6576 Results for “production”
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Jess dela Merced
Children and pyro — two things they admonish first-time filmmakers to avoid. But tell that to San Francisco-based filmmaker Jess dela Merced, who is gearing up to make her kid-centric, flame-infused first feature, Chickenshit in Detroit in 2017. It’s the story of a young black girl who teams up with a group of boys to stop an arsonist from burning down their city. “I set out to write an honest story about kids who are living in Detroit,” dela Merced writes in an email, “and as I started writing, it was clear that arson was essential to the authenticity of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016 -
Negative Aspects
Aspect ratios are a film’s canvas; the size of your frame determines the look of your film and is one of the essential questions that a filmmaking team faces in preproduction. Lawrence of Arabia wouldn’t be Lawrence of Arabia if it wasn’t for its incredible widescreen cinematography and sense of scale. Filmed with anamorphic lenses and screened in both 35mm and 70mm, the film was shot and projected at a 2.20:1 aspect ratio. Properly presented in movie houses, the widescreen image would be masked to remove the negative space around the image that we commonly call letterboxing. One would think […]
by Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia on Jul 25, 2016 -
Destini Riley and Nicholas Pilarski
Submitted as evidence in the trial of co-director Destini Riley’s brother, I, Destini is a work of startling power and a fair amount of finesse. An animated documentary that juxtaposes the separate journeys of reckoning for each of Riley’s family members in the wake of her brother’s imprisonment, it meditates on the emotional and psychological toll prison sentences inflict on the families of those left behind. (Riley’s brother, Carlos Antonio, was acquitted of shooting a North Carolina police officer but imprisoned on lesser charges.) An emotionally resonant and imaginatively constructed work of personal remembrance, the short relies on delicately rendered […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016 -
Editor’s Letter
Filmmaker is heading, next issue, into our 24th year, and it struck me that if you strung together our interviews with Ira Sachs, who has appeared in this magazine since his first feature, The Delta, in 1996, you’d have a pretty good micro-history of the American independent film movement. Sachs is deeply ruminative about his own process, and he’s enormously self-aware about his own place in the broader moviemaking apparatus. I always look forward to reading the transcripts of his interviews, and there’s usually an answer or to that gets me thinking — or, in the case of his talk […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 25, 2016 -
Time for Outrage: James Schamus on Indignation
Whether he is pitching a movie, essaying the work of Carl Theodor Dreyer or teaching his Columbia Film Program students Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, writer, producer and now director James Schamus understands the power of discourse. In fact, if you’re a longtime Filmmaker reader, you’ll have read his arguments in these pages over the years, from his “Long Live Indie Film” debate with Ted Hope back in the ’90s of their production company, Good Machine, to his more recent — and mortal — “23 Fragments on the Future of Cinema” just a few issues ago. Now, Schamus continues one […]
by Walter Bernstein on Jul 25, 2016 -
Blood in the Snow
Blood Bath “Wait, what happened?” asks Sid Haig at the end of the entertaining but nonsensical 1966 AIP flick Blood Bath, and one can’t help but wonder if it’s intended as a wry bit of self-critique on the part of screenwriter-director Jack Hill. Hill was neither the first nor the last filmmaker to work on Blood Bath, which had a tortured production history even by producer Roger Corman’s standards — and that is really saying something given Corman’s predilection for reshoots, extensive dubbing, and retitling to transform and resell his pictures. Blood Bath began life as Operation Titian, a lackluster […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 25, 2016 -
MEMORY
“You go see a movie,” says Riel Roch-Decter, “and there are 20 production companies listed at the head of the film. And none of those names mean anything.” Roch-Decter and fellow producer Sebastian Pardo are the heads of one new Los Angeles production company, and its name — MEMORY — is a quiet rebuke to the widget-making mentality that can creep into all but the most focused of moviemaking outfits. Indeed, in MEMORY’s early days, Roch-Decter and Pardo are producing bold films sharing a certain ineffable quality that lodges in your cranium. “We want to make films containing ideas that […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016 -
New Media Ltd.
Over the last nine months, four arresting short works — two short films and two music videos for the electronic psych band Yeasayer — dropped on Vimeo from a new production outfit boasting a defiantly innocuous, almost retro name: New Media Ltd. An elegantly skeletal website — less than 100 words of black, san serif type on a white background — offered not much more than the Vimeo embeds and a link to the company’s commercial rep, Pulse Films. In a world where new companies burst on the scene with sizzle reels, fancy logos and open-bar launch parties, New Media, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 25, 2016 -
The Digital Lowdown
Is online distribution a boon to independent filmmakers or a boatload of false promises? Given that streaming/downloading is the primary way that many audiences are now consuming content, this may be the most pressing and important question for today’s business-savvy independent filmmakers. But it’s difficult to discern the answer. For one reason, the digital distribution revolution is always evolving, and what was standard procedure three years ago is no longer the norm. A few years ago, everyone was talking about multiplatform day-and-date hits Margin Call, Arbitrage and Bachelorette — starry films that received huge grosses through simultaneous theatrical and digital […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jul 25, 2016 -
Because Breaking Up is Hard to Do
As a cinematographer, I’m always looking for the perfect marriage: the director I can lock eyes with to communicate volumes without uttering a word. Someone who knows how to use my work to its best potential, who can challenge my ideas about filmmaking and push me to reach places I didn’t think I could — and then keep going. In my dreams, it never starts and ends with one film. It’s a lifelong journey to seek out something greater. All my heroes have these sorts of relationships: the Coens and Deakins, Allen and Willis, Iñárritu and Prieto (maybe now Lubezki?!). When meeting with directors, […]
by Sean Porter on Jul 25, 2016
