Most short filmmakers have a hard time getting people to watch their work. Joe Nicolosi has had the opposite problem. His filmmaking career recently took off because of the playfully inventive and technically accomplished bumpers he wrote and directed for the SXSW Film Festival. Because they play in front of every film, his shorts were guaranteed audiences as they screened again… and again… and again. “There is a certain responsibility in making something that people will watch as many as 30 times,” Nicolosi admits. “So I try to cram these pieces full of details so there will always be new […]
If you listen to the radio, then you may have seen the short documentary essay films of the New York collaborative, Everynone. For the last two years, the three filmmakers — Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante and Julius Metoyer III — have been creating witty and allusive short films to accompany the popular WNYC radio program Radiolab, heard on more than 300 public radio stations around the country. Radiolab explores science and philosophy in the guise of radio theater, mixing music and sound effects into presentations that thrillingly veer from the pedagogical to the personal. And if you listen to Radiolab […]
Carlen Altman is strictly low-brow. She loves Leslie Nielsen, Ja Rule and Weekend At Bernie’s; she runs a jewelry company that stocks Jewish Rosaries (jewishrosaries.com); and was seduced into performing by the success of her first public access show, Sunday Night Live, which ran on the campus channel of SUNY-Binghamton College. “It got taken off the air because we did this skit about a rape clinic, which did not go over well,” says Altman. “It was a competitive rape group, like who had been raped the most times… It was funny though.” Born and raised in New York, Altman’s parents […]
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now. Damon Russell is a filmmaker whose work lives right on that line. The Atlanta, Georgia native, who shuttles between Atlanta and New York as projects come and go, made a short film that was partially shot in the notorious western Atlanta ghetto, “The Bluff.” After seeing Russell’s film, a Bluff resident named Curtis Snow, whose livelihood revolves around armed robbery and drug pushing, sought out Russell to make a film about his life. Snow on Tha Bluff, which world premiered at this year’s […]
From the outside it looked like Eddie Alcazar had it all figured out. With only a year under his belt at the Academy of Art University where he studied visual effects and animation film theory, Electronic Arts plucked him in 2004 to work in its game design division on the Medal of Honor series. A year and a half later he started the digital content creation boutique Alcazar Entertainment, where he did the video game design and 3D modeling for more than 30 commercials and games, including The Matrix: Path of Neo, James Bond: From Russia with Love and Oddworld: […]
Blast! director Paul Devlin on the IRS’s battle with documentary filmmakers.
For Evan Glodell, surviving a bad breakup by making a movie wasn’t enough — he also built the camera it was shot on and the car featured in its story. Dubbed the mad scientist of this year’s Sundance, he takes Septien director Michael tully through the apocalyptic fever dream that is BELLFLOWER. Photograph by Henny Garfunkel