We shot most of Channel B over a weekend, but it was only two weeks later, during an evening of pickups, that the aesthetic of the movie really started to come together. This probably happens a lot, especially on little rinky-dink shoots like ours. We were about to do a third take of one of our last setups, shooting in a public park, a few benches down from some drunks. I asked Cory Popp, our director of photography, to shift the first part of a camera movement just a little bit, and when I watched the playback on our one […]

I saw a number of startlingly good films in 2014, but nothing shook me quite like a picture I saw at BAMcinemaFest this past summer. The film was Ellie Lumme, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s debut…debut what, exactly? Clocking in at 42 minutes, the film’s runtime frustrates typical designations – is it a featurette? A quasi-feature? A long short film? Perhaps we should just call it a medium. A medium seems most appropriate, as the film is a ghost story — albeit, as Vishnevetsky has cheekily explained, a ghost story sans ghost. (This description is, in fact, perfectly appropriate, and if you read […]