Apps
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Elements of Oz: Producing Live Video and Interactive Theater
When MGM undertook to produce a film adaptation of the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1938 they wanted to use all the newest technological tools — think Technicolor — and special effects wizardry that they possibly could to bring the fantastic story to life. Equally, when the Builders Association decided to make the film the subject of their latest play last year — Elements of Oz ran Off-Broadway throughout December — they did the exact same thing. But for an innovative theater company in 2016 that meant integrating live video production, online clips, and a multitasking phone app into the onstage proceedings. New media […]
by Randy Astle on Feb 1, 2017 -
BitTorrent Launches BitTorrent Now with Streaming Option for Creators
BitTorrent Bundle will re-launch as BitTorrent Now, extending the platform with new streaming apps for Apple TV, iOS, and Android, as well as introducing advertising as a new revenue stream for creators, BitTorrent announced today. Straith Schreder, BitTorrent’s VP of Creative Initiatives, who has been the principal driver of this initiative, told Filmmaker, “we wanted to build a platform with the ability for creators to connect with their audience no matter where they are in the world. So being able to bring their project to what’s now an audience of 200 million passionate fans of indie film and indie music and to be able […]
by Paula Bernstein on Jun 23, 2016 -
DIY Previs: Developer Dan Fearing on ShotPro
Just as pencil-and-paper storyboarding has by and large given way to computer-based previsualization software, high-end previs suites are now confronting much more budget-friendly software and apps. The newest of these is ShotPro, an iOS app from WebGames3D.com that premiered on the App Store late last year. Developed by Dan Fearing and a small team of Sacramento-based designers and coders, ShotPro already looks like a game changer in the world of DIY previsualization. It launched loaded with characters, props, settings, lights and even lenses, and two updates have already followed, adding scalability for onscreen items, animatable cameras, new camera models, moveable keyframes and other features. Version 1.5 […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 16, 2015 -
The Rumpus Launches Manual Typewriter iPad App, Typing Writer
I grew up on a manual typewriter, the same one my mom used to write articles for Life Magazine in the ’50s and ’60s. It was a small portable in a beat-up canvas case, and you had to hit the keys hard. Later, my dad outfitted his basement home office with an IBM Selectric. I loved that typewriter. It was a brick, a giant slab of molded something, and once you gave the keys a little push the thing would explode. The violence of it was kind of thrilling. Still, I don’t fetishize old-school typewriters, manual or electric. I can’t […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 10, 2014 -
Thoughts Towards the Killer App of Indie Film
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 […]
by Randy Mack on Mar 28, 2014 -
Robert Herrera on the App and Distribution of the Basketball Documentary The Gray Seasons
It’s been two full decades since Hoop Dreams, but any basketball documentary is still bound to be compared to that iconic film. Still, technological changes over those 20 years beg the question of how Steve James and Kartemquin Film would handle distributing the film today. When director Robert Herrera was faced with the same challenge for his new film The Gray Seasons, about the women’s basketball team at St. Louis University, he struck upon a series of festival screenings, simultaneous cable PPV and VOD (via Vimeo on Demand) availability, and finally a DVD release and iOS app that encapsulates much of […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 24, 2014 -
Push Notifications for the People (and Super Fans): App.net’s Broadcast
If you own a smartphone, chances are you’re familiar with push notifications. Popularized by Apple’s iOS 3.0 edition in 2009, push technology utilizes open IP connections to forward notifications from third-party apps to your mobile interface. Formerly reserved for large-scale corporations — The New York Times, etc. — San Francisco-based App.net has created a free marketing channel called Broadcast that democratizes the process of push notification. App.net CEO Dalton Caldwell likens this application to “your own promotional arsenal” for users who already enjoy an active social media presence. News that may otherwise be buried in the barrage of tweets and […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 21, 2013 -
Taking Horror Interactive: Neal Edelstein on Haunting Melissa
As the producer of films like The Ring and Mulholland Drive, Neal Edelstein is no stranger to horror films and thrillers. And with his new project, Haunting Melissa, he’s moved beyond traditional pictures with his first immersive production for iPad and iPhone. Available for free in the App Store, Haunting Melissa centers around the search for a girl who vanished from the farmhouse where her mother had earlier gone insane, but this story is told in a succession of videos released to the viewer in seemingly random bursts. The temporal extension – and unexpected timing – of the narrative through these push notifications […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 30, 2013 -
DIY Multiplatform Storytelling: Kal on the Tokyo Sally Film and App
Tokyo Sally is the second narrative feature by director-cinematographer-editor Kal, after his 2010 debut Superhero in the Rain. He’s also a prolific producer of music videos, documentaries, and spots for companies like the Food Network. The Tokyo Sally project, which features Anna Adams, consists of one 60-minute film and a related app, Tokyo Sally: Lost Highway, both of which are nearing completion. Kal envisions the film as the first in a series of ten pictures that will explore different aspects of horror and suspense films; each will be self-contained but, when seen together, will relate to a larger story. The film […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 7, 2013 -
What Indie Filmmakers Need to Know About Mobile Video Viewing
As of January 2013, comScore reports that 129.4 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, accounting for more than half (55%) of mobile devices. A recent study by Harris Interactive for Telly, a social networking video service, conducted with 2,000 smartphone users projects that 78 million mobile device owners watch videos on their smartphones. One of the study’s surprise findings is that Apple’s iOS devices do not dominate the mobile video viewing market. Rather, Android devices are viewed by nearly one-half (46%), while Apple captured only a little more then a third (36%) while a little more than a tenth […]
by David Rosen on May 31, 2013
