How does a chance encounter bring about an on-the-spot decision to make a feature-length documentary? For Cole Claassen it all started with country music.
DP Steven Turco explains how he was able to maintain a dynamic, filmic look without exceeding the budget in Director Tre Manchester's film, "The Things We've Seen."
Picking up on the latest trend, the Vancouver Fashion Week event organizers had seen the success of the New York Fashion Week 360 video stream and hired Canada-based virtual reality (VR) experts Time Technologies to develop a 360 video plan for their upcoming 2017 Spring/Summer event.
For me to ever have created MicroFilmmaker Magazine in 2005, two key elements had to occur in my life. The first was that, in 2003, I make a narrative first film called Commissioned, which revolved around the world of commissioned computer sales, that broke all the cardinal rules of Indie filmmaking and suffered because of it. (The audio ended up being so bad that the film couldn’t be salvaged, even after a year of redubbing, due to the fact that two actors never returned to loop their work.)
Filmmaking is a storytelling process. But what do you do when you can’t find the right story to tell? Sometimes it’s just a matter of getting out there and letting the story come to you. As a filmmaker, there’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like you don’t have a story to tell. When I was a kid, this wasn't a problem. Back then, I made movies for the pure joy of it. I wasn't thinking ahead to the third act. The stories just happened, one moment after another.
Recently I’ve been involved in pick-ups shoots for a couple of projects I lensed last year: action-comedy feature The Gong Fu Connection and fantasy series Ren. Both pick-up shoots were strange experiences, featuring some very familiar aspects of the original shoot – locations, sets, costumes – but noticeably lacking others – certain actors, crew members and so on. The Ren pick-ups in particular were like re-living principal photography in microcosm, with stressful crowd shoots followed by more relaxed, smaller scenes and finally night shots with flaming arrows again!