The onset of summer movie season traditionally regularly journalistic notes on the current state of multiplex moviegoing, with a heavy emphasis on the incivility of unrepentant talkers and wielders of mobile devices. Serious consideration of the changing experiential aspects of normal multiplex visits are few and far-between; though my perspective is skewed by the particulars of mostly attending NYC’s multiplexes, some newish norms seem worth noting. Special screenings and parallel tracks are unignorable, even if not attending them According to Dealflicks (a sort of Priceline for discounted movie tickets), 88% of movie theaters are empty. High ticket prices and worry […]
Most festivals mixing movies and music include the former as an afterthought, even if they’re lovingly programmed. That’s certainly the case at SXSW, the granddaddy of them all, and attendance at the film programs of nascent music festivals across the country bears this out. Indie film audiences skew older if not whiter than indie music audiences, so a conundrum is born: how does one get indie films out in front of the same eyes that stare at Pitchfork every morning? It doesn’t seem that Pitchfork offshoot The Dissolve, as good a site as it is, will necessarily provide a solution; […]
Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week for your Sunday perusing pleasure. At Vulture, producer Gavin Polone has developed into an excellent essayist. Here he is discussing the emotional complexities of a particularly Hollywood-type of relationship, the paid friendship: While I’m sure that paid friends exist in many walks of life, I doubt they are as common anywhere else as they are in the entertainment industry. I’ve encountered many big-deal stars and directors with an entourage of assistants and development executives who have crossed the business-personal line. Some were friends before they were employees. Others drifted the other […]
Arriving in theaters this weekend following its SXSW premiere is DamNation, Ben Knight and Travis Rummel’s ecological advocacy documentary supporting the removal of obsolete dams. Funded and distributed by Patagonia — and the winner of SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight Audience Award — DamNation and its release are a study, says Sub-Genre’s Brian Newman, in “how a brand can use film to create impact.” Newman is the film’s marketing and distribution consultant, and along with the company and other partners he’s implementing an innovative campaign employing Patagonia’s customer base, collapsed release windows, partnerships with affinity groups and the old-fashioned hustling of DVDs. […]
I recently attended the Gasparilla International Film Festival in Tampa, Florida, where I served on the documentary grand jury as well as a panel discussion about filmmakers and the press. In the Filmmaker Lounge post-panel, I was surprised to meet the subject of one of the docs I’d watched. Kevin Evans’ Machine Gun Preacher tells the unbelievable tale of Sam Childers, outlaw biker turned rescuer of African children, fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army with a Bible in his hand. (If this stranger than fiction story sounds familiar, it’s probably because you saw Gerard Butler play Childers in the 2011 Hollywood […]
Mooshine Kingdom director Milton Horowitz says that, like a lot of Americans, he grew up watching too much television. This eventually led to film school at Cleveland State University, where he met cinematographer Ryan Forte. “Ryan’s younger than me,” says Horowitz. “He’s 21, I’m 32, and even though we’re 11 years apart we still love the same types of films and the same movie techniques.” While this is ostensibly their first feature film, Forte says he tried to make a feature film when he was younger that became “way too long. I sent it to a film festival and it […]
We’ve been covering development of the Digital Bolex camera for a while now. Designed to look like a 16mm camera and meant to simulate a filmic quality, it’s been a buzzed-about piece of technology since a March 2012 Kickstarter to raise funds for manufacture of the first 100 cameras. “I had been frustrated for a really long time that I was never quite able to get the look that I wanted with the cameras that were available to me,” camera co-developer Elle Schneider told Michael Murie in an interview last year. During his NAB new camera roundup last month, David […]
Richard Ayoade’s The Double successfully eluded me on the festival circuit, so I’ll be excited to catch it when it opens in New York theaters tomorrow. For The Creators Project, Ayoade and his VFX producer Simon Walley speak about duplicating Eisenberg without the standard green screen keying, instead relying on a more camera-heavy process called “rotoscoping.” Removing Eisenberg’s body double in post, the VFX team was able to essentially combine takes, or “overlay layers,” as Ayoade puts it. The tricky part was working with the motion control rig, which meant Ayoade had to choose his preferred take on the spot, so that Eisenberg could switch characters and play […]
“Have you wondered what your favorite movie looked like from the sidekick’s perspective?” asks the pitch video for Invisivision, a proposed new kind of 3D-and-more glasses being developed by PipeDream Interactive. The basic idea: since 3D already projects two images simultaneously, why not put those two information streams to a use other than creating stereophonic depth? The pitch video below outlines a potential multitude of uses. Would you like to choose which angle you watch a scene from — e.g., to toggle from the hero’s POV to the villain’s? Now you can, and that should be no extra work for […]
I’m not writing this for the careerists. For the ones just looking for an edge, for a way in, who think they have an idea that can sell and are poking for a soft spot in the walled city. If that’s you, you can stop reading now. Hell, just stop. I’m writing for the hopeless lot who scramble for meaning. Who care about what’s in the box, not the pretty package. Who care about result, impact, and why people and societies do the things they do. This is why we shot a movie over four months in a remote Ghanaian […]