David Schonauer
DEADLINE.com Tuesday November 13, 2012
Chasing Ice, a documentary about photographer James Balog’s arduous effort to record time-lapse evidence of glacial melting due to climate change, froze out the specialty-film
competition at the box office during its opening weekend, notes Deadline.com. The film, from director Jeff Orlowski, grossed $21,000 in a single theater, NYC’s Cinema Village. It will expand
into 10 additional markets next week. Perhaps Hurricane Sandy has created fresh interest in the dire effects of climate change. MCN Videos features an interview with Balog and Orlowski. Read the full Story >>
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Monday March 25, 2024
As we noted recently, OpenAI’s upcoming video-generating artificial intelligence AI model, Sora, is freaking out a lot of people, with many wondering about what data was used to train the technology. During a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, left the question unanswered. “We used publicly available data and licensed data,” she noted. But when asked whether Sora had been trained with data from social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram or Facebook, Murati said, “I’m actually not sure about that.” The Verge notes that Sora will be available sometime later this year. See also: Cointelegraph.
Read the full Story >>
Flipboard Thursday October 9, 2014
The top PPD posts from September are now on view at Flipboard, the app that brings you content from your favorite websites in a magazine-style format. Also look for Flipboard posts from our sister
newsletters, Motion Arts Pro, Dispatches From Latin America, and DART: Design Arts Daily. (Once you’ve downloaded the app, you must subscribe to the newsletter to access the PPD
content—see button at top.) Among the posts up now: A look at the youthful winner of the 2014 EyeEm Photographer of the Year Award and an interview with master photographer Stephen Wilkes about
his complex and beautiful “Day to Night” photo series. Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Wednesday June 8, 2016
Since 2011, the Tribeca Film Institute Latin America Media Arts Fund has offered grants and guidance to
promising filmmakers living and working in Central and South America. Following this year’s edition of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Christina Stoddard of Latin Trends talked with José Rodriguez, director of documentary programs at TFI,
about the program’s past and future (see the interview at the Huffington Post). Today, he notes, the Latin America Fund assists over ten projects—in any stage of development—a year.
Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Tuesday July 19, 2016
Bill Jones, who photographed black celebrities in Hollywood as well as Dr. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, died on June 25 at his home in Los Angeles, reports PDN Pulse. He was 81. As one of the first black photographers working the celebrity beat in
Hollywood, Jones brought attention to Halle Berry, Denzel Washington and other black stars early in their careers, adds the New York Times. “As a black man, it was very difficult at the time
when I started,” he said in an interview. “It was tough to get a space in what we call ‘the line,’ meaning the line of photographers taking shots of the celebrities.”
Read the full Story >>
gofundme Thursday April 10, 2014
Photographer, filmmaker, and popular blogger Benjamin Von Wong was on route from Singapore to Malaysia when he got an email from PetaPixel editor in chief DL Cade about a young girl with a terminal
genetic disease called Sanfilippo Syndrome. Together, the two decided to create a video that could be used to raise money for
experimental treatments for the four-year-old, Eliza O’Neill. Over the course of what Von Wong calls an “emotionally charged week,” he created the touching video, which has gone
viral. You can go to GoFundMe to learn more about the girl and contribute: Nearly $200,000 has been raised so far, with a goal of $1 million. Go to DIY Photography for an interview with Von Wong about the project. Read the full Story >>
Bloomberg Thursday April 11, 2024
OpenAI has been vague about what data was used to train its new Sora text-to-video generator But YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan has made it clear that the use of YouTube videos to train Sora would be an infraction of the platform's terms of service. “[W]hen a creator uploads their hard work to our platform, they have certain expectations,” Mohan said in an interview with Bloomberg. Last month, OpenAI CTO Mira Murati said she wasn’t sure whether Sora was trained on sources like YouTube, adds The Verge. According to The New York Times, OpenAI has "cut corners" by training its AI models on texts transcribed from YouTube videos.
Read the full Story >>
Motionographer Monday December 21, 2015
“Are new styles the product of large cultural forces, or are they spurred on by technological advances? Or both?” asks Nol Hong at Motionographer. And what are the motion-graphic trends
driving creatives at the dawn of 2016? Recently, Hong reached out to a number of trendsetters in animation and asked them to share their opinions. The result is an interview with three trendsetting
animators — Jorge Estrada (aka JR Canest), Sander van Dijk, and Phil Borst — that explores today’s dominate trends and where they come from. “Hand-made stuff is really popular
now, because artists look at it and know how much work it took to create,” says van Dijk. Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Monday March 23, 2015
Movie posters as an art form are in the news: The Huffington Post has an illuminating interview with artist Jason Edmiston, whose latest show, "Eyes Without a Face," is now up at the Mondo gallery in Austin, TX. Filmmakers and illustrators alike will be interested in
his take on current trends—he notes that he grew up admiring work by illustrators like Earl Norem and Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, known for their work on movie posters. Such work fell out of
favor, but now, he says, illustrated movie posters are back in style. Meanwhile, at Filmmaker IQ,
Minnesota-based illustrator Alex Griendling explains how movie posters are made. And BFI admires artist Vera Chytilová’s celebrated Czech film posters.
Read the full Story >>
Canon Rumors Tuesday July 23, 2024
Currently, Canon leads competition for global mirrorless camera market share: Canon sits at 41.2 percent, with Sony close behind at 32.1 percent. Nikon is lagging behind the new “Big 2” at 13.2 percent of market share, notes Canon Rumors, which spotlights an interview that Canon Vice President Tsuyoshi Tokura gave to Nikkei recently. In it, Tokura acknowledged that Sony is his company’s “biggest competitor” and noted that Canon’s new R1 flagship mirrorless camera is designed in part to help Canon maintain its lead over Sony. See also: PetaPixel.
