Damon Stea’s “Memoirs of a Scanner”, an entry in this year’s Disposable Film Festival – which celebrates film making minus movie cameras – was produced using a flatbed scanner…
Stea, a double-major in cinema production and videogame design at USC, ran into one technical difficulty. “It was hard to do lighting for a machine that was [...]

Film shots of a certain length, that repeat according to a regular pattern, are more likely to make for a movie that will hold the attention of its audience:
“Film-makers have got better and better at constructing shots so that their lengths grab our attention,” says James Cutting, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, [...]

Amazing, the number of apparently outdoor scenes in movies and TV shows that are actually filmed inside, using “green screen” technology.
Via that’s how it happened.

A good primer on 3D image technology and how it works.
3D imagery has been around for ages, mostly as a gimmick, but things have changed in the past few years. The current incarnation of digital-quality 3D photography, combined with high-quality and distortion free viewing technologies, is finally mature enough to warrant an industry-wide technology [...]

Mike Le’s collection of the 20 Greatest Extended Takes In Movie History.
The extended take is a cinematic hire-wire act that pushes the director, actors, cinematographer, art department, sound design, and every other department to their limits. They take a very long time to set-up, and are very easy to mess up. The longer the [...]

Gerard Courant has spent over 30 years producing a film – titled “Cinématon” – that runs to 150 hours in duration, featuring the contributions of numerous participants who have each been permitted to do whatever they wish to for three and a half minutes.
So, as I sit down facing the camera, I’m not expecting [...]

The drama off-camera can sometimes trump that of the movie being made as was the case for Apocalypse Now.
Casting problems start after one week, when Harvey Keitel is sacked and replaced in the central role of Capt Willard by Martin Sheen, who proceeds to have a heart attack (at the age of 36). Marlon [...]

Five groundbreaking movies that were produced on small budgets.
I’m not sure I’d consider eight million dollars low budget – as is the case for Little Miss Sunshine – but when compared to something like Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End which was said to cost some US$300 million, eight million suddenly doesn’t seem [...]

An exposé into the life of a film extra, or supporting artist, as they are now referred to. Despite their relatively minor role in films they can nevertheless go someway to making or breaking a movie:
The chariot race in Ben Hur, MGM’s 1959 Roman epic, will go down in history for two reasons. First, [...]

Think twice if you want to send US screenwriter and director Josh Olson one of your movie scripts for his consideration… he can spot poorly written screenplays almost instantly:
It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to [...]