THE “PINK MUMMY” IN DIRECTOR NACHO VIGALONDO’S TIMECRIMES. COURTESY MAGNOLIA PICTURES. Nacho Vigalondo is part of an exciting new generation of Spanish filmmakers who are reinvigorating genre filmmaking with their creativity and invention. Born and raised in the insular town of Cabezón de la Sal, he grew up on 80s studio movies before discovering the work of cult directors like David Lynch and Peter Jackson, whose idiosyncratic visions inspired the teenage Vigalondo to eventually become a director himself. He studied Visual Communication at the University of the Basque Country, where he began making a series of playful and distinctive shorts […]
IFC begins their Roadshow edition of Steven Soderbergh‘s Che tonight in NYC and L.A. Tonight at New York’s Ziegfield Theater Soderbergh will be in attendance to do a Q&A. A special program will also be given out. If you haven’t read our piece on Che‘s Red camera workflow, you may want to check it out if you’re going tonight. You’ll find a new appreciation for the gorgeous images you’ll see on screen. I also chatted with Soderbergh in the Fall issue (which you can read right now by subscribing to our digital issue).
Another piece on the demise of our favorite art form, this time titled “The Death of Indie Film as a Business Model” and found at Mike Curtis’s HD for Indies blog. It’s all there — the Gill speech, overcrowded theaters, uninspiring films, the high cost of marketing, piracy, the high cost of film school, the Darwinian acquisitions environment. Curtis’s piece is already generating a nice comments thread with the first poster, sean90291, offering some reasons why he’d rather pay $5 to see Ballast at home than see it at a theater where the screen is “the size of my plasma […]
Daily Routines is an inspiring little blog that reports on the daily routines of various artists, writers, thinkers and public figures. The site culls its short entries from biographies, interviews and printed sources. Here’s the daily routine of writer Haruki Murakami: When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day […]
Okay, you’ve finally gotten around to accepting that something from your film — a trailer, some clips, whatever — should be online. But you’re the kind of person who cringes when the bulb is a little dim in the theater, or when the masking is askew, so you’d like it look good. And, yes, you think a lot of online video looks like crap. This link (hat-tipped to Noah Harlan) is for you. Over at Techvideoblog, Charbax compares the measurements, frame rates and audio qualities of all the sites offering HD video right now, including YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook.
Virginia Heffernan’s column in the Sunday Times Magazine this week, titled “Content and its Discontents,” is a must-read, concise summation of the issues facing content creators today. (Yes, that means you, filmmakers.) What I like about the piece is that it deals with not only content but form, and, particularly, how it acknowledges the relationship between the form a piece of content is embodied within and the method by which it is delivered and, particularly, advertised. She discusses how, for example, a magazine article on volunteerism is shaped by not only the perceived reader base of its audience but also […]
Below I posted a piece about the settlement Google recently made with authors and publishers involving the scanning of out-of-print books. The chief link was to a program on KCRW’s “The Politics of Culture” that discussed the legal implications of the settlement. Now on Today’s Zaman is a piece entitled “Google revolution the end of the publishing world?” It’s a collection of responses from key critics and editors about the effect of the settlement, and the key take away seems to be “good for readers, good for authors, bad for used-book stores and complicated for the ‘information wants to be […]
LUKE FORD AND RHYS WAKEFIELD IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ELISSA DOWN’S THE BLACK BALLOON. COURTESY NEOCLASSICS FILMS. Since she was very young, Elissa Down has been honing her skills as a director. Admittedly, it wasn’t strictly conscious when she was writing, acting in and masterminding little drama projects as a kid growing up in Australia, or bossing her parents around when they were reading her bedtime stories. However, her vocation as a filmmaker became ever clearer as she grew older and by the time she was a film and television student at Perth’s Curtin University, she had her eye on cinematic success. […]
Steven Soderbergh and his RED camera-shot Che is our cover story this month, and here, MovieCityIndie’s Ray Pride captures three minutes of the director talking about his work with the camera. Check it out… … and also check out Brian Chirls’s piece on Che‘s post-production in the current issue online.
This doesn’t have to do with film per se, but this podcast dealing with book copyright in the digital realm is an interesting listen, especially when one wonders if, for example, the AMPTP and Google could work out the kind of agreement that book publishers have worked out with the internet search giant. It’s from KCRW’s “Politics of Culture.” Host Jonathan Kirsch, an attorney specializing in intellectual property and publishing law, moderates a panel discussion on a landmark literary-legal settlement. It allows Google to scan and make available online many out-of-print but still-copyrighted books. The settlement portends a viable digital […]