Gender-targeted abuse and harassment have long made comment sections on the internet borderline unreadable, but those same nasty attitudes have been poisoning the digital well for years in subtler ways. As a recent exposé from FiveThirtyEight shows, online reviews for television shows geared towards women have been artificially lowered by axe-grinding men. By analyzing a […]
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What’s it like to be a woman in cinematography?
via Variety Much has been made about the unfortunately small pool of women directing in Hollywood and lack of the opportunities they are given. Things are even more dire for women in cinematography. According to Vulture, only 2% of cinematographers for major films are women, and none have ever been nominated for an Oscar in […]
Continue readingWho run the world? Ghostbusters. It’s Women in Film Week on the blog
Haters be warned: the new Ghostbusters movie comes out this Friday, and we are extremely excited. It looks like a whole load of fun, and we’re glad to see a big-budgeted action comedy in theaters. But it’s impossible to talk about Ghostbusters in a vacuum, because the discussion around the movie has been dominated by […]
Continue readingThe five years in Chicago when movies were forbidden
from Exhibitors Herald,via Wikimedia Commons Today, we learned about a truly bizarre moment in film history that we want to share. For as often as you hear people (usually wrongly) claiming censorship of media, you’ve never lived through anything like the reign of Major M.L.C. Funkhouser, film censor of the city of Chicago. As The […]
Continue readingLearn the secrets of directing from Adam Nimoy this Thursday
image via School of Communication website Maybe you’ve had to direct a student film for class. Exciting! But that means you have to direct people, and if you don’t have experience managing a set, you may be awkward to work with your actors without accidentally being a jerk. You need to learn the best way […]
Continue readingFiveThirtyEight figures out the most and least successful movies based on books
A book is not a film. Each format has strong and weak points, and as common as book-to-movie adaptations are, not every story is well-suited for both. Fans of the original books might bemoan when the movie version misses the point, but sometimes movies end up being the right way to tell a story that […]
Continue readingThe next time you need a camera, check KitSplit
The AU Library is happy to lend out cameras, tripods, and microphones for students, staff, and faculty working on film projects, and SOC students also have the option to borrow equipment from the Media Production Center. But what happens if you graduate, or if you need something higher-end or specialized? You’d normally rent from a […]
Continue readingSome of the great, weird things we found while cleaning out our desks
Now that we’re in the slow months of summer, we have a chance to tidy up our department. A big part of that this summer is cleaning out desks that haven’t been emptied in decades and finding all sorts of goodies in them. Most of what we found was old files, but a few wonderful […]
Continue readingEvery Frame a Painting turns inward with a look at the editing process
Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos’s Every Frame a Painting is one of the best film criticism channels on YouTube. The creators are excellent editors, and the attention they put into the pace and structure of the videos shows. Appropriately, this month, Every Frame a Painting’s new video looks at the editing process. Zhou edits films […]
Continue readingWhat does independent film look like today?
via Maryland Film Festival The slow roll into summer is the time of year when we start to look at our big-picture tasks, so it seems appropriate to share a big-picture article about the state of film. For The New Yorker, Richard Brody wrote a lengthy piece about the state of “independent film” and what […]
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