Read the full Story >>
Short of the Week Thursday October 29, 2015
“This film contains footage which may induce seizures.” Those unsettling words are the first thing you see in Icelandic director and animator Einar Baldvin‘s USC thesis film The
Pride of Strathmoor. The rest of the nine-minute animated short is no less disquieting. A festival favorite, the film is now available online, just in time for Halloween. Stash raves, noting that the film, which tells the story of a Southern pastor’s descent into insanity, works because of raw technique,
nightmarish imagery, and themes of race and madness. “It all started in 2009 during my last semester at CalArts when I watched Raging Bull for the first time,” says Baldvin in an interview. Read the full Story >>
DAZED Thursday June 1, 2023
Photographer Tom Woods’s portraits of life in working-class Merseyside—a metropolitan county in the Liverpool City Region of England—are taken “with manifest tenderness, sympathy and respect,” notes Dazed, which spotlights the exhibition “Photie Man: 50 Years of Tom Wood” at Liverpool’s Walker Gallery. In an interview, Woods offers thoughts on photographing communities: “Every time I take a photograph, I’m asking a question. I don't know how it’s going to turn out. And if I knew how it would turn out, I wouldn’t be interested in exploring life,” he says.
Read the full Story >>
LACMA Wednesday February 4, 2015
Fine-art photographer Elena Dorfman has recently been working on location at the Los Angeles River as part of the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art’s “Artists Repsond” series. Dorfman was asked to create an image inspired by a LACMA exhibition. She chose “Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River
School,” on view through June 7, and, in particular, Thomas Cole’s painting “The Savage State.” Says Dorfman in an interview, “I was drawn to the themes of discovery,
exploration, and settlement along the water.” Read the full Story >>
British Journal of Photography Wednesday October 23, 2013
Earlier this year, Mexican photojournalist Javier Manzano received a Pulitzer Prize for his dramatic photo of two Syrian rebel fighters in their bullet-riddled snipers’ nest. Now Manzano, a
stringer for Agence France-Presse, has received the €3000 Public Photo Prize at the 20th Bayeux Calvados Awards, reports the British
Journal of Photography. (Go here for a BJP interview with
Manzano.) Another AFP stringer, Fabio Bucciarelli, won the event’s €7000 top prize—also for photography shot during the Syrian civil war. Read the full Story >>
Indiewire Friday August 8, 2014
The bad news is that films have always been the targets of censors in societies around the world. The good news, notes Indiewire, is that censorship “speaks to the power of the medium to address
subjects ranging from politics and social issues to religion.” Iranian filmmakers Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof have, for instance, faced strong government sanctions over their latest
courageous works, Closed Curtain and Manuscripts Don’t Burn. Other examples: The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); The Da Vinci Code (2006); Brokeback Mountain
(2005); and the recent bromantic comedy The Interview, which North Korea’s Kim Jong-un didn’t find funny. Read the full Story >>
DAZED Tuesday March 29, 2016
Harrison Bauer Rodrigues, aka Baauer, announced his debut album “Aa” with a live performance on Late
Night with Stephen Colbert — in a way. With rapper Rapper Leikeli47 at the mic, Baauer sat off to the side on a couch, playing the music, with its ominous synthesized horns, on his laptop.
The documentary Double A, from director John Merizalde, takes viewers behind the scenes of the performance and Baauer’s life, tracing his rise “from college beatmaker to hip hop
boss.” Inside the world of his explosive music, the film finds a center of calm. See it at Dazed, along with a Baauer interview. Read the full Story >>
By
David Schonauer Thursday May 31, 2018
Is it news anymore when print publications fold? Recently we learned that two very different magazines, each with its own place in photography's recent history, are leaving the scene -- or at least
the ink-on-paper scene. Legacy photography magazine Shutterbug announced that it is dropping its print edition after 45 years of publishing and will focus on its website. Meanwhile, Interview
magazine, founded by … Read the full Story >>
British Journal of Photography Friday September 30, 2016
Chinese artist Ren Hang is the recipient of the 2016 Outset/Unseen Exhibition Fund from the Unseen Photo Fair in Amsterdam. The award presents the Beijing-based photographer with the opportunity to
have a solo exhibition at Amsterdam’s Foam Photography Museum in 2017. “Deliberately provocative, Ren Hang’s images challenge conventional codes of morality in a still highly
conservative society,” notes the British Journal of Photography. See Vice for an interview with the artist. See
AnOther for highlights from the Unseen festival. Read the full Story >>
Mashable Friday July 17, 2015
Making an impact on the web is director Samual Abrahams’s Offline Dating, an entertaining short that sends a nice guy out into the streets and parks of the real world to find a date the
old-fashioned way—face to face. The piece feels like the kind of well-edited video sketch that David Letterman mastered, but it goes deeper to make a point about the way modern romance is
conducted. Abrahams got the idea for it when his newly single friend Tom Greaves was about to download a dating app: “We started talking about the difference between the us we present online and
the us that exists in real life" Abrahams tells Mashable.” See another interview at Short
of the Week. Read the full Story >>
British Journal of Photography Thursday August 16, 2012
Details continue to emerge about the sale of Getty Images to the private equity firm Carlyle Group for $3.3 billion. As the British Journal of Photography notes, the deal will see Carlyle
acquire a controlling stake in Getty Images, while co-founder and chairman Mark Getty and the Getty family "will roll substantially all of their ownership interests into the transaction." In an
interview with BJP, Getty CEO Jonathan Klein says the “enormous scale” of the Carlyle Group will help the agency expand internationally. He also states that the company will maintain its
support of photojournalism initiatives, including Reportage by Getty and grant programs. As for Getty contributors: “Nothing will change for them,” says Klein. Read the full Story >>
