6575 Results for “production”
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Resist, Ye Andalusians!: Seville European Film Festival 2014
The local, national and continental share a happy space at Seville European Film Festival (SEFF). Now 11 editions strong, the Andalusian capital’s chief annual film event boasts a range of movies as healthily varied as southern Spain’s autumnal weather: here a morning shower, there a midday sun, here an established auteur, there an unknown debutant. While diversity is the aspiration of many a film festival, the cost is often quality. Now under artistic director José Luis Cienfuegos for three years, though, SEFF has done well to carve out its current position as the festival calendar’s prime place to discover quality […]
by Michael Pattison on Nov 18, 2014 -
Should Documentary Filmmakers Be Friends with Their Subjects?
Luke Korem is in the final days of an Indiegogo campaign to fundraise for Dealt, his documentary on the amazing blind card magician Richard Turner. During the course of filmmaking, he’s become friends with Turner, and below he discusses that friendship within the framework of documentary ethics and practice. Read and consider visiting his Indiegogo page and contributing. It’s the question every documentary filmmaker will at some point ask themselves: “How close should I get to my subject?” Making a documentary is like running a marathon with no definite end in sight. It takes time and 100% commitment to your subject. For anyone […]
by Luke Korem on Nov 17, 2014 -
“The Lingua Franca of Non-Fiction Filmmaking Should be the Language of Cinema, Not Grant Applications”: Sundance Documentary Film Program Director Tabitha Jackson at DOC NYC
“We have to make artful films,” declared Tabitha Jackson at this morning’s DOC NYC keynote. Her thoughtful and engaging address — accompanied, half-jokingly, by what she dubbed her first attempt at Powerpoint — was filled not with statistics about audience reach or NGO partnerships but instead illustrations drawn from documentaries as well as poetry, visual art and experimental films. Indeed, this Director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program — one of the field’s most important funders — could not have been clearer about the direction she intends to bring to the program when she said, to applause, “The lingua franca […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 17, 2014 -
Bridging Ford and Antonioni with Jack Nicholson: Monte Hellman on The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind
In July of 1964, director Monte Hellman and actor Jack Nicholson went to the Philippines to shoot two war movies back to back: Flight to Fury, which Nicholson also wrote, and Back Door to Hell. By June of 1965, Hellman and Nicholson had shot two more movies, the Westerns The Shooting (written by future Five Easy Pieces scribe Carole Eastman under the pseudonym Adrien Joyce) and Ride in the Whirlwind (scripted by Nicholson). Four movies in twelve months, and not one of them shows any sense of a director straining against limitations of time and money. To the contrary, The Shooting is a flat-out masterpiece, a […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 17, 2014 -
Five Questions for Sex and Broadcasting Director Tim K. Smith
The title Sex and Broadcasting may be a grabber, but I doubt any listener of WFMU — and, over the years, there have undoubtedly been millions — needs the hint of salaciousness to tune in to a documentary about the country’s preeminent long-running free form radio station. Indeed, the URL of the film’s website — WFMUtheMovie — might just suffice. In a landscape of Clear Channel-produced corporate playlists, WFMU’s rambunctious, highly personal and often deeply weird deejays continue to offer not just a palette for the ears but an inspiring and enduring vision of independent media. Longtime documentary editor Tim […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2014 -
“It’s Such a Weird Story”: Bennett Miller on Foxcatcher
When I wrote about Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher a couple of months ago after seeing it at the Telluride Film Festival, I called it “extraordinary… a subtle yet extremely unnerving examination of how family, class, and competition inform and are informed by the American dream.” There’s always a little danger in writing about a movie in the heat of film festival hysteria, as one can easily overrate (or underrate) a film under the pressure of weighing in with an immediate opinion. In the time since Telluride, however, my admiration for Foxcatcher has only grown upon reflection; the supremely confident restraint of Miller’s visual style and the psychologically and […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 13, 2014 -
2014 Cinema Eye Honors Nominees Announced
The nominees have been announced for the eighth annual Cinema Eye Honors (of which Filmmaker is an industry sponsor), which recognize outstanding achievements in documentary filmmaking. A quick breakdown: CITIZENFOUR (the cover story subject of our latest issue) leads the pack with six nominations, closely followed by Life Itself and 20,000 Days on Earth with five apiece. Below, find the bulk of the nominations. For more information, visit the Cinema Eye Honors website, which also contains more trivia and facts about the nominees in each category. The Cinema Eye Honors winners will be announced on Wednesday, January 7 at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 12, 2014 -
“There are No Restrictions, Except For Pornographic Material:” Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld on High Maintenance
High Maintenance, the widely reputed, gold standard of web series, began as an experiment of sorts between Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld. When interviewed for our 2013 25 New Faces issue, the pair expressed the foremost need to “get out all these weird stories that have happened over the years.” Now Vimeo’s first venture into original programming, the husband and wife team are pushing the envelope in a whole new way. With episodes nearing a 20-minute runtime and tonal highs and lows as accomplished as any feature film, High Maintenance challenges the very serial format it calls home. As of today, all three episodes from […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 11, 2014 -
Blackmagic Releases a Free Version of Fusion 7
Back in September Blackmagic announced they had purchased eyeon Software, developers of the high-end VFX application Fusion 7. And now they have done the same thing they did after acquiring DaVinci Resolve; they have drastically slashed the price of the application. You can get Fusion 7 for free, or buy Fusion 7 Studio for $995. The base version supports 3D compositing, paint, rotoscoping, retiming, stabilization, and titling. Fusion 7 Studio adds features such as optical flow, stereoscopic 3D, support for OpenFX plug-ins and distributed network rendering. Fusion Studio 7 also includes a multi-user workflow and collaboration tool called Generation and […]
by Michael Murie on Nov 11, 2014 -
The Reagan Years Producer Sierra Pettengill on the Textures of Archival Footage, the Value of Community and Pitching at CPH:FORUM
In the decade after graduating magna cum laude from Boston University, Sierra Pettengill hasn’t wasted much time carving a niche for herself in competitive New York City as an award-winning producer. Originally from nearby Nassau County, she has utilized her wide-ranging interests, innate curiosity, whip-smart instincts and indefatigable work ethic to establish herself rather quickly in an increasingly tough marketplace. She was exposed early on in her career to the PBS model as an associate producer for American Experience’s Walt Whitman (an Emmy Award nominee in 2008), and Triangle Fire, a Peabody Award recipient in 2009. She would partner again […]
by Pamela Cohn on Nov 11, 2014
