6583 Results for “production”
-
12 Steps to Avoid Going Broke Applying to Film Festivals
The author of this guest essay is a filmmaker whose most recent film is Between Us. He is also the co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival. — Editor I recently wrote an article about 12 Steps to a Saner Festival Plan in which I suggested the volume-method of festivals: Get your film into as many festivals as you can, and build momentum from one to the next. Unfortunately, a lot of people read that article. And the one consistent question I’m getting is if we’re broke filmmakers, how can we afford to apply to so many festivals? Chances are you […]
by Dan Mirvish on Sep 10, 2013 -
Venice 2013 Critic’s Notebook: A Means of Escape — African Cinema on the Lido.
At this year’s Venice Film Festival, there was a conspicuously sparse showing in the programme for native African and African-themed cinema. However, although the majority of these slim pickings were tucked away toward the end of the festival when attendance had thinned considerably (many journalists had either headed home or departed to Toronto), their quality was largely impressive. To varying degrees, these films broached an historically enduring theme in African cinema: the attempts of young people to escape straitened circumstances. The only sub-Saharan representative at the festival — and the most harrowing film I saw overall — was Berlin-based Israeli […]
by Ashley Clark on Sep 9, 2013 -
Five Questions with Beneath the Harvest Sky Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly
Filmmaking team Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly first made their mark on the U.S. independent scene in 2009 with the documentary The Way We Get By, a heartwarming festival favorite about a trio of senior citizens who have spent years greeting U.S. troops returning from combat as they arrive at Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine. Four years on, the pair are once again telling a story set in Maine, but this time it’s a bleak, fictional narrative. Beneath the Harvest Sky, a 2013 IFP Narrative Lab project, tells the story of two teenage best friends whose paths in life are sharply diverging: […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 8, 2013 -
“25 New Face” Rodrigo Reyes on Purgatorio (+ Trailer Premiere)
There’s no lack of films and TV shows focusing on Mexican-American relationships mediated by the border, their focus most commonly on the never-ending drug wars. On TV, The Bridge and Breaking Bad criss-cross between the two countries, mapping out mayhem and violence, as do recent documentaries like 2010’s El Sicario, Room 164, 2011’s El Velador and this year’s Narco Cultura. 2013 “25 New Face” Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio is a different kind of border movie, beginning with footage of rural Mexico as the director urges us, in voiceover, to “try to imagine what the world was like, many, many years ago. Try to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 6, 2013 -
Gabriel Gomez & Julien Melendez on Robert Black and Possessed
Twenty years ago I spent a week with a Boy Scout troop riding a horse through the canyons of Moab in southeast Utah, feeling like young Indiana Jones in the opening sequence of The Last Crusade. Still, the red rocks, the brush, and the steep cliff walls created an ambiance unlike anywhere else, even the better-known national parks in the area like Arches and Zion and Bryce Canyon. While I was riding around half naively admiring the views, cutting edge musicians like Robert Black, a bassist and founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, were discovering Moab’s acoustic […]
by Randy Astle on Sep 6, 2013 -
Color Grading The Kings of Summer
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ coming of age comedy The Kings of Summer premiered successfully at Sundance this year, but it took a hectic few weeks of work to grade and produce the final deliverables in time to make the Sundance submission deadline. The Kings of Summer was graded by Narbeh Tatoussian, senior DI colorist at Blacklist Digital. Tatoussian has worked in the industry for over 16 years. He started in the shipping vault, then moved up through post-production and the QC department before becoming a tape room supervisor, assistant colorist and finally a colorist. During that time he says that’s he’s […]
by Michael Murie on Sep 6, 2013 -
Thank Heaven for Seven: The Best of NewFest
This year marks the 25th anniversary of NewFest (September 6-11), kissin’ cousin of LA’s OutFest. Before the acronym LGBT became a more inclusive umbrella for groups stigmatized on account of sexual and gender preference, an earlier incarnation of a queer film event, The New York Gay Film Festival (1979-1987), was the only game in town. Founded by Peter Lowy, it took place at the Thalia cinema, then a film-buff paradise on the Upper West Side, and filled a huge gap for many of us. Distributors were fearful of gay-themed films. Of the selection, recurring topics included coming out and of […]
by Howard Feinstein on Sep 6, 2013 -
A Woman Under the Influence: Hannah Fidell on A Teacher
Hannah Fidell’s slow-burn character study A Teacher relies on a taut and unsettling performance by Lindsay Burdge in the title role to crawl deep under the skin of the viewer. Diana, a youthful and fetching as a high school teacher, is one of the year’s most fascinating indie film characters; a remote and somewhat coy woman who is nonetheless caught up in a forbidden sexual dalliance with a male student, one which grows from a delicate crush into a dangerous and foreboding full-blown obsession with alarming velocity. That we’re at turns sympathetic to, fascinated and repulsed by Diana is a testament to Burdge’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 5, 2013 -
The Invention of Paramount Pictures
The Media History Digital Library is a goldmine of information about early cinema, 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, and what I plan to do in Time Frames, a five-part series, is 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. It’s perhaps impossible for us not […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Sep 5, 2013 -
Test Footage and Drawbacks of the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera
Many pundits predicted a serious shakeup when Blackmagic announced their new Pocket Cinema Camera back at NAB in April. Priced at just $995, the Super 16 handheld, complete with 13 stops of dynamic range, seem poised to encroach upon DSLR’s steadfast popularity. As the camera underwent initial shipments in August, homegrown test footage began popping up here and there. Dan Chung, co-editor of News Shooter, recently took his BMPCC out for a spin in the Sanlitun area of Beijing — at night. The experiment yielded mixed results. Armed with a Voigtlander 17.5 mm f0.95 lens to maximize light on the […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 4, 2013
