6576 Results for “production”
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“Character, as Always, Proved to Be King”: Directors Susan Froemke and John Hoffman | Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? The biggest challenge was working concurrently with an author who was profiling the same subjects but in a different medium. Print and film lend themselves to different ways of storytelling. The flood of information constantly coming at us from the author, with so much color, complexity, and detail, took time to sort through and evaluate in terms of what was best suited to film. We sometimes suffered […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2017 -
DPs Bob Richman, Buddy Squires and Thorsten Thielow on Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
It took a team of four seasoned documentary DPs to capture the stories of Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman. Shot in Montana, Kansas and Louisiana, the film documents the lives of three men (the titular rancher, farmer and fisherman) who act as environmental conservationists in their respective fields. Directors Susan Froemke and John Hoffman have the action unfold in a vérité fashion, which stresses the land and the people who work it. Among the DPs they hired for the project were Bob Richman (An Inconvenient Truth), Buddy Squires (The Central Park Five) and Thorsten Thielow (30 for 30). Below, these three cinematographers discuss the unique challenges […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2017 -
“Mistakes Are What Make Life Interesting”: Director Helene Hegemann | Axolotl Roadkill
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? Axolotl Overkill is about a 16-year old girl, but was never supposed to be the typical coming-of-age odyssey that shows a teenager who struggles with the world just to find her place in it in the end. We always felt like we needed to do something different and to really make it relatable to how a young person feels – instead of showing her from the outside and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2017 -
A Slice of Southern Life: DP Dustin Lane on Dayveon
Hailed one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in 2016, Amman Abbasi makes his Sundance and feature film debut with Dayveon. The film stars Devin Blackmon as a 13-year-old kid coping with the violent death of his older brother in small-town Arkansas. Given the setting, age of the characters and Abbasi’s lyrical approach to the story, the film has strong echoes of George Washington by David Gordon Green, who served as an executive producer here. Below, Filmmaker speaks with Dayveon DP Dustin Lane about his connection to the American South, shooting in a small town and his visual approach to this story. Filmmaker: How […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2017 -
“How Can You Make an Elephant Communicate Different Emotions?”: Director Kristen Tan | Pop Aye
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? How can you make an elephant communicate different emotions? This was a challenge I found myself saddled with during the production of Pop Aye. Obviously, there’s a tight balancing act involved here. I did not want the elephant to be cloyingly expressive or overtly cute — we’re not making a children’s film here. I wanted him to have the same kind of nuanced and naturalistic performance as […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2017 -
“Film Has a Unique Ability to Transcend Barriers”: Director Amman Abbasi | Dayveon
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? One of the great powers of cinema is its ability to create empathy and communicate with the world. How people live, what people dream of, what we all struggle with. Ultimately it’s all pretty similar and, in my opinion, film has a unique ability to transcend barriers of place, time and condition to allow us to understand we all are more alike than different. In my opinion, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2017 -
Pink Skies and Poetic Artifacts: DP Linus Sandgren on La La Land
Early in La La Land, Emma Stone’s aspiring actress rises from a restaurant conversation about the unpleasantness of contemporary moviegoing and sprints to the Rialto Theatre to take in Rebel Without a Cause with Ryan Gosling’s intractably traditionalist jazz pianist. The burst of exuberance doesn’t last. The Rialto later closes down and as Gosling waxes poetic about jazz’s declining cultural relevance you begin to feel that for La La Land jazz is just a surrogate for the state of film itself. La La Land is an ode to the magic of movies – at a time when going to the movies has […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 18, 2017 -
Hits & Misses: The Theatrical Performance of the Sundance Class of ’16
How do you measure success these days? When more than two million people vote for you over the other guy and you still lose? When you receive no endorsements from a single major newspaper, your party’s leadership practically ignores you, and you still win? Or, perhaps, when your heralded Sundance acquisition earns a whopping $15.8 million at the box office, but you spend more than twice that in acquisition fees and prints and advertising costs to release it? (i.e., The Birth of a Nation). How about if your film isn’t released in theaters at all, but Netflix paid $5 million […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2017 -
Paradigms of Change
“Let us use our cameras to build our communities, strong, healthy and with joy.” This seemingly low-key imperative serves as a radical foundation for the Black Feminist Film School, an evolving assemblage of tools, traditions and teaching that supports the telling of stories about the Black experience founded and led by scholar/practitioners Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Julia Roxanne Wallace. Both Gumbs and Wallace can boast a long list of academic credentials. Gumbs holds a doctorate degree in English, African and African-American studies and women and gender studies from Duke University, and she was the first scholar to research the Audre […]
by Holly Willis on Jan 18, 2017 -
Dispatches from the Frontlines of a Studio Picture, Part 2
This is my second and final installment detailing a few of the experiences I’ve had and lessons I’ve learned while working on my first studio picture. We wrapped principal photography back in October, so I’ve had a couple months to digest the massive meal that was. Luckily, everyone seems happy with our efforts — which is a big deal, because it’s not just about you and the director feeling good about yourselves at the end of each day. On a studio film as a DP, I have been employed by a pretty major corporation to perform a job in an effort to […]
by Sean Porter on Jan 18, 2017
