John Seale, ASC, ACS will receive the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Plus Camerimage Film Festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The festival will show a special retrospective of his films representing some of his greatest professional achievements.
Seale photographed Peter Weir’s Witness, and earned his first Academy Award® for the film. He earned his second Oscar® nomination for Rain Man, which was also nominated for an ASC Outstanding Achievement Award in 1989. Seale won the Oscar and the ASC Award for The English Patient in 1997. He earned Academy Award and ASC nominations again in 2004 for Cold Mountain. Earlier this year, Seale received the ASC International Award for his incredible images.
Zombies, ghosts, vampires, and werewolves have never enjoyed such “spook”tacular popularity! At cinemas and on television, the supernatural and ghoulish are drawing big audiences. From True Blood to the Twilight franchise, film is the medium of choice for capturing all the frightening, bloodthirsty elements!
To get just the right new “American gothic” look for AMC’s horror series The Walking Dead, cinematographer David Boyd, ASC said they tested every conceivable format before production. “When the images came back, everyone realized that Super 16 was the format that made everything look right. With the smaller gauge and the grain, suddenly the images seemed to derive from the graphic novel itself. Every image is a step removed from reality and a step deeper into cinema.” Hear the rest of The Walking Dead team discussing the show’s creation.
Before directing the noir thriller A Wife Alone, Justin Reichman had worked extensively as a script supervisor. That experience gave him insight into a wide variety of directing styles. When he was ready to direct his own feature film, he knew what he wanted. “I wanted to make my project personal,” he says. “It has a classic noir framework, with flashbacks and twists and turns. But I put my own spin on it, with some real comedy to balance the darker themes. It’s about newlyweds, and having just gotten married myself, I can understand the ethos.”
A Wife Alone is the story of a nervous, but ruthless and determined young woman whose female lover is a prostitute. The pair concocts a scheme to murder one of her clients, and rob his partners. The plot culminates in a dinner party where the weather is hot and the subtext is hotter.
A responsible director takes the question of production format very seriously. That decision has a major impact on how audiences will react to the story and characters. Other factors include cost concerns, story considerations, shooting style, and the emotions that filmmakers are hoping to evoke in the audience. Wise directors and producers depend on cinematographers to help wade through the hype and marketing claims to determine which format is best for a given story.
Recently, two Australian filmmakers wanted to see with their own eyes the differences between various formats, and to get a sense of how they performed under difficult conditions. They wanted to compare metrics like resolution and clarity, but more importantly, to see how the images differed in less empirical, more instinctive ways.
Today, the Sundance Film Festival is a world-renowned gathering of filmmakers and film industry bigwigs, and the Sundance Institute is recognized as one of the premier organizations fostering independent filmmaking. The Festival and Institute share the goal of promoting independent voices in American and international filmmaking, but with slightly different methods driving each communal experience. The Festival provides a venue for films and the opportunity for filmmakers at the margins to connect with the people who can bring their creation to the mass market and boost their careers. The Institute focuses on helping filmmakers hone their creative and practical filmmaking skills.
The histories of the Festival and the Institute are forever intertwined, and crucial to the success of both was the involvement of Robert Redford. The Sundance Film Festival began in August 1978 as the Utah/U.S. Film Festival with the goal of attracting filmmakers to Utah. One of the co-founders was head of Redford’s company Wildwood. That first year, the Frank Capra Award was presented to Jimmy Stewart, and the jury included actress Katharine Ross, editor Verna Fields, director Mark Rydell, and visual effects pioneer Linwood Dunn, ASC.
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