Downtown Community Television Center's program Media Enabled Musketeers will partner, this fall, with Moscow's Journalism Advancement and Support Center to connect disabled citizens with American and Russian local media organizations. One of the films showcased is Jonathan Novick's eye-opening Don’t Look Down on Me, which took the Internet by storm, going live on Youtube August 7th.
When cinematographer Thomas Rist, geared up to shoot an in-store promotional video for shoe maker London Kate’s Get High on Heels campaign, he used the opportunity to try out the new Schneider-Kreuznach Xenon FF-Prime lenses. The dynamic music video-style promo featured renowned choreographer Ferly Prado performing dance moves on a downtown L.A. rooftop and in the L.A. River Basin.
Pakistan post house Darkroom Asia has won a major contract with ARY Films as a strategic partner in providing post-production and VFX-related services. Darkroom Asia CEO Salman Hasan credits the company’s new SGO Mistika 4K system with sealing the deal. The first project was the feature film Main Hoon Shahid Afridi, which some say marks the rebirth of the Pakistan film industry.
Discovery Park of America has opened in Union City, Tennessee, offering visitors a world-class entertainment and educational experience with more than 70,000-square feet of exhibits on nature, science, technology, history and art.
The Reel Thing (www.The-Reel-Thing.org), the 33rd technical symposium on film restoration and preservation will be held August 21-23 at the Linwood Dunn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study in Hollywood.
Kicking off the 2014 season of Canada’s Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing, Toronto’s Woodbine Racetrack hosted The Queen’s Plate Stakes last month. The event is the longest continuously run stakes race in North America, and this year marked its 155th anniversary. To ensure not a moment of horseracing action was missed, the production of the event included use of For-A’s FT-One 4K variable frame rate camera, used in conjunction with For-A’s ZE-One 4K extraction system.
The Room, the boutique finishing facility located within Technicolor-PostWorks, New York, recently completed two months of post-production finishing on The Giver, the new film from director Phillip Noyce and The Weinstein Company. In a project involving numerous creative and technical challenges, the facility handled editorial conforming and color grading. The latter included applying the finishing touch to an onscreen world that undergoes a gradual transition from black & white to color.
Based on Peter Rees’ book The Other ANZACs, ANZAC Girls tells the true story of five military nurses from Australia and New Zealand who served with Allied forces during World War I. Witnessing the horrors of war, the women experienced severe hardships while tending to the wounded and formed bonds of friendship that would last a lifetime. As series producer Lisa Scott (who produced the series with Felicity Packard) explains, the series “offers unique insight by showing how the war affected people, other than soldiers on the line.” The first episode premiered on Australian TV earlier this month and got exceptional ratings around Australia and much critical acclaim.
Canon was already no stranger to the international filmmaking community when in November 2011 the company hosted a major event at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. Fujio Mitarai, who is chairman and CEO of all of Canon, flew from Tokyo specifically for the event to demonstrate that, in his words, “Canon hoped to be welcomed by the Hollywood filmmaking community and to work together to greatly expand the boundaries of digital cinema.” The history of Canon’s involvement in professional motion picture production is widely known but worth repeating here. In 2007 the company introduced the Canon EOS 1D Mark lll. The camera was designed for the high-end professional still photography market. Sometime during its development the engineers felt that adding the capability of shooting high definition motion pictures would add to its appeal. One Canon executive told me that at that time they were envisioning the camera being used for applications such as wedding videos. But cinematographers discovered the camera and it was suddenly being used for some often un-credited shots in major Hollywood films. Then, in 2008, it was used extensively to shoot the Mumbai scenes in Slumdog Millionaire. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Anthony Dod Mantle captured the Oscar for Best Cinematography.
British cinematographer and Polecam owner operator John Gillan was booked to cover the Azores leg of the Red Bull Cliff Diving competition. He flew in to the Azores on his way to the small island where it would take place, 1000 miles from the nearest city and two days away from shooting the event. It was not the ideal place to hear from the airline that brought him there: "Sorry, Mr. Gillan, we’ve lost one of your Polecam flight cases."
