The Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which ran January 7-10 in Las Vegas, is not the place to see the latest pro gear, but it is a good place to see the general direction of the electronics entertainment industry. Just a couple of years ago 3D was the rage, with manufacturers showing off their 3D displays and headsets. By all reports, 3D wasn’t so hot this year. Instead, we saw the first salvos in the 4K battle to convince consumers to part with their money for another high-end display. But when it comes to televisions, 2013 may be seen as the […]
Three thirtysomething buddies reunite for a funeral in a sleepy Massachusetts fishing hamlet in Tom O’Brien’s finely tuned Fairhaven. They beat about the shores of this southeastern Massachusetts town in the dead of brutal winter, one which ace DP Peter Simonite photographs in such a way as to chill the bones of attentive audience members–even ones who don’t find themselves, or this movie, which debuts today both theatrically and on VOD, in a typically over air-conditioned modern movie house. Close knit and working class, the milieu of O’Brien’s movie is at once confining and comforting for its three leads. Jon […]
Nothing like a good fiscal crisis to get things moving in our federal government. After months of speculation and hand-wringing, the often misunderstood and underutilized Section 181 is back for producers, and it’s retroactive to 2012! Here are the specifics: The recently-enacted American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012, which halted various tax increases scheduled to go into effect as part of the fiscal cliff, also retroactively extended the temporary rules for deducting certain film and television production expenses. The provision, Section 181 of the Internal Revenue Code, generally allows a deduction of up to $15,000,000 of the cost of a […]
With more than 106,000,000 unique monthly visitors and 2 billion views worldwide, Dailymotion is one of the leading video sharing sites in existence. They already offer 34 localized versions, in 16 different languages, and are steadfastly committed to providing an easy-to-use forum for high-quality and HD video to be shared online via their own users, independent content creators and premium partners. Dailymotion’s official squad of creators, known as “Motionmakers,” is free to join and grants access to benefits such as streaming in 1080p HD, 3D and live, participation in contests and festivals, priority positioning on the site and its search engine and […]
At the Museum of the Moving Image last night, Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras took the headlines at the Cinema Eye Honors by taking the top prize, Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Feature Filmmaking, while Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Detropia also took two prizes, for directing and score. Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims (2012 “25 New Faces” alums for their film Only the Young) won Best Debut Feature, while a slew of acclaimed 2012 docs such as Chasing Ice, How to Survive a Plague, Bully, The Imposter and Searching for Sugar Man picked up statuettes too. With the announcement this morning […]
In Part Two of this interview with Patrick Moreau of StillMotion, Moreau discusses the settings used while filming the short film Pulse with the Canon C100, as well as the lenses and audio hardware they used. He also discusses intercutting footage from the Canon C100 with other cameras. See also: Pulse: Shooting with the Canon C100 Part One Filmmaker: For this project you were recording to AVCHD? Moreau: Yes. We used AVCHD in this situation because we wanted it to be as natural as possible, which is possible with this small footprint. We did an AT&T campaign for the Olympics […]
New York-based Deborah Twiss burst on the scene as the co-writer and star of the 1997 thriller, A Gun for Jennifer. The film achieved cult success in the U.S. and abroad, and since then Twiss has built a diverse career by juggling multiple hats. For Eric Schaeffer’s After Fall, Winter, she co-produced and acted. For School of Rock: Zombie Etiquette, she starred and wrote. She wrote and directed her own feature, In Between, in 2005, and she also regularly appears in both mainstream movies (Kick-Ass) and television (Law and Order). Now she’s producing and wrote the screenplay for a psychological […]
What began as a short film, Joshua Tree 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, became a feature film almost by the insistence of social media. Director/writer Matthew Mishory says the initial shoot for the film took place in Joshua Tree, California, over a few days in 2010. When he returned to Los Angeles, he edited a trailer and posted it online, not thinking much of what would happen. Almost immediately the trailer went viral and expectation was that it was going to be a feature film. “Our production team got together and decided, well, we really ought to be making […]
When manufacturers are preparing a new camera for release, they often loan pre-production units to filmmakers in the hope that they’ll make a video the company can use to promote the camera. Such is the case with the Canon C100. Canon loaned the filmmakers of StillMotion two C100 bodies and financed the making of a short video, Pulse. As StillMotion described in their blog post on the making of the video, the idea for the video came from a potential client: We’d recently been approached to make a Kickstarter film for a team who had created a pretty remarkable innovation […]
Public transit’s always been a great place for art, from busking musicians to the New York MTA’s current Sam Shaw photography exhibit, sponsored by Arts for Transit. Such exhibits are often moving in the direction of narrative media, and today the Toronto Transit Commission is launching a new project that explores the boundaries between public art and a good old-fashioned transmedia detective story. Every day for the next two months a new thirty-second episode of Murder in Passing will play in the Toronto subway. The series, which adds up to a roughly twenty-minute film, begins today with the discovery of […]