The Sky’s the Limit: Cinematography’s Technological Revolution
Just as smart phones and tablets are changing the way we experience daily life, other technologies are dramatically shifting the cinematic landscape. Directors today can harness these tools in order to express their artistic vision on the screen as never before. We spoke with two of the most significant players in this field in order to find out what’s possible now, and what we can expect to see in the future.
3D moves beyond ‘next big thing’
By The Book: Literary Icons Flock to Hollywood
Los Angeles, arguably best known for its flagship status as a gateway to Hollywood and the film industry at large, has developed uncountable stereotypes for the culture that populates its traffic-clogged arteries. And while there might be too many LAisms to count (for starters: epic taco trucks, grass-scented juice bars, fuzzed-up band members sauntering down Sunset Boulevard, etc. etc.) those reserved for the film industry are particularly iconic misnomers. Among them, my favorite: the questioningly ambitious,
Are you a Joffrey, a Cersei, or a Jon Snow? Take our Game of Thrones Personality Quiz
Season three of Game of Thrones is finally, mercifully here. Of the many, many reasons to love GOT (dragons, palace intrigue, a Tolkien-esque commitment to mythical cartography with a Cinemax After Dark commitment to carnal relations), we've found that it’s the fantastically divergent (and huge) cast of characters that makes it endlessly enjoyable, week after week. Millions of fans would no doubt agree.These characters!
Writer-Director Derek Cianfrance on The Place Beyond the Pines
Ryan Gosling may have recently suggested that he is taking a break from acting, but fans can still find solace in this weekend’s release of The Place Beyond the Pines, a triptych that reunites him with Blue Valentine writer-director Derek Cianfrance.
The cops and robbers caper—costarring Bradley Cooper, Eva Mendes, and Ray Liotta—traces the ramifications caused when Gosling’s character, a drifter-cum-motorcycle stunt driver,
On the 50th Anniversary of The Birds, the Story of how a Disney Animator Helped Hitchcock fly
On this 50th Anniversary of the premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, we learn how The Mouse House helped the master of suspense realize one of his most technically ambitious and influential movies.
After the global success of Psycho in 1960, the world was anxiously awaiting to see how director Alfred Hitchcock would scare them next. Rather than rest on the laurels of an already legendary thirty-five year directorial career,
The Art of Armory: Chatting With Game of Thrones Costume Designer Michele Clapton
Emmy and BAFTA award winning costume designer Michele Clapton has perhaps one of the most demanding, and most fun, jobs in TV—she clothes the wild, epic world of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Clapton, who works in Belfast, Ireland, heads up a team of weavers, embroiderers and armorers as she creates the costumes, most of them from scratch (they have their own loom in which they weave the fabric) for a show unrivaled in its scope,
Getting Gleefully Lost in The Shining Documentary Room 237
“In all things mysterious, never explain.” – Stanley Kubrick, quoting H.P. Lovecraft in an interview with John Hofsess of the International Herald Tribune, October 26, 1980.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining was released in the summer of 1980 to tepid reviews but, lucky for him, boffo box office. As with all of Kubrick’s movies since 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, the critics were confounded by what they had seen.
Triple Threat: Chatting With Film/TV/Video Game Composer Christopher Lennertz of NBC’s Revolution
Christopher Lennertz’s composing career has settled nicely across three mediums, making him one of the busiest musicians in Hollywood. His most recent film successes includes scoring a string star-studded comedies like Identity Thief, Think Like a Man and Horrible Bosses. For scoring TV, his credits include NBC’s new series Revolution, about a family struggling to reunite in a totally powerless American landscape–and we mean that literally,
Week in Review: Eight Talking Points from the World of Film & TV From This Past Week
Surely you’ve got more to talk about than Jay Leno and Jimmy Fallon…
Back to school: The Weinstein Company has officially confirmed they will release Salinger, a feature length documentary on the Catcher in the Rye author, on September 6th. The film was directed by Shane Salerno (he also co-wrote a companion biography with journalist David Shields, to be published by Simon & Schuster, who is a co-producer on the film).
Veronica Mars Takes Hollywood By Storm: We Imagine The Next Back-From-The-Dead Kickstarter Projects
The wildly successful campaign for the Veronica Mars movie brought in $4 million in mere days, making Kickstarter a viable interest-vetting platform for Hollywood. As rumors continue to volley about the potential resurrection of long-forgotten or ended-too-soon series, sequels, and one-offs, industry insiders have been prophetically asking: does the digital model of supply-and-demand mark a new era of movie-making as we know it?
How'd it happen?
