6575 Results for “production”
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Sunshine Superman Director Marah Strauch on BASE Jumping, Interview Technique and Recreations as an Imaginative Space
Piling off cliffs and from airplanes, locking arms in the air or tumbling singly, the divers in Marah Strauch’s compelling documentary, Sunshine Superman, are simply hypnotic to watch. Seen mostly in archival footage culled from 250 hours of material, their forms take on a near-abstract quality — a quality that seduced first-time director Strauch to transition from experimental installation art work to documentary film. Her long-in-the-works Sunshine Superman, about pioneering BASE jumper Carl Boenish (he coined the acronym, which stands for building, antennae, span and earth) and his wife Jean, is a mixture of love story, human mystery and extreme […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 4, 2014 -
Joel Bach and David Gelber on Years of Living Dangerously
The title Years of Living Dangerously could just as easily refer to the time its creators spent producing the recent series, and it has indeed been a busy few years for the journalists-turned-film producers Joel Bach and David Gelber. The pair left their posts at 60 Minutes several years ago to pursue a passion project, a long-form documentary on global warming. The result was a nine-part series that aired on Showtime this spring and, last week, took home the Emmy for the best nonfiction series, beating out Fox’s fantastic, much-lauded series Cosmos. Now the team is gearing up for phase two of the release, a DVD […]
by Randy Astle on Sep 3, 2014 -
Watch: How Color Correction Alters a Film’s Tone
Color correction is often the least talked about, most overlooked portion of the post-production process. Alex Bickel has spoken out about how grading can alter the presumed production value of a film, and a recent guest post from Michael Medaglia and Jalal Jemison discussed the importance of communicating your story through the process. This video from the International Colorist Academy offers a nice visual supplement to the aforementioned claims, as it demonstrates the colorist’s ability to amend the tone and context of any given scene. When it comes to transforming day to night, and romance to horror, some things can be left […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 2, 2014 -
12 Picks for the SXSW PanelPicker
Not five months after the mammoth festival wraps, SXSW opens up their PanelPicker site, an online forum which aggregates all industry and filmmaker programming pitches for their next conference. Last year, I went through the offerings and highlighted 15 that piqued my interest; this year, the stakes are higher, and I’m down to 12 from the 183 listed. You have till September 5 to vote on your favorites. How “High Maintenance” Is Redefining Storytelling I fondly recall the day former Managing Editor Nick Dawson sent me a link to an episode of High Maintenance some 18 months back. Since then, Ben Sinclair and […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 29, 2014 -
Blackmagic Does Manhattan
On August 13 the disruptive Australian company Blackmagic Design took over the Grand Ballroom at the historic New Yorker Hotel at 8th & 34th to showcase their growing stable of switchers, signal converters, encoders, routers, and test equipment along with their latest unorthodox production products: cameras, monitors, disk recorders, and grading/NLE software. Plus a new scanner for film transfer. Call it a make-up day for Northeast media makers who missed out on Blackmagic’s crowded NAB booth this year. Since few companies boast the range of products Blackmagic now produces, no less their erosive pricing, it made good marketing sense to also […]
by David Leitner on Aug 27, 2014 -
ARRI AMIRA To Do 4K, New GoPro Tutorials, and a New 50mm Cine Lens from Samyang
In a move that says a lot about the unrelenting pressure to move to 4K, ARRI has announced that they will release a 4K UHD upgrade for the AMIRA by the end of the year. This upgrade will provide in-camera recording of 3840 x 2160 UHD video at up to 60 fps to CFast cards in ProRes, as well as live uncompressed UHD output through 6G-SDI. For the past year, ARRI has been discouraging the move to 4K, stressing that image quality is more important than the total resolution of the image, and with this announcement they continue this message: […]
by Michael Murie on Aug 27, 2014 -
Stray Links, 8/18-8/21: Orson Welles’ First Film is Online and Chinese Film History
This week’s round-up of suggested reading is all film-related for a change: • The China Digital Times conducts a long, fascinating interview with Paul Pickowicz, an authority on Chinese cinema who talks about studying film in China from 1982-83 as an “unwelcome guest,” shifting trends in national anxieties as expressed on-screen through the decades, how long-dead political affiliations shape the government’s choice of which films from pre-1949 to promote as canonical, and much more. It may be the most interesting film-related thing I’ve read all week. • Kurmanzhan Datka: Queen of the Mountains, a Kyrgyzstani epic about a 19th-century hero, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 21, 2014 -
Life’s Compass: Talena Sanders on Liahona
Liahona begins with distant figures walking silently through a field. It is nighttime, and both the sky and the ground seem to sparkle. The people move slowly while wearing glittering and flickeringly feathered costumes that, from a distance, make them appear to be extraterrestrial. Within the scope of modern American culture, perhaps they are: they’re members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, known more commonly as Mormons. This opening sequence of American filmmaker Talena Sanders’s 2013 debut feature — which will screen in September at Brazil’s Indie Festival, following sessions at FIDMarseille and at last year’s New York Film Festival — […]
by Aaron Cutler on Aug 20, 2014 -
Last Looks: The 2014 Locarno Film Festival
[Paul Dallas’ first report can be read here.] Time wasted and time well spent — a ratio every festivalgoer has to work out when gambling on what to see and miss. At Locarno this year, one had to decide whether or not to devote five hours and forty minutes to a single competition film, the equivalent of four Italian classics from the wonderful Titanus retrospective. It wasn’t easy when the former was Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, an early frontrunner and eventual winner of the Golden Leopard, and the latter all screened on 35mm — an increasingly powerful incentive […]
by Paul Dallas on Aug 19, 2014 -
“Burn That Film! Burn It!” Tsui Hark and Patrick Lung Kong on A Better Tomorrow
It’s not every day a director comes on stage in Buddhist monk’s garb and slippers, but such was Patrick Lung Kong’s refreshingly idiosyncratic appearance Saturday night at Queens’ Museum of the Moving Image, two days into a two weekend retro of his work. To his right was Tsui Hark, who himself reshaped the Hong Kong film industry multiple times: with 1986’s Peking Opera Blues, a breakthrough moment for international recognition of HK martial arts fare, 1992’s Once Upon a Time in China, and as producer on John Woo’s 1986 A Better Tomorrow, among many other instances. 1967’s The Story of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 19, 2014
