6303 Results for “Open ”
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Editing Today: Beyond the NLE
David Lean once called editing the soul of filmmaking. Today it’s more like the Mission Control. You’ve got to understand pixel counts, bit rates, bit depth, color sampling, sampling frequencies, frame rates, codecs, RAW files, deBayering, audio channels, waveform displays, vectorscopes, audio levels, LUTs, proxies, file-wrappers, Log gammas, XML, titling, effects — need I go on? Arcane stuff that used to be the domain of video engineers with EE degrees. To ensure a smooth and efficient postproduction “workflow” (term borrowed from I.T.), you must know about cameras too: which frame sizes they capture, which codecs they employ, which gammas they […]
by David Leitner on Oct 20, 2014 -
A Roof over Their Heads: Jesse Moss on The Overnighters
When Jesse Moss headed to North Dakota to make The Overnighters, it was truly a one-man endeavor. He took no crew with him. He was on his way to meet Pastor Jay Reinke, who had been giving shelter to the many men who uprooted themselves and made their way to Williston, N. D., in hopes of finding work in the town’s booming oil industry. With so many desperate souls appearing in Williston, resources to feed and house them were quickly drying up. Soon, the offices, floor space and pews of Reinke’s church were filled with itinerant workers, and town residents […]
by Alix Lambert on Oct 20, 2014 -
Glory at Sea: Mike Leigh on Mr. Turner
Within a career that’s now in its fifth decade, Mr. Turner is only the third period film Mike Leigh has made, but, ironically, it’s the first he’s shot digitally. The picture captures the last 25 years of revered British painter J.M.W. Turner’s life — already famous, his days are filled with awkward visits from an ex-wife and daughters, confrontations with both artistic rivals and lesser painters, and the salon visits that constitute the business of being an artist in the mid-1800s. Timothy Spall deservedly won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his turn as the eccentric Turner, who walks […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Oct 20, 2014 -
Positive Trauma: Editor Mathilde Bonnefoy on CITIZENFOUR
Paris-born editor Mathilde Bonnefoy has criss-crossed documentary and fiction, working with directors such as Wim Wenders (The Soul of a Man) and, most prominently, Tom Tykwer. Her first feature editing credit is the director’s time-bending international hit Run Lola Run, and she has continued to work with Tykwer on Heaven, Three and The International, among others. Long based in Berlin, Bonnefoy, as she relates below, was sought after by Poitras because of her work on Tykwer’s films and the “thriller” nature of CITIZENFOUR’s source material. Below, in the final days of post-production, I speak to Bonnefoy about encrypted workflows, working […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Digital Tableaux: Cinematographer Dick Pope on Mr. Turner
“Turner was progressive,” says cinematographer Dick Pope. “He was not a Luddite. He was very forward-looking. And if he was making the decision today, whether to shoot on film or digital, with all the tools and control of the palette [digital] offers, Mike and I felt that he would choose digital.” “Mike,” of course, is Mike Leigh, and “Turner” is J.M.W. Turner, the 19th-century painter of roiling seas and fiery vistas containing a near-religious quality of apocalypse. Together, Leigh and Pope have made Mr. Turner, a rare artist biopic that imbues within its visual strategies a sense of its subject’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Graphic Design: Miao Wang’s We the Economy
For We the Economy, the 20-part web series collaboration between Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions and Morgan Spurlock’s Cinelan, documentary director Miao Wang tackled the topic of globalization and trade with China. Her short intercuts interviews with elegantly designed yet informationally dense graphics. Below, she and her motion graphic artist discuss challenges and solutions. Miao Wang, director: The biggest challenge of this project from day one has been how to address such an immense topic in such a short five-to-seven minute film. I knew I wanted to make a film driven by poignant human elements and stories, while also providing concrete […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 20, 2014 -
Has the Cinematic Water Cooler Run Dry?
Sex, lies and videotape; Pulp Fiction; The Blair Witch Project; Juno — they are now the stuff of indie film legend. Movies that came out of nowhere (although that’s not entirely true) and became not just crossover hits, but cultural phenomena, spawning think-pieces in The New York Times, TV talk-show fodder and conversations around the water cooler. Yes, they made money along the way, but we remember them as much for the zeitgeist they captured as their box office. These days, we can still point to the occasional breakout. This year, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has benefited from that mysterious magical […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Oct 20, 2014 -
Film Studies for the 21st Century
In 2008, film scholar Catherine Grant started a blog titled Film Studies for Free as a venue for collecting and sharing links to interesting examples of film and media scholarship available online. Between university positions, she was unsettled by the thought of losing her faculty privileges — such as access to the library — and wanted to stay connected with academia. By launching the site, she quickly discovered a burgeoning community of other scholars in the blogosphere, as well as a readership that expanded beyond the university. “I guess I didn’t really understand how it would take off,” she says […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 20, 2014 -
Freeze Out: Ruben Östlund on Force Majeure
Amidst the red-carpet mayhem of any major international film festival, critics tend to adopt a sort of cinematic shorthand — a private language of allusions and descriptors. It didn’t take long for Force Majeure to earn its seemingly ready-made sobriquet: “the avalanche movie,” further confirmed by the film’s theatrical poster. Force Majeure does indeed revolve around an avalanche — a controlled blast in the mountains of a ski resort in the French Alps, watched by a vacationing Swedish family with awe until, as it hurtles its way toward the restaurant terrace where they are enjoying their breakfast, awe suddenly curdles […]
by Calum Marsh on Oct 20, 2014 -
When Restoration Met Distribution
As CEO of the Los Angeles-based creative studio and postproduction house Cinelicious, Paul Korver had the unsettling feeling that too many deals were passing him by. The preferred film scanning and restoration vendor for Criterion and Alamo Drafthouse, Cinelicious was also making a name for itself as a digital intermediate supervisor. Touring the festival circuit with the likes of Boyhood and Prince Avalanche, Korver found himself in conversation with various rights holders who were looking to restore films but without the funds to do so. What if, he thought, Cinelicious had a distribution arm to monetize that restoration investment? Thus […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 20, 2014
