David Schonauer
feature shoot Wednesday September 2, 2015
In February of 2015, London-based photographer Baker traveled to a small eco-village in southern Colombia to take part in a Vision Quest
— a ceremony in which “questers” spend several days in the wilderness without food or water praying for a vision to guide them on their path in life. Feature Shoot spotlights the
portraits Baker made during his sojourn. “I first learned about Vision Quests through a project I had been doing on Shamans,” he tells the website in an interview. Read the full Story >>
nofilmschool Thursday July 24, 2014
Adam Epstein, the staff editor of the Saturday Night Live Film Unit, recently launched his Cutting Edge workshop, in which he teaches
post-production skills needed to produce a broadcast-ready video. The workshop is divided into two parts—a daytime technical instruction session and an evening session on how to bring value to
your clients with your unique voice and skill-set. NoFilmSchool has the workshop schedule and an interview with Epstein. Read the full Story >>
LensCulture Thursday March 9, 2017
In a recent interview,
acclaimed photographer Todd Hido, one of the judges of LensCulture’s 2017 Portrait Awards competition, talks with the website about what he thinks makes for a great photographic portrait. Asked
to name an example of a great portrait, he cites Richard Avedon’s photo of Marilyn Monroe, calling it the epitome of an unguarded moment. His advice to students: “To be kind is most
important. After that, be prepared with a plan of how you’re going to make the picture.” Read the full Story >>
WIRED Tuesday November 20, 2012
“To say that digital cameras have profoundly changed photography is both true and cliché. But few of the regurgitaters of the idea can tell you exactly how. Stephen Mayes, director of
VII Photo Agency, is one of those few,” notes Wired in a provocative interview. Mayes argues that the rise of digital technology changed the nature of photography by transforming it from a fixed
image to a fluid one. “Digital photography is anything and everything at any single moment; it has contradictory meanings all at once,” says Mays. Read the full Story >>
nofilmschool Wednesday September 15, 2021
In a documentary filmmaker’s dream world, notes NoFilmSchool, you work with a two-person sound team — one running the mixer, one the boom, and every interview subject or performer has a lavalier mic. “In reality, sometimes we're out in the field just shooting, holding the camera, asking questions, or watching two people talk, and we still want good sound,” adds NFS, which spotlights the Movo WMX20-DUO, a kit that, for under $200, gives you two wireless lavaliers that go back to a single receiver. Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Monday January 19, 2015
Filmmaker Ben Aston’s short He Took His Skin Off For Me is a twisted modern-day fairytale that is making a big splash online. Short of the Week, which features an interview with Aston, says it’s one of the most memorable and striking
short films you’re likely to view in 2015. Based on a short story by Maria Hummer, it tells a captivating tale about a man who takes his skin off for his girlfriend, and why doing so probably
wasn't the best idea. The film features superb effects work by SFX Supervisor Jen Cardno. Read the full Story >>
Indie Mogul Thursday February 23, 2017
Here’s an idea for you:
Use a wireless transmitter with a boom mic. Indy Mogul explains why in a new tutorial. As NoFilmSchool notes, the idea of combining a wireless transmitter with a
lav mic is already popular. Using a wireless transmitter with a boom mic instead means your talent or interview subject can feel free to move around and touch their shirts without worrying about
causing any noise issues. You’ll also eliminate the task of synching sound in post, because it records it directly into your camera. Read the full Story >>
Motionographer Monday June 27, 2016
Over nine months in the making, the animated short Seed Matters from the Buck production studio is a promotional vehicle for Seed Matters, an organization that campaigns against big agriculture. But the film makes its case riotously, with a dirty-mouthed seed —
indeed, it’s a comedic masterpiece “brimming with lovely crafted details,” declares Motionographer, which has a BTS feature about how it was made, including an interview with Buck
co-founder and CEO Ryan Honey. Read the full Story >>
TIME LightBox Thursday November 15, 2012
Two years ago Larissa Leclair founded the Indie Photobook Library in her Washington D.C. home with the goal of preserving rare
self-published books and making them available to a larger audience. She hopes the collection—on view now at the FotoWeekDC event—will one day land at the Library or Congress for
safekeeping. “For me, some of the most potent and challenging photographic work being done today is being realized in self-published photobooks,” Leclair tells Time’s LightBox blog
in an enlightening interview. Read the full Story >>
Script Wednesday October 3, 2012
Stephen Chbosky’s 1999 novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower sold nearly 800,000 copies … and was regularly challenged by the American Library Association for its exploration
of drug use, homosexuality, and adolescent suicide. Filmmaker notes that a film version seemed inevitable, but the writer wasn’t ready to hand over his book to just anyone. More than a decade later, a Chbosky-piloted
adaptation starring Emma Watson finally has hit the big screen. He talks with Script about his influences, including Rebel Without a Cause screenwriter Stewart Stern. Read the full Story >>
AnOther Thursday September 13, 2018
At age 93, photographer
