Category: News

Oscar Dominguez and the lighting team for “The Voice” have won two Emmys. Variety’s Elizabeth Wagmeister went backstage before a live show to visit Oscar and find out how “The Voice” gets its trademark sizzle.

What Makes a Hero? Today Kyle is asking what makes cinematic heroes – at least American cinematic heroes. And to answer that he’s digging into some classics such as Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne. But what about Captain America? Does Cap fit the bill of what an American Hero should be? Don’t worry he dives into that as well, to find out if we should be rooting for Captain American in Civil War, or if we’re on the wrong side of the conflict.

This episode of Hitch20 explores the Hitchcock Presents episode “Banquo’s Chair” as well as delving into Hitchcock’s strategies in using high shots:

We are obviously living in a technological super age when it comes to effects. Go to YouTube and type in “VFX breakdown” and you’ll see the latest and greatest Hollywood has to offer. But many still deride Visual Effects – saying they can always spot CGI and that it’s ruining film today as we know it.

But then there lies sort of the odd conundrum of 1940′s The Thief of Bagdad.

From Roger Ebert’s own great movie review (May 6, 2009)

It remains one of the greatest of fantasy films, on a level with “The Wizard of Oz.” To see either film is to see the cinema incorporating every technical art learned in the 1930s and employing them to create enchanting visions. Today, when dizzying CGI effects, the Queasy-Cam and a frantic editing pace seem to move films closer to video games, witness the beauty of “Thief of Bagdad” and mourn.

If we were to be completely honest the special effects of The Thief of Bagdad simply don’t hold up well today – many of these techniques are about the same quality as the output from a first year high school video class:

Are we really suppose to mourn a film which features a blue screen job like that? Even the use of practicals in the shot on the right is obviously a paper mache form on a machine. It moves with the linearity of a Murphy bed being lowered from the wall and twice as slow.

And yet, this film makes Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” list. To be fair, The Thief of Bagdad showcased groundbreaking special effects for it’s time but now, taken out of context and compared to modern techniques, they’re laughably incompetent. How does a film that trades so heavily on special effects survive to be considered a classic?

The answer is simple – we want to believe.

Belief is our only mechanism for understanding the world. The universe is nothing more that a swirling soup of energy – vibrations of energy make up matter and electromagnetic forces give us the illusion of solidness – of touch. Our eyes respond to a narrow band of these vibrations – a small section we call visible light that stimulates cells to send electrical impulses to our brains. Sound is the beating of air molecules against a drum in our ear canals. From the constant feedback we get from our senses we try to gather information about the world around us and that begins with a belief that our senses represent reality.

But our senses are easily fooled – not just by trickery but by everyday interactions. We look in a mirror but we do not believe there is an identical person standing on the other side of the glass. When it’s foggy outside, we don’t assume that the world has been erased and turned gray – instead we believe that there is a low hanging mist that obstructs our view. We don’t need to test it every time, we just believe even though our senses may tell us otherwise.

In the case of the physical world, science has done a pretty outstanding job reaching beyond our biological capabilities in order to explain to universe. But even science itself is a belief – more accurately a philosophy (hence the Ph. in Ph.D). Things get even more muddied when we step into history, politics, morality, ethics and of course film criticism.

A friend on Facebook once worried about the future of information now that face swapping technology can make people say anything – people will be easily fooled into believing anything. I had to remind him that we don’t have the technology yet but there’s already plenty of people on Facebook that will believe anything (like ahem.. chemtrails). The bar to fooling people is already incredibly low, you don’t need high tech to get people to buy on some phoney baloney crap (like… chemtrails).

That’s because it doesn’t matter what the reality is – we as human beings want to believe. We want the narrative we hold true to be true. And that means seeking confirmation and vilifying opposition. Even the pursuit of “reality” is flawed in that it believes “reality” to be something that is knowable or measureable. The trouble with this understanding of the world is… you guessed it… it itself is a belief.

So what the hell does this have to do with filmmaking?

How we approach film and talk about film and make film is based on our own internal narrative – what do we believe and want to be true. In the passage above, Roger Ebert has already created the narrative in his review – his narrative shapes how we perceive – predisposing us to liking the film as superior to modern creations because we all admire and like the late Roger Ebert. We can tolerate the special effects because we have the narrative that it was groundbreaking for it’s day whereas a modern CGI cash grab has no excuse (the fact that Thief of Bagdad is just charming helps too).

