Month: November 2010

Categories
Issues and Actions

The Audience Award Of Audience Awards

VOTE BEFORE SUNDAY AT 11:59PM FOR THE NOMINEES OF THE 1st EVER FESTIVAL GENIUS AUDIENCE AWARD AS A PART OF THE GOTHAM AWARDS

This weekend, voting is well underway for IFP and Slated’s Festival Genius Audience Award for the 20th Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards. This first-ever award gives audiences from all across the country the chance to pick five of their favorite films that took home an audience award at one of the Top 50 US and Canadian film festivals in the past year. After you, the people, have spoken, your voices will be heard on November 10th when the five finalists, the first-ever Festival Genius Audience Award nominees, will be announced on both IFP’s and Slated’s websites. This award is a fantastic, unique opportunity for you to give your favorites of this past year one last round of applause, whether you’re just a casual festival-goer or die-hard movie buff. And also, when you vote, you’re also automatically entered to win a one night’s stay at the Andaz Wall Street in New York City and two tickets to the 20th Anniversary Gotham Independent Film Awards on November 29th at Wall Street Cipriani. So go vote THIS WEEKEND at http://gothamawards.slated.com … and then run to tell your friends to vote, too. Awards season starts here…and it starts with you.

Categories
The Next Good Idea

I Knew I Should Of Done This With My Son…

Living My Life Faster – 8 years of JK’s Daily Photo Project from JK Keller on Vimeo.

Had I started this with my son 8 years ago, you would have seen some significant changes. I have to imagine ten years from now, there will be 1000s of these, but for now I am grateful that JK Keller did it for us. Thanks!

Categories
Truly Free Film

Exclusivity is OUT. Connectivity is IN!

Guest post by Nelson Carvajal, digital filmmaker and writer. Nelson is one of the key figures behind Cinefile.com (http://cinefile.com/), an intuitive new online platform aimed at connecting and promoting independent artists in the digital movie industry.

After I graduated from college in 2007, I was ready to take the movie industry by storm. Suffice it to say, I did not find myself not making tomorrow’s great movie overnight and a big, broad reason for this was due to my being overwhelmed with the fervent dissonance among my peers. Every time I worked as a production assistant on a movie set, it seemed that most of the other PAs were dead set on staying put in the big studio totem pole, so long as they could associate themselves with a “real movie”. I would usually respond by asking, “Yes, but don’t you want to make your own movies?”

After some time it became clear that

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Categories
These Are Those Things

Gareth Edwards’ MONSTERS Is A Microbudget How To Model

I recently had the great pleasure of watching MONSTERS.  I enjoyed the movie on many levels, including that it is just good fun.  But what I really loved was how well micro-budget production techniques enabled good story telling.  In my raving about this, Jonathan Stromberg responded and pointed me to his far better articulated post on the same subject.  What follows is his first two paragraphs in CineSpect , but check out the whole post here.

The following review is partially adapted from a workshop I gave to film students at the State University of New York at Purchase College on 6 October 2010.

“Monsters”, the debut feature of writer/director Gareth Edwards, is, from the point of view of a spectator, an imperfect film. It is, however, from the point of view of a filmmaker, one of the most exciting releases I’ve seen this year. Edwards’s production reads like a map for young filmmakers, marking pitfalls with his struggles and showing a way forward with his successes. “Monsters” is one of the clearest case studies yet for the challenges—and advantages—of micro-budget filmmaking.

The ostensible auteur Edwards approached his first feature from his background in visual effects and documentary television. In some ways, this spelled destiny for the production style of “Monsters.” The narrative is basically theatrical, but the shooting style is strongly influenced by the production necessities of non-fiction television. For example, the film has no script per se. Edwards shot using scene outlines and necessary plot points but allowed his cast, Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy, to improvise freely within the scene. The apparent production doctrine was for Edwards, also the cinematographer, to shoot the scene multiple times from different angles to get broad coverage of every beat. The film in this way develops a signature somewhat different from more traditional narrative constructions. Edwards foregoes the “establishing wide then punch in for medium shots and close ups” archetype for something that ends up more like a multi-camera shoot. The angles in any particular scene are more varied, but also less predictable. In documentary television we—I work in non-fiction television as well—often shoot this way. In this way, a decision regarding the mode of production has significant impact on the film’s aesthetic, for better or worse, in a way that contrasts it to traditional productions.

Categories
Issues and Actions

Rejoice! NOBODY Knows What To Do.

The LATimes Company Town Blog has a post on a recent conference on Blu-Ray that the Five Studios Home Entertainment Heads all participated.

The executives said the biggest issue they face is sorting through a proliferating array of distribution platforms and figuring out when and where to release their movies and at what price in order to maximize profits. Such staggered release strategies are known in Hollywood parlance as “windows.”

Read the full post, but my takeaway is that the indie sector needs to figure out new ways to experiment and gain both understandings and footholds.

Categories
Truly Free Film

The Audience Is Out There: Cinema is Alive & Well, in New Jersey?

Guest post by  filmmaker Joseph Infantolino. His first feature HELENA FROM THE WEDDING opens in NYC on Nov 12th.

That’s right. Everyone knows despite the dire commentary of the prognosticators that cinema is alive in well in NYC (cinema meaning films created as artistic expression sans commercial calculation). But I was astounded to discover that cinema is alive and well in, yes, my home state of New Jersey.

In advance of my film HELENA FROM THE WEDDING’s release by Film Movement on November 12 at the Quad Cinema in NYC, I did three screenings at multiplexes in shopping malls in the Garden State last week, two for the Filmmaker’s Symposium on Monday (Mountainside, NJ) and Tuesday (Eatontown, NJ) and one for the NY Film Critics on Wednesday (Morristown, NJ). I admit, I was a little skeptical. I have a film coming out in NYC, why am I doing 3 screenings in a row in NJ?

The skepticism lasted until

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Categories
Truly Free Film

If We All Love Sex, Why Don’t We Have More Of It (On Screens)?

Guest post by Mel Agace, producer of ‘Destricted’, a collection of shorts that brings together sex and art in a series of films created by some of the world’s most provocative artists and directors. ‘Destricted’ has been on the verge of being distributed in the USA for 4 years, and finally its coming … Destricted was released on DVD and VOD on the 2nd Nov on Amazon.com and netflix.com < http://bit.ly/c5Dfes>

www.destrictedfilms.com

Trailer link  http://destrictedfilms.com/us/trailer.php

So what is Destricted? our dictionary definition is – 1. To unlimit restriction. 2. To deconstruct within bounds, to unconfine. We wanted to create a platform for films and ideas without restriction. An alternative view.

The platform was curatorial and experimental, i.e. high risk, rather than traditional film development and production with a clear commercial product! We invited international artists such as Gaspar Noe, Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Larry Clark, Sam Taylor-Wood, Marco Brambilla and Richard Prince to explore the topics of Sex, Pornography and Art in a series of short films.

Why do a project like this? I guess it started from

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