David Schonauer
Fstoppers Thursday October 24, 2013
Whether you’re a filmmaker, photographer, or photographer transitioning to film, you’ll want to watch the visual set piece created by the Norwegian production house Slaughterhouse
Pictures as a promo for an upcoming feature film called Sønner av Satan, or Sons of Satan. The video successfully combines principles of both stills and motion work to create
high-impact visuals with zero budget and very limited resources, notes Fstoppers, which features a BTS clip and detailed interview with the filmmakers. Meanwhile, NoFilmSchool shares
three no/low-budget editing tips from filmmaker and editor Vashi Nedomansky. Read the full Story >>
The New York Times Monday July 27, 2015
Ingrid Sischy, a writer, editor and cultural critic known for her long associations with Interview magazine, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, died on Friday in Manhattan at 63. Her death was from
breast cancer, reports the New York Times. Sischy, whose career began with an internship at the Museum of Modern Art, where she curated an exhibition called "In the Twenties: Portraits From the
Photography Department," and another on photographer Ansel Adams, went on to champion many artists, including photographers Cindy Sherman and Robert Mapplethorpe. Slate has more. The Observer collects some of her best writing. The New Yorker remembers Sischy, and does Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter. Read the full Story >>
feature shoot Wednesday July 3, 2013
David Rochkind’s book Heavy Hand, Sunken Spirit chillingly documents the social costs of Mexico’s violent drug
war, notes Feature Shoot, which has an interview with the Detroit-born, Haiti-based photographer. Rochkind began the work in 2007, with a trip to Nogales, Sonora. “At the time I was living in
Caracas, Venezuela, and didn’t know the exact shape that the project would take,” he says. In 2009 he moved to Mexico City to work on the project in more depth. At this point, he says,
Mexico is “defined as much by violence and tension as by history and culture.” Read the full Story >>
THE CREDITS Friday August 2, 2013
After working as an assistant editor on movies for the likes of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Nora Ephron, and getting her break cutting Nicole Holofcener’s first feature
Walking and Talking (1996), Alisa Lepselter got the job of a lifetime—cutting Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999). She has now edited her 15th Allen film, the acclaimed
Blue Jasmine. “The way he makes films…[is] specific to him, he doesn’t want to edit the film until he’s shot the whole thing,” Lepselter says in a BTS interview
with website The Credits. Read the full Story >>
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 >>