But many more negative judgemental themes float about in film discussion circles today – themes like “the Golden Age of Hollywood” or “CGI is crap” or “Movies from the 70s are way better than today”. These are are prevalent in the zeitgeist but easily dismissed with evidence (75% of the films made in the Golden era were B movies, Plenty of beautiful CGI out there, and the 70s had their fair share of crap). The danger in these critical themes is they predispose us from enjoying contemporary culture in exchange for a fleeting sense of superiority.

In terms of filmmaking, an internal narrative can blind us to possibilities of our medium. There is a myth about Alfred Hitchcock that he storyboarded every shot so that when it came time to shoot the film, it was just a clinical matter of following the storyboards. This narrative makes for great legend building, but is far from the truth and even completely undesirable in live action – you don’t just draw a shot and it magically comes to being. But the narrative persists and it colors young filmmakers minds thinking everything needs a storyboard instead of letting a scene grow organically.

Narratives are powerful things. Narrative makes film work. We know the CGI dragon isn’t real in the same light that we know The Prince of Bagdad doesn’t have a humongous genie. But it doesn’t matter (or it shouldn’t) because ultimately we want to believe. We buy in because a good film asks us to.

The magic of the human experience and the magic of the narrative meet at the crossroads called cinema. It is our most powerful tool and yet it can be our most limiting. Being prepared to change that belief, to weigh and accept new and different modes of thinking will lead to better filmmaking and better film viewing experience. But in the end, perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

 

Patrik Forsberg of Stiller Studios offers insights on how they are slamming the boundaries between live action and game engine technology using motion control, real-time VR, and Adobe Creative Cloud software like Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop.

In 1964, renowned filmmaker Satyajit Ray was asked to create a short film for ‘ESSO World Theater’, a cultural showcase presented on television and funded by the American oil company Esso. Asked to write and direct the film in English, Ray opted instead to make a film without words. The result is a poignant fable of friendship and rivalry. As he did for many of his films, Ray composed the music for the film, including the haunting tune played on the flute.

After Satyajit Ray was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1992, the Academy embarked on an ambitious endeavor to preserve the works of the Bengali filmmaker. “Two,” also known as “Parable of Two,” is part of the Academy’s Satyajit Ray Collection which includes 18 feature films directed by Ray and preserved by the Archive.

Though Ray worked exclusively on 35mm, “Two” may have been filmed on 16mm, as it was created specifically for television. After an exhaustive search for elements relating to the film, three 16mm prints were found. From the 16mm print with the least wear and tear, courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum, a preservation negative was struck. “Two” was then digitally scanned and picture clean up and restoration were performed to eliminate scratches. The 16mm film’s poor audio was also restored. The film is now preserved and available to screen theatrically on 16mm or as a digital cinema package (DCP). Now, audiences everywhere can see this obscure gem, preserved by the Academy Film Archive, from master filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

Ever pick up a tripod from a thrift store that wasn’t quite perfect? thefrugalfilmmaker shows you how I fixed my second hand tripod, and how you may be able to fix yours.

In this video essay, Jeremy Ratzlaff connects Paul Thomas Anderson’s films through his characters and themes, and makes the argument that different versions of the same people appear in every one of his movies throughout the chronological timeline (there are slight spoilers, so it’s better if you’ve seen most of these films):

Here’s more from Jeremy on the video:

Paul Thomas Anderson has been my favorite filmmaker since I started watching films closely. I’ve always wanted to somehow pay tribute to the influence his stories have had on my life, and so I finally decided to string each of his feature films together in chronological order, beginning with There Will Be Blood, set in 1898, and eventually arriving at Punch-Drunk Love, which was set in the present day when it was shot in 2002.

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New Year’s is about 3 things: champagne, drunk midnight kissing, and making resolutions that you’ll forget by the end of the first week of January.

I can’t lie, I’m notorious for making New Year’s resolutions that dry up faster than I do on New Year’s Day. A lot of us are guilty of that — you probably are, too. However, if you want to ring in the new year the right way, with a fiery passion to become a better you, you might want to take a crack at bolstering your cinematography skills.

Dogwood Photography has shared a fantastic 52-week challenge (for photographers, but we’re all on essentially the same team here) that aims at pushing you to your creative limit all year long. Every week you’re given an assignment that will focus on one of three categories (from Dogwood’s site):

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There are a myriad of other things to get situated before you ever even turn on your camera.

This, of course, is called pre-production. It’s the time before actual shooting starts wherein cast and crew are hired, locations are scouted, and gear is rented. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg — the list is seemingly endless. Luckily, producer Devin Reeve, in this interview with Film Courage, shares a checklist of sorts that details a bunch of the big and little things that you’ll have to accomplish before you head into production.

Here are the tasks Reeve mentions in the video:

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