Designed for the launch of the Close-Up series, Filmmakers' Choices explores different areas of decision-making within film production, focusing on each in the analysis of a film. The discussion of Talk to Her (Pedro Almod'var, 2002) examines the detailed construction of point of view; the account of Lured (Douglas Sirk, 1947) is simultaneously a reflection on narrative construction and a look at the creative possibilities of coincidence. The Pop Song in Film offers a series of detailed interpretations of moments in films where the pop song adopts a decisive storytelling role. The study focuses on both on-screen musical performances and the use of the song as a kind of musical voiceover. Reading Buffy looks at Joss Whedon's acclaimed television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, through a close- reading approach more usually applied to films. The series is seen not just to create a richly detailed and satisfying fictional world, but to be an abundant source of complex meanings. Several aspects of Buffy are examined: its visual intelligence, the playful sophistication of its narrative strategies and the interest the series takes in its relationship with its many fans.

The first, most crucial step in making a film is finding the funds to do it. Let Louise Levison, who wrote the innovative business plan for "The Blair Witch Project," show you how. This unique guide teaches you not only how to create a business plan, but also how to avoid common business plan mistakes, so that you can attract and secure an investor. In jargon-free terms, the author leads you through every step. Each chapter concentrates on a different section of the business plan, including the industry, marketing, financing, and distribution. Large format films, new media and shorts are also discussed. The included companion web site features supplementary exercises and spreadsheets so that you get comfortable crunching the numbers--no math degree required! The sixth edition contains completely revised and updated industry data along with updated information on distribution including online and foreign markets. Plus, new interviews and case studies with filmmakers will show you real-world examples of equity investors and markets.

Exploring aesthetic decision-making skills through active, critical interpretation of the screenplay, this book investigates the ways filmmakers translate a screenplay into a powerful film. Guiding the reader through the formal choices a filmmaker makes, this book encompasses all aspects of the filmmaking process, including directing, acting, cinematography, lighting, production design, sound, and editing. Author Joyce illustrates how to apply aesthetics in a way that encourages creative thinking and stylistic choices, while emphasizing the importance of active decision-making to foreground the screenplay in the filmmaking process. Focusing on how films should be crafted stylistically from beat to beat, the book provides tangible footholds to assist filmmakers with the aesthetic decision-making process, empowering filmmakers to create films to resonate emotionally and intellectually. Ideal for students of filmmaking and aspiring filmmakers looking to train their gut and hone their creative and aesthetic decision-making in the filmmaking process. Additional online screenplay samples show how one singular story can be told with different emphasis and narrative perspectives.

In recent years, the Arab world and Iran have been afflicted by cataclysmic events, among them brutal state crackdowns of revolutions. Yet, filmmakers have persisted in their desire to tell their stories, against the odds, in creative acts that attest to their imagination, courage and resilience. In this book, Shohini Chaudhuri examines a broad range of films made during the tumultuous period since 2009, ranging from internationally award-winning festival favourites, such as For Sama (2019), Capernaum (2018) and Taxi Tehran (2015), to lesser-known films from the region. While freedom of expression is often understood through the lens of state censorship, she reveals the different types of obstacles that filmmakers face and their strategies for overcoming them so that those constraints are transformed into creative opportunities. Using her original interviews with filmmakers such as Waad al-Kateab, Yasmin Fedda, Larissa Sansour, Mani Haghighi and Ossama Mohammed, she identifies nine creative strategies for producing work under conditions of crisis. Chaudhuri argues that creativity is indelibly shaped by constraints, whether these are externally imposed by existing materials, funding and socio-political conditions, or self-imposed constraints, through choices of genre or acceptance of rules and responsibilities.She shows that the range of creative strategies emanating from the region is much wider than allegory and becoming ever more direct. She thus opens up new lines of inquiry into cinematic creativity in sites of conflict and crisis in the Middle East and beyond.

The Routledge International Handbook of Ethnographic Film and Video is a state-of-the-art book which encompasses the breadth and depth of the field of ethnographic film and video-based research. With more and more researchers turning to film and video as a key element of their projects, and as research video production becomes more practical due to technological advances as well as the growing acceptance of video in everyday life, this critical book supports young researchers looking to develop the skills necessary to produce meaningful ethnographic films and videos, and serves as a comprehensive resource for social scientists looking to better understand and appreciate the unique ways in which film and video can serve as ways of knowing and as tools of knowledge mobilization. Comprised of 31 chapters authored by some of the world’s leading experts in their respective fields, the book’s contributors synthesize existing literature, introduce the historical and conceptual dimensions of the field, illustrate innovative methodologies and techniques, survey traditional and new technologies, reflect on ethics and moral imperatives, outline ways to work with people, objects, and tools, and shape the future agenda of the field. With a particular focus on making ethnographic film and video, as opposed to analyzing or critiquing it, from a variety of methodological approaches and styles, the Handbook provides both a comprehensive introduction and up-to-date survey of the field for a vast variety of audiovisual researchers, such as scholars and students in sociology, anthropology, geography, communication and media studies, education, cultural studies, film studies, visual arts, and related social science and humanities. As such, it will appeal to a multidisciplinary and international audience, and features a dynamic, forward-thinking, innovative, and contemporary focus oriented toward the very latest developments in the field, as well as future possibilities.