The Art of Adaptation: Talking With Karen Croner, Admission Screenwriter
Best known for her adaptations of Olive Ann Burns’ Cold Sassy Tree and Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing, screenwriter Karen Croner is, above all things, a writer’s screenwriter if there is such a thing. Croner’s first stab at comedy hits the screen this weekend in the ever-capable hands of Tina Fey and Paul Rudd in Admission. Focused largely on the nervous breakdown suffered by a Princeton University admissions officer played by Fey,
From Game of Thrones to 42: An Epic Spring Awaits
At 7:02 a.m. EDT this morning, the sun crossed directly over the Earth’s equator in a moment called the vernal equinox (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, that is)—when both day and night are, more or less, equal. Spring lasts until the summer solstice, which comes on Friday, June 21st. Although this might sound like a strange intro to a Weather.com report, we’re merely alerting you to this specific stretch of time because, between today and June 21st,
From Making Hats to 3D Cats: Self-Taught Animator TJ Nabors Helps Create The Croods
TJ Nabors has taken your typical road to becoming a top animator in Hollywood—she started out designing hats. She was in theater at the University of Texas, and was focusing on textiles and costume, when she took a particular shine to the creation of hats. "There was a distilled and theatrical power to transform the wearer," she says. The power to transform one thing into another would become a theme in Nabors professional life, as she transformed herself into a self-taught animator,
511 Days of Total Darkness: The Incredible True Story Behind the Documentary No Place on Earth
In 1993, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, NYPD officer and caving enthusiast Chris Nicola set out to Western Ukraine to explore Verteba and the Priest’s Grotto Cave, one of the longest cave systems in the world. Inside the caves—dark, damp, and stifling, wholly inhospitable to human life—he found the unthinkable: buttons, shoes, a house key, artifacts of human habitation decidedly recent. Upon returning from the caves, his attempts at discovering the origins of these items led him to only the offhand comment from a local villager that,
Week in Review: Seven Talking Points From the World of Film From the Past Week
Veronica who? While it’s entirely possibly you’ve never heard of the series Veronica Mars, which aired on the CW from 2004-2007, a Kickstarter campaign launched on Wednesday by the show’s star Kristin Bell, and its director Rob Thomas, raised $2 million in ten hours to resurrect the show in film form. Read more here.
There’s little doubt they’ll struggle to raise their goal of $3.2 million by the April 11 deadline,
The Smithsonian’s Warner Bros. Theater Celebrates Women’s History Month With Bette Davis Tribute
Right next to the Warner Bros. Theater at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. is the Artifact Wall. It showcases 20 feet of Hollywood memorabilia from the Warner Bros. Archive and switches up costumes every so often. Called “You Must Remember This,” the display currently features Bette Davis’ famous butterfly cape from Now, Voyager, along with Harry Potter’s Hogwarts uniform and Jack Warner’s personal address book (which includes the likes of Salvador Dali,
Composer John Debney Answers The Call, and Goes Really Dark
Incorporating ‘found sound’ into his score for director Brad Anderson’s The Call, Oscar nominated composer John Debney wasn’t afraid to get weird. From slapping the tops of pianos to creating a bizarre engine revving sound for the film’s deranged lunatic, he took risks. The result is a truly unsettling soundscape–from the same man who wrote the score for Elf, no less.
The Call,
Meet William Corso, Oscar Winning Makeup Artist Behind The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
With a formidable resume that includes five Steven Spielberg movies (from Amistad to Munich), eight Jim Carrey movies (from The Majestic to this Friday’s The Incredible Burt Wonderstone), and dozens of film and television projects in between (from Jackass: The Movie to Grey Gardens), makeup artist William Corso has become one of the most esteemed—and in-demand—behind-the-scenes guys in Hollywood.
Eleven Very Short Answers From James Franco About his Upcoming Film, Bukowski
James Franco’s appearance at Sundance this year was a stunner. But then again the risk-taking renaissance man is accustomed to surprising his critics. At Sundance’s New Frontiers the actor/director/producer/visiting professor/writer presented his collaborative effort with gay filmmaker Travis Mathews. The graphic sixty-minute documentary Interior. Leather Bar, a hard core riff on the gay leather bar scene, and two other films, Kink and Lovelace,
Documentary Filmmaker Andrew Jenks Makes Compassion Cool on MTV’s World of Jenks
Andrew Jenks wasn’t the first free spirit to drop out of college. He also wasn’t the first to do it despite having two successful parents, one of whom currently serves as the Assistant Secretary General for the United Nations. But he was certainly the first to go from the halls of NYU straight into an assisted living facility, where the documentary he shot, Andrew Jenks, Room 335, was quickly acquired by HBO,
