So "whimsical" and "sweet" are not words that usually pop up in my vocabulary with great frequency. At least not in their non-ironic form.
Yet those are the exact adjectives–irony free–that come to mind whenever I encounter the short form work of writer/director Wendy McColm.
This piece, featuring McColm and comedian Josh Fadem with cinematography by Nate Cornett needs no more introduction.
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100 Yen, the documentary about Japanese arcades has become availible on DVD. We interviewed director Brad Crawford last year about the film.
After the jump, a taste of the interview…
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If you care about film and your physical well-being don’t eat before reading this New York Times article:
A chain-smoking former statistics professor named Vinny Bruzzese — “the reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,” in the words of one studio customer — has started to aggressively pitch a service he calls script evaluation. For as much as $20,000 per script, Mr. Bruzzese and a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?
Look, I can see the value of contextualizing a screenplay in relation to other films. That’s something a screenwriter should be conscious of, but a tool like this cannot support innovation by design. I’m not usually big on schadenfreude, but I really hope these guys get done with their studio casino run real quick.
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Last night at the LA Music Video Festival I got to see a breakdown of how this hybrid live-action/traditional cell animation music video was put together. The short answer: through painstaking work.
It pays off.
Director Warren Fu asked animation director Jeremy Polgar and his team to replicate the style of the late, great French comics illustrator Jean Giraud, better known by the pseudonym Moebius. Polgar delivered.
Fans of The Killers might also catch some narrative nods to one of their first big hits. Can you pick up on the thread?
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Eight short films by emerging women directors will screen at the Director's Guild in Los Angeles this coming Monday night.
The American Film Institute's AFI Directing Workshop for Women (DWW) is holding their annual screening at the DGA theater, and amongst the crop of filmmakers is friend of the blog Lauren Ludwig. You might remember Ludwig from our coverage of the Hollywood Fringe Festival.
We've covered the DWW before, and now's your chance to see just what all the fuss is really about.
Those in Los Angeles who are interesed in attending can reserve a spot for the 7:30 PM screening at AFI's DWW site. (Personal note: I wish I could make it, but have a prior commitment.)
The full press release follows after the jump.
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Each year the San Francisco Film Society invites a filmmaker to make the annual “State of Cinema” address at the SF International Film Festival. For this year’s event they got indie auteur/studio film savant Steven Soderberg to give the talk.
It’s a doozy.
The original plan was that this would only be for people in the room, but bootleg copies of the speech started making the rounds on the internet and now the Film Society has released both an official transcript and video.
If you care about film at all I won’t even talk to you again until you read or watch this. Bonus points: Soderberg talks Present Shock at the top.
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Kieran Masterton's "How to Choose a Crowdsourced Theatrical Platform" brings up Simple Machine (which we wrote up earlier today), as part of a great overview of the availible platforms in this Filmmaker Mag post.
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While it can be daunting for some, I find myself loving the seemingly exponential emergence of new film distribution platforms.
Every few weeks it feels like a new contender emerges: VHX, Tugg, Seed & Spark… the list keeps growing.
What's best about the indie film ecosystem
is that these different services aren't competing with each other so much as they are offering different pathways for filmmakers to connect with audiences. Make no mistake: there's overlap amongst the services, and there's bound to be some businesses that go under or merge with their more successful counterparts down the road.
At the moment we're in the "infinite diversity in infinite combinations" stage, and it's a fun place to be. This is the stage where we get ideas like Simple Machine.
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The San Francisco Film Society has developed an impressive track record over the past two years as an independent film development organization. They're not resting on the laurels they've received at Sundance–for Beasts of the Southern Wild and Fruitvale Station (nee Fruitvale). IndieWire has the latest:
Following an announcement earlier this month about its upcoming digital distribution lab A2E: Artist to Entrepreneur, the San Francisco Film Society revealed exclusively to Indiewire that Vimeo would serve as the presenting partner of the event, which is scheduled to take place during the second weekend of the San Francisco International Film Festival early next month.
Farther down in the article is a list of their partners and sponsors for the A2E lab. It is a veritable Who's Who of the new indie frontier. So go on, click.
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Over the weekend I was having a conversation about the new Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum that’s been announced. Specifically we were talking about the interactive exhibits. My companion expressed disgust at that kind of thing for a museum ostensibly about an art form.
I countered that people don’t appreciate what goes into something as complicated as filmmaking until they get some hands on experience with it themselves. Film lighting, in particular, is underestimated by pretty much everyone who hasn’t tried to make a video look halfway decent.
So you can imagine how delighted I was when BoingBoing’s Rob Beschizza posted this teaser for an upcoming music video today. Here’s the power of light, kids.
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As you all undoubtedly already know, Google Glass is finally here.
Sponsors
Now streaming: the archive of our Google Hangout On-Air with Jesse Vigil of Psychic Bunny, one of the designers of the new audio adventure game FREEQ (iOS/Android).
We’ve featured dancer Matt Luck’s work before.
I first encountered Sifteo Cubes back at IndieCade last October, and spent some time playing around with the little blocks which I first mistook for iPod Nanos.
