It was clear that this would be the year of 4K, but perhaps more surprising is who plans to ship 4K cameras this year. Sony, who actually bought out two new 4K cameras last year – the F5 and F55 – clearly decided they didn’t need to roll out new cameras this year. Instead, they announced ProRes and DNXHD recording options, and a new ENG-style base for these cameras. They also announced that the F5 will be upgradeable to the F55. Perhaps feeling they needed to show something new, Sony invited their consumer camera unit on stage to show off […]
Cancer is taking a toll on our postwar generation of filmmaker activists, and now we mourn Richard Brick. Richard was a coiled spring whose febrile energy made him a one-man power station, radiating waves that enveloped you and insisted that you pay attention. Whether he was running the Mayor’s Office of Film & Television, chairing the Board of Directors of the IFP, helping to run Columbia University’s graduate film school, teaching his famous pre-production class, or trying to bring a director into line (most famously Emir Kusturica), his verve, passion and discipline were a wonder to behold. The various obituaries […]
While today is the official day the exhibition halls open their doors at NAB, last night some companies got to release a sneak peek of some do their new products. Definitely the most exciting in the production field is Ronin, a new handheld gimbal stabilizing system that’s a direct competitor to the MoVI. Like MoVI’s manufacturer, Freefly Systems, Ronin comes from a company with a background in making aerial drones with gyrostabilizers, DJI. They’re probably best known for the Phantom, the GoPro aerial drone that’s made high altitude shots available to just about anyone. While Ronin and MoVI look pretty […]
Welcome to Filmmaker Magazine’s fourth annual digital cinema camera round-up. Each year for reasons of publishing schedule, this overview is written on the brink of the big NAB show in Las Vegas. By the time some of you read this, journalists and bloggers will have breathlessly uploaded each and every scrap of breaking news from the frenzied show floor, saving you the airfare, sore feet, and those Vegas cab fares calibrated to expense accounts. But what do these splashy product introductions mean? Do we need to trade up our cameras? How soon? Are more resolution, bit depth, frame rates, color […]
Anthony Chen has been promoting Ilo Ilo for 10 months and isn’t finished yet: after the UK release in May, a year’s worth of constant interviews and promotional travel may finally be over. Launched at Cannes, Ilo Ilo garnered the Camera d’Or for best first film; a little over three months later, it opened at home in Singapore and became the country’s highest-grossing film of the year. That’s an unusual feat for an emotionally harsh family drama in the arthouse vein. “In Singapore we make about ten films a year,” Chen explained over Skype. “Nine out of ten are usually […]
Richard Brick — producer, Columbia University film professor and the first ever Commissioner of New York City’s Office of Film, Television and Broadcasting — died yesterday at his New York home of cancer. A longtime member of the independent film community, Brick began his career in the early 1970s, when he worked in various capacities, including as director and sound recordist, on documentary shorts. He production managed a number of documentaries, television productions and feature films, including Silkwood, Places in the Heart and Sweet and Lowdown. In the ’80s and ’90s he became an active producer, with such producing and […]
Low-budget period indie films are rare in and of themselves, but to find one which inhabits the war-torn south with such authenticity and veracity as Chris Eska’s The Retrieval is rarer still. Set towards the end of the Civil War, the picture follows young Will (Ashton Sanders), a former slave. Along with his uncle Marcus (Keston John), Will has fallen under the sway of brutal bounty hunter Burrell (an eerily effective Bill Oberst Jr.), who threatens to kill them unless they can retrieve escaped slave Nate (Tishuan Scott). Crossing lush forests that double as battlefields, Will and Nate struggle to survive […]
It’s unlikely many films released this year will lean as heavily on sound design for their overall impact as Jonathan Glazer’s Under The Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name. The director’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s Birth is a warped, haunting melange of sci-fi and cinema vérité which reinvents Hollywood siren Scarlett Johansson as a blank-eyed, cold-hearted alien with a cut-glass English accent. The alien shores up in the Scottish highlands and embarks on an implacable quest which involves cruising around in a white van, looking for hapless local men to “seduce.” Under The […]
This is a brief post-mortem on my last interactive live event at a small interactive festival in Miami called FilmGate 2014. Over the past year, I have been focusing on a few core principles in my work. These are not rules, but questions I return to when making a piece of immersive/interactive work. Rules/audience agency. When we go to a movie, we know the rules. Sit in the dark, eat our popcorn, watch. When designing a new experience, it’s important to communicate the rules to your audience so they can let go of their minds and get immersed. Along with this, […]
I’m a writer-director/producer with a couple of features under my belt. Since the last one was released (Burning Annie), the world’s economy collapsed, half of the studios’ arthouse labels folded, and the audiences for music, books, and film splintered into a million fragments. At the same time, smartphones and app-culture rose to dominance. My new film Laundry Day is in post. As I warily eye the world that I will be releasing my baby into, I’m somewhat alarmed by the large and growing divide between modern audiences and modern distributors, and how inadequate the trends of the moment are for […]