» Posts Tagged ‘shorts’
Focus Forward Filmmaker Challenge Offering Largest Short Documentary Prize Ever: $100K to the Winner
Alright NoFilmSchoolers, it’s time to fire up your brains, set up your lights, check your mic levels, and turn on your cameras! GE and Cinelan are joining forces to bring you Focus Forward, a contest that challenges you to make a short non-fiction film on the theme of invention and innovation. There’s some serious money up for grabs, with $200k in cash prizes in all. Morgan Spurlock has more info: More »
When we dig into the specs of the latest and greatest camera gear here at NFS our natural bias tends to be reporting how these affect the work of the live action director, but long before Nikon and Canon began considering video as a viable feature to add to their DSLRs, stop motion filmmakers were already busy at work with these cameras creating their films painstaking frame by frame.
British animator Lee Hardcastle is probably one of the most prominent stop motion directors — at least in the online space, his YouTube channel has clocked up nearly 24 million views — at the moment, building a growing army of fans for his original and re-imagined claymation work such as the recent re-telling of Gareth Evans’ action feature The Raid featuring claymation cats (warning: Hardcastle’s work is DEFINITELY not for kids): More »
Speaking of making storytelling a priority over camera tests, Ken Burns is in a league of his own when it comes to filmmaking. His documentaries are widely known and his visual techniques have been adopted by countless productions, so much so that panning and zooming into a still image has been dubbed the “Ken Burns Effect.” For once, however, the lens is turned the other way, and filmmakers Sarah Klein and Tom Mason have produced a short documentary called Ken Burns: On Story. In the film embedded below, Burns talks about good storytelling and the ways in which we manipulate audiences. More »
Now for something completely different. From one end of the film spectrum to the other, here is a short documentary called A Brief History of John Baldessari, directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. You may or may not know their names, but you certainly have heard of the films they’ve directed, like Catfish and Paranormal Activity 3. While much of the film is graphics, photos, and text, it’s the voice-over that adds to the film’s larger than life personality. More »
When a much anticipated camera such as the Canon 5D Mark III makes its way to market it’s inevitable that filmmakers will rush to be the first to shoot a fully formed story on it. While not officially the first, Barry Andersson’s ‘based on true events’ short Incident on Marmont Ave is certainly among the vanguard of Canon 5D Mark III shorts to hit the web. More »
Speaking of watching films instead of camera tests, we’ve got another short curated by the wonderful people at Short of the Week. If you haven’t been following the site, one of the creators of Short of the Week, Andrew S Allen, was involved in the design of a beautiful iPad app called Paper that we reviewed here at NoFilmSchool. The Division of Gravity, embedded below, is a short film directed by Rob Chiu. With gorgeous cinematography and moving performances, we’re taken on the journey with the characters from the beginning of a relationship all the way to the bitter end. More »
Home may not always be where the heart is, but it is the place where we — and the strangers who came before us — live out our lives, building some of our most abiding memories in the process. Los Angeles based director Laura Yilmaz mixes a whole host of animation techniques (stop motion, hand drawn, pixelation, rotoscoping) with family interviews in Places Other People Have Lived to deconstruct the relationships which play out in the various rooms of the house her family called home for over 25 years. More »
When a story traverses from stage to screen it can often be a less than rewarding experience. Those beautiful flowing prose which wow audiences in the theatre become somewhat redundant in a medium which has ‘show don’t tell’ as one of its most abiding rules. Even worse is the monologue, which requires action to stop whilst we concentrate on an actor’s singular delivery, often direct to camera (admittedly Neil Labute pulls this off to disturbing effect with Jason Patric’s frank ‘confession’ in Your Friends and Neighbours). The fact that many filmmakers have attempted and failed in this translation endeavour makes the recent duo of projects from Sydney-based Australian Theatre for Young People (ATYP) Boot and Bat Eyes, all the more impressive as powerful pieces of short cinema. More »
FS700 Video Roundup - 4 Videos That Will Make You Want to Buy or Wait
The FS700 has dominated much of the camera buzz in the couple of weeks heading into NAB, and with the early announcement comes early footage. Last week we posted the official launch film that excerpted a number of test shorts shot by various DP’s with a pre-production FS700, and over the past week the full shorts have been coming on-line. These tests by Peter Prevec, James Miller, and Den Lennie/James Tonkin, show off just what the camera can do with a variety of subjects — from dirt bike races, to samba dancers to birds flying against the sun’s light. Throw in a balloon murdering test by Andy Shipsides and you’ve got plenty to compare and contrast: More »
Last week we had the terrific short film Rest. The guys over at Short of the Week, Jason Sondhi and Andrew S Allen, are not only ambitious, but have some great taste. At NoFilmSchool we’ve covered them before with their animated short The Thomas Beale Cipher. If you haven’t seen it you should drop what you’re doing and watch it, and then come back here and check out this short, Moving Takahashi, that centers around a mover and a suicidal rich girl. More »
