Filmmaking on the Edge at the 2014 Provincetown Film Festival
The Credits is back at the Provincetown Film Festival, and we'd be lying if we said we weren't just a little bit thrilled. Last year, our first in Provincetown, was the type of introduction that will marry you to a place, and a festival, for life. We had the great fortune to spend some time with legendary filmmaker, writer, visual artist, wit and unofficial (but sort of official) Provincetown mayor John Waters. Interviews don't come much more enjoyable...
Dawn of the Planets of the Apes Location Manager on Filming in Rainforests
It has been ten years since the last human and ape contact. That last contact was combat, and it took place on the Golden Gate Bridge in a frenzied battle between a recently intellectually enhanced ape faction, led by the chimpanzee Caesar, and the bewildered humans who were not prepared for the coordinated assault of their suddenly intelligent, formerly captive simian subjects. The film ends with Caesar and his primate army heading into Muir Woods, north of San Francisco, where they’ll build a new society and live peaceably for a decade,...
From Stage to Screen: Adapting Jersey Boys
Jersey Boys is the story of the rise and fall of The Four Seasons, the “clean-cut,” all-American rock band that actually had two ex-cons and enough mob connections to satisfy a Scorsese film. Yet in the early 1960s the band sold themselves as the (Jersey) boys next door, and created some deathless tunes in the process.
Jersey Boys began it’s life, of course, as the Tony Award-winning juggernaut that became the 13th longest-running show in Broadway history when it played its 3,487th performance this past April 9th...
Think Like A Man Too & the Greening of Hollywood Films
From a distance, the film industry appears be a well-oiled machine, operating seamlessly and churning out interest pieces for every type of audience. But rarely do we look closer at the process of creating and sharing the films we love. The film industry is modernizing in front of our faces, progressing without audiences noticing.
Behind the scenes, actors, directors, producers, and studios have begun to take note of excesses within the industry and have been on a campaign of self-reform...
So You Graduated Film School, Now What? A Recent Film Grad Explains
I remember spending most of the time leading up to graduation feeling like my education had been worthless. I went to a liberal arts college, majoring in film in a program that emphasized that only half of my education would come from a classroom. The rest would come from working on student films, shot exclusively on weekends. Admittedly, giving up all of those weekends contributed largely to my sense of semi-entitlement when I graduated, and I spent a lot of time in those first months wondering when (if ever) I’d have the chance to be on a set again...
Watch How to Train Your Dragon 2‘s Dean DeBlois Take Kids’ Questions
We learned a lot from talking to writer/director Dean DeBlois. One is, he must be one of the most calm, even tempered and laid back individuals helming a major film franchise in the business. Two, a lot of work, and risk, went into making How to Train Your Dragon 2, a sequel that is being heralded as one of the best in animated history. And three, the man is committed to creating an animated trilogy that’ll live on and inspire kids and adults alike for years to come...
Sticking the Landing: 22 Jump Street‘s a Sequel Worth Seeing
21 Jump Street, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the duo behind this year’s The LEGO Movie), came out in 2012 and was something of an unlikely smash hit. Unlikely in its odd couple lead pairing (comedy vet Jonah Hill and action-Adonis Channing Tatum), and unlikely in that there seemed to be little reason to reprise Stephen J. Cannell’s television series from the late 80s, remembered mostly as an early vehicle for Johnny Depp...
How to Train Your Dragon 2‘s Writer/Director Dean DeBlois
When Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders film How to Train Your Dragon was released in 2010, it was a critical darling but had something of a sleepy opening. Adapted from Cressida Cowell’s book, How to Train Your Dragon contained everything that you expect from a stellar animated film—a great script, no small amount of wit, dramatic depth and fantastic effects. At its core it had a relationship that was hard to beat, a young boy named Hiccup (voiced by Jay Baruchel) and a young dragon named Toothless,...
Lions and Transformers and Giant Lizards, Oh My! Studios Taking to Tumblr
Adidas became the first major brand to build an advertising campaign on Tumblr, back in 2012, shortly after Tumblr announced they would be including paid advertising on their site. Today, the Adidas Tumblr page is a wonder of beautiful product shots, videos, artwork and what feels like an infinite amount of scrollable content.
Tumblr now hosts nearly 189 million blogs comprising more than 83 billion posts, with more than 90 million posts created each day. Along with being a gif-laden time-suck of anthropomorphic animals and a veritable inexhaustible incubator of inanity,...
Social Media Savvy Helps Fuel The Fault in Our Stars Excitement
Amid mutants, massive monsters and a horned and winged Angelina Jolie, a much quieter but no less anticipated film has been on everybody’s radar well in advance of it’s June 6 release—The Fault in Our Stars. Based on John Green’s 2012 novel, TFIOS centers on the story of Hazel (Shailene Woodley) and Gus (Ansel Elgort), two witty, irreverent teenagers who meet, and fall in love,...
