“How do I find a producer?” It’s a question asked by many first-time independent writer/directors, and there’s good reason this seemingly simple query is so vexing. Screenwriters selling commercial screenplays and directors seeking employment on Hollywood pictures are guided by standard, usually market-based protocols. But it’s not so easy for budding independent auteurs — those without agents, managers or box-office track records. For them, partnering with a producer is as much about building a personal relationship as scoring a business transaction. At least, that’s what a number of producers interviewed here likened it to. Mary Jane Skalski (Very Good Girls, […]

The last few years have seen a rise in filmmakers who are extending the stories they tell beyond a single medium. At the same time, festivals, schools and organizations are starting to nurture work that mixes story and code. Tribeca has a program called Storyscapes, which highlights new trends in digital media and recognizes cross-platform approaches to story creation. While Sundance’s New Frontier section has highlighted experiments in storytelling since 2007, they recently added a Story Lab to help incubate forward-thinking, platform-agnostic projects. At Columbia University, where I teach, we are in the process of developing a digital storytelling lab […]

Once life was simple. NLEs were NLEs. They did offline editing of conspicuously compressed picture with unmixed audio tracks and limited titling. Maybe it started with the MiniDV revolution 15 years ago, but over time low-end NLEs competed with high-end NLEs in tools and feature sets, becoming today’s desktop online systems and sealing the fate of many midlevel post facilities. Along the way several NLEs became suites of applications called “studios.” Back in 2005, for instance, Final Cut Studio arrived as FCP bundled with DVD Studio Pro, Motion, LiveType, SoundTrack Pro, Cinema Tools and Compressor. Two years later, Color, for […]

I’ve been editing commercials and longform programs with Sony Vegas Pro since 2005. Our latest feature documentary, They Wore the Red Suit, was edited, color corrected and mixed totally in Vegas. Why Vegas? The editor I brought in for this project was experienced with Avid and FCP but had never used Vegas before. I asked him to try it for a few days, and if he wasn’t happy, I’d bring in the system of his choice. After a week, he said he couldn’t have made as much progress with either of his old “favorites.” My initial decision to use Vegas […]

“What surprised me more than anything when we got to Sundance,” says John Sloss about Randy Moore’s Escape from Tomorrow, “was this sort of tacit acceptance that this film will never see the light of day. Everyone kept saying, ‘See it here because Disney won’t allow this to be [commercially] released,’ as if Disney by itself has that power. That kind of compliant response awakened something in me.” Sloss, whose Cinetic Media was selling the film, may have been surprised at the industry’s dismall of its commercial prospects at Sundance, but I was not. A confession: After seeing the first […]

The first project I used Adobe Premiere Pro on was a short film called “Masterpiece” that I created for Filmmaker Magazine at Sundance 2011. Prior to that, I’d been a Final Cut Pro devotee for a decade — and even reviewed the two previous generations of Final Cut Studio for Filmmaker. My history with digital editing goes back to late 2001. I was working on a short film, shot on 16mm, which I’d initially intended to cut on an old school Steenbeck. But when that fell through, I tracked down and installed a bootleg copy of Final Cut 2 on […]

For many film editors, including yours truly, Avid’s Media Composer is the preferred software for cutting our work. It’s rock solid, powerful and once you really know how to use it, one of the most versatile tools for getting the job done. However, over the past several years the future of the Media Composer platform has been in doubt. Strong competitors moved into the marketplace, and Avid, once king of digital editing, seemed headed to the sidelines. But as fast as it seemed to fall, Media Composer may be making a comeback, due in part to major enhancements to the […]

It’s been six years since moviegoers last saw Jared Leto, but it’s not as if he has been slacking. Since playing John Lennon’s murderer, Mark David Chapman, in Chapter 27, Leto has been occupied by his other creative passion: music. While most actors’ bands are merely a pop culture punch line, 30 Seconds to Mars has sold more than 10 million albums and recently completed a record-breaking, two-year global tour. Even the group’s trials have borne fruit: their legal battle with record label EMI was chronicled by Leto in the Gotham Award-winning documentary Artifact. Now, though, Leto the actor is […]

The memories of our childhood are owned, their copyrights controlled by giant multinational corporations. Whereas the fantasy figures of the 20th century hail from centuries-old sources — the Brothers Grimm, Greek and Norse mythology — their contemporary incarnations, found on T-shirts, lunchboxes, mugs, iPhones and in video games, constitute precious intellectual treasure, their value diligently upheld by World Trade Organization rulings. Or, to phrase things a bit differently: If you’re an independent filmmaker, make sure your lead actor isn’t wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt you haven’t cleared! Despite the forces aligned against pop culture-deploying media artists in our mash-up, remix […]

Laurence Anyways Breaking Glass – Oct. 8 In this striking third feature from the precocious early twentysomething French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan, the title character is a happily engaged French teacher, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), whose first novel is about to be published at the dawn of the 1990s. Following an epiphanic 35th birthday party, he confesses to his fiancée, Frédérique (Suzanne Clément), that he longs to transform himself into a woman and asks for her unconditional support. What follows is a simultaneously baroque and rip-roaring three-hour exploration of a touching and unforgettable relationship that also serves as a mildly nostalgic trip […]