Short Film
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Kirsten Dunst on Celebrity Fandom in the Age of Instagram
Director Matthew Frost and actress Kirsten Dunst team up for this short film, Aspirational, about celebrity fandom in the age of the selfie. A tag is worth more than a moment as Dunst encounters two fans outside her house. Via VS Magazine.
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 29, 2014 -
Watch: 17 TIFF Shorts Available on Vimeo
The distribution rollout for short form work remains a tenuous enterprise, at best. Aside from throwing it up on Vimeo or YouTube, and hoping it catches the eye of a curated site like Short of the Week, many filmmakers end up sitting on their shorts for months after their festival premiere. Vimeo is shaking up that paradigm by offering 17 shorts from the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts program — which the streaming site sponsors — online through September 19. These include the Jury Prize winning A Single Body, which offers insight into an earnest male friendship; the Shane Carruth-starring everything & everything & everything; the sci-fi Entangled, from […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 17, 2014 -
Somebody: Miranda July’s Messaging Service
Remember We Think Alone? Miranda July’s investigatory aggregate into the emails of famous people? July is again re-examining how people communicate in the age of information with a new app/messaging service entitled Somebody. Some sort of sick combination of texting and Tinder, Somebody ensures human contact upon receiving a message because that message is not your own — it belongs to someone nearby, and you are tasked with delivering it. To promote the project, Miu Miu commissioned a short from July that premiered today at the Venice Film Festival. In the supplement, a varied cast of characters (including July herself) […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 28, 2014 -
Not So Fast: A Short Film With G&E Equipment Sourced From Ikea
In his short film Not So Fast, filmmaker David Sandberg managed to achieve a dramatic tunnel effect with no more than a few Ikea products and the free 3D modeling app, Blender. The very embodiment of DIY ethos, Sandberg fashioned a portable light — enclosed in a trashcan — to his dolly — a bit of shelving — and orchestrated the action atop his PVC pipe track. Granted, his battery pack and Black Magic Cinema Camera don’t exactly run cheap, but the homemade equipment used to relay his protagonist’s sleepwalking probably rounded out to no more than $30. Watch Sandberg break down his […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Aug 5, 2014 -
Short Film: Lost Arts, by Peter Mattei
Inspired by Ira Sachs’ Last Address, filmmaker (Love in the Time of Money) and novelist (The Deep Whatsis) Peter Mattei made this short film, Lost Arts, in 2010. Sachs’ film — which he discusses in the current issue of Filmmaker — looks at the final addresses of a generation of New York artists who died of AIDS. With Lost Arts, Mattei has taken Sachs’ formal approach and applied it to the real estate of arthouse cinema. For those who have long lived in New York, see how many of these Duane Reades, health clubs and Apple stores evoke any hint […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 5, 2014 -
Short Film: Intuition, by Danielle Lurie
Filmmaker, 25 New Face and Film Fatales early member Danielle Lurie was in Barcelona recently, and, as she writes, made a short film there on the fly. Connecting with lead actress Montse Muñoz through Facebook, she has made a lovely film about romantic indecision, conflicting signals and the magic of serendipity. Check it out above. Read Lurie on women in today’s filmmaking at Sundance and the Film Fatales collective here at Filmmaker.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 4, 2014 -
“If You Selfie I’ll Delete You”: Alessio Fava on Selfie Addiction
Filmmaker Alessio Fava, whose Yuri Esposito was one of the inaugural films at the Venice Biennale College Cinema, has directed this ironic, fantastical social media campaign about… selfie abuse. (I supposed whether that abuse is self-abuse or abuse towards others might depend on the shooter/subject.) This video has gone viral in Fava’s native Italy; check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 1, 2014 -
Breaking Down the DIY Visual Effects in A Truncated Story of Infinity
Paul Trillo’s A Truncated Story of Infinity considers the limitless schema of possibilities that unfold over the course of a series of moments. The eight minute film — recently featured on Short of the Week — also boasts some pretty impressive practical effects for a budget of $10,000. I asked Paul to break down the means behind each technique, which he notes may not “the correct way” to render an effect, even if they look pretty fine to me. Hall of Mirrors at :00 “Our ‘mirror’ was just a framed piece of green on a wall. We did a simple dolly into the green so it […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 31, 2014 -
Tall Enough and The Short Films of Barry Jenkins
In an article by Esther Robinson in our upcoming Summer issue, Barry Jenkins speaks to the delicate work-work balance incurred by many a filmmaker — that is to say, what he does to financially support his filmmaking career, and how that job tends to detract from passion projects. Jenkins is fortunate enough that his particular day job, as ringleader of the production company Strike Anywhere, allows him to regularly create content, even if of the branded and not feature-length variety. Over at Fandor, resident video essayist Kevin Lee takes a look at Strike Anywhere’s catalogue, and the work Jenkins has produced in the six […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 16, 2014 -
Short Film: James Franco’s Herbert White Starring Michael Shannon
James Franco, it seems, spent the majority of his Tisch career translating the lives and work of tormented American poets. There was C.K. Williams with the Tar omnibus, Hart Crane with The Broken Tower and Frank Bidart with the just released Herbert White. Franco and Michael Shannon played lovers in the largely misguided Broken Tower, and here, Shannon, fulfilling his menacing hulk of a persona, prefers dead girls. Franco discusses his adaptation of the Bidart poem with Matt Rager, his co-writer on As I Lay Dying and The Sound In The Fury (Faulkner, being yet another poet of sorts), over at Vice. For those who are largely uninterested in the musings […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 14, 2014
