» Posts Tagged ‘watch’
We briefly interrupt our regularly scheduled NAB programming to bring you this short announcement about an intriguing animated short film masterclass. A little while ago, I highlighted a video from animation filmmaker Lucas Martell about his ideas tournament for generating new ideas and selecting the best ones to pursue further. Lucas is currently running an Indiegogo campaign for his latest animated short, The OceanMaker, and is now offering a perk specifically for those of you looking to expand your animation capabilities. For details about his upcoming animated short film masterclass, check out the video below. More »
If you were taken by the film noir aesthetics and overall cinematic atmosphere of Playdead’s award winning computer game Limbo, then the cautionary tale Between Beasts from Swedish filmmaker Jesper Eriksson will feel like a welcome return to that monochrome world of danger and beauty. Get acquainted and watch the film after the jump: More »
Expanding Godard’s classic assertion to include; “A man, a girl, a monster costume, gun toting villagers, a tragic end,” Supinfocom alumni Fx Goby, Matthieu Landour and Clement Bolla unite forces for their ‘reverse B-movie’ about a night watchman whose prank turns tragic when he gets stuck in a monster costume. Ready to suspend your disbelief? Hit the jump to watch the film and learn about the filmmakers’ inspirations, process, and regrets: More »
A few days ago we pondered what the effect of mobile video sharing app Vine enabling website embedding may have on filmmakers, but with mobile app Echograph seeing itself recently acquired by the filmmakers’ video site of choice Vimeo, perhaps we should be looking at the cinemagraph landscape as one of the new creative arenas filmmakers will choose to explore. Ian and Cooper’s Back to Me music video for Joel Compass may well be the bellwether which kicks off that creative flood: More »
Blender Foundation Releases 4TB of 'Tears of Steel' Sony F65 4K Footage & Demonstrates Post Workflow
The Blender Foundation is constantly pushing the boundaries of availability, openness, and access to the raw materials it uses to create its ‘proof-of-Blender’ animated shorts. This type of access is usually more associated with open source software than filmmaking, but especially since the Project Mango live-action CGI/VFX-heavy Tears of Steel was realized, that distinction has become increasingly blurred. Now filmmakers, animators, or compositors looking to cut their teeth on professional-grade material have access to the entirety of Tears of Steel‘s footage, in 4k OpenEXR (in the ACES color space), courtesy Xiph.org. In the meantime, the Foundation has also made available a number of resources concerning their post-production pipeline, which allowed them to transcode 4K Sony F65 footage to those Linux-workable OpenEXR frames. Check below for more details. More »
Tasked with the creation of a music video for the Joey Ramone track New York City, director Greg Jardin decided to get literal in his interpretation of the song and hit the NY streets with his crew, some famous faces and its residents for a pixilated, lip-synced tour of some of the most recognizable spots in the world-famous city. See how good your landmark and cameo spotting skills are after the jump. More »
Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, at age 104, is still making films. He is noted as being the only filmmaker whose career has spanned from the silent era through to the digital revolution. He’s come a long way since his directorial debut in 1931, and now as part of MUBI’s rotating repertoire of films, his 64-minute feature film from 2009, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, is available to stream online until April 19th. Hit the jump for more info, below: More »
If you’re heavily into music you’ll undoubtably be aware that certain geographical areas tend to become associated with particular music scenes. For myself here in the UK, I could quickly point to Manchester as the birth place of the aptly named ‘Madchester’ scene comprising bands such as The Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, and The Charlatans, and the beautifully idealistic Factory Records, closely followed by rave culture which sprang up around the legendary Hacienda nightclub. Recently Nokia Music in partnership with the Sundance Channel raided Somesuch & Co’s director roster (Emily Kai Bock – Spit Gold Under An Empire, Tyrone Lebon – Atlanta Dream$ & SFV ACID, Bob Harlow – Lords of Detroit & Abteen Bagheri – Electric Noise & That B.E.A.T) for New American Noise; a six-part series of documentaries exposing the underground music scene in six US cities. More »
Acclaimed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa would have been 103 years old this coming March 23rd, and in honor of his birthday, Criterion Collection is making 24 of his films absolutely free to watch on Hulu through Sunday, March 24th. It’s more than that, however, as they are making available some interviews with people like George Lucas and Robert Altman talking about Kurosawa’s films, and a documentary about the origins and influences of The Seven Samurai. Click through to check those out embedded below. More »
You’ve all seen first person or POV videos at some point — but the new Biting Elbows music video is something else entirely. Continuing with the Insane Office Escape Series (insane is an understatement), Ilya Naishuller (who is also in the band) directs another video with balls-to-the-wall non-stop action — giving movies like Crank a run for their money. Using a first person perspective, our hero fights his way through seemingly endless waves of suit-and-tie bad guys, with a little bit of teleportation thrown in for good measure. Check out the decidedly NSFW video below: More »
If you’re a regular reader you’ll be aware that work featured on Short of the Week sometimes makes its way to our pages. In fact, if you spend anytime at all watching shorts online, it’s highly likely that SotW co-founder & Vimeo staff curator Jason Sondhi was (in)directly responsible for some of that work making its way to you. As filmmakers looking to find an audience for your work, I’m sure there are several questions you’d love to put to Jason, both in his curatorial role and as a producer who launched The Thomas Beale Cipher to 170K online views (now over 500K). Well, during a recent stop in Québec at the REGARD festival, Jason sat down for a 25 minute chat about his work at SotW and Vimeo: More »
