One independent film I’m especially looking forward to in 2010 is Braden King’s Here, shot in Armenia by Ballast‘s Lol Crawley and starring Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal. Braden’s film is ambitiously conceived, a story of a romance between a cartographer sent to map the Eastern European country and a local art photographer that will blend King’s striking images and moody drama with interstitial material by a number of great experimental filmmakers. Braden has launched a blog about the making of his film. Here’s an excerpt: It was an adventure. It was magnificent. It was terrible. It was hard. We […]
One of the most creative and fascinating young filmmakers working today is Brent Green, the Pennsylvania-based animator whose work we first brought to our readers’ attention in 2005 when we selected him as one of our “25 New Faces.” His new film, Gravity, a feature, is his most ambitious film yet, and at the Andrew Edlin Gallery site he has posted a preview that makes me psyched to see the whole film. You can check it out here. Gravity promises to be an amazing blend of live action, narrative, and puppet stop-motion animation in a fantastically constructed set built on […]
I’ll post a bit later about all the stuff in the new Filmmaker magazine that’s not online. It’s a particularly good issue, I think, and one of the things which is print-only is Alicia Van Couvering’s look at five films that found their money and went into production in 2010. We decided to do a financing-oriented corrective to all the doom-and-gloom stories out there, and this one is full of practical tips for filmmakers looking to crowdsource and raise money through other unconventional means. One of the films she writes about is Kentucker Audley’s Open Five, which is our 25 […]
Ted Hope has an excellent blog post today, one of those print-this-out-and-post-it-above-your-computer lists to guide you through your work as a screenwriter. It’s entitled “Ten Things to Do Before You Submit a Script,” and it’s not about getting an agent or using two brads, not three. It’s about the final stage of a writer’s own in-house (i.e., in brain) development. There are a few that really resonated with me. One is: “Know what the historical precedents are for your story and how you differ from them in how you have chosen to tell it.” This is crucial. If a producer […]
Well, not really but sort of… While researching an article I’m writing, I came across this trenchant passage by critical theorist Frederic Jameson in the foreword to the U.S. edition of Jacques Attali’s 1977 music manifesto Noise: The Political Economy of Music: “Not the least challenging challenging of Attali’s thought lies in his tough-minded insistence on the ambiguity, or better still, the profound ambivalence, of the new social, economic and organizational possibilities, which he often describes in terms of autosurveillance. From one perspective, autosurveillance marks the penetration of information technology within the body and the psyche of the individual subject: […]
Click here to read select stories from the Winter issue. Terry Gilliam talks about his new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus; Tom Ford discusses his debut feature, A Single Man; Don Argott highlights what’s considered the heist of the century in The Art of the Steal. Also, Esther B. Robinson weights risk vs. responsibility while making your films; Shari Carpenter highlights a software for script supervisors, ScriptE; Jon Reiss tells us how to choose a fulfillment house and the need for awareness about digital archiving. Plus, Anthony Kaufman‘s Industry Beat & Lance Weiler‘s Culture Hacker columns.
A recipe for no-budget filmmaking might go something like this: gather no more than a baker’s dozen of crew members, a half dozen actors, a large helping of friends and family, and a lighting/camera/sound equipment package smaller than half the size of a cargo van. Fill the other half with set dressing, props, wardrobe, unit supplies, and craft service and load into a smattering of free locations of varying shapes and sizes. Roll camera, repeat up to 1,000 times or until you run out of time, money and hard drive space. Total prep time – 4 weeks. Total shooting time […]
Another video from the Cine Institute, a film school in Jaclem, Haiti. “Priere” (Prayer) by Manassena Cesar from Ciné Institute on Vimeo. See this blog post for our reporting on the Cine Institute as well as for links you can go to to help.
I just caught up with this Manohla Dargis piece from the New York Times published on the 14th. What she writes about — the DIY and hybrid distribution distribution strategies espoused by Peter Broderick and Jon Reiss as well as the current discussion about transmedia — will be familiar to readers of Filmmaker, but it’s still interesting to see them covered now in the Times. From the piece, titled “Declaration of Indies: Just Sell it Yourself!”: The new D.I.Y. world is open-source in vibe and often execution. Participants refer to one another in conversation and on their Web sites and […]
Louie Psihoyos’s The Cove was the big winner at the Cinema Eye Awards, which were held tonight at the Times Center in midtown Manhattan. The film won the Oustanding Achievement in Non-Fiction Filmmaking Award as well as the Production and Cinematography Awards. A complete list of the awards follows. 2010 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking: Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking:The Cove, directed by Louie Psihoyos, produced by Paula DuPre Pesman and Fisher Stevens Outstanding Achievement in a Debut Feature Film:October Country, directed by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher Outstanding Achievement in Direction:Agnes Varda, The Beaches of Agnes Outstanding […]