'Rest' is a Zombie Film That's Not a Zombie Film, Connecting with an Audience is What Matters
We are going to try to get more short films on this site, because that’s what many of you are making out there, and it’s important to watch them if that’s your end product. The short format can be very tricky, and most festival shorts can be a completely different animal than what many are used to. Courtesy of Short of the Week, we’ve got a zombie art-house film. Rest was created by Sunday / Paper, a collaboration between Cole Schreiber and David Parker. This is just one of many examples where the story and the emotional connection take precedence over the world that the story takes place in. It’s a slow burn, as many art-house films tend to be, but it’s a nice change of pace from most other zombie flicks you’ll see online or in a theater. More »
The Camera Doesn't Make Your Film: Camera Tests Can Be Tedious, Watch Short Films Instead
The camera tests of the newly released Canon 5D Mark III can get a little tedious, and before long we’ll get back to some of them, but why not watch some films to spur your imagination a bit? It doesn’t take a $3500 camera to make an interesting film, in fact, the three examples below are proof that you can do almost anything with a little bit of ingenuity. Different films can be interesting or inspiring to different people, but all it takes is a few minutes to experience something you probably haven’t seen before. More »
Sundance has announced this year’s Jury-prize winning shorts, and one of the winners is already available to watch online free. In total there are ten shorts online, and you don’t have to be in Park City to see them. Here’s one short that’s embeddable — note that it is not for the faint of heart (bad pun intended… there is a fair amount of surgery shown): More »
A 30 minute short film sponsored by Canon and shot on the Canon C300 and 5D Mark II, When You Find Me premiered on YouTube this week and will reportedly go offline tomorrow morning. So I figured I’d share it while it lasts — if the full film has been taken down, the trailer is below. Executive produced by Ron Howard and directed by his daughter Bryce Dallas Howard, here it is in full here is the trailer (the full film was taken down according to schedule): More »
I get a fair number of emails from other filmmakers who have made a short, posted it to Vimeo, and are wondering what to do next. Finding an audience and gaining exposure is a definite challenge, and due to time constraints lately I haven’t posted as many shorts or exposure opportunities as I’d like. So here’s one opportunity: the 180 Second Microcinema Film Festival is calling for submissions of, as you can guess from the title, 3 minute shorts. Got a film of this length, or an idea for one? The deadline is December 15th. More details: More »
In my last roundup of DSLR-shot videos, I focused on the stunning cinematography that large-chip DSLRs enabled. One year later, no one’s doubting the visual capabilities of these cameras. But the DSLR revolution isn’t just about pretty pictures; it’s about who can make those pictures. Indeed, the widespread availability and low price point of the cameras has been democratizing. So for this roundup I tried to find ten examples of the other “C”: creativity. Without DSLRs, most of these productions wouldn’t have happened, or they would’ve been very different: More »
Every year I make it a point to watch all of the Webby Award film/video winners (self promotion alert: since winning one myself, that is… ), as it’s a good way to catch up on the online video projects that you might’ve missed over the past year. The “Oscars of the Internet” were announced the other day, so if you’re looking for the best projects that premiered online recently, check ‘em out: More »
Few have given the photographer-filmmaker label as much meaning as Tim Hetherington, whose directorial debut Restrepo won the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival. I had a chance to see Hetherington in person a few months after the film’s Sundance bow, at the Full Frame Film Festival, and I’m sure everyone in the room shared my belief that his filmmaking career would be a long and storied one (as a photographer, he’d already won numerous awards). However, news of the worst kind made its way to us via Libya today, where Hetherington was shot and killed in a firefight. Hetherington’s abstract short, “Diary,” premiered at this year’s Full Frame festival just a week ago; here it is. More »
Yesterday I checked out the YouTube Play exhibit at the Guggenheim here in New York, which is showing for three days (simultaneously with the Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice Guggenheim museums) “the ultimate YouTube playlist: a selection of the most unique, innovative, groundbreaking video work being created and distributed online during the past two years.” In the spirit of YouTube, however, these videos are not restricted to expensive museum installations; anyone can watch them online, for free. More »
The Vimeo Festival + Awards this past weekend in NYC were a great time, with all sorts of panels, networking, and partying going on (I assume much of this will make it online at some point — it is Vimeo we’re talking about, after all). I met a lot of fellow filmmakers (and gave away some free passes too) and expect that the festival will be a staple of the NYC filmmaking community for years to come. As part of the festival, the Vimeo Awards were announced, and the winner of the first annual $25,000 Vimeo Grant is Last Minutes with ODEN, an emotional short about a dog’s battle with cancer, directed by Phos Pictures and shot on a Canon 7D: More »
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