NEW BREED L.A. #6: “THE INTEGRITY OF STORY”

Here’s the latest of our videos by Sabi Pictures in collaboration with the Workbook Project on L.A. Film Festival filmmakers and their creative processes. This installment: “The Integrity of Story.” The final episode in this series will be up Monday, so if you haven’t caught up with the others yet, check out the links below.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 6 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

NEW BREED L.A. #4: “ELEMENTS OF CASTING”

“Elements of Casting” is the title of the fourth New Breed video from the Los Angeles Film Festival. Look for two more next week, on Monday and Thursday.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 4 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

NEW BREED L.A. #3: “PLANNING FOR DISCOVERIES”

Here’s the latest in the New Breed series of videos with filmmakers at the Los Angeles Film Festival. This one is called “Planning for Discoveries.” The previous episodes were “Nothing You Have to Have” and “Engineering Serendipity”. Episodes go up Monday and Thursday until all seven are live on the site.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 3 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

NEW BREED L.A. #2: “ENGINEERING SERENDIPITY”

Here’s the second of the New Breed videos on the creative process filmed this year by Sabi Pictures at the Los Angeles Film Festival and presented by Filmmaker and the Workbook Project. Appearing in this episode are filmmaker Julius Onah (one of our “25 New Faces”), filmmaker Jeff Malmberg, actress Trieste Kelly Dunn (another “25 New Face”), director Brett Haley and producer Ted Hope.

NEW BREED LOS ANGELES – Episode 2 from Sabi Pictures on Vimeo.… Read the rest

25 NEW FACES – PART 2

By Filmmaker Staff

Jason Byrne

When we caught up with filmmaker Jason Byrne to include him in this year’s “25,” it was via e-mail from Tanzania. At the sa me time Byrne’s hypnotic experimental documentary Scrap Vessel winds its way along the festival circuit, he is working as an audio/visual archivist for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. “Living in East Africa for the last two years has been a deeply rich experience, and this job has been fascinating but psychologically difficult at times, especially when listening to the many graphically explained testimonies from witnesses to the genocide,” he writes.

Byrne has worked previously as an archivist in Los Angeles, and he also graduated from the Film/Video Masters program at CalArts, where he “received a lot of help in understanding space and time from filmmakers Betzy Bromberg and James Benning.” His understanding of the relationship between film practice and historical memory informed Scrap Vessel, which was his thesis project at CalArts. The film takes place on the final voyage of a former Chinese-owned freighter ship on its way to the breaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh. As he explains, “I shot this film in the frame of mind of being alienated from the rest of the crew and of trying to capture my initial understanding of the new environment. Maybe the film is the reverse of an anthropological study. Once I began editing, I realized I also wanted the film to reflect the memories I had aboard the ship, which I created by manipulating shots to give them a dreamlike image. By manipulation, I was able to capture a stronger state of sublime (technically by building heavy contrast by rephotographing the print over and over again), along with sound of Albert Ortega’s haunted-like score, to capture the traces of memory that leave me continuously with the surreal vision of being aboard the vessel. Also, I was interested in creating a similar haunted feeling with the use of the dusty archival material left over from the former mainland Chinese crew, which is interspersed throughout the film, that includes 16mm motion pictures of 1970s/’80s … Read the rest

25 NEW FACES

By Filmmaker Staff

The 25 new faces of independent film.

NEW BREED L.A.: “NOTHING YOU HAVE TO HAVE”

Premiering below is the first of a seven-part series entitled “New Breed Los Angeles” presented by Filmmaker and the Workbook Project. Produced and directed by SABI Pictures, the series was shot at the Los Angeles Film Festival and features festival participants talking about their creative process. From the filmmakers:

For the community of working-class filmmakers at New Breed a constantly evolving creative process of telling our stories is the one thing we can count on in these changing times. Embarking on journeys through deeper methods of collaboration & engaging with fans across various platforms is certainly exciting – but one thing is for certain, the creative needs to be the driving force behind any and all approaches in order to preserve the integrity of the story (and the core reason we make our art).

In the previous series “New Breed: Park City,” several knowledgeable artists had converged for Sundance and Slamdance & graciously shared with us their perspective on the state of the industry, film festivals & distribution. As we (and you) continue to weigh and explore distribution offers and new DIY opportunities, one of the things that keeps coming up is the creative process. More specifically, how we want to evolve our collaborative creative process in our next features.

The creative process is itself hard to get handle on as it is different for every filmmaker – and each filmmaker needs to develop their own in accordance with the needs of the film. But there is always room to learn & to experiment, and most importantly to share and discuss what works for you.

In this series we begin at the beginning & explore what what perhaps drew us all into making movies in the first place: the mystery of the creative process. What follows are short documentaries with creative tips, techniques, learning lessons & personal experiences from a handful of artists we encountered at the Los Angeles Film Festival 2010.

Episode One is titled: “Nothing You Have to Have.” Featured in this episode are Julius Onah, Jeff Malmberg, Brett Haley and Ted Hope. … Read the rest