The indie, not-too-bold, “market-friendly” film, trying as […]
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Every Six Hours
The film and TV industry has been through a lot these past four years, including the start of a pandemic and two strikes. Then, there’s inflation, one of the causes of another issue: skyrocketing food prices. That means that on-set catering, an oft-overlooked but important part of any production, has been hit with a triple whammy. There are other matters as well—food quality, increasing focus on dietary restrictions, waste. As productions get back to work post-strikes, caterers—and those who hire and eat from them—are juggling a return to normal and new challenges. Set caterers are responsible not only for lunch—which, […]
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A Blurring of the Real: Damon Packard, Documentary Archival Footage and Generative AI
A crowd of people, animals and AI-generated beings sleeps in a movie theater. Faces are lit by the explosions of an atom bomb on screen. All we hear is the loud snoring of hundreds of people and the sounds of their bodies moving; a nondescript rodent crawls on the floor. We cut to the 70mm IMAX projection room, where the projectionist is also sleeping. The camera moves very slowly, but each shot morphs within itself at a faster pace. These two visual rhythms are layered on top of each other. The explosions on screen intensify; a panic sets in. We […]
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Did You See (and Hear) That? Why Home Viewing Can Be Dark and Inaudible
If the most frequently used pejoratives for contemporary films—“dim,” “muddy,” “inaudible”—are to be believed, we’ve entered a literal dark age of cinema, with cinematographic and sonic tools pushing filmmakers to ever-greater depths of audiovisual obscurity. For more than a decade, Christopher Nolan has incurred the wrath of audiences who prefer their dialogue clearly audible.1 Five years ago, the Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night” propelled the topic of the visual “New Darkness” into mainstream discourse. That this seemingly unsustainable state of affairs has persisted for as long as it has is, to many outside observers, perplexing. Why haven’t we […]
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Creative Reactions: Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on Oppenheimer
When it comes to the machinery of moviemaking, cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema refuses to be constrained by the bounds of technological precedent. For van Hoytema, “That doesn’t exist” or “That’s never been done” isn’t the end of a conversation, but rather a puzzle to solve. Oppenheimer, a look into the life of the titular physicist (played by Cillian Murphy) and his role in the creation of the first atomic bomb, offered several such puzzles. To enable van Hoytema to capture macro shots in a water tank on gargantuan 15-perf 65mm IMAX cameras to depict physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer’s visions of […]
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Lessons from the AI Filmmaking Rabbit Hole: Holly Willis on Teaching During Rapid Technological Change
I recently found myself sitting between three tech bros on my right and three cinephiles on my left. The film festival panel was meant to be a discussion about AI in the film industry; instead, it was an exasperating—if entertaining—demonstration of the radical gap in knowledge separating people who have some technical understanding of AI and those who don’t. There were tone-deaf proclamations about “generating content” and “optimizing workflows” on one side. And there was shouting, swearing, table-pounding, finger-pointing and (almost) tears on the other side, culminating in the announcement, “We’re very afraid!” I get it. AI has been foisted on […]
