Facebook introduced Surround 360, a high-end video camera, today at F8, the company’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In reality, Facebook unveiled a reference design for the VR video camera, which it plans to release as an open-source project on GitHub this summer. In other words, Facebook will not be producing the camera. Instead, Facebook is open-sourcing the camera in order to encourage developers to take the design and create their own version of the camera. “In designing this camera, we wanted to create a professional-grade end-to-end system that would capture, edit, and render high-quality 3D-360 video. In doing so, we hoped to meaningfully […]
Since its first edition in 2009, the Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN has earned a reputation as a daring music festival whose eclectic lineup is unfettered by commercial or corporate concerns. Artists run the gamut: avant garde jazz (Anthony Braxton), experimental hip hop (Shabazz Palaces), electronic (Nicolas Jaar), modern classical (Philip Glass). All of this takes place in remarkable indoor venues within walking distance of each other in the city’s downtown center. Governed by the idiosyncratic taste of its founder, Ashley Capps of AC Entertainment, Big Ears has attempted to expand its scope into film and video. In the 2015 edition, there was a […]
Tribeca Film Festival, I love you but you made a very serious mistake. On Monday, the widely discredited and dangerous anti-vaccination quack Andrew Wakefield tweeted: “Haven’t posted forever. Huge news tomorrow.” Perhaps he hadn’t “posted forever” because the media finally stopped giving him a megaphone. Perhaps once people in America and England began dying of measles, journalists finally realized that the “two sides to every story” approach granted Wakefield was literally killing people. Last I heard, Wakefield was headlining Conspira-Sea, a seven-day cruise where passengers learn about crop circles, chemtrails, yogic flying, ESP and astrology. Good, I thought, that’s where […]
The more money involved in any industry, the more timid and conservative the financiers become about what they are willing to back. When deciding what to greenlight, they cling to outdated ideas of what audiences will want to watch, often lagging behind what the rest of us have always known: both men and women alike will watch, love and cheer a badass female protagonist. Props, then, to Netflix for recognizing that a series based on the Marvel character of Jessica Jones and created by Melissa Rosenberg could be fed to a hungry audience waiting like chicks with tiny beaks open […]
Good news for filmmakers looking for finishing funds to complete a feature-length documentary which highlights a social issue: The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund is open for submissions through February 5, 2016. Even better, there is no application fee. The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund will provide funding to four-to-10 feature-length documentaries. In addition, The AOL Charitable Foundation Award, a subset of the Fund, gives grants to four filmmakers whose feature-length documentaries illuminate the lives of women and youth around the globe. Previous grantees of The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund include Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot, Marc Silver’s 3 1/2 Minutes, Leslee Udwin’s India’s Daughter […]
Rooftop Films, New York’s pre-eminent eventized screening series, has announced the first films from their 2015 Summer Series program. Set to open with a slew of shorts on May 29, including the excellent All Your Favorite Shows! and Actor Seeks Role from 25 New Faces Danny Madden and Michael Tyburski (respectively), the lineup includes festival favorites like The Wolfpack and Krisha, and some more relatively unseen titles like Bloomin’ Mud Shuffle, Spartacus & Cassandra, and Divine Location. Check out the films below and head to Rooftop’s Kickstarter to support the series in exchange for memberships. Friday, May 29, 2015 This is What We Mean by Short Films […]
Simple and effective: Kevin B. Lee breaks down the opening credits sequence of A Hard Day’s Night into four separate editorial strands. The main two are the “Beatles cam” trained on the running band and the “fan cam” following their screaming admirers; runners up are the “milk cam” (a guy eating in front of a milk ad) and the “Paul cam” (Paul in fake facial hair disguise, sitting out the pursuit). Each segment is timed with stopwatch precision, with all four parts arranged in a quadrant formation reminiscent of a security system, suggesting the surveillance that comes with celebrity. Very neat.
New York City may not want for nascent filmmakers, but said filmmakers are certainly in need of more grassroots screening venues. Fortuitously, The Tank, a Midtown West arts presenter that specializes in comedy, dance, music and storytelling, is rebooting its film program, dubbed Filmmaker Breakthroughs, this October. Headed up by critic Nick McCarthy, the programming seeks to showcase exciting new talent across short and long form narrative, documentary and animated formats. A one-time haven for Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, as well as Hal Hartley and Jem Cohen’s early works, McCarthy hopes the latest iteration of The Tank’s film arm […]
Last year, I did a lengthly profile on Dogfish Pictures’ inaugural Accelerator program, which adapts a start up financing model to the independent film landscape. Dogfish equips each of its selected participants with seed financing and an office space where they’ll develop their product(s) over the course of nine-weeks, with added input from mentors. The program is capped off by a demo day, in which a member from each team pitches to a room full of investors, industry personnel and lowly journalists like myself. Applications are now open for the second edition of Accelerator through August 8, but this year, James Belfer and Co. are widening the field. “Content […]
Filmmaker Magazine‘s coverage of the Cannes Film Festival will begin soon. Today is day one; here are some contextual items of interest while waiting for the first reviews and interviews to roll in. • Fandor‘s David Hudson rounded up the largely scathing reviews for opening night selection Grace of Monaco, as well advance writing on the festival, including interviews with festival heads Gilles Jacob and Thierry Fremaux, on the defensive against charges that (among other things) Cannes recognizes the same safely-established world cinema directors year after year. • The main jury convened for a press conference, where head juror Jane […]