iOS
-
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 -
Enter Vine: Crafting the 6-Second Film
Since Vine was launched a little less than a year ago it’s gotten a fair amount of attention from the technology press but not as much, it seems, from filmmakers. The premise, that all films must be limited to six seconds, doesn’t lend itself to narrative films; it has, rather, been a gathering place for stop-motion animators, encouraged by its use of iOS device screens as the camera shutter, and, more famously, porn. But the app has proven nearly as popular as Twitter, which bought it last October, and just this month it became the most-downloaded free app in the […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 27, 2013 -
Paper Co-Creator Andrew Allen about his Award-Winning iPad App of the Year
Back in April I published this interview with Andrew Allen, filmmaker and developer with the software company 53, about his newly launched Paper app. This week the app was named by Apple as its #1 app of the year for iPad. Our original conversation about Paper’s development, and Allen’s journey from filmmaker to developer, is detailed below. — SM Andrew Allen, one of Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces of 2011,” had a big premiere this month, but it’s not a film. Allen is part of FiftyThree, the company behind Paper, an iPad drawing app that made Apple’s App Store “App of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 15, 2012 -
Miranda July and Ira Glass Tell the Future of Storytelling
The Silent History is a fascinating new publishing project that merges app distribution with geolocational storytelling. Launched by former McSweeney’s publisher Eli Horowitz and colleagues, the project will launch next month, downloading stories to readers’ iOS devices and then coaxing them out into the streets of nearly 400 cities for more. Here is the trailer featuring the voices of Miranda July and Ira Glass. Horowitz is interviewed by Reyhan Harmanci at Buzzfeed, and he speaks of the project’s inspirations: “I got to thinking about new storytelling experiences — what can these things do, what can these things lead to,” he […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 16, 2012 -
APP REVIEW: VIDEO TIME MACHINE
Video Time Machine, free this weekend on the App Store for both iPhone and iPad, is one of the most entertaining apps I’ve played with in a while. Like all good video viewing apps, it’s based around one simple curatorial concept. In the case of VTM that concept is — yep, you guessed it — time. Dial up a year and the app pulls from YouTube videos produced during that year. You can further drill down by category, browsing TV, movies, music, sports, news and advertisements. And, there’s a curatorial element: the videos are “hand-picked” and always seem to strike […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 6, 2012 -
MEDIA CURRENT: YOU SHOULD BE PARANOID
Sometimes paranoids are right to worry. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) recently exposed a common practice long hidden by wireless carriers: they track your every keystroke and movement through software known as Carrier IQ (CIQ). As Franken warned, “The average user of any device equipped with Carrier IQ software has no way of knowing that this software is running, what information it is getting, and who it is giving it to—and that’s a problem.” Carrier IQ, located in Mountain View, CA, was founded in 2005 and is backed by a group of VCs. Its software is installed on about 150 million […]
by David Rosen on Dec 22, 2011 -
WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS, 2/20/11
Here are a few things in my Instapaper this week. In GQ, Mark Harris looks back at “The Day the Movies Died” and the preeminence of easy marketing over original ideas. An excerpt: Such an unrelenting focus on the sell rather than the goods may be why so many of the dispiritingly awful movies that studios throw at us look as if they were planned from the poster backward rather than from the good idea forward. Marketers revere the idea of brands, because a brand means that somebody, somewhere, once bought the thing they’re now trying to sell. YouTube has […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2011