Building Edge of Tomorrow’s Armored ExoSuits
How might a soldier be able to fight giant, sophisticated, and fantastically violent aliens with sundry razor-sharp tentacles and a taste for carnage? Simple: just create an articulated armored suit capable of protecting a soldier’s body while delivering a massive amount of firepower from weapons mounted to the carapace. This was the challenge the filmmakers behind Edge of Tomorrow created for themselves, and instead of relying on CGI to create these fantastic and fearsome combat “jackets,” or ExoSuits,...
Maleficent and the Strange and Storied History of Fairy Tales
This coming Friday one of the most eagerly anticipated films ever based on a fairy tale will be casting its spell on millions. We're talking about Maleficent, of course, Disney's fresh look at one of the most iconic villains of any fantasy or fairy kingdom, played by the seemingly perfectly cast Angelina Jolie. The production design looks lush, the effects superb, and the cast of the whole film a touch darker than we're used to with a Disney film...
Get Excited: Star Wars: Episode VII, the Coen Brothers as Writers for Hire & More
What do J.J. Abrams, the Coen Brothers, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Ames and UNICEF have in common? Nothing, save for the fact that they're all apart of this round-up of things to be excited about. Let's have a look:
The Coen Brothers as the Best Possible Writers for Hire
Here’s the [true] story; one afternoon in May, in 1943, an Army Air Forces B-24 bomber crashes into the Pacific Ocean. Former Olympic track star Louis Zamperini, a young lieutenant and the plane’s bombardier,...
Made in Georgia: Film Production Ripe in the Peach State
The excellent X-Men: First Class (a sort of prequel to the current, also excellent, X-Men: Days of Future Past) was filmed in Georgia. The Blind Side, also Georgia. Classics like Forrest Gump and My Cousin Vinny, Georgia. The beloved Zombieland was filmed there, too. Sweet Home Alabama? A little bit in Alabama, but really mostly Georiga. And then there's a little show called ...
It’s 2014: Do You Know Where Your Mutants Are?
Just to be clear, the new X-Men movie, Days of Futures Past, is both a sequel and a prequel. It’s a sequel to the original film trilogy, since the older set of characters (the Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan crowd) have already lived through the events of X-Men: The Last Stand. It’s also a sequel to the prequel/reboot X-Men: First Class, with its new generation of James McAvoy,...
Mutants, Maleficent & Tom Cruise: Summer Blockbuster Season is Upon us
Godzilla thrashes and trashes his way into theaters this weekend, marking the unofficial start of summer blockbuster season (you could argue The Amazing Spider-Man 2 kicked off the increasingly earlier start to tent pole season on May 2). In the coming weeks, some of the year’s biggest films are hitting theaters, including mutants, mutating robots, turtles who are also mutants, Maleficent, Tom Cruise, monkeys riding horses, and the Wachowski's latest mind-bender...
Godzilla Sound Designers Erik Aadahl & Ethan Van der Ryn on Creature Language
“Whenever I heard his roar, it’s a long roar, a screaming, and to me it almost feels like Godzilla is scolding us for humanity’s foolishness. It’s like Godzilla exists as a symbol of human consciousness. It’s a scream involved with sadness.”
So said Ken Watanabe, one of the stars of the latest incarnation of Godzilla, describing the iconic roar of the original Godzilla in the 1954 film that started it all. That roar was created by composer Akira Ifukube,...
Cricket out of Water: The Sport Behind Disney’s Million Dollar Arm
It’s a story that seems tailor-made for film: the surprise twist is that it’s true. Million Dollar Arm, the latest feel-good sports flick from Disney, tells the tale of a down and out sports agent (Jon Hamm) who turned two Indian cricket players into Major League pitchers.
Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel were both seventeen years old, speaking no English and raised in villages without cellphones, when they took part in J.B...
Looking Back at the Original Godzilla
In August of 1954, Toho Studios began shooting a film unlike any that ever been made in Japanese cinematic history. Three photography teams were required: a special-effects photography team to cover the film's star, a principal photography team to capture dramatic scenes between the rest of the cast, and a composite photography team who would help mesh star and cast into a cohesive whole.
That film was, of course, the original Godzilla, made by a nearly rebuilt Japan still rocked by Hiroshima and Nagasaki,...
Director Gareth Edwards, Producer Thomas Tull & Star Ken Watanabe Talk Godzilla
We combed through a few Godzilla round table interviews Warner Bros. recently uploaded to their press site in anticipation of the iconic monster's May 16 landfall, and have provided some choice quotes from three major players involved in the film—director Gareth Edwards, producer and Legendary Pictures Chairman and CEO Thomas Tull, and star Ken Watanabe.
DIRECTOR GARETH EDWARDS
On creating the look of Godzilla
"We imagined that sixty years ago,...