Much of the criticism on Stephenie Meyer's immensely popular 'Twilight' novels has underrated or even disparaged the books while belittling the questionable taste of an audience that many believe is being inculcated with anti-feminist values. Avoiding a repetition of such reductive critiques of the series's purported shortcomings with respect to literary merit and political correctness, this volume adopts a cultural studies framework to explore the range of scholarly concerns awakened by the 'Twilight novels and their filmic adaptations. Contributors examine 'Twilight's debts to its predecessors in young adult, vampire, and romance literature; the problems of cinematic adaptation; issues in fan and critical reception in the United States and Korea; and the relationship between the series and contemporary conceptualizations of feminism, particularly girl culture. Placing the series within a broad tradition of literary history, reception studies, and filmic adaptation, the collection offers scholars the opportunity to engage with the books' importance for studies of popular culture, gender, and young adult literature.

Today's independent and digital filmmaking demands a clear guide to the business and legal aspects of the art. What fundraising options are available to a filmmaker? When should a filmmaker establish a corporation or limited liability company? How do screenwriters protect their work? What are a director's legal obligations to the producer, cast, and crew--and what are their obligations in return? This indispensable resource addresses the legal, financial, and organizational questions that an independent or guerrilla filmmaker must face, and the problems that will doom a project if left unanswered. It demystifies issues such as founding a film company, obtaining financing, preparing a budget, securing locations, shooting, granting screen credits, and distributing, exhibiting, and marketing a film. Newly updated and expanded, this third edition explores concepts such as integrating social media; crowd funding and nonprofit status funding; diversity, inclusion, and compensation equity; and distribution via streaming services. Appendixes provide sample contracts and riders, copyright circulars, Documentary Filmmakers' Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, and more.

How do filmmakers guide viewers through the frame using the movement of bodies on screen? What do they seek to communicate with their cinematic choreography, and how were those choices shaped by industrial conditions? This book is about the powerful relationship between human movement and cinema. It demonstrates how filmmakers have used moving bodies and dance as key storytelling elements and how media industries' changing investment in this aspect of film style impacts filmmakers' choices in portraying movement on screen.

DreamWorks is one of the biggest names in modern computer-animation: a studio whose commercial success and impact on the medium rivals that of Pixar, and yet has received far less critical attention.The book will historicise DreamWorks’ contribution to feature animation, while presenting a critical history of the form in the new millennium. It will look beyond the films’ visual aesthetics to assess DreamWorks’ influence on the narrative and tonal qualities which have come to define contemporary animated features, including their use of comedy, genre, music, stars, and intertextuality. It makes original interventions in the fields of film and animation studies by discussing each of these techniques in a uniquely animated context, with case studies from Shrek, Antz, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar, Shark Tale, Bee Movie, Trolls and many others. It also looks at the unusual online afterlife of these films, and the ways in which they have been reappropriated and remixed by subversive online communities.

From the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras, revolutionary upheavals characterized China’s twentieth century. In Revolutionary Becomings ̧ Ying Qian studies documentary film as an “eventful medium” deeply embedded in these upheavals and as a prism to investigate the entwined histories of media and China’s revolutionary movements. With meticulous historical excavation and attention to intermedial practices and transnational linkages, Qian discusses how early media practitioners at the turn of the twentieth century intermingled with rival politicians and warlords as well as civic and business organizations. She reveals the foundational role documentary media played in the Chinese Communist Revolution as a bridge between Marxist theories and Chinese historical conditions. In considering the years after the Communist Party came to power, Qian traces the dialectical relationships between media practice, political relationality, and revolutionary epistemology from production campaigns during the Great Leap Forward to the “class struggles” during the Cultural Revolution and the reorganization of society in the post-Mao decade. Exploring a wide range of previously uninvestigated works and intervening in key debates in documentary studies and film and media history, Revolutionary Becomings provides a groundbreaking assessment of the significance of media to the historical unfolding and actualization of revolutionary movements.