SXSW 2014: Things to See & Hear

Now that SXSW is underway and The Credits lounge is open for business, let’s take a quick glance around the festival at some of the things going on over the next nine days. Obviously this is but a tiny little snapshot—SXSW is a festival with so much going on it’s a little like a moving Louvre, you can’t possibly hope to see everything in your allotted time, so you have to pick and choose your spots. Here are some of ours...

Building a Plane From Scratch With the Production Designer of Non-Stop

Have you ever walked through a missile silo? What about into the Oval Office or onto an alien planet? We didn’t think so. But chances are each of the millions of moviegoers who have flocked to see Non-Stop know what the inside of an airplane looks like. And since he was charged with creating an interior that looked totally realistic and doubled as a functional movie set, that posed a pretty big challenge for production designer Alec Hammond...

Flying the Unfriendly Skies with Non-Stop Stunt Coordinator Mark Vanselow

Using an airport bathroom can have the degree of difficulty of a gymnastics floor routine. But when your job is United States air marshal and there’s a mystery man on your plane threatening to kill one passenger every 20 minutes, taking care of business means means squeezing into the stall to swap punches with a bad guy like two angry sardines in a can. And though star Liam Neeson, playing air marshal Bill Marks, no doubt took some licks during filming,...

Post Oscars Wrap-Up: Our Social Awards Season App Delivers the Goods

The things that we could agree would happen, like Ellen hosting with her easy going charm (has there ever been a more relaxed, amiable host?) and Gravity mopping up a slew of technical awards. And how did our Social Awards Season App, the DataViz, fare in predicting the winners?  Let’s have a look.

To access the DataViz and see for yourself, click here. For our brief synopsis, see below:

Best picture

Predicted Correctly?...

Our Social Awards Season App Gears up for the Oscars

We’re a week away from the biggest night in Hollywood, and our DataViz, a collaboration between The Credits and global social analytics and monitoring firm Brandwatch, a truly one-of-a-kind Social Awards App, is proving its mettle for the second year in a row. The DataViz tracked, crunched and analyzed how critics and the public predicted who would the various categories in the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Golden Globes, Producers Guild of American Awards and Directors Guild of America Awards,...

In Their Words: Some of This Year’s Oscar Nominees on Their Craft, Part II

Yesterday we took a look at four filmmakers whose work has earned them an Oscar nomination (in Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's case, his sixth), sharing with you some of their thoughts on their craft. In one of the most anticipated Oscars in recent memory, it's refreshing to step back and reflect on exactly how these talented individuals created such memorable moments in such a fantastic year for film.

We continue this reflection on craft with part two,...

In Their Words: Some of This Year’s Oscar Nominees on Their Craft, Part I

One of the strongest years in recent cinema history will officially come to a close this Sunday at the 86th annual Academy Awards. What just about everyone agrees on is that, with a few exceptions (most people seem fairly convinced Cate Blanchett has Best Actress locked up, for example), it’s anyone’s guess (including our social awards season app, the DataViz—but it's doing just a little bit more than guessing) who might take home Oscar.

While there’s legitimate excitement about who might win each award,...

Olympic Stars Who Made it in Hollywood…and 3 Who Should

Like Hollywood, the Olympics has its A-listers. Your Shaun Whites, your Bode Millers, your Apolo Ohnos and Lindsey Vonns. These are the high wattage stars of the Olympics who have returned multiple times (with varying degrees of success) intent on capturing another medal. Then there are the promising young athletes trying their hardest to ascend to the podium, looking for their one chance to be on top. Full of comeback stories, close wins, and triumphs over adversity,...

Georgian Filmmaker Nana Ekvtimishvili on her Powerful Debut In Bloom

The debut feature from Georgian filmmaker Nana Ekvtimishvili, In Bloom, is a powerful coming-of-age story that takes place in in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Shot in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, it’s about two 14 year-olds, Eka (Lika Babluani) and her best friend Natia (Mariam Bokeria) whose ordinary lives—school, friends, domestic strife—are set against the sudden changes to the social order of the country as well as a backdrop of war in the Abkhazia region...

The Digital Camera Company That Oscar Nominated Filmmakers Prefer

Last week saw the release of RoboCop, a slick and technologically savvy re-imagining of the 1987 classic directed by Paul Verhoeven. With it’s combination of 3D holographic video screens and large scale multi-tier HD video screens present in every environment, from the corporate computer labs that assemble RoboCop, to the cable news channel studios that cover his exploits, to the sleek design of RoboCop himself, the new movie acts as yet another reflection of ourselves – showing the audience what the future that we live in now looks like,...

