Archive for May, 2009
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
You could read all the blogs, all the coverage… or you might just watch the 47 delightful micro-shorts that Red Bucket Films (Go Get Some Rosemary filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie and colleague Alex Kalman) made while attending the Cannes Film Festival this year. By way of introduction, they write, “With these small observations from a place and time where most of the humanity exists on a screen in a dark room, we (Alex, Benny and Josh) thought we’d find comfort in our pocket sized cameras. The little bits of people, moments, absurdity, glamor, humor and mistakes are for our albums, but also for those who want to imagine a real place and also a place that once of year becomes home to one of the biggest events in Europe and in the world, especially when talking about film. They are called Buttons.”
Check them out at Indiewire at the link.… Read the rest
Sunday, May 31st, 2009
On his 401st Blow blog, Noah Harlan unfurls a lengthy and detailed (charts and all!) post entitled “This is the Right Time to Make Movies.”. He’s not referring to creative issues, like the wealth of things in the world that contemporary filmmakers can be reacting to or be inspired by, but rather the evolving media economy and how viewer trends, monetization potential, and distribution efficiencies may make this moment a good one for sharp-eyed movie investors.
I particularly liked these two paragraphs:
In a business plan for a traditional company you will have sections that deal with barriers to entry for your competitors, market demand and a void in the market that needs filling. Recently I was talking with an executive at a cosmetics company about a new line of products they were launching. She explained in remarkable detail each part of the market that was currently being served and then showed the specific niche that they were looking to step into. She laid out the rising demand in the segment, the other products that existed and what her company would bring that was different and compelling to the consumer. In essence, she explained how many people wanted her product and how FEW other people were providing it.
In film, our business plans have tended to put forward a nearly opposite argument. We have tried to show our investors how MANY films that are like ours exist and make money. We try to make our product seem as similar to other products in the market as possible (while maintaining that we’re unique enough to be marketed). If you’re making a small horror film you’re going to cite SAW and BLAIR WITCH and others to say to potential investors: “little films can make money so invest in a little film”.
Harlan ends with five points, one of which he generously credits me with helping him clarify: “Whether you are making a traditional 90-minute feature or a ‘new media’ work, we are ALL in a new distribution model. As filmmakers we need to not cling to the arguments of past success … Read the rest
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
That’s the question two developers from Google, Lars and Jens Rasumussen (creators of Google Maps) asked themselves, and their answer is Google Wave, the one-hour, twenty-minute demo of which is generating talk all over the web. The first 38 minutes are the meat of the demo, and if you want to see the near-future of web communication, check it out. In brief, Wave is an open source protocol that rolls email, chat, blog publishing, forums, photo sharing, wiki contributing and document collaboration into a single “shared object” that is accessed through the browser. Blogger Andy Wibbels says “Google Wave completely obliterates business models and entire verticals of companies left and right,” and IT Blogwatch has a round-up of other responses. Fast Company’s Chris Dannen is “terrified” of the service, calling it a “social trainwreck waiting to happen,” while Mike Elgan at Computerworld decries its move away from “linearity.” He writes, “The other major problem with Wave is its generous contribution to the larger problem of over complexity and information overload. There is so much going on here that Wave fights against the quest for clarity, simplicity and minimalism – the qualities that made Google famous.” MG Siegler at Techcrunch has the best piece that actually details all the things that Google Wave can do, and he concludes:
It’s a really interesting concept, one that you really do need to see in action. It’s ambitious as hell — which we love — but that also leaves it open to the possibility of it falling on its face. But that’s how great products are born. And the potential reward is huge if Google has its way as the ringleader of the complete transition to our digital lives on the web.
I watched the demo, thought it seemed pretty amazing, immediately started thinking of the various ways I can use it to create collaborative docs and projects and also how it can work with the Filmmaker blog, and I signed up to be alerted when it goes out in beta. You can too right here.
Here is an interview with the creators and … Read the rest
Friday, May 29th, 2009
ERIC NDORUNKUNDIYE AND JOSEF “JEFF” RUTAGENGWA IN DIRECTOR LEE ISAAC CHUNG’S MUNYURANGABO. COURTESY FILM MOVEMENT.For Lee Isaac Chung, filmmaking is linked to tackling challenges and obstacles above and beyond those inherent to the cinematic process. The son of Korean immigrants, Chung was born in Denver in 1978 and grew up on a farm in rural Arkansas. He attended Yale and was studying biology, on track to become a doctor, when he discovered arthouse movies. Rather than continue on his path to a medical career, Chung took a filmmaking class given by Michael Roemer and went on to earn an MFA in film from the University of Utah in 2004. A classmate at Utah, Yohei Kawamata, became the star of Chung’s first two shorts, Highway (2004) and Sex and Coffee (2005). In his work, Chung has been attracted to projects in other languages: in 2005, he made the Spanish language short Los Coyotes about immigrant smuggling, and in 2007 he completed his long gestating documentary about Chinese Christian preachers, Six Days – despite the fact that he speaks neither Spanish nor Chinese. He is currently in post-production on his first English language feature, Lucky Life, which was chosen as one of the participants in the Cannes L’Atelier du Festival initiative in 2008.
