6576 Results for “production”
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Long-Term Care: How to Archive Your Film
Your film is done. Audiences have laughed and cried while watching it. You got a week-long run in New York and Los Angeles. Soon your aunt in Springfield will be able to watch it on Netflix and have a strained telephone conversation about how “interesting” it is. On to the next project! Not so fast. You need to archive your film now. Put down your storyboard for your next picture and help preserve your old one first. The Film Foundation estimates that “one half of all films made before 1950, and over 80 percent made before 1929 are lost forever.” […]
by Sergio Andrés Lobo-Navia on Jan 20, 2016 -
Editor’s Letter
I met with a director recently, and as I sat down I asked him about the small book he was reading, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. It’s a philosophical book about climate change, and the thesis is that we’ve passed a tipping point in terms of our relationship with our planet. We’re on the other side — we’re screwed — and we must not only learn to adapt but also to reorganize within new political, social and cultural institutions. We will have to do this in purely practical ways, author Roy Scranton argues, but also in terms of storytelling. We […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2016 -
Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews Krisha Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted. Winner […]
by David Lowery on Jan 20, 2016 -
Prime Time: Jacob Gentry’s Synchronicity
Among Synchronicity director Jacob Gentry’s formidable gifts is a sharpened sensitivity to context, background, and setting that frees him to put in his characters’ mouths dialogue that might seem in the hands of less attuned writer/filmmakers overblown, at best chuckle-worthy in its impropriety. After all, even before being forged into a balanced partnership, these variables are already so complex. Consider the following line from the film as if it were a stand-alone: “Time is a great teacher that eventually kills all its students.” It does express a truism, but it also sounds, and reads, pretentious. One of several correctives would […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jan 15, 2016 -
The Jaunt ONE — Development of a VR Camera
The past year has seen a lot of development in VR cameras – cameras that can shoot 360-degree video. Offerings range from inexpensive rigs for mounting multiple GoPros to custom units that cost many thousands of dollars. It’s an interesting field for sports and experiences, though it remains to be seen how this will impact narrative film making. We recently spoke to Koji Gardiner, Jaunt’s Director of Hardware Engineering, about their Jaunt ONE camera. This is a single unit that contains 24 camera mechanisms. After two years of development the unit is now being used for a variety of production […]
by Michael Murie on Jan 12, 2016 -
Anomalisa, Stop-Motion Animation and How 3D Printers are Changing Filmmaking
Remember stop-motion, that venerable technique of animated films ranging from old-time children’s classics by Rankin/Bass to sword-and-sandals epics by Ray Harryhausen? Given the success of Pixar’s movies, Minions and other computer-animated features, you might have thought that 2D, hand-drawn, and traditional stop-motion has been relegated to the dust bin of history. Well, if you are a fan of these styles, don’t lose hope just yet. Opening just before the New Year was Charlie Kaufman’s much-anticipated directorial follow up to 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa. Directed by Kaufman and Duke Johnson, it’s being touted for its unique amalgam of animation processes […]
by Christianne Hedtke on Jan 11, 2016 -
A Suburban Megachurch in John Hughes Territory: Stephen Cone on Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party
Simultaneously a rebellious yell against Christian authority and an appreciation for growing up with evangelical values, Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is neither religious condemnation nor agitprop. Its title character is a gay teenager celebrating his birthday with friends and family; the film, unfolding over 24 hours, keenly observes how temptation and buried secrets can rise to the surface when theological and political debates make their presence known. A rather sexy movie — in part because premarital sex is presented as something risqué or taboo — Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party is a beautifully rendered, impeccably scored experience that makes a profound, heady impact. There’s an interesting moment featuring a conversation […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 8, 2016 -
“All My Characters Are Like Buster Keaton”: Corneliu Porumboiu on The Treasure
Corneliu Porumboiu is the most drolly despairing filmmaker of the Romanian New Wave. His previous narrative feature, When Nights Falls on Bucharest, or Metabolism, followed a director in the middle of production breaks off an affair with his lead actress while exasperating his patient producer. The opening shot is the director discoursing pedantically on the merits of celluloid; the movie was itself shot on film, and the joke is that this opening shot lasts exactly as long as one reel — deep drollery indeed. Following 2014’s one-off experiment The Second Game (in which Porumboiu and his dad watch a VHS tape of a Ceaușescu-era soccer game […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 8, 2016 -
Christian Carnality: Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party
The below review of Stephen Cone’s Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party was originally posted on June 16 as part of a review of BAMcinemafest. It is being reposted to coincide with the film’s opening as part of the IFP Screen Forward series. A nearly lily-white poolside birthday party in the upper-middle-class Chicago backyard of exuberant, righteous minister “Pastor Bob” Campbell (Pat Healy) and his gorgeous, younger, joyless wife Kat (Elizabeth Laidlaw) celebrates the seventeenth birthday of their handsome, blond-haired, blue-eyed son Henry — the nice, polite, and well-liked boy parents are proud to call their own. Like many youths his age, […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jan 7, 2016 -
2015 in Ten Double Features
Every cinephile knows the curatorial bliss of a great double feature. A flexing of film nerd muscles while sitting on your ass for three to five hours, a double bill brings two films into dialogue with one another based on style, subject, theme, or whatever connective tissue you can find. Double features, like well-sequenced mixtapes, require the instincts of a programmer. Thanks to streaming, digital rentals, and the perennial ease of sneaking into a second film at your local AMC, the work of making a double bill happen has never been easier. Below, I rally through 10 great double features from […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 5, 2016
