Director Mike Figgis may be best known for the acclaimed hit Leaving Las Vegas, which ushered in a continuing renaissance in Super 16 film production that began in the mid-1990s. Figgis has earned a reputation since then as a technology-savvy artist and iconoclast, so maybe it's not surprising that, when Sony Pictures insisted that his latest TV project, Canterbury's Law, be shot in HD, Figgis defied the order.... »
Red Digital Cinema was on the NAB show floor this year with its usual tent, a red velvet rope, and a bouncer practicing crowd control. If you didn’t make it in to see the show, here’s a quick rundown of what the team announced.... »
The recent prolific growth of video games is drawing what some might regard as inevitable comparisons with the evolution of cinema, a putative convergence certainly reinforced by venture that just last year alone had action helmsman Jerry Bruckheimer joining forces with MTV’s games division and director John Woo collaborating with game-developer Midway to bring the Hard Boiled series from the screen to the console; a few years earlier techno-classic TRON became TRON 2.0, the game, and even Steven Spielberg has an office in Electronic Arts’ campus.... »
Probably bound to be Errol Morris' most controversial film, Standard Operating Procedure examines the cases of torture and murder at Iraq's now-infamous Abu Ghraib prison. Mixing 35mm and HD video, Morris uses re-enactments to depict torture and other images he wasn't able to film directly.... »
James Haygood got his big break back in the mid-1980s, when he connected with a young music-video director named David Fincher. More recently, he just worked as co-editor (with Spike Jonze regular Eric Zumbrunnen) on Where the Wild Things Are, and took up residence at Union in Santa Monica, CA, where he just finished spots for PlayStation MLB and Range Rover. Read about his career path, storytelling in 30 seconds (or less), and what he really thinks of Final Cut Pro.... »
Visual-effects artists at CIS Hollywood worked with Clooney and production designer Jim Bissell to turn a junior-high-school football field in Boiling Springs, SC, a middle-school football field in Travelers Rest, SC, and Memorial Stadium in Charlotte, NC into ever-larger stadiums that they filled with crowds of digital people. ... »
Jason Kohn says he didn't make Manda Bala in order to raise awareness of poverty, or to effect change in Brazil. He says he made it more to challenge what he saw as hopelessly mundane, limiting ideas about what documentary films could and should be.... »
He's not exactly a household name, but movie buffs know Wong Kar Wai as one of the most distinctive stylists working in film today. F&V asked him about his first time working in the U.S., why digital cinema is "too perfect," and the future of film-watching.... »
Academy Award-winning actor and critically acclaimed screenwriter, director and producer Tim Robbins will deliver the opening keynote speech on Monday, April 14 at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.... »
Building out storage and rendering power for Hollywood projects at a new facility in Santa Monica, PostWorks executives think they see the future of the high-end television pipeline — and it looks a lot like a feature-film DI workflow. The proof of concept is its recent implementation of a datacentric, largely tapeless workflow for the five-nights-a-week HBO series, In Treatment.... »
