For Braden King, the lookbook process is an iterative one that doesn’t even stop with a film’s production. “In the case of my last feature film, Here, the lookbooks were very close to the final film, both tonally and imagewise,” he writes in an email. “But they were also completely comprised of my own photographs and functioned as a part of the larger, multiplatform project. We created a three-screen installation with live soundtrack accompaniment and several gallery exhibitions, [and] the lookbook for that film was also featured in a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.” King’s […]

Writer/director Cedric Cheung-Lau says the initial version of the script for his in-development debut feature, The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me, consisted solely of 44 images. Then came the words. For the lookbook, Cheung-Lau took sentences from the finished script and married them to images of his location, the Annapurna section of the Himalayas. The script tells the story of a grieving older woman and a young Nepalese man who meet in the mountains and go on a journey together, and Cheung-Lau stresses the importance of the setting to the story. “The landscape surrounding them is real,” […]

Lookbooks are an increasingly vital part of the filmmaking process. A good lookbook can make a pitch, just as a bad one can dissuade an investor, producer or financier from a project. Yet the creation of lookbooks is rarely discussed. The topic is missing from the many labs and tutorial programs set up to help first-time filmmakers—even though a good lookbook is perhaps the quickest way for a project to stand out. Simply put, refined visual knowledge and the skillful conveying of that knowledge is power for a director. When we interviewed Reed Morano last year about her work on […]

“With our lookbook, we wanted to capture our visual aesthetic and emphasize the importance we place on images,” write directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarín about the presentation deck for their hybrid documentary, 306 Hollywood. A work years in the making, the doc details the sibling filmmakers’ excavation of their grandmother’s New Jersey home in the years after she died. The archeological metaphor here is intentional; the Bogaríns describe the house in their 2017 Filmmaker 25 New Faces profile as “a microcosm, a universe… The whole history of the 20th century can be found in the layers of this house.” 306 […]

“I knew from looking at lookbooks that people pull images from online, but I didn’t see the point of doing that,” says writer/director Elisabeth Subrin. “Because then you are just saying, ’I want my film to look like someone else’s film.’” For the lookbook for her first feature, A Woman, A Part, Subrin says, “I thought it would be fun to see if I could create the images from the script that I had in my head for years.” (Disclosure: I produced A Woman, A Part along with 2019 Film Independent Producers Award winner Shrihari Sathe.) Subrin, previously best known […]

“Because I was a no-name filmmaker,” says Lily Henderson, who made Filmmaker’s 2014 25 New Faces list on the strength of the lookbook and demo reel for her forthcoming documentary, About a Mountain, “I felt I needed to go to Nevada on spec and shoot some images for myself to see whether it was worth it to make the film.” Her initial trip was a fruitful one, generating footage—shot on the URSA Mini—and photos that captured both the lonely, dry heat and consumerist fantasy world that would be the stage for her film. As she writes in the lookbook’s introduction, […]