This is Unbox in his new studio unboxing the 77-inch Wallpaper TV. It’s unbelievable.
But as one Youtube comment pointed out: From unboxing on a dining room table…to this. That’s what’s unbelievable. 13 million subscribers-strong and showing no signs of slowing down. The dude is a machine.
Very happy to be collaborating with the Unbox team. Congrats! The new studio looks great.
Éric Summer, best known for ‘Ballerina’, comes on board to direct Liz Gilbert’s ‘Lovely’.
‘Lovely’ is a 2017 Nicholl’s semi-finalist whose storyline revolves around a red vintage vespa. The animation film is being produced by Syon Media’s Danny Bergeron.
Liz has a project under option with Avalon/AwesomenessTV, a comedy she co-wrote with Julie Lake. She has also developed film and television projects with Imagine Television, Sony Pictures, and Team Todd among others.
She just got selected for the Women In Film Writing/Producing Program, where she’ll be mentoring under Melissa Bernstein (Gran Via Productions) and Gayle Abrams.
A prisoner within the heart of the Alliance seat of power, Varok Saurfang is confronted not only by King Anduin Wrynn, but the choices that lie before him.
“This weekend was Blizzcon 2018, where we premiered my latest World of Warcraft short, LOST HONOR,” says writer/director Marc Massenger. “We got a thunderous response on the show floor – I’m always so grateful to the Blizzard fans for their enthusiasm.”
“A wounded stranger finds a secret on his rescuer’s property. A film shot entirely via the light of the full moon.”
“After the most unimaginably difficult shoot in a decade of making movies,” says Slain, “it’s a pleasure to finally share with you my new film DEMON, produced by Toboggan and GRLA.
“Demon is a 2019 Oscar®-qualifier, winner of Best Narrative Short at the Austin Film Festival, and receiver of the Emerging Cinematographer honor from the International Cinematographers Guild (ICG). It is the first film shot entirely by the light of a full moon, relying on cutting edge technology through a partnership with Panavision.
“If you dig our crazy film, please help get the word out by sharing the image and link below. We forewent distribution offers to release the film online for free, and short films really depend on grass roots love. Mainly I hope the story gives you a brush with the mystic this season, and I’d love to hear what you think.
Happy Halloween and all my affections,”
Caleb Slain
P.S. If you’d like to know more about the film, check out the detailed backstory on our website.
‘While living in Joshua Tree a couple weeks before the shoot, I fell into small talk with an old woman munching on a scone outside a dusty cafe. When I told her what we were up to out there, she replied without a trace of humor that to chase a full moon is “to court chaos.” She spoke of the moon with feminine pronouns. She said her gaze is long and heavy and something about no suitors.’
There’s a strong sense of the mystical here. But it fits this strange, lyrical and exciting short. It is a harbinger of a great talent. The score by Wlad Marhulets is absolutely brilliant, adding to the sense of foreboding throughout. The takes are long. The acting is shrouded in a purposeful heaviness, every word almost prophetic. The dialogue is poetic and important, but adds to the unreliability of the trio of characters. No lightness here. Everything is intensely stylized and pored over. The technical challenge of shooting via the full moon informs the film: watching (and listening) is specific and commands the viewer’s attention. But isn’t that the sign of all really, very good work? The artful Demon is everywhere and nowhere challenging us to see what is and isn’t.
— See Slain’s text explaining the MAKING OF.
– See also Short of the Week ‘s write-up on Demon.
Finding a metaphor for a problem is what legendary writer/director Paul Schrader sets out to do. This is one of the lessons he imparted to the crowd gathered for his masterclass at Cinéma Impérial for this year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma, which rightly awarded Schrader the 2018 Louve d’honneur prize and treated festival-goers with a retrospective of his oeuvre.
We like to think we’re pretty writer-centric at the agency. And it came as no surprise to hear Schrader say he’d read two books twice before embarking on the writing of mythical Travis Bickle’s journey through New York City in a taxi.
The two books are The Stranger by Albert Camus and Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. Tackling French existentialism in big doses is apparently life-changing. The metaphor for crushing loneliness is indeed embodied by a lone yellow cabbie roaming New York city streets. It would appear the Ethan Hawk character in Schrader’s most recent outing, The First Reformer, is cast in the same mould, in what is yet another spiritual film for this writer/director, which steers us to the heart of every Schrader conversation, transcendentalism style in film. Best described as creating dead time. He gave the example of holding the shot of a character’s exit and “holding on the closed door longer than you normally would. You’re not going to cut. Dead time transfers the action to viewers, engaging them to be moved. It uses the power of cinema against itself to get the viewer to participate.”
Using boredom as technique, subverting the viewers’ expectations and consistently withholding action activates the audience, according to Schrader. Most films today lean into you and give you all the action you desire and ask nothing of you. Transcendental style works the opposite way. You lean back and take your time. “It creates something much more powerful,” he says.
The transcendental style is clearly not for all audience members. Asked what he thought about the change US cinema has undergone since he penned Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and Last Temptation of Christ, he said that it was really the US audience that had undergone the biggest change. “It was much easier to get a conversation going around something than it is now. People are much more fragmented now. Films using the transcendental style are still getting made but it’s increasingly hard to get them seen.”
Paul Schrader the film critic turned to spiritual films after seeing Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, a true exemplar of the transcendental style. His early period as film critic and budding script writer, he wrote about in a four-year correspondence with his brother Leonard, newly published by Film Comment. It captures what Film Comment calls an “extraordinary and perhaps unrepeatable era” in world cinema.