Steve Collins’ You Hurt My Feelings is the story of emotionally remote and unavailable people, a trio of wounded individuals who fail to connect with one another. Though Collins’ film deals with familiar subject matter, its tale is told with such clever minimalism and discernible sweetness that it goes down rather smoothly. While the characters may not be able to express themselves emotionally, Collins and his director of photography, Jeremy Saulnier (Septien, Putty Hill), find real poetry in the changing of the New England seasons, the passage of time providing an even greater window in the the failed lives on display. John […]
A Filmmaker reader recently emailed me with a simple question. After going to film school, making some shorts and working conspicuously within his means, he’s now written a script purely from the imagination — not censoring himself by thinking of things like money and production requirements. The resulting project, I take it, is too big for his usual DIY methods. He asked, “What do I do now?” A tough question, not knowing the filmmaker very well and not having read the script. There are easier-said-than-done answers: “Find a producer! Get an agent!” But just sending out a bunch of PDFs, […]
With her debut documentary, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck reinvented the nature doc. Oreck, an entomologist who worked as a docent at the American Museum of Natural History, made a film about an insect that was as much about man’s fascination with that creature as it was the creature itself. To top it off, she made her poetic and allusive picture in Japan, exploring the country’s endemic beetle-mania through evocative cinematography and haunting voiceover. When so many documentary filmmakers make their artistic choices based on the desires of their funders, Oreck chooses the harder path. Her latest film, Aatsinki, […]
In this second part of an interview with Eric Austin of HeliVideo, Eric talks about camera control, future cameras, and the most amazing sequence he’s shot so far: What camera control are you doing remotely? We have remote record-on, off from the ground, and we can also punch-in. The lens we are currently using on the Sony is actually the kit lens, usually the 18 to 55. Are you using that because of the image stabilization? Yes, in part. The gimbal is stabilized, and with the extra little stabilization in the lens it just takes out the little nicks […]
David Lowery, one of Filmmaker’s 2011 “25 New Faces,” is set to direct a new, “contemporary western” that teams him with three others from our annual talent survey. As announced by Deadline, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints is set to star Rooney Mara (picked for our 2009 list) and will be produced by a team including Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen (from our 2006 list). Ben Foster and Casey Affleck are also attached; James Johnston, Toby Halbrooks, Amy Kaufman also produce; and the pic is repped by WME Global. Evolution Independent’s Cassian Elwes is putting together the financing. Lowery’s Pioneer […]
In just under eight hours, the first hackathon dedicated exclusively to narrative transmedia gets underway at Lincoln Center; here’s Part 1 about what it is and who’s sponsoring it. There are seven teams of four, so 28 participants total, and if the other groups are anything like my team U.S. Maple, they’re all already feeling tired and well worked. I’ve written sample bibles and transmedia proposals before, as evidence of my versatility as a writer and ability to work in transmedia, but I’ve never finished an actual project. So this Story Hack is my first chance to develop something cross-platform beyond […]
Josh Koury is a chronicler of art on the fringes. In 2002, he founded the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival (BUFF), which he ran until 2006, screening weird and wonderful movies that had failed to find a home elsewhere, and in 2007 he directed the documentary feature We Are Wizards, which spotlighted Harry Potter fans who demonstrated their profound love of J.K. Rowling’s world by forming bands that performed “wizard rock.” Now Koury has teamed up with his frequent collaborator Myles Kane (the co-founder of BUFF and Koury’s editor on Wizards) to co-direct Journey to Planet X, a non-fiction feature that focuses […]
Anyone interested in transmedia in New York City needs to know about StoryCode. Mike Knowlton and Aina Abiodun, seen below with their team, originally founded it as a transmedia Meetup group, and then last year transformed it into a nonprofit dedicated to cross-platform storytelling–the first such organization in the world. They continue to sponsor monthly meetings to discuss recent transmedia projects, and now for the first time they’re sponsoring a narrative transmedia hackathon. Hackathons, which come from tech culture, have become a popular venue for transmedia designers to develop their work, but this is the first hackathon to explicitly showcase […]
New York City’s “Made in New York” marketing credit, which offers NY-shot movies and television productions free, co-branded citwide advertising, is expanding. Now offered to these productions are additional bus shelters, subway advertising and TV spots. Participating projects are eligible to receive the following packages (and, as noted, must pay a very small percentage of their production budget to a New York charity): A production with a below-the-line budget between $5-$10 million: 40 Bus Shelters (4 week run) 500 Subway boards (4 week run) 13,000 taxi cabs (2 week run) City covers cost of producing the creative elements production donates […]
It’s hard to write about Julia Dyer’s The Playroom without writing about the passage of time. It’s been sixteen-years since Dyer’s previous (and first) film, the Sundance hit Late Bloomers, and Dyer has finally crafted a proper follow-up. But beyond that, the film itself is quite concerned with the changes in attitude and perspective that time renders. Set in 1970s suburbia, The Playroom tells the story of a dysfunctional, alcohol-fueled dinner party, while also showing the same night through the eyes of a group of kids upstairs in the house’s attic. Premiering this week in Tribeca’s Spotlight section, the film […]