We continue with our series of guest blog posts from the Sundance Labs with Carol Dysinger, who is a mentor at the Sundance Documentary Film Edit and Story Labs. There is a joke told by the Afghans in Kabul. It goes like this: An American came to Afghanistan. An Afghan asked him “Why have you come?” and the Westerner said, “I am writing a book.” The Afghan said, “Oh, you must have been here for a long time to be writing a book.” and the American said, “No, I just got here yesterday.” “A-ha,” says the Afghan. “Then you must […]
Over the next few days we’ll have blogs from participants of both the Sundance Documentary and Creative Producing Labs. Up first is producer Mynette Louie. Hello! I’ll try my best to sound coherent here… I’m kinda going nuts right now because I’m packing for the Lab (I leave for it in a few days), prepping for a short film shoot in August, prepping for a feature film shoot starting in October, shepherding a feature through the film festival circuit (and trying to figure out distribution for it), doing post-production duties on another feature, and developing three other features, including my […]
Our press release announcing our annual “25 New Faces” feature has just gone up at Indiewire, and you can read our profiles of the selections on our site here. As I wrote in the editor’s letter for the upcoming issue, we looked at a lot of work this year — maybe too much work, actually — and could easily have made a list of “125 New Faces.” Of the people we finally chose, every person on the list was championed passionately within our editorial team, and each person also seemed to us to be approaching their roles as filmmakers, dps, […]
Our friends at Power to the Pixel have launched a competitive pitching forum focusing on U.K. and international cross-media projects. From the announcement: We are looking for stories that can span film, TV, online, mobile and gaming to be presented to a select group of financiers, commissioners, tech companies, online portals and media companies in front of an audience of PTTP participants. The selected project teams will compete for the BABELGUM PIXEL PITCH PRIZE of £6,000. Teams will benefit from significant international publicity and be introduced to new international business and partnership opportunities as well as one-to-one consultancies. Last year’s […]
Announced this morning, the Toronto International Film Festival will open its 34th edition Sept. 10 with Creation, starring Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin and Jennifer Connelly playing his wife. Director is Joe Amiel. The festival describes the film as “part ghost story, part psychological thriller, part heart-wrenching love story. Torn between his love for his deeply religious wife and his own growing belief in a world where God has no place, Darwin finds himself caught in a struggle between faith and reason, love and truth.” TIFF also announced the four Gala Presentations and eighteen Special Presentations. The Boys are Back, […]
Since I posted yesterday about the ways in which journalists might learn to pitch in the future, I suppose I should finally commit to the blogosphere this post about how they should pitch in the present. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, and I haven’t because, frankly, I’ve been afraid to. That’s because the Filmmaker magazine editorial mailbox fills up with about 500 posts a week, and I’ve been hesitant to write something that’s going to increase that in any way. Of course, most of those 500 posts are spam, or press releases that can […]
I took note of Anthony Kaufman’s most recent blog post, “How to Survive the Recession?” for a number of reasons. First, Anthony writes our “Industry Beat” column, which is a place every issue where we survey the broader trends affecting this industry. He’s one of the few writers in our independent sphere who equally understands art and business issues, and he knows how to communicate both in concise and clear prose. But Anthony only does four columns a year for us, and if he’s finding the freelance world in general too forbidding at the moment, that’s awfully sad. He writes: […]
I’m making my way through Chris Anderson’s Free, which I’d like to finish before posting thoughts on it and the current discussion of free pay models for content creators. (In order to most meaningfully connect with the deep content of the book, I am reading it for free — or, rather, listening to it for free in the downloadable audio book linked to from Anderson’s site.) But Anderson’s colleague at Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, just linked to a great article that’s relevant to filmmakers whether or not you subscribe to all the tenets of Free, so I’m going to link […]
Interesting article in The Guardian this week about Tied to a Chair filmmakers Michael Bergmann and Doug Underdahl who obtained a Leica Pradovit D-1200, built a tenth-row rig at New Jersey’s Washington Theater and projected their film off their laptop. From the piece: The picture on the ageing silver screen in front of us is unquestionably of theatrical quality. The independent film-makers Michael Bergmann and Doug Underdahl move around, checking from all angles. It is, as Bergmann has warned, different: not film’s luminous grain nor video’s harsh flatness. This digital image is thrown by a high-end Leica business projector powered […]
DIEGO CATAÑO IN DIRECTOR FERNANDO EIMBCKE’S LAKE TAHOE. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT. You only have to look at the work of a director like Fernando Eimbcke to see that there is a lot more to get excited about in Mexican cinema than just the so-called “Three Amigos,” Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu & Alfonso Cuarón. Born in Mexico City in 1970, Eimbcke studied film direction at the University Centre of Cinematographic Studies at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico). During his time there, he made a handful of shorts, including the fiction films Sorry for the Inconvenience and Excuse Me? […]