Unity Series Part II: Production Design
How IATSE Art Departments Build 3D Worlds. By Pauline Rogers.
How does Local 800 member Michael Corenblith, currently working on the 3D summer release Dolphin Tale, describe the production designer’s craft? “We depict the visual contours of the screenplay and select or create the environments and decors that best express this to an audience, without their ever being aware of our presence. We create the canvas upon which the director and cinematographer paint their movie,” he says. Read more
Catch The Buzz
Local 600 President Steven Poster, ASC, Opening Remarks
The 48th Annual Publicists Guild Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. By Pauline Rogers. Photos courtesy of Mathew Imaging.
Despite the usual L.A. gridlock, made even more difficult because of this winter’s almost unending rain, The Beverly Hilton Hotel was packed with more than 800 of Hollywood’s busiest publicity and marketing executives, producers, studio and network executives, celebrities and media, on Friday, February 25th, for the 48th Annual Publicists Guild Awards. The event, which typically comes two days before the Oscars, has come to symbolize the casual breeziness of a non-televised, industry-only luncheon that the Academy Awards began as decades ago. Read more
Unity Series: Part I – Grips
Exploring the craft every other production department relies on. By Pauline Rogers.
To kick off our first in a five-part series on IATSE crafts, we asked grips across the country not only to define their jobs but to reveal how they go about, as New York-area Local 52 member George Patsos describes it, capturing on film the dreams of others. “Grip actually comes from an Old English term that referred to suitcases with handles,” Patsos explains. “As time went on, people moving the camera cases, which resembled those suitcases, became known as grips.” Read more
The Real Deal
Henri Cartier-Bresson, widely considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, once remarked that above all else he craved to “seize the whole essence in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.” Real life, of course, is just that: an unending series of situations that reel before our eyes – unpredictable, unknowable, ineffable. And it is often left to documentary photographers to sort out the chaos of our world, and slow things down into a single moment that not only tells a complete story about a place, a person, or a way of life, but does so in a way that is forever seared in our hearts and minds. Take a good look at the gallery we’ve assembled for our nonfiction-themed issue and keep Cartier-Bresson’s words at hand; these images linger, no matter how many times you look away. Read more
Shooting Gallery 2010
Somewhere, Out There
When we asked Local 600 photographers to submit work for our Shooting Gallery spread, the only requirement was that the image be shot on location. Anywhere, anytime, anyplace, as long as it told a story about that singular time and place captured through the lens. The results were so astonishing that a winnowing down (to the 22 images contained in these pages) was fiendishly tough. The moment before young lovers kiss transforms an iconic backdrop into something fresh and magical; a stunned glance from a son to his father, as a man, stripped naked of far more than his clothes cowers in “the road” behind them; a century-old Gothic prison echoes the stark melancholy of an inmate, head down, and focused on his task. Images and moments, like all the others in this spread that throb with power, mystery, joy and drama. Somewhere, out there, if you go looking, you’ll find these places. But it took a photographer with a still camera to flesh them out in just a single frame. Read more
The Heart of the Beast
Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC use live-action cinematography techniques to help tame DreamWorks new 3D animated feature How To Train Your Dragon By Debra Kaufman
Got My Back!
Rodrigo Prieto, ASC & Hector Moreno
The critical partnership between the DP and DIT explained… By Pauline Rogers
Shooting Gallery 2009
All photographs, by definition, are “period” images. They capture a time and place that is ephemeral, and, in essence, gone the moment the shutter is snapped. Never again will what that shooter saw through the frame be exactly the way it was when he or she pushed the button on the camera. The same can be said for unit stills captured on period movies; even if the production has the ability to re-create a place, a time, a feeling over and again on a set or location, that moment captured through the lens by a Local 600 photographer – an actress warming herself under a big HMI light, a group of young background actors playing in a Slovakian square, an old Chevy Impala speeding mysteriously off into the night – is fleeting and one-of-a-kind. For our annual Shooting Gallery spread, featuring the very best of our members’ work-for-hire, we turn back the clock (and occasionally push it all the way forward) to highlight imagery captured during the production of features or television with period content. Diane Arbus once noted, “The more specific you are (with an image), the more general it will be,” and what is most surprising about the following photographs is not only their specificity for a lost time and place, but the energy and life contained within. As William Faulkner wrote, “Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”
It’s Not Easy Being Green (or is it?)
From LED to ceramics, there are more environmentally friendly lighting options powering the film and television industry than ever before, as cinematographer Jim Matlosz reports.
Surviving Sundance
FOUR Park City publicity pros offer SEVEN tips to the 10 craziest days in January.
By Margot Carmichael Lester
PARK CITY IN JANUARY … To indie filmmakers and their crews, those four simple words are akin to winning the lottery. To the Local 600 publicists who represent Sundance movies (or those heading up to the mountains to promote the filmmakers), the phrase can send a lightning strike of anxiety and stress searing right through their Blackberries. What began as a “casual” little film festival has become the hot industry ticket, and nothing screams that more loudly than the marketing avalanche cascading down Main Street every winter. Linda Brown-Salomone, owner of Indie PR in Studio City, Calif., has been representing films at Sundance for 15 years. She says the festival has become a media frenzy like none other. Now, “the biggest star names and quirkiest of campaigns [are the ones] most often winning press time and space over a truly magical film that may deserve it more,” the Sundance regular observes. So let’s say you have a film that got in and it’s your first time down the slopes. How can you keep from getting buried alive? Here are seven tips to surviving the Sundance publicity game:
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