Steadicam operators! Are you tired of simply walking with your camera rig to achieve that special wobble-free shot? Or maybe you're making a movie on the cheap and can't afford all that heavy equipment? Behold! The future of filmmaking has arrived! Presenting: Steadicam on a Segway! (Warning: Obnoxious, awful Flash interface on second link)
posted by 40 Watt on Jul 25, 2007 - 28 comments

Baraka is an astonishing film voyaging six continents and twenty-four countries. Directed by Ron Fricke, it is a visual tour de force painstakingly shot on Todd AO-70mm film. Information on the film (and its upcoming sequel!) can be found here or you can always watch the making of.
posted by ageispolis on Mar 16, 2007 - 48 comments

Peter Greenaway speaks (what follows are short Youtube excerpts of a lecture by Greenaway): on the tyranny of celebrities; on Martin Scorcese; on airport bookshops and culture; on notions of media; on his belief that Bill Viola is worth ten Scorceses; on why he goes on making films; on the notion of the frame in theater and cinema; on Dutch producer Kees Kasander; on why we have to get rid of the camera: "There's a way in which a camera is essentially a mimetic tool which tells us how the world exists, and what it tells us is always going to be less interesting than what's really happening out there. Also: interview about 8 1/2 Women.
posted by jayder on Oct 30, 2006 - 48 comments

RED ONE is a 12.6 megapixel digital film/HD camcorder developed by Jim Jannard, founder of the Oakley sunglasses company. The camera will retail for $17,500, and is alleged to outperform HD and digital film cameras from established companies like Sony, Arri, Panavision and Dalsa (whose offerings all cost well in excess of $100,000). The general consensus among pundits in media production circles is that Jannard's camera will be a true disruptive technology. Last night, no less than 24 hours after the very first publically available sample images from the camera's "Mysterium" sensor were posted to the RED Digital Cinema website, the company's development offices were broken into. According to Jannard, "Everything they took was camera and camera file related...there is no question all they came for was RED camera stuff." (Additional obligatory and annoying YouTube links: First public demonstration of the RED camera at the IBC convention in Amsterdam and the RED Q & A session that followed.)
posted by melorama on Sep 24, 2006 - 79 comments

The Golden Gate Bridge Suicide Documentary is going to be an interesting project. Filmmaker Eric Steel applied for a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco for a year, saying he was trying to "capture the grandeur" of the bridge. But what he actually ended up doing was capture 19 suicides and many attempts. He is now working on a feature-length documentary about these suicides, and has 100 hours of interviews with family members, psychiatrists, and some of the people who attempted suicide but didn't follow through. Now that he's revealed what his documentary is and what it will be about, a lot of people are pretty ticked off.
posted by jscott on Feb 2, 2005 - 27 comments

Mystery Solved. Somewhere in the Catskill Mountains, two nature filmmakers are busy shooting a documentary on rabbits in their natural habitat. In the morning dew they are about to meet something considerably bigger than a rabbit... [Flash and safe for work]
posted by KevinSkomsvold on Nov 11, 2003 - 14 comments

The next wave in Filmmaking? This summer, the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, along with NVIDIA, will hold the world's first Machinima Film Festival on August 17th in Mesquite, Texas.

Machinima is, simply stated, filmmaking within a real-time virtual 3D environment. In an expanded definition, it is the convergence of filmmaking, animation & game development. Machinima is a very cost- & time-efficient way to produce films.
posted by lilboo on Jul 12, 2002 - 11 comments