Category: News

A seamless background can make your project look like a million bucks, but lighting one can be a little tricky if you don’t know where to start.

Zach Arias offers up this lighting tutorial on DEDPXL to show you how to light for a seamless white, black, grey (virtually any color, really) background. If you’re a stickler for details like me, one thing you’ll appreciate is the utter thoroughness of the lesson. Arias breaks down not only the hows, but the whys behind every creative and technical decision he makes on his set. Check out Part 1 below. (You can also find out more in his blog post here.)

Now, not everybody can afford the equipment or the space that Arias is able to utilize in his tutorial, but there are certainly some cheap workarounds that you can use to get the same effect. If you don’t have the cash to spend on professional backdrops (Arias uses a Photo Basics 9×20 high key white fabric background), fabric stores carry all sorts of materials that cut down on creases and wrinkles and effectively distribute your light evenly. Muslin is usually the go-to, but velvet, fleece, and duvetyne work well, too.

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Eric Zala and Chris Strompolos are two best friends. When they were kids, they decided to make their own Raiders of the Lost Ark adaptation by reenacting each scene of the film shot by shot. Now adults, the two have finally raised the money to shoot the final missing scene, so VICE decided to meet up with them as they finish their lifelong project and attend its premiere.

Vyer Films brings Roku support and an entry level free subscription. (Plus, a special 50% discount for NFS readers, one week only!)

As curation becomes more important in a flooded marketplace, Vyer Films offers a unique streaming model and a diverse library of art films. Been waiting to jump into Vyer’s Volumes because of a steep subscription price or lack of platform support? Adopting the almost ubiquitous freemium model, now you can start enjoying the quality cinema on the platform for free.

“Time is the most valuable thing you have, and we understand that. That is why Vyer Films is not simply a streaming service. We are curators, connecting you to underseen contemporary films that offer unique experiences distinct from the established classics of film history.”

Streaming right now for free on Vyer is The Destiny of Lesser Animals, a film by Deron Albright:

Of course, philosophically if you enjoy quality movies you should be willing to pay for them, but this new free tier will allow people a chance to see what they’re in for. Take a look at Vyer’s paid subscription models:

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How does a film use a city as a main character instead of just a setting? Consider John Boorman’s Point Blank or Roman Polanksy’s Chinatown — films that you could argue are just as much driven by a character study of Los Angeles as they are the rest of the plot.

At Sundance 2015, The Strongest Man premiered in the NEXT section as an incarnation of magical realism where the city of Miami is a central character. We sat down with director Kenny Riches, who came to Sundance 2015 from the burgeoning Miami film scene, to talk about his new microbudget film, writing scripts for people he already knows, and shooting an “existential comedy” with BMX stunts and a Canon C300.

Thank you, Kenny! Stay tuned for the release of The Strongest Man so you can check the whole thing out for yourself.

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Believe it or not, film piracy goes way back before BitTorrent and those FBI warnings. Nope, ripping off films is as old as film itself. Piracy not only changed the movies… it BUILT the movies.

In this episode of the Hitch 20, Jeffrey Michael Bays looks at how Hitchcock still has a strong influence over multiple generations of directors. Plus, how unpredictable characters can heighten tension for the audience, as in “Wet Saturday” of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

You can watch “Wet Satuday” on Netflix or on Hulu

The episode is an interesting opener for Hitchcock’s second season. “Wet Saturday” was a short story by John Collier originally printed in 1938 in the New Yorker magazine. Since then it has been a perennial adaptation on radio and television with the Hitchcock version being very true to source material (even borrowing many lines of dialogue). The short story concludes at the same place as the teleplay – the epilogue which Hitchcock provides was probably forced upon by the network – but in my opinion it makes more sense as a logical conclusion.

Judd Apatow, Amy Schumer, Seamus McGarvey, Adrian Lyne, Jean-Marc Vallée, and Sarah Treem discuss how Hollywood approaches shooting sex scenes.

“I personally am very excited when we shoot sex scenes,” said Sarah Treem, a creator of the Showtime series “The Affair.” “Because I think they can be transgressive; they can be very, very real.”

When they work, she added, “everybody actually enjoys them.”

Audiences certainly do, if the blockbuster success of “Fifty Shades of Grey” is any measure. But they are delicate moments to capture. “We did actually save the explicit sex to the final week” of shooting, said Seamus McGarvey, the cinematographer of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” based on E. L. James’s S-and-M-centered novel — though on-screen, some of the whipping is created via digital imagery.

Ruth Wilson and Dominic West in “The Affair.” Credit Mark Schafer/Showtime
To simulate sex, actors employ tricks: pillows between them, prosthetics and body stockings, and push-ups to get their muscles bulging. But the movement is often improvised. “If it’s overly rehearsed or overly thought through, it seems like a bad soft-core porn on Cinemax,” said Judd Apatow, the auteur of raunchy rom-coms (and a producer of “Girls”). In the forthcoming comedy “Trainwreck,” Mr. Apatow directed the writer and comedian Amy Schumer in her first big-screen sex scenes; she pumped herself up by listening to Beyoncé in her trailer.

The New York Times | Read the Full Article

A century ago, people worried that color would ruin motion pictures; instead, it changed visual narratives forever.

In the dawn of the age of cinema, adding color to black-and-white films was something like “putting lip rouge on Venus de Milo.” That is to say, it had the potential for disastrous, garish results. And that’s how the legendary directorAlbert Parker referred to the process of colorizing motion pictures in 1926,according to The New York Times that year.

Parker’s lipstick-on-the-Venus de Milo line wasn’t originally his—it was the same comparison famously used by silent film star Mary Pickford to lament the rise of talkies. As with sound, adding color to motion pictures represented a revolutionary shift in onscreen storytelling—and not everyone was convinced that change was worthwhile. Even those who were excited about color filmmaking felt trepidation.

“The color must never dominate the narrative,” Parker told the Times. “We have tried to get a sort of satin gloss on the scenes and have consistently avoided striving for prismatic effects… We realize that color is violent and for that reason we restrained it.”

The Atlantic | Read the Full Article

A few filmmaking apps have made themselves indispensable in years past. Shot Assistant is bound to become the next.

Shot Assistant was designed by a cinematographer and Steadicam operator by the name of Ruben Sluijter, and at its very core, the app takes advantage of the advanced motion sensors embedded in our phones, and it uses that data in order to present camera operators with information about how their camera is positioned and how it is moving.

Our friend Matt Workman, who runs the excellent Cinematography Database website, recently test drove Shot Assistant and shared his thoughts on the app.

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The No Film School list of Spring grant deadlines is back for 2015 with new deadlines, program changes, and more grants than ever.

Spring is the color of green: fresh green leaves, green grass, and green dollar bills for your next film project if you get cracking on the deadlines below!

The following opportunities are organized by Documentary, Narrative, or Screenwriting, and are in order of deadline from March to May. An asterisk next to the grant title means there is an equivalent grant for both doc and narrative. To find out more specifics on a grant, click on the title and get started.

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