The Artist Dominates at the 2012 BAFTA Awards
As expected, The Artist was the big winner at last night's Orange British Academy Film Awards—or, as they're better known, the BAFTAs—winning seven of the 12 categories in which it was nominated,...
View ArticleHooray for The Artist!
Awards season is over for another year. Last night's Oscars saw the big award go to—surprise, surprise—The Artist, which picked up a total of five wins (Best Film, Actor, Costume Design, Original Score...
View ArticleBringing Suspicion to the Big Screen
When I moved to Los Angeles in 2007, I didn’t know I wanted to be a director. I thought I just wanted to produce. Like everyone else who moves to L.A. to pursue their dream, I figured that said dream...
View ArticleBecome a Professional Producer with the ProShow Competition
It doesn't matter whether your film dream job is directing, writing or producing—if your goal is to break into the industry, it's nice to have some help along the way. Luckily, the Producers Guild of...
View ArticleFrom Penguins to Pirates: The Best of Aardman
After taking a detour into the world of CGI for last year's Arthur Christmas, Aardman Animations—the studio behind the Wallace and Gromit films, Chicken Run, "Shaun the Sheep" and more—has returned to...
View ArticleWhat The Dictator Learned from Borat
From Cannes to Hollywood, Sacha Baron Cohen is back in the news this week as his latest mash-up of humor and political commentary makes it way into theaters, courtesy of The Dictator. If the moviemaker...
View ArticleJames Franco vs. the Fact Checkers Unit
Director Dan Beers' moviemaking success story began with his short film FCU: Fact Checkers Unit, which premiered at Sundance in 2008. The film, about two magazine fact checkers tasked with confirming...
View ArticleJennifer Fox Turns to Crowdfunding for My Reincarnation
When moviemaker Jennifer Fox (“Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman”) completed her latest project—the documentary My Reincarnation, about a Tibetan Buddhism Master and his Western-born son—a...
View ArticleLights, Camera, Social Action: The Disposable Film Festival
With our world’s amazing technology making spectacular cameras small, cheap and ubiquitous, new types of moviemaking (and, by extension, moviemakers) are proliferating. From the highest-powered film...
View ArticleResurrecting Sixto Rodriguez: Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching For Sugarman
In the 1970s, the music of a mysterious singer-songwriter named Rodriguez became the anthem for a generation of Afrikaners increasingly isolated from the outside world by the international response to...
View ArticleAFI is a wrap, but Maja Milos’ CLIP is still haunting me
My girlfriend and I managed to attend eight films at AFI this year over the course of the seven-day festival: Amour; Rust and Bone; Clip; Caesar Must Die; Starlet; Beyond the Hills; Leviathan; and...
View ArticleWe Make Movies: How I Started an Indie Film Collective
My name is Sam Mestman, and I run a film collective in Los Angeles and Toronto called We Make Movies. Moviemaker asked us to write a weekly DIY filmmaking blog about tips and issues facing...
View ArticleWe Make Movies (Better): Please Don’t Have the Following Conversation About...
When I talk to filmmakers, way too often I have a version of the following conversation: Sam Mestman (MM): What’s your movie about? Filmmaker (FM): Well, it’s a love story. Sort of a When Harry Met...
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Fictionalizing Truth: Lee Daniel’s The Butler & More
We’ve all seen those stately biopics (usually with Oscar aspirations), in which renowned actors portray real-life historical figures (Patton, Queen Elizabeth, Gandhi, etc). They are often interesting...
View ArticleHow to Create a Franchise, Indie-Style
Transmedia is a buzzword that has been used quite a lot in the last couple of years to define all sorts of things, from the independent movie that has a companion Website and a Facebook fan page to the...
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