Orlando Suero is finally seeing his life’s work receive its due, notes AnOther: A new book, Orlando:
Photography, brings together Suero’s images of stars from Hollywood’s golden age — Brigitte Bardot, Charlie Chaplin, Dennis Hopper and Paul Newman among them. “My
father was a World War II veteran and always suffered from PTSD. Photography was his escape. It was his way to put that aside and focus on what he truly loved,” says his son in an
interview. Read the full Story >>
STASH Thursday March 16, 2017
Back in the 1960s, Canadian
philosopher Marshall McLuhan made brilliant observations about electronic media that had everybody talking — even irritating pontificators on movie lines who needed to be set straight on
McLuhan’s ideas by Woody Allen and McLuhan himself. A new short for Al Jazeera’s Listening Post feature created by
Brooklyn-based animator Daniel Savage shows how McLuhan’s notions about the media are still prophetic, notes Stash. Motionographer has an interview. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Wednesday June 19, 2013
Over the course of his brilliant career, the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has photographed the great sweep of human existence. Whether he is photographing the poor, the laborers,
or the displaced, he imbues all he sees with a fundamental sense of nobility and an unmistakable beauty. In his newest book, Genesis, Salgado looks at the planet rather than people, but again
finds astonishing beauty in his pictures. “They are different, but in the end, they come around to the same place,” he tells the New York Times. “They have the same message: We are
living in a very special moment, when the effect of everything we are doing to our world is accelerating. If we do not pay attention now, we will be facing catastrophe.” Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Tuesday October 14, 2014
“I don’t usually like my own work, but I’m rather proud of these,” notes acclaimed documentary filmmaker Errol Morris in a Tweet about three new shorts now on view at the New
York Times. The films focus on three very different people: Nobel Prize winners Leymah Gwobee and Lech Walesa and nominee Bob Geldorf. Visa hired Morris to interview the trio as part of a commercial
campaign, and he took the opportunity to conduct extended interviews on activism and social change, notes Filmmaker. Read the full Story >>
TEDxVienna Magazine Monday January 17, 2022
Photojournalist Ron Haviv, a co-founder of the VII Agency, has documented over 25 conflicts in over a hundred countries. He recently gave a TEDxVienna presentation about the power of photography to change history, and it’s a powerful statement. In an interview with TEDxVienna Magazine, Haviv talks about the “challenges, power, and possibilities” of photojournalism.”It was very inspiring to be documenting these historical moments in humanity. My constant goal is always to try to have an impact with my work. But it doesn’t always work. In fact, most of the time, it fails,” says Haviv. Read the full Story >>
FILMMAKER Tuesday September 24, 2013
Famed cinematographer Gordon Willis has some words of advice for novice filmmakers, and veterans, too: Avoid “Dump Truck Directing,” a term he coined to describe the bad habit of
directors who aren’t discerning when shooting and overwhelm editors with footage. Willis’s sage advise comes in handy for the digital filmmaker whose temptation to fix everything in post
can overshadow the simplicity of doing it right the first time, notes Filmmaker, which features an interview with the great DP. Read the full Story >>
Creative Boom Monday February 1, 2016
UK-based photographer June Calypso has been earmarked as one of the brightest new photographers to burst onto the creative scene in recent
years, declares Creative Boom. Calypso describes her work — self-portraits in which she appears as a fictional character named Joyce — as “solitary studies into modern rituals of
seduction and the labored construction of femininity.” The images were shot in rented hotel bedrooms and honeymoon suites. Go here for an interview. Read the full Story >>
nofilmschool Wednesday July 23, 2014
Is transmedia storytelling the future of film? NoFilmSchool spotlights filmmaker Nathan Punwar’s Loves of a Cyclops, a
short film about a nonsensical world that comes with supporting material (like film strips, recordings, and photographs) that helps make the fantasy seem weirdly real. “The concept began only
with an image of a man with a lens for an eye,” says Punwar in an interview. “It evolved into this story about a mythical one-eyed man who sees other dimensions we can’t
see.” Read the full Story >>
British Journal of Photography Wednesday December 23, 2015
Italian photographer Riccardo Bononi’s series “Las Valkyrias de Bolivia” focuses on a group of women farmers who come to the capital city of La Paz to wrestle — a moneymaking
sideline that enables them to raise their children, often single handed. “In Bolivia, which has the highest rate of working women in Latin America, the idea of a woman is hardly ever associated
with that of the ‘weaker sex,’” he tells the British Journal of Photography in an interview about how he gets close to his subjects. Read the full Story >>
News Shooter Tuesday September 2, 2014
“I almost always work in a one-man-band situation and that requires equipment that is easy to set up and use,” writes Matt Allard at News Shooter, noting that “as far as motion
control devices go, the Redrockmicro one-man crew is about as simple
to operate as it gets.” The all-in-one motorized parabolic slider allows your camera to move back and forth while keeping your subject at the same position in the frame. Allard thinks it may be
the perfect tool for filmmakers who shoot interviews single-handedly. Read the full Story >>
