Now that the playing field is level, what puts one filmmaker ahead of another? For Renan Ozturk, a veteran expedition filmmaker, the answer is simple: suffering. “You get maybe five [magic moments] in your life,” Renan told us. “You have to suffer a little more for them, put yourself out there a little more…”
Our good friend (and Musicbed Ambassador) Sam Kolder has taken his followers on journeys around the globe in the most striking, creative ways possible — and it all starts with a spark. In his latest YouTube video, he explores how inspiration, music, and creativity all play a role in keeping that spark alive to create insanely good travel videos.
Some people know what they’re going to do with their lives before they’re old enough to drink a beer. Some of us take a little longer. Autumn Durald didn’t decide to be a director of photography until after she’d graduated college, traveled the world, and held a steady job in advertising. Once she’d made the decision, though, she didn’t look back. Since then, she’s lensed everything from major motion pictures (Palo Alto) to documentaries (Portraits of Braddock).
We’ve been rereading one of our favorite books, Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist, and getting as much — or more — out of it the second time than we did the first.
The thought of a “path” can be a little bit misleading. Just the name implies that there’s a clearly marked way to go, or maybe even a route backward toward where we came from. We all know that’s not the case. Finding our way can be a confusing, wayward, and terrifying experience — more like navigating a maze than anything else.
There’s a lot of strategy that goes into starting a YouTube channel. Skip “hard way” and take a few notes from creator Jeven Dovey.
It’s easy to feel helpless when it comes to the lack of diversity and inclusion in filmmaking. How do you even begin to approach that conversation, much less start thinking about how to solve it? According to a 2018 report from the Directors Guild of America, only 9.7 percent of films were directed by minorities in 2018 and only 12.2 percent of films were directed by women.
Forty years ago, legendary editor Walter Murch was working late one night on a film for Francis Ford Coppola called The Conversation (starring Gene Hackman). Like always, Murch was going back and forth through the footage, over and over again, looking to make the perfect cuts. Murch cuts intuitively, in real time. He never goes frame by frame. As the night went on, Murch started to notice something weird happening: Every time he made a cut, it seemed to line up perfectly with Gene Hackman blinking. “I began to get the sense that there was some collaboration going on between myself and…Gene Hackman,” Murch told Radiolab during an interview in 2009. What Murch had stumbled upon wasn’t just a useful editing technique; it was theory for why film editing works.
You could point out a lot of reasons why Oscar-winner Tom Cross is one of the best editors in Hollywood. Maybe the most obvious, though, is evident in the diversity of his portfolio. Along with director Damien Chazelle, he’s crafted a tightly wound character study on obsession (Whiplash), a throwback love-letter to Hollywood via a musical (La La Land), and now a historical biopic unlike any we’ve ever seen in First Man. You probably couldn’t dream up three films that are more different than these, or three films edited as precisely and artfully.
Roger Deakins said, “People confuse ‘pretty’ with good cinematography.” In a way, he’s saying cinematographers’ work is more important than simply the look of a film. It serves a greater cause — the story. In fact, the visual side of a film, ‘pretty’ or otherwise, can tell a story as much as a script can.
