Behind the Controls With Chappie Drone Operator John Gore
It’s a good time to be a drone operator. As the basic devices have gotten cheaper and the more expensive ones more sophisticated, drones have proliferated, not just in the film industry but for applications like mining, surveying and search and rescue.
John Gore, a South Africa-based drone operator who has worked on nine features to date, including Chappie, The Last Face and Seal Team 8,
Lies, Illusions & Murder: A Look at True Story
Journalist Michael Finkel had a promising career ahead of him when he started at the New York Times Magazine, although his future was soon shattered by his own mistakes. Finkel was caught fabricating elements of his feature story “Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?” which looked at the life of the young, titular laborer on a cocoa plantation on the Ivory Coast. Although Malé was a real boy, it was revealed that Finkel had create the version you meet in the article from a composite of several boys he met,
Berlinale 2015: A Q&A With The Filmmakers & Star of Koza
A bleak, beautiful entry from Slovakia in the year’s Berlinale, Koza starts off slow and static and stays that way, even as worlds heap themselves on the titular main character. An uncommon blend of reality and fiction, the film stars the real life Koza, birth name Peter Baláž, more or less as himself. The Roma boxer competed in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games for Slovakia, returned home, and over the ensuing years, slipped back into the chronic poverty that’s typical of what many Roma face across Europe.
Project Almanac Shoots Found Footage With Cinematographer Matthew Lloyd
As director Dean Israelite spun Matthew Lloyd a tale about kids creating a time machine, showing him detailed storyboard panels with picture of teens with a secret tools that looks liked a dark graphic novel, Lloyd made a decision. He would be the cinematographer for the Paramount feature Project Almanac.
The next challenge was figure out how to make the film’s found footage style work. The duo decided to split the difference,
2014 in Review: DP Robert Yeoman on The Grand Budapest Hotel
When people think of Wes Anderson’s films, often the first thing that comes to mind is their singular look. Here is a director with a signature style, whose films look like nobody else’s. As the year draws to a close, we’re looking back on some of our favorite films and chatting with the people who helped bring them to life. Today, that means cinematographer Bob Yeoman, the man who has helped Anderson achieve his look since Anderson’s breakout 1996 debut,
Building the Sets of Middle-Earth for The Battle of the Five Armies
Peter Jackson and his crew shot The Hobbit trilogy concurrently over 266 days (the same total number of days it took to shoot The Lord of the Rings trilogy). Another 10 weeks was needed for cast and crew for pickup shooting for The Battle of the Five Armies on the performance capture stage, which ends the Middle-earth saga that Jackson and his team have been working on since last century.
Cinematographer Dion Beebe Takes us Into the Woods
Academy Award winning cinematographer Dion Beebe is now on his fourth film with Rob Marshall. He won an Oscar for his work on Marshall’s Memoirs of a Geisha in 2005. He was nominated for lensing Marshall’s Chicago in 2002. He was nominated for an ASC Award (American Society of Cinematographers) for another Marshall film, Nine, in 2009. And for their fourth collaboration, Into the Woods, Beebee has helped translate Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Broadway musical into a lush,
Wild’s Cinematographer Yves Bélanger on Framing Face of America
Director Jean-Marc Vallée gathered a lot of his favorite collaborators for the upcoming Wild, which comes out this Friday, Dec 5. This includes his fantastic makeup department head, Robin Mathews, as well as his cinematographer Yves Bélanger. “I’ve known him twenty years,” Belanger says, “but there was always some reason we couldn’t work together.” Bélanger was wrapping up Laurence Anyway in 2012 when Vallée phoned him. “He said he had this great film,
At Long Last Filmgoers Will Head Into the Woods
Into the Woods began its life as a musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, debuting on Broadway on November 5, 1987 at the Martin Beck Theater. Former New York Times' theater critic Frank Rich (later an Op-Ed writer, now an editor-at-large at New York Magazine) wrote in his review, "The characters of ''Into the Woods" may be figures from children's literature, but their journey is the same painful,
Harsh Conditions Bring out the Best in The Homesman‘s Crew