Chung’s debut feature, Munyurangabo, continues the writer-director’s exploration of cinema beyond the boundaries of language. It was shot in Rwanda in just eleven days, and represents the fruits of a filmmaking course for aspiring Rwandan natives conducted by Chung. The film, the first in the Kinyarwanda tongue, tells the story of two young friends, Sangwa (Eric Ndorunkundiye) and Ngabo (Josef “Jeff” Rutagengwa), a Hutu and a Tutsi respectively, who leave the Rwandan capital of Kigali to go and kill the man who murdered Ngabo’s father during the genocide of 1994. On the way, they visit Sangwa’s family, and the bond of friendship between the two is tested by the intolerance and prejudice rooted in age-old ethnic divisions. Mostly improvised, and shot in a documentary style, Munyurangabo has a feeling of total authenticity and Chung and … Read the rest
Friday, May 29th, 2009
Ted Hope gave a talk at the New York Foundation for the Arts that ties together a lot of things he’s been talking about at his Truly Free Film blog. The section up front that pulls together some statistics about the state of our arthouse cinema is pretty sobering. I won’t summarize it here — just go to the link to read it — but I especially liked a paragraph near the end in which he urges people to get out of the single-picture mindset and to see their activites as a film artist as part of a continuum of life activities designed to give themselves and their fans value and pleasure. Despite the fact that the piece is called “The New Model for Indie Film,” I think the subtext of this piece is that that model is as much of a perceptual or behavioral one as an economic one.
From the piece:
Your work is your life. You aren’t striving for any one thing other than to improve and to change. Don’t think about that ONE movie you want to make;focus on the long term and what you need to feel as excited, as engaged in fifteen years as you are today. Use your resources. Use your audience. Grow it. Sustain it.
… Read the rest
Friday, May 29th, 2009
In Bookforum, novelist Richard Ford discusses his method for writing his acclaimed “Frank Bascombe” trilogy of novels, The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land. Along the way he references some useful theories about art, literature and character creation. An excerpt:
To my mind, and faithful to Frost, these three Frank Bascombe novels, along with everything else I’ve ever written, have been largely born out of fortuity. First, I fortuitously decided I wanted to write a book. I then collected a lot of seemingly random and what seemed like significant things out of the world, things I wanted to make fit into my prospective book—events, memories, snippets of what someone said, places, names of places, ideas—all, again, conveyed in language (sometimes just words I liked and wanted to put into play). After that, I set about trying to intuit that unruly language into a linear shape that was clear enough to make a reader temporarily give up disbelief and suppose that herein lies a provoking world with interesting people in it. And I did this with the certainty that even if I were working straight from life, and was trying to deliver perfect facsimiles of people directly to the page, the truth is that the instant one puts pen to paper, fidelity to fact—or to one’s original intention or even to sensation itself—almost always goes flying out the window. This is because language is an independent agent different from sensation, and tends to find its own loyalties in whimsy, context, the time of day, the author’s mood, sometimes even maybe the old original intention—but many times not. Martin Amis once wrote that literature “is a disinterested use of words. You need to have nothing riding on the outcome.” Another way of saying that is: The blue Bic pen glides along the page, and surprising things always spill out of it.
… Read the rest
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Internet Week New York kicks off next week and social fundraising site IndieGoGo will bookend the event with a screening of Mark Becker and Jennifer Grausman‘s Pressure Cooker on Monday night at the IFC Center (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers, moderated by yours truly), then on Sunday they will host a panel discussion on film funding, promotion and distribution on the Internet at the Apple Store in SoHo (panelists include filmmaker Lance Weiler, Christopher Roberts, and CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner will moderate) ending with a party in the evening. Details for all events are here.… Read the rest
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
The music, the make-up… I dunno. Maybe it’s time for Abel Ferrara to retire his vendetta against producer Ed Pressman and director Werner Herzog for their remake/reboot/Southern-gumbo-laced reimagining of Bad Lieutenant. Or maybe it’s just a lousy showreel cut to make the film seem more generic to foreign buyers than it really is. You decide.
… Read the rest
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
The DFC, a co-production market that coincides with the Dubai International Film Festival, is now open for submissions of doc and narrative feature projects in development or works-in-progress from directors of Arab nationality or origin. Deadline for online submission is Aug. 15. The third editon of DFC will take place Dec. 11-15.
Learn more here.… Read the rest
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009
Producer Noah Harlan posted earlier on this blog about his first few days in Cannes attending the Atelier with Jake Mahaffy’s Free in Deed, and his report below, cross-posted at his own 401st Blow blog, is a great intro to the world of co-production finance for U.S. indie producers. Read it and take notes.
I’ve been attending the Cannes Film Festival for nearly 10 years now (which, admittedly, makes me a Johnny-Come-Lately) and each experience of the week on the Croisette takes on it’s own qualities. Where you are staying, what you are trying to accomplish (premiering, selling, financing), the weather and a multitude of other factors come into play when evaluating the overall festival experience. But no single factor can change your experience more than the difference between attending the festival and participating in the festival.
When you have a film in the Official Selection the team at the festival are amazing and in the best possible way. Unlike festivals that are obsessed with social caché or media relations, Cannes is obsessed with its filmmakers and it treats them phenomenally well. Directors of selected films are invited, completely at festival expense, and are given ‘protocol’ representatives who will take care of any needs they have while they are there.
Tickets to a premiere? Done. Car to drive you somewhere? Done. Invitations to parties? Done. Press conference with a knowledgeable moderator? Of Course…
In 1998 the festival started the Cinéfondation to “inspire and support the next generation of international filmmakers.” The Cinéfondation is broken up into three parts: the Selection, the Residence and the Atelier.
The Selection comprises short films (this year 17), made by film students from around the world and which are screened in Cannes, as Official Selections, during the festival. These films compete for prizes that include roughly 35,000 Euros in cash and are judged by a serious jury, this year headed by John Boorman.
The Residence selects 6 filmmakers, twice a year, for a 4-1/2 month residency in a beautiful apartment in Paris where they are supported and mentored through … Read the rest
