Over the past few decades, film’s iron-clad grip on the motion industry has gradually been chipped away by emerging digital technology. Yet it hasn’t necessarily been a smooth transition. Traditional celluloid film has gone largely unchanged as a medium for a century and has been the canvas for works from Casablanca and Apocalypse Now to this summer’s blockbuster The Dark Knight Rises. As the saying goes: old habits die hard. In this case, for good reason, a film produces a picture quality, texture, and dynamic range unparalleled by digital. But digital technology has continued to make leaps and bounds in […]
The Open Call for the 2013 Karen Schmeer Editing Fellowship has been announced. The fellowship, which comes with a cash prize as well as various mentorship activities, is currently accepting applications and has a deadline of September 28, 2012. From the website: The Karen Schmeer Film Editing Fellowship assists emerging documentary editors by supporting and developing their talent, expanding their creative community, and furthering their career aspirations. In conjunction with American Cinema Editors (ACE) and other partners, the Fellowship, in its third year, offers a wide array of opportunities. The Fellowship is targeted at documentary editors; fiction experience is welcome, […]
Leviathan. You may have heard the title by now. By the time it screened to press, the film had already gained some momentous hype, and I’m pleased to report it does not disappoint. Often exhilarating, Véréna Peraval and Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s creation is a unique viewing experience—loud, disorienting, frightening, exciting and visually awesome. The best film from the main competition, at the very least, Leviathan (above) offers the sort of sensory adventure that cinema can but rarely does offer. Using cheap GoPro digital cameras, the filmmakers show us images and perspectives we’ve never seen before. Apparently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul did not like […]
A rough road from the existential world to the sickie ward to the movie screen, dodging hungry demons and embracing cinematic gems, while maintaining a clear eye on the tall grass on the horizon. For several years, my life revolved around attending film festivals and screening movies and writing reviews. Then the bomb dropped. The C-bomb! Now I’m fighting cancer and enduring chemotherapy and struggling as a whacked-out Chemo Head. Unlike Speed Heads and Flop Heads and Crack Heads, whose chem-soaked brains are tightly wrapped around a single heat-seeking obsession and whose emotions are riveted to one Pavlov […]
I’ve had wind of this for a while, via both filmmaker Kentucker Audley and programmer Miriam Bale (who has a feature on Beasts of the Southern Wild in our current issue), but now the news is public. On September 14 and 15, the 92Y Tribeca will host the first La Di Da film festival, which takes a look at the recent work of a group of post-Mumblecore figures, including Amy Seimetz, the Safdies, Sean Price Williams, Dustin Guy Defa, Alex Karpovsky, Kate Lyn Sheil, Eléonore Hendricks and Audley. In the press release explaining the genesis of the event, Bale says, […]
Brandon Vincent is a Massachusetts-based freelance videographer and editor and a Sony NEX-FS100 owner. He’s had the camera for almost a year, and I recently talked to him about his experience using it. Filmmaker: What kind of work are you shooting? Vincent: I do pretty much whatever comes to me really, but I do a lot of interviews, highlight videos of events, and I do a lot of my own personal stuff. I shot some comedy things. I don’t shoot a lot of documentary work, but it’s something I would like to get into. Filmmaker: When did you get the […]
For years, people misjudged Julie Delpy. A screen actress since the age of nine, by her late teens Delpy was a gorgeous, willowy blonde who perfectly fit the mold of the French cinematic ingénue. After standout performances in films by Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa), Volker Schlöndorff (Voyager) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors: White), Delpy decamped from Europe to America, where she worked both in mainstream Hollywood fare and in more distinguished indie productions, playing muse to directors such as Alan Rudolph, Jim Jarmusch and, most notably, Richard Linklater. But Delpy was far from just a muse. In addition to inspiring […]
Independent film has long been considered the farm leagues for Hollywood’s majors. But with fewer specialized distributors and a risk-averse studio system, do up-and-comers still have the opportunities they once did during the ecstatic exuberance of the sector’s heyday? The crossover success of former DIY filmmakers Lena Dunham (with HBO’s Girls), Sean Durkin (who is developing The Exorcist TV series) and the Duplass brothers (with their studio-indies Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home), suggests that breakthroughs are still very possible. And yet, for every Jeff Nichols (Mud) or Zal Batmanglij (The East), there are numerous filmmakers who have made […]
In the fall of 2007, I interviewed Craig Zobel about his first film as a director, Great World of Sound, a wryly funny drama about scamming “talent scouts.” Zobel, who for some years worked as a UPM and co-producer for David Gordon Green, was on a high after getting great reviews at Sundance earlier that year, selling Sound to Magnolia at SXSW, and then being chosen as one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces in the summer. As we casually chatted before the interview officially began, Zobel talked about a script he had written that was to be his next movie, […]
The pitch — boiled down to its simplest terms, it’s when someone with an idea tries to sell it to someone with the money or resources to get it made. Writers and directors can pitch their own original ideas or pitch their creative skills to win a job on an already-developed for-hire project. For decades, these pitches were purely verbal. They were about “being good in the room.” But today the pitch game is changing, and it’s a harder game to play than ever before. A great verbal presentation is still key, but filmmakers are increasingly supplementing their pitches with […]