Featured Video - Introducing the Scorpion

Steve's Pick

“Voices from the Field” by John X. Carey

So wonderfully done. I often talk about questioning and how it should be done and you did it here, man, and you did it brilliantly. You asked the right questions to get emotional responses. Laughing is so important and I love having that at the end of a piece. All emotions.

People don’t realize that the formula for a documentary is the same as a feature. Characters need to transform so we can grow with them. You did that so beautifully here. You interviewed them as lost souls and then interviewed them as people with hope. This is not easy to do and I don’t know if people realize that. I know I’ve been there. Again, your style is so unique to you. Your cinematography, storytelling, lines, screen direction and editing are great but the most important factor in a documentary is story and you did that and more.

Watch John X. Carey’s, “Voices from the Field” Now

In the News

Rodney Charters Reviews Canon C300 and Accessories

Rodney Charters, the cinematographer probably best known as the DP on the TV series “24″ and “Shameless”, recently did a live review of the new Canon C300 camera with fellow filmmakers, Lan Bui and Drew Gardner. The camera was outfitted with Zacuto’s C300 baseplate and EVF. Charters seemed to really like the camera as well as the Zacuto gear.

“Well done to Weiss and the boys at Zacuto. I like this a lot,” says Charters of the Zacuto Canon C300 camera support rig. “You can sit all day with this on your shoulder. This feels amazing. The weight of this is ridiculous.”

Check Out Rodney Charters Review on the Canon C300 and Accessories

Featured Photographer

Anna Fishkin: A Photographer for Our Time

There is a sequence in the 1999 film “What Dreams May Come” starring Robin Williams in which Chris, his character, has died and finds himself in a heaven more beautiful and amazing than anything he could have imagined. It is a “Summerland” of rolling green hills, lush grass, and flowers of blinding brilliance. The film won an Academy Award for art direction, and its color had not been matched—not until a young American photographer named Anna Fishkin went behind a camera and started photographing sunsets in Tulum, Mexico. Gorgeous, breathtaking, magnificent, splendid, and stunning are inadequate descriptions of her famed sunset series. All you can do is look at them and say, “These cannot be real”. They are. Fishkin captures color in a way that reveals the true natural beauty of the sunset phenomenon and quite literally blows you away.

Discover Anna Fishkin, A Photographer for Our Time

What's New

Original iPhone Film Festival Finalists Selected

All submissions for the first annual Original iPhone Film Festival have been received and three finalists have been selected in the categories of Fiction, Non-Fiction, Music Video and Brand Film. All finalist videos can be viewed in the Winners Showcase on the Original iPhone Film Festival website.

“We are absolutely thrilled with the response we had to the 2011 Original iPhone Film Festival and are already talking about OIFF 2012,” says Original iPhone Film Festival Founder, Matt Dessner. “The truth is the OIFF has become much bigger than we had originally anticipated. The industry is growing rapidly and we have been approached by a couple of other film festivals that are interested in using iPhone filmography as a new category in their own festivals.”

Original iPhone Film Festival Finalist Selected

Featured Columnist

Is Wireless Dead? ~Adam Forgione

Well maybe not exactly, but for me, wireless audio is a last resort. Signal always wants to travel the path of least resistance and air is resistant. The same concept applies many times to wireless internet vs. direct ethernet connection.

The goal is always to travel through the least amount of devices and through the shortest and least resistant path. Because you are using the wireless system to “carry” the signal, two more devices (transmitter + receiver) are added to the chain which causes more noise. Fortunately, technology has given us many options to record our audio without wireless. Field recorders are becoming more mainstream and most record directly onto media like SDHC cards. There are 2 types of field recorders – full size and pocket size.

Check Out Featured Columnist, Adam Forgione