In the first season of Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the titular teenaged demigod and his compatriots travel across the country, with stops from St. Louis to Las Vegas, on a mission to prevent war among the Greek gods. However, cinematographer Pierre Gill and his crew never left the vicinity of Vancouver. Percy Jackson is the first show to use Industrial Light & Magic’s new 20,000-square-foot StageCraft Volume in the Canadian city. Gill estimates 30 percent of his episodes were shot in the virtual production environment on its 95-foot LED wall. With the show now streaming in its entirety […]
Sugarcane, co-directed by journalists Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is an investigation into the abuse and missing persons cases at an indigenous residential school and the associated tumult on the nearby Reserve. It is the debut film by NoiseCat, a former policy with personal ties to the community, and the second, after A Girl Named C, for Kassie. Christopher LaMarca served as cinematographer, his second such credit, after Ry Russo-Young’s Nuclear Family. Below, he discusses some of the challenges peculiar to shooting verité films. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you […]
In making Maestro, his magisterial portrait of Leonard Bernstein, Bradley Cooper set out to explore the life of the legendary American conductor and composer through the lens of his complicated relationship with wife Felicia Montealegre, which lasted from the 1940s until her death in 1978. Depicting their love story across four decades, two engagements and three children, Cooper—who directed, co-wrote, co-produced and starred in the biopic—often approached Maestro “as if he was conducting a musical symphony,” according to production designer Kevin Thompson. Envisioning its story in movements, Cooper opted for period shifts in color and black-and-white (both in a 1.33 […]
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. Ethan Tobman describes production design as the art of “visually interpreting the world of a director through emotional architecture.” Below, he and director Mark Mylod discuss their film The Menu and going from reference images on the wall to a fully realized world structured to best absorb the viewer emotionally while furthering the narrative (along with meticulously crafting a last-minute birthday cake […]
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. At the heart of production designer Akin McKenzie and writer-director Terence Nance’s long-running collaboration is a mutual recognition of the importance of, as Nance puts it, “creative execution that flows from emotional framework.” The two first worked together on the Peabody-award-winning HBO show Random Acts of Flyness and went on to create Space Jam: A New Legacy and award-winning commercial campaigns for […]
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. In the first episode of The Wilds, one of the main characters is introduced via a quick beat of her smoking a cigarette on her family’s back deck with a nicotine-stained, pink flamingo ashtray nestled on the rail nearby. Sara K White, the show’s production designer, recalls: “We were working to build out Dot’s character—a girl who doesn’t come from money and […]
Ahead of the launch of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of meetings between directors and production designers in which they discuss the particularities about their working dynamics as well as how production design can elevate the vision of a filmmaker. Derek Cianfrance and Inbal Weinberg first collaborated on Blue Valentine, which set the stage for exploration and discovery. They continued to experiment with environment and process on such projects as The Place Beyond The Pines and I Know This Much Is True. Here they discuss the delicate balance of artifice and authenticity […]
Ahead of the first-ever International Production Design Week, the Production Designers Collective has coordinated a series of interviews with directors and production designers, in which they discuss their working dynamics and mutual passion for the craft of storytelling. Below, is the first of these conversations published at Filmmaker, a conversation between production designer Jade Healy and director David Lowery. Their first collaboration had them wearing different hats. Shot in Costa Rica, It Was Great, But I Was Ready to Come Home was written by four friends, among them Jade Healy, an actress, and David Lowery, sound designer and editor. Years later, as […]
Rathaus, the New York and Detroit-based production company behind such films as Tim Sutton’s Funny Face, Cedric Cheung-Lau’s The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me and Diana Peralta’s De Lo Mio, has announced a new grant supporting Detroit-based filmmakers. The Rathaus Film Grant will give $10,000 to one moving image artist in support of a short film, feature film, documentary, hybrid piece, or video art. Funds are unrestricted. As the FAQ notes, they “can be used in any way that significantly progresses your project forward. This could be anything from; supporting you to take time off to write […]
Vu just announced a new product that aims to make virtual production a lot more accessible: the Vu One. It’s two parts. One part turnkey virtual production studio in a (very, very, big) box. One part Vu’s Virtual Studio, a software platform that makes creating and running virtual scenes a lot easier. Let’s break down both parts. Complete Virtual Production Setup Vu One offers a complete, configurable VP setup, which includes: LED Wall by Unilumin, with sizing starting at 13×9 ft Media Server by Puget Systems LED Processor by Megapixel Stereoscopic camera tracker (more on that below) Optional camera tracker […]