Alex Proyas has never shied away from utilizing the latest digital technology to make his films. I remember getting a call from him back in 1994 when I was cutting “Civil Wars” for Steven Bochco Productions, one of the first network shows to be edited digitally on the Avid. The company had given the director my name to give him some feedback on what is was like cutting long-form on the Media Composer as he was considering using the system on his first American feature, “The Crow”.  So it came as no surprise to me when I heard he and his cinematographer, Simon Duggan were shooting his latest film “Knowing” with the RED ONE digital cinema camera. The film, which opened last week, is the largest budget film to date to shot with the RED.

From Wired

Alex Proyas has made plenty of films in traditional fashion, shooting Dark City, The Crow and I, Robot on old-fashioned celluloid.  For his new sci-fi thriller Knowing, the Australian director decided to go digital for the first time and put the ultrahigh-resolution RED camera to the test.  Now that he’s worked out the kinks, Proyas says, “There’s no going back.”

Here is the second part of my interview with Joe Fordham, director of the new short “The Glitch” and his cinematographer Tom Gleason. Here Joe tells us how he met his composer Laurent Watteau, who lives and works in Paris, online through the message boards at Film Score Monthly.com. I also ask Joe how he plans to get his film in front of an audience and any advice he might have for those thinking of making their own indie film.

Today we present Part I of our first Independent Profile of “The Glitch”, a short film directed by Joe Fordham. This is Joe’s first venture into HD, but he didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. Joe started making Super 8 films in his native Britain at a very young age. He ultimately became part of an award winning amateur filmmaking group known as Dangerous Visions. A short while later, he found himself working in London’s Soho filmmaking district, where he produced an eight-minute short entitled Board Game, which went on to win a BBC TV Showreel86 award. From there he was hired to write and direct Dogplant for Channel Four TV London.

After moving to Los Angeles Joe spent the next few years “breaking-in” to film production, again, this time the Hollywood film industry. He eventually landed work creating visual effects, creature effects and in post production on films such as Terminator 2, Men in Black, Virus and the Species series. Several years of all nighters were enough to convince Joe to pursue a writing career, and for the last six years he has been covering the international visual effects scene as a journalist and associate editor at Cinefex magazine.

Joining us is Joe’s cinematographer on The Glitch, Tom Gleason. Tom has been accumulating dramatic narrative DP credits for the last several years but he also has an extensive resume that demonstrates the breadth of his experience. This includes work as a visual effects model maker, where he built the 60’ version of the Titanic, (the one that breaks in half), one of the most impressive and widely published shots of the film. He’s also been a VFX DP, operator and 1st AC on films such as Beetlejuice. The Passion of the Christ and Mr & Mrs. Smith.

The Glitch – Official Site
Method
Laurent Watteau, Composer
CineWidgets
WithoutaBox.com
FilmScoreMonthly.com

Here is Part III of our interview with Dan Lebental.

In this segment Dan gives us some great insights into the feature film editorial process. We discuss topics such as what it’s like screening the “first cut” with the director and starting out on the directors cut, bringing the length of IRON MAN down from 3.5 to it’s final running time of 2 hours, exploring variations of the film and reinventing scenes, and something he fondly refers to as “index card death row”. We also get to talk a bit more about his long term working relationship with director Jon Favreau, getting the studio involved and the editorial muse. Finally we discuss an issue that confronts directors and editors on many visual effects films, the time quandary. Specifically, the amount of time it takes from the director’s contractual (DGA) 10 week cut to lock VFX sequences and get them in the “pipeline”.