Joshua Oppenheimer on Chatty Killers in his Oscar Nom’d Doc The Act of Killing

When filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer set out to document the aftermath of what he calls “one of the biggest killings in human history,” he started with the survivors.

But it is the killers who speak in his Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing, a film that reinterprets the documentary.

“Documentary implies that we’re documenting a pre-existing reality, and I think we never are in nonfiction; we’re always creating reality with the people we film,”...

The Movies Behind the Study That Finds Movies Might Save Your Relationship

Valentine’s Day is a marketing ploy developed by cynical advertisers whose only aim is to separate suckers from their money. Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to show the person you love how much they mean to you, regardless of its origin. Valentine’s Day is a 2010 Gary Marshall film starring two Jessica’s (Alba, Biel), Bradley Cooper, Anne Hathaway, and about four thousand other famous actors that you were either dragged to see or dragged somebody else to see...

How Matthu Placek Created the Single Take, 3D A Portrait of Marina Abramović

The synthesis of technology and art is at the very heart of cinema. Filmmakers are natural innovators. Whether they're working on a big budget film or a small independent, there has simply never been a film made in which the crew didn't have to surmount obstacles through ingenuity—be it with state of the art technology or a nuts and bolts solution.

The ingenuity, technical daring and beautiful beating heart Matthu Placek's 130919 • A Portrait of Marina Abramović ...

Dinner & A Movie: 10 of the Greatest Dine-In Theaters in America

Whether you call it food and a flick or dinner and a movie, the trend of cinemas offering a full menu with a ticket to the silver screen is red hot right now. Some, like Brooklyn’s now famous Nitehawk Cinema, provide in-theater table seating and waiter service. Others are more casual with a buy-it-in-the lobby and carry-it-to-your-seat policy. Most, if not all, understand the value of a good libation. The ten theaters below run the gamut of service,...

Director Ritesh Batra on his Mumbai Set Love Story The Lunchbox

Writer/director Ritesh Batra is enjoying critical and viewer acclaim for his first feature-length film, The Lunchbox. The film, set in Mumbai, is a quiet love story that takes place mostly through hand-written letters. So it’s a surprise to find the Indian-born director and his film at the center of a fiery controversy over the current role and power of the Film Federation of India.

But the decision late last year by India’s official film body to select a lesser-known film with limited distribution,...

How The Lego Movie Got Its Stop-Motion Look

When the trailer for The Lego Movie came out, the Internet was abuzz. The Lego characters had that signature stop-motion feel to them, moving in a slightly stilted manner. Was the movie filmed in stop-motion or CG animation? “There were a couple arguments that we all found quite humorous when we first put out the trailers. People on the Internet were saying they knew for a fact we were doing stop-motion,” remembers Alfie Olivier, the animation supervisor...

The Monuments Men Production Designer Jim Bissell Re-Creates a Ruined Europe

In The Monuments Men, art experts weave through battlefields and behind enemy lines in order to find art looted by the Nazis. Before he was a dictator, Adolf Hitler was an art student, and he planned to take the best art from the countries he conquered and assemble it in a museum that would rival the Louvre in Paris. It was the act of a lunatic, and The Monuments Men had to capture that scope...

Director Jehane Noujaim on her Oscar Nominated Doc The Square

An Oscar nomination can vault a young filmmaker into the big leagues. But for Jehane Noujaim, director of The Square, it means that her film might have the chance to be seen by many of the people who made it. The Square, a powerful, on-the-ground look at Egypt’s revolutionary uprising, was shot by Noujaim and a largely Egyptian crew on the volatile streets in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square for more than two years...

Sonic Manipulation: Deborah Stratman on her Foley Artist Doc Hacked Circuit

Hearing is believing—this is one of the points Debroah Stratman makes with her fantastic short film about foley artists, Hacked Circuit. While we often associate our eyes as the prime mover in our emotions when we watch a film, it’s our ears, Stratman argues, that moves us to really feel.

Stratman has made some very intriguing documentaries in her career. Hacked Circuit is her 28th film, her third at Sundance Film Festival...

Sundance: Getting Low Down With John Hawkes & Elle Fanning

Elle Fanning is fantastic in Low Down, a film filled with superb actors. Fanning holds the center of a film as loose and atmospheric as the music it portrays, playing Amy-Jo Albany, the daughter of the brilliant, smack addicted jazz pianist Joe Albany (one of the best character actors in the business, John Hawkes.) It’s a beautifully shot film by experimental filmmaker and cinematographer Jeff Preiss about a perfectly ugly situation. Set in the decidedly unsexy,...