Moving Around!

So it's official. On Wednesday May 3rd, Department Chair Eve Okupniak will be moving to the second floor. Her office will be located next to the elevators and across from the cage. This convenient new location will be better for students and staff to communicate directly with the chair!

Today Now! Interviews Screenwriter for Fast 5

Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of "Fast Five"

Source: The Onion - Cheers! Eve.

2011 Summer VFX Preview

With the anticipation of all the new blockbuster films coming out this summer, here is a list of Ten Flix who's VFX are expected to raise the bar for the future of movie special FX. The list was compiled by Animated world Network.

SOURCE: AWN

the Reel: Blog!

The Reel - Student Club - has a blog, and it's on our blog! Look under the Film/Commercial Blogs on the right of this page for posts from our student club! - Eve.

Perfect Companion for the TriBeCa Film Festival this week!

Click on the picture for the APPLE STORE EVENTS PAGE
The Apple Store, SoHo, and the Apple Store, West 14th Street, are proud to take part in the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. Come celebrate the spirit of independent filmmaking with free workshops and events—including the exclusive Meet the Filmmakers series. Presented by Apple and indieWIRE, this series will feature some of the film industry's leading writers, directors, producers, and actors.

All Meet the Filmmaker events will be available as free podcasts on iTunes.

A list of filmmakers at the Meet the Filmmakers event:
Will Ferrell Ed Burns Zach Braff
Alex Gregory Jason Sudeikis Massy Tadjedin Eva Mendes
Steven Silver Taylor Kitsch James Westby Gaukur Úlfarsson 
Jon Gnarr David Dusa Philip Gelatt Dan Rush

Art Institute of New York City Interviews Kevin Smith

AVID Sponsored a 30 minute interview with Kevin Smith for Art Institute of New York City and NYU to do an extended interview regarding the filmmaker's process. Below is the interview shot by Eric Acosta, edit and sound by Dave Maxime.

Evening with Kevin Smith from Genevieve Okupniak on Vimeo.

Behind the scenes of "The Hobbit"

Check out Peter Jackson video blog going behind the scenes of The Hobbit. There are some great insider special effects images, as well as valuable tips and tricks if you listen and watch carefully...

Infographics: Genus!

French TV Channel Canal + has published three infographics on how to make Horror, Action, and Animated films. Below are the pics. Here are your production cheat sheets! Double click to get a larger picture - Eve.

REEL Meeting This Week

CS5 is coming out and it seems to have some great new features! Warp Stabilizer lets you smoothly and easily stabilize your footage with out having to wait for a render while it does it and it even takes some notes out of photoshops "content-aware" feature and rebuilds edges using data from previous and future frames in your clip!

Not only have they added some cool new features their making it more affordable. Apparently soon you'll be able to hold a subscription and pay monthly for different levels of the program. Check it out @ the source below.


SOURCE: STUDIODAILY.COM

Before reality TV . . . there were documentaries.

And this editorial has led us to believe they are once again, cool.
We have several active documentarians on our staff: Susi Graf with Lost in the Crowd, Ian Fischer with Rude Dude, and Francisco Vargas with Ulla. Whether a narrative or non-fiction, every film has a story as its backbone. I encourage you all to read this article to broaden your spectrum of film knowledge. - Eve

Why-documentaries-can-and-should-be-considered-cool - From First Showing

Filmmaker Spencer Susser

One thing I see over and over again are students who loose a sense of perspective. Creating short films (especially for a director) is the key to get funding for bigger, projects. Spencer Susser is a good example of this. He has recently found distribution for his feature film, produced and starring Natalie Portman. His feature premiered at Sundance in 2010. When I saw the trailer, I couldn't believe the cast. Everyone is masked so well in their character, they are almost unrecognizable. Posted below is Spencer's short film and a link to the page and trailer for his first feature. Enjoy! - Eve.

Fair Warning: This is a zombie film with profanity and violence. If you are sensitive to that kind of material, I would suggest that you do not watch. 



Link to Spencer Susser's Feature Film, Hesher

Fan-Made More Popular Than The Original?

I thought of this topic when doing my usual surfing on the interwebs this morning. Fan-Made is a term used to describe any artwork that re-uses characters or themes from a previously created fictional universe in an unprofessional setting. Most popular are the fan-made short stories that expand the Star Wars or Star Trek universes. This sub-sub genre of filmmaking has its place in the economy of the movie business thanks to the internet. If you are a professional or a lucky student, you have the ability to create a film or (for the purposes of this post) a title sequence that could be circulated in the blog-o-sphere. This modern day word-of-mouth could potently land you a job!
The most interesting (recent) case of this was the fan-created Walking Dead sequence by Daniel M. Kanemoto (Student Academy Award Winner for Short Animation). When this surfaced, around the time of the AMC series was due to air, several fans of the comic preferred this sequence to the one that AMC commissioned.

Today, I am posting another title sequence for the upcoming X-Men Reboot by fan Joe D (from Vimeo). Here is a quote from his Vimeo page. "Super Punch held a contest redesigning the posters for the film, which played it safe by sticking very close to the correlation to the original trilogy, and winding up rather mundane compared to the slick trailer rife with espionage, red fear, and 60s hair. Several people were quick to make posters in the Mod, Saul Bass, and James Bond style that I had in mind, so it was decided that I'd make a title sequence instead."

X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo.

If you are interested in title sequences, I would strongly recommend that you check out the site below.
http://www.artofthetitle.com/

Enjoy! - Eve.

Hey everybody! So I saw Sucker Punch last week and despite all the bad critiques flooding the internet even before the movie officially released, I thought this film was AWESOME! granted I may be a little bias because I'm partial to the whole comic book style super chicks blasting mutant samurai... But contrary to what some people have been saying about the film it DID have a great story. I'm not going to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, but check out these clips from G4's exclusive look of the film (in case you haven't already seen it) they reveal a little bit of the special effects process used to put the film together.

G4 Sucker Punch Exclusive via EmilyBrowning.com

Xtranormal Film Festival! - Entries Due April 14th

From Xtranormal: "Fame and fortune awaits you (maybe): submit your decision-themed film to the Xtranormal Film Festival between March 24 and April 14. Entrants are eligible to win their share of over $10,000 in prizes, and one lucky winner will be immortalized as an Xtranormal character."

Click Here for Rules and Details!Xtranormal Contest

I literally did this in 20 minutes. It's a lot more fun than I expected. Go for it! Practice your screen writing abilities. - Eve.

Documentary Event in NYC on April 8th and 9th

FRIDAY APRIL 8 AND
SATURDAY APRIL 9, 2011
The TimesCenter
242 West 41st Street, New York City

From the Envision site "The UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) serve as the focal point for screenings, panel discussions and social networking. The Spotlight Focus in 2011 is the MDGs and their impact on eradicating extreme hunger and poverty.

The MDGs are to eradicate poverty, achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and develop global partnership for development."

Those of you interested in progressive social storytelling should look into attending. Click here http://www.envisionfilm.org/ for further details.

It's good to be back!

Hello Students and Staff! I just wanted to say a big HELLO! It's great to be back after being gone for eight weeks. Cadence Jaina (yes, her middle name is the name of Han Solo's daughter) is doing well. I'll resume posting along with Freddy.

Welcome Back Everyone!