Many recent American documentaries have downplayed cinema's aesthetic possibilities, but Laura Dunn's The Unforeseen (opening in limited release this week and screening on the Sundance Channel later this year) plays out its environmentalist politics by honoring the beauty of the nature threatened by unchecked land development in Austin. Focusing on developer Gary Bradley and the threat his plans pose to Barton Springs, a natural spring-fed pool, Dunn combines a variety of textures, from new footage shot on HD video and Super-16 to TV news footage dating back to the '70s. Executive produced by Terrence Malick, it shows his influence everywhere. Not content merely to luxuriate in gorgeous imagery, The Unforeseen describes the battle between liberal and conservative activists in Texas and offers a surprisingly sympathetic character study of Bradley.... »
Is the current 3D renaissance poised to leverage a full-blown transformation of movie-making technology? That was the story coming out of this week's Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat in Palm Springs, CA, where hundreds of the proverbial brightest minds in the business gathered to get a jump on the future of the industry.... »
Be Kind Rewind gradually evolves into a utopian celebration of DIY, community-based filmmaking, as Mike and Jerry turn from remakes to a film about jazz pianist Fats Waller. You're not likely to see a studio release with a more irreverent attitude towards using copyrighted material as a springboard for original creativity.... »
Fox Sports Creative Directors Mark Denyer-Simmons and Jason Scott oversaw a promo piece for Fox's coverage of the 2008 NASCAR season that revs up viewers by depicting a race set inside a massive, city-sized engine.... »
"It is about people becoming reporters," director George Romero says. "I guess there's a collective subconscious. You've got Redacted, you've got Cloverfield, you've got Vantage Point. Everybody seems to be aware of this camera that's on us. It's like, 'I am a camera.' Everybody's a camera these days."... »
When F&V covered Vision III Imaging last fall, company founder Chris Mayhew gave us the details behind his “depth-enhancement” technology, which uses special “parallax scanning” lens adapters to capture depth information and give 2D footage an almost three-dimensional quality.... »
Technical supervisor Clark Graff devised a tapeless workflow for Captain Abu Raed, a Jordanian film produced by GigaPix Studios (Chatsworth, CA) that played in competition at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, using custom-built digital film recorders both to capture footage from the production’s Arriflex D-20 cameras and to conform the feature using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3.... »
The three Fs of layout – “form follows function” – are truest inside post-production facilities. In fact, they might add a fourth “F” to the equation, for “frequently”: the rate at which technology forces changes to facility design can be as fast as the technology advances themselves.... »
When it comes to monster movies, it's generally the monsters that get all the attention. But in the case of Cloverfield, the creature team at Tippett Studio got a big assist from the crew at Double Negative, which handled more or less every VFX shot in the film that didn't involve the monster itself.... »
If you haven't seen it yet, you'll have to take our word for it — U23D is something special. Debra Kaufman visited 3ality in Burbank to get insight into why this digital-3D concert film is a unique experience. She's got the story on the challenges of the shoot itself, as well as the special sauce that went into post-production.... »
