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,...
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,...
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 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,...
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.
In Wonderstone,...
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, in which he plays Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner in the latter,...
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, making him a rising star of the film world at the tender age of 19...
Meet Gary Jones, the Man Behind the Fantastical Fashion of Oz The Great and Powerful
The clothes make the man, as they say. And in Disney’s Oz The Great and Powerful, director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man, The Evil Dead) and his team of designers found themselves with not just a man to make but a few fashionable witches, a carnival crew, some Munchkins and indeed a whole army of Winkie guards.
With Oscar® winner Robert Stromberg (Avatar,...
Sony Pictures Classics Gives Woody Allen’s Latest To Rome With Love The Blu-ray Treatment
There is a scene in Robert B. Weide’s 2012 American Masters special, Woody Allen: A Documentary, in which Allen, sitting casually atop a bed in an unassuming guestroom that betrays the elegant townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that contains it, takes out an array of paper scraps encompassing a career’s worth of film plots. Or, for the most prolific force in cinema, releasing a movie a year for the past four decades, maybe just half a career...
Hearing Is Believing: MPAA’s TED2013 Master Class With Music Supervisor Randall Poster
Everyone knows ‘seeing is believing,’ but master music supervisor Randall Poster will tell you: what you hear in motion pictures is just as tantamount to the images whirring across the screen. Poster is one of the most sought after music supervisors in Hollywood (a sampling from his impressive oeuvre: Rushmore!, Velvet Goldmine, Boardwalk Empire) —and he brought his prowess to TED2013, where he hosted the dynamic MPAA sponsored-Master Class,...
The Last Exorcism Part II’s Ashley Bell Shares Another Dance With the Devil
When we last saw Nell Sweetzer she was in the middle of the woods at the top of an altar giving virgin birth to a demon baby while the reverend who tried to save her soul suffered a fate that would make William Peter Blatty proud. If it made fans cringe, well, that was the point. Nearly three years and $68 million in box-office receipts later (against a budget of $1.8mm), The Last Exorcism has an awkwardly named but hotly anticipated sequel,...
From Return of the Jedi to Jack the Giant Slayer, the Worlds of Production Designer Gavin Bocquet
Starting out as a draftsman on Return of the Jedi (1983), Gavin Bocquet’s career as a production designer coincided with the development and implementation of CGI technology into all spheres of the movie business. Bocquet was at the forefront of that revolution, working regularly for George Lucas, honing his craft on the TV show The Young Indiana Jones Adventures and the trilogy of Star Wars prequels. His career reflects the developing integration between practical production design and ever evolving CGI technology...
The Polymath: Chatting With John Ottman, Composer and Editor of Jack the Giant Slayer
Perhaps one of the most famous film sequences of the past thirty years was edited together in a living room using a splicer. By somebody who is also a composer. A composer who has gone on to score a slew of films (while somewhat begrudgingly continuing to edit, too), making him one of the few people in the film industry who is a professional at both of these demanding positions. John Ottman, the composer and editor on Warner Bros...
Lovesick: Comedian Natasha Leggero Knocks Our Socks Off in the Ben Stiller Produced Burning Love
Sixteen lovelorn bachelorettes bunk up in an L.A. mansion where they’ll compete for the heart of hunky firefighter Mark Orlando and, naturally, embark on some epic makeout sessions and drunken catfights along the way. If it sounds like the “plot” to just about every reality show out there, that’s because it is. But Burning Love, an instant cult classic that started as a Yahoo web series and began its TV run on E! Monday night,...
Can We Predict The Oscars? Social Media Reveals Who The Public’s Rooting For
They are known as quants (short for ‘quantitative analyst), and their undisputed supreme leader, at least in the public’s perception, is Nate Silver. You’ve heard of Silver, the man who went from relative obscurity before the 2008 presidential election to a household name thanks to his pinpoint accuracy predicting the last two presidential elections.
Quants are not just employed to help us figure out who the next Commander in Chief is going to be, of course. There are other races that capture the public’s interest and imagination—namely,...
Meet Lucy Alibar, Oscar Nominated Screenwriter of Beasts of the Southern Wild
It’s not often you hear an Oscar nominee recount her road to recognition as a rapid one, but that’s just how Lucy Alibar describes it. Turning her one-act play Juicy and Delicious into Beasts of the Southern Wild with co-writer and director Benh Zeitlin, the first-time screenwriter won her film a spot in more than twenty film festivals including Sundance, Berlin, Deauville, and Cannes—the last of which she paid her own way to by selling everything from chocolate peanut butter cookies and homemade gelato to postcards and hugs on Indiegogo.com...
Celebrate The Other Oscar Nominees – You Know, The Ones Ryan Seacrest Likely Won’t Interview
Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director–these might be the most anticipated categories of the Oscars, but this year, let's celebrate the other half. After all, the year's best films wouldn't stand a chance without the genius nominees in less-publicized realms like Production Design, Cinematography, Makeup/Hairstyle, Sound Editing, and Visual Effects.
Here at The Credits, we love all parts of film, which is why we created this infographic to celebrate the many industry icons who are making big waves (but perhaps not big red carpet debuts) at this year's 85th Academy Awards...
An Evening With George Stevens Jr., Celebrating his Honorary Oscar and his Remarkable Career
George Stevens Jr. has lived and breathed films since he was a child. His father, the legendary director George Stevens, instilled in Steven fils a love of story. It was a teenage George Jr. who paced around his father’s bed one night, excitedly telling him the truncated story of a book he had read that his father should turn into a movie. That movie turned out to be the legendary western Shane (1953),...
