VIA: videomaker

Financial concerns caused Disney to cease production with less than 20 seconds of film completed. Sixty years later modern Disney artists completed the film using Dali’s and John Hench’s original storyboards.

The result is without a doubt the coolest animation ever released by Disney!

Click here for more information on Destino.

VIA: CinemaTech

(The clips play in sequential order - when you reach the end of clip one, clip two will automatically start.)

MODERATOR
- Joaquín Alvarado, svp for Diversity and Innovation, Corporation for Public Broadcasting

RAPPORTEUR
- Pat Aufderheide, professor and director, Center for Social Media, American University School of Communication

PRESENTERS
- John Boland, chief content officer, PBS
- Andy Carvin, social media strategist, NPR
- Doug Craig, senior vice president, home entertainment, Discovery Communications
- Paco de Onís, producer, Skylight Pictures
- Jacquie Jones, executive director, National Black Programming Consortium
- Scott Kirsner, editor, CinemaTech, and contributing writer, Variety
- Alyce Myatt, executive director, Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media

…In a change up from the technical elements that I’ve written about in the last couple posts, this time I’m going to talk about three skills that I think any editor needs if he or she aspires to eventually lead a whole team of editors – which is my goal. Those three skills are public speaking, leadership, and project management.

— Michelle Dunlap | Read The Full Article

Greetings, Grasshoppers! The Samurai was meditating on one of the most overlooked aspects of the low/no budget short film world – props! Perusing the already available information revealed a plethora of discussions and how to videos about horror and blood effects – which is great, but where does that leave the new film maker who wants to do something a bit different?

Mostly swimming around alone. One should always be willing to experiment and try new things, and having inspiration or a starting point can help so much when brainstorming.

In this edition, I’m going to talk about a super low budget science fiction short “The Perfect Time” that I worked on with a friend of mine, aspiring director Jason Klein. One of the things I love about Jason, is that he’s willing to tackle subjects that most low budget film makers will run screaming from – as they’re just too daunting on the surface.

For this particular project, he needed a time machine. One that looked like more than something made out of cardboard and poster paint. (There are projects that cardboard is perfect for, but the tone of this was something a bit more serious.)

Enter the amazing Stuart Levy, prop-maker extraordinaire. While you may not have a Stuart of your own, let his examples spark your own creative juices.

Stuart had, effectively, one week and no money to create all of the props for this extravaganza. What he DID have, was a huge garage full of junk – broken monitors, chairs, odds and ends – you name it. It was like walking into the graveyard of forgotten gadgets!

Here’s a shot of the time machine in progress:

Can you see the camp chair and dolly in there? After scouring said garage for more spare parts, add ons, and whatever else we thought looked ‘cool’:

We have a pretty convincing home built bit of machinery. Even if you don’t have a warehouse of stuff to pull from, everything that was used here could be found at yard sales, thrift stores, and your local dump.

There were more dead computer monitors lying around, than at MIT’s yearly ‘break stuff’ party! Our main character’s work site was a lot more ‘neat’ looking pieces that didn’t actually work:

But with the assistance of editor Garrett Ilardi:

The impressiveness of those animations don’t really translate in a still, but you get the idea.

Have you noticed those wild electrodes on our actor’s head yet?

I bet if you look carefully, you can figure out a lot of what was used.

LED lighting technology is the boon of the low budget science fiction film maker. These little gadgets are light, small, cheap, and can add TONS of production value with relatively little elbow grease:

Those are LED book lights from your friendly, neighborhood discount store.

I didn’t want to get deeply into the creation of each piece – not because it’s not interesting or cool – but because I don’t want you to feel limited to using the same parts and pieces that you’ve seen here. The joy and challenge is in creating cool toys all of your own, with the bits and bobs that you can get your sticky film hands on.

And never forget the importance of powerful lighting tricks to add drama and a ‘wow’ factor to everything you do! DP Adrian Correia and yours truly pulled a whole bunch of rabbits out of our respective hats for the look of this piece.

This is Samurai heading back to the Dojo of Film – hoping that I’ve sparked some new, great ideas!

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… well it’s not really an app.

…My story is not unlike that of most independent filmmakers these days. We bust our butts for years producing — in our minds — a great film, only to find the distribution landscape radically different from the one in our hopes and dreams.

For a number of years now I had heard a variety of filmmaker pundits declare, “Theatrical is dead, long live the long tail!” But until my own distribution adventure I refused to believe these pronouncements. Now, 18 months after the world premiere of my feature documentary Bomb It at the Tribeca Film Festival and six months after the launch of the film‘s theatrical release, I believe that while there still is a strong role for theatrical releasing in an independent film‘s distribution strategy, savvy low-budget filmmakers must be more creative in the ways they approach these releases. Theatrical is not dead, but the long tail is a lot longer and involves a lot more work than you might expect.

— Filmmaker Magazine | Read The Full Article