Have you ever found yourself in a foreign country, jet lagged but wide awake. You turn the TV on, flick through the channels, and happen upon a film that, while strangely compelling, you just can’t make head nor tail of? Perhaps it’s your exhausted brain or something’s getting lost in translation, but either way, you’re not sure you’re getting the whole story, yet feel too invested to bail out. That’s how you may well feel watching Beyond Mountains, More Mountains, an Italian road movie initiated by the hunt for a lost boot from directorial team CANADA, created for fashion label 55DSL. More »
It’s one thing knowing that directors and actors can combine their talents (along with a whole army of folks working away behind the scenes) to have us suspend our disbelief and buy into their presentation of a character experiencing a particular situation. Succumbing to a well-directed scene isn’t that great of a leap from being sucked into a well delivered story told round a camp fire, after all. For those of us who aren’t animators by trade, especially the stop motion variety, there’s something of a black box mystery when it comes to the art of turning inanimate objects into living, breathing characters we can route for. That’s why it’s always a fascinating treat to get a peak inside the inner workings of a top animation studio such as Laika, who are responsible for compelling animated stories such as Henry Selick’s Coriline or more recently, Sam Fell and Chris Butler’s dark adventure, ParaNorman – for which Grow Film created a series of behind the scenes videos. More »
A few months ago, Justin posted a series of videos of 10 renowned directors offering their advice on filmmaking. While this list isn’t quite as extensive, today I present to you five award-winning screenwriters discussing their approach to the craft of screenwriting. You may want to get a snack or even a small meal because some of these videos are long, but all of them offer unique insights into how each of these writers (or writing teams) approach a story, and then break the story down into screenplay format. Hopefully, these videos will educate and inspire you as you work on your own screenwriting craft.
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While you might have already seen the recent video featuring the history of the Steadicam in cinema, today we’ve got a video from Kevin B. Lee — who most recently gave us his best films of 2012 — that gets much more specific, and follows the career of Paul Thomas Anderson and his use of camera stabilizers. Not only does the video focus on specific shots in his films, but it also goes into the psychology of what the shots do (or are trying to do) for the scene in the context of the movies. More »
There has been an explosion in aerial videos over the last few years thanks to cheaper “drones” and “copters” and smaller and smaller high-quality cameras, but it still takes a tremendous amount of skill and patience to properly take these machines into the air and get usable footage. We’ve posted a number of these videos in the past, but GoPro recently shared one from Robert McIntosh that blew me away. Taking his GoPro to the Santa Monica Pier, Robert does a few maneuvers that had me expecting the worst, but his camera and the copter came out the other side unscathed. Check it out below: More »
While hand-held shooting has basically been around since there was a camera light enough to do so, it’s safe to say that the Steadicam (which is technically a Tiffen name) constitutes a cinematographical revolution all its own. Hand-holding dates back as early as 1911, but it was a long time before cinema gained the dolly’s fluidity of motion coupled with the hand-held operator’s freedom of travel. Audiences would first meet the ‘Steadicam shot’ in 1976′s Bound for Glory, and the first impressions were enough to earn the film an Academy Award for Cinematography. Larry Wright of Refocused Media recently created a supercut called The Art of Steadicam, paying homage to the ground-breaking invention and the artists who helped reshape the possibilities of cinematic movement — check it out below. More »
Not having a ton of professional talent or money doesn’t mean you can’t make a great film, but letting your budget be your aesthetic opens up a whole other world of creative possibilities. Ray Tintori’s short Death to the Tinman, which won an award at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, is a perfect example of working within a limited budget but achieving what feels like a much bigger film thanks to some clever DIY effects and ingenuity. I first saw the film a few years ago, and while it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, it’s a great example of doing a lot with a little, and not apologizing for your budget. More »
Bringing 'HENRi' to Life: a Filmmaker's Arduous Low-Budget Animated Journey
Do you love underdog stories? How about underdog stories about independent filmmaking? If the answer is yes, there’s a lot to love about HENRi, a low-budget science fiction short film, written and directed by Eli Sasich, starring Margot Kidder and Keir Dullea of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame. HENRi tells of the poetic journey of its titular character, a self-evolving robot who wishes for nothing more than to become human. The film is a unique blend of traditional miniature and puppetry effects alongside more modern motion-reference animation, and the results are simply stunning. Check out the trailer below. More »
Hive Lighting Brightens Up All-Plasma Chevy Volt Ad (With Only Batteries and 60A Generator)
Modern lighting technology continues to become more energy-efficient, while at the same time increasing light output. This applies to LEDs, but it also applies to plasma lighting systems, which are growing rapidly in popularity. Plasma is capable of a very naturalistic light spectrum (much closer to traditional Tungsten lights depending on the design), which is usually more difficult with LEDs. A company really pushing the boundaries of plasma technology is Hive Lighting, who recently lamped-up a 30-second Chevy ad using only batteries and a 60 amp generator — to rather impressive effect. Check out a line-item lighting breakdown of the Volt Plasma Challenge video from Hive Lighting below. More »
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