This fifth and final installment of Time Frames draws on The Media History Digital Library, a reservoir of information about early cinema that includes the sorts of magazines, journals, and trade publications that, in the pre-digital era, had only been available to those able to travel to research libraries. At over 800,000 scanned pages and growing, the collection is daunting. In Time Frames I’ll cull through and select a series of images and text from the collection to highlight key transformative moments in the film culture and industry, as well as other oddities and obscure artifacts. For this final installment I’ve focused on the remainders, those […]
The following is a guest post from filmmaker Bryan Poyser, who is currently crowdfunding the road show for his most recent film, The Bounceback. Bryan’s A.S.A. (Air Sexes As) name is “Lunchmeat.” I am currently in the midst of what must be the longest month and a half of my life. On October 4, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a “Road Show” for my film The Bounceback, which will wrap up this Sunday, Nov. 17th. I’ve barely been sleeping, I’ve had depressive lows and giddy highs, nearly all of my pride has been swallowed and yet […]
Only 32% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. That figure, coming from the organization A Human Right, means that 4.6 billion people are effectively left out of the Information Age that most of us take for granted. Individuals and organizations across the world are working to ameliorate that and spread online connectivity into underdeveloped and rural areas from the U.S. to Kazakhstan. And films like Tiffany Shlain’s Connected (2011) are starting to probe what can happen to global consciousness when the collective wisdom of the world, not just our meager social networks, are finally truly linked together. […]
Keeping apace with camera technology is like running a race where the finish line keeps on moving. Just as the next generation of games consoles go on sale boasting the ability to display 4K images (although for the moment only those with the salary of a pro-footballer can afford screens able to make use of all those pixels) Japanese broadcaster NHK has started to film and broadcast events in 8K. NHK are so excited about the technology that they have commissioned filmmakers to make short films showcasing 8K, which were screened at the recent Tokyo International Film Festival. I went […]
The coming-of-age tale is a durable independent film genre, but it takes on added political and personal dimensions in I Learn America, Jean-Michel Dissard and Gitte Peng’s documentary about five new teenage immigrants within New York’s public school system. Dissard, a dual citizen who immigrated himself from France when he was a teenager (and with whom I worked with on Raising Victor Vargas), and Peng, an education reform expert who worked in the Bloomberg administration, embrace within the film the emotional complexity of their subjects’ lives while an exhaustive outreach campaign amplifies its various messages and policy implications. I Learn […]
Today, Blackmagic Design announced the release of the first and long-awaited software update for their Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. The 1.5 upgrade adds a 12-bit Log CinemaDNG RAW recording file so users can capture extensive dynamic range — the brightest highlights and darkest shadows — in a single file. The new addition will allow for lossless quality when images are decompressed, and greater flexibility in the color grading process. Further, users can begin editing or color correcting directly from an SD card, which will facilitate the post-production workload. A nice function for a camera that runs under $1000. The Blackmagic […]
George Orwell claimed in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that English was in a bad way: common consensus (which he was satirizing) held “that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes.” His own opinion was more that “the decline of language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer.” Thus it could be resisted: “Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and […]
1961 — I drove up to the gate of 20th Century Fox studios and hesitantly gave my name to the guard. I had an uneasy moment watching him look at a pad before he greeted me with “Good morning, Mr. Baron” and waved me forward. I steered my car under the elevated train set of Funny Girl and passed several soundstages to a parking area with my name in large white letters written on it. I got out of my car and paused to look at the surrounding studio activity, and the question. “How the hell did I get here?” […]
Situated in the southwestern part of Germany where the Rhine and the Neckar meet, Mannheim, like its sibling city Heidelberg – located upstream from Mannheim on the Neckar and a half hour away – is a university town. Only the University of Mannheim is housed in the 18th century Mannheim Palace, a massive baroque extravaganza that resembles Versailles more than any learning institution I’ve ever encountered. And even that pales in comparison to Heidelberg Castle, still partially in ruins since the Renaissance structure was demolished in the 17th and 18th centuries. This quaint city’s imposing castle emerges from the forested […]
In parts I & II of our interview with Gez Medinger, the co-director of AfterDeath, we covered finding the story, script development, and the difficulties of finding locations and cast. In this final part of the interview, Medinger talks about co-directing a feature, offers some advice for first time filmmakers, and attempts to explain what it’s really like to make your first movie. The film is currently in post-production, and is expected to be released in early 2014. Filmmaker: You and Robin Schmidt are co-directors on the movie. How does that work? Medinger: Robin and I have both directed […]