When we interviewed Marco Beltrami, he was particularly jazzed up about the work he did for Tommy Lee Jones’ upcoming film The Homesman. Beltrami is the type of composer who seeks out directors (as he did with Joon-ho Bong for Snowpiercer) and he was excited about Jones’ second directorial effort. The film’s set in the punishing Nebraska frontier in the middle of the 19th century. This inspired Beltrami to record a lot of his score outdoors,
Interstellar’s Out of This World Crew
In a little over two weeks, on November 7, Christopher Nolan’s long awaited Interstellar will finally hit screens across the country. Jeff Jensen’s cover story for Entertainment Weekly uncovered a lot of juicy details which add up to what sounds like the director's most personal, and possibly ambitious, film yet. When Jensen was on set in October of 2013, the film's code name was Flora's Letter. As Jessica Chastain told Jensen at the time,
Longtime Collaborators Helped David Fincher Find Gone Girl
The New York Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of David Fincher’s Gone Girl last Friday, and boy, did it deliver. Fincher’s directing chops are never in question, and Gillian Flynn’s novel is perhaps perfectly suited for his particular skill set. Gone Girl combines his instinctual way around pitch-black thrillers (Se7en, Zodiac, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and offbeat, grimy comedies (Fight Club) and delivers 148 compelling minutes without any evident lull.
DP Emmanuel Lubezki Soars Again With Birdman
Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki could credibly claim to have put together some of the greatest shots in modern filmmaking. By the early aughts he’d already worked with a slew of great American directors, including Mike Nichols (The Birdcage, 1996), Martin Brest (Meet Joe Black, 1998) Tim Burton (Sleep Hollow, 1999), and Michael Mann (Ali, 2001), to say nothing of the generation defining 1994 film Reality Bites,
How Into The Storm‘s DP Filmed in Torrential Rain & 100-mph Wind
How do you take a moderately budgeted action film that requires Biblically ferocious storms causing massive damage and make it look like money was no concern at all? With ingenious filmmaking techniques, expertise along a broad spectrum of skills, and a whole lot of problem solving is how. Into the Storm was initially contracted with the VFX house Rhythm & Hues to handle the creation of the cataclysmic tornados that are the film’s raison d’etre,
Garrett Brown: An Interview With a Visionary—Part II
In part one of our two-part conversation with Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown, the Philadelphia-based cinematographer talked about holing up in a motel for a week in the early 1970s to experiment with designs for a more commercial version of his revolutionary camera stabilizer. He talked about shooting his first-ever feature film using a Steadicam on Bound for Glory. And he described his improvised solution for filming one of the most famous scenes in all of cinema history: Sylvester Stallone running up the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum in Rocky.
Garrett Brown: An Interview With a Visionary—Part I
The major breakthrough moments in motion picture technology are fairly well known to the amateur film fan. There’s the advent of sound marked by the wondrous appearance of Al Jolson crooning “Mammy” in 1927’s The Jazz Singer. Technicolor, first developed around the same time, came into full bloom in the 1940s and 50s with the grand Hollywood Westerns and musicals. The first feature-length CGI movie was 1995’s Toy Story,
Father’s Day With the Lannisters: Game of Thrones Thrilling Finale
An absolute ton of spoilers below. Just a ton. Don't read if you're not caught up.
The end of the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones, “The Watchers on the Wall,” saw Jon Snow leaving Castle Black after surviving the first onslaught of Mance Rayder’s Wildling army. Giants, mammoths, Wildlings and Crows were strewn inside and outside the wall, dead and soon to be burned. Jon was leaving, alone, without his sword and,
Award Winning Documentarian Rachel Beth Anderson on Filming in Conflict Zones
Rachel Beth Anderson is a cinematographer-turned-director who has spent her career working almost exclusively in conflict zones. She was recently awarded the cinematography award for a U.S. documentary at Sundance, along with Ross Kaufman, for her work on E-Team, which followed a group of four Human Rights Watch workers documenting war crimes around the world.
Along with filming in Syria, Anderson has worked in Libya,
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.
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 –
