Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2019

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EVENTPROGRAM

THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY NYIT AUDITORIUM ON BROADWAY 1871 BROADWAY, NEW YORK CITY THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2019 4:00PM – 10:00PM


Exquisite Composition. ZEISS Supreme Prime Lenses

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Welcome to

SIGHT, SOUND & STORY 2019 THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY

I

n 2005, we launched a series of public events with prominent film editors, providing an intimate and casual environment where both students and members of the local film community could gather and explore the art of visual storytelling.

From those events, we began co-producing ACE’s EditFest NY, an all-star lineup of the industry’s most exciting and expressive talent. Over time, EditFest NY evolved into Sight, Sound and Story and eventually into an evening dedicated to The Art of Cinematography. In this year’s fifth annual Cinematography event, we’ll go behind the lens to better understand the challenges and decisions made by top visual artists in the realm of narrative TV, documentary and feature films. Our event series is where we hope many pieces of the creative puzzle fit together – a familiar enclave for the exchange of ideas and a celebration of this unique collaborative process. Josh Apter Manhattan Edit Workshop, Owner and Founder

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*All panelists are schedule permitting.

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3:30pm CHECK-IN 4:00pm OPENING 4:15pm - 5:30pm IN THE MOMENT: The Art of Cinematography in Documentary Filmmaking

Audience from Sight, Sound and Story 2018

MODERATOR:

Jim Kamp, Producer PANELISTS:

Tom Hurwitz, ASC

(American Dream, Harlan County U.S.A., The Queen of Versailles, Valentino: The Last Emperor) Claudia Raschke (RBG, God is the Bigger Elvis, Mad Hot Ballroom)

SCHEDULE continued on page 6

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SIGHT, SOUND & STORY IS SPONSORED BY MASTER STORYTELLER SPONSOR

TECHNOLOGY SPONSORS

SUPPORTING SPONSOR

MEDIA PARTNERS

ORGANIZATION PARTNERS

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manhattan edit workshop

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119 W 23rd Street, Ste 700 New York City Tel: 212.414.9570 www.mewshop.com twitter @mewshop @sightsndstory

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5:45 pm - 6:45 pm THE NEW AGE OF TV: Bringing the Look of Cinema to the Small Screen

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SIGHT, SOUND & STORY STAFF

MODERATOR:

David Leitner, Director, Producer,

JOSH APTER

Executive Producer info@mewshop.com

and Cinematographer

PANELISTS:

JASON BANKE

Frank Prinzi, ASC (The Blacklist, Northern

Executive Producer jason@mewshop.com

Exposure, Law & Order: Criminal Intent)

Tom Houghton, ASC

JANET DALTON

(Elementary, American Horror Story, Rescue Me, 30 Rock)

Producer janet@mewshop.com

MICHAEL VALINSKY

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm

Sponsorship Director & Producer mvalinsky@me.com

BEHIND THE LENS: A Conversation with Oscar-nominated Cinematographer Dean Cundey, ASC

TRISTAN LEDWIDGE Event Producer tristan@mewshop.com

MODERATOR:

Sean Weiner,

RIVA DANZIG

Jacob Burns Film Center, Director of Creative Culture

Program Guide Designer riva@danzigdesign.com

PANELIST:

DP Bruce Logan, ASC speaks with Snehal Patel from ZEISS

Dean Cundey, ASC

(Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Halloween, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Apollo 13)

8:30 pm - 10:00 pm Networking Party & Tech Lounge SPONSORED BY

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Q&A WITH CINEMATOGRAPHER

by Janet Dalton

TOM HURWITZ, ASC

T

om Hurwitz, ASC is one of America’s most honored documentary cinematographers. Winner of two Emmy Awards, the Sundance and Jerusalem Film Festival Awards for Best Cinematography, Hurwitz has photographed films that have won four academy awards and several more nominations (most recently for Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, Dancemaker and Killing in the Name).

EDITOR

DP Tom Hurwitz, ASC on Tiger Tiger

Manhattan Edit Workshop (MEWShop): Where did you grow up?

as a gaffer. I even did sound for a little while so I would get to know what the sound person was thinking. In addition to that, I began to shoot documentaries during that time. But most of my effort was in the area of fiction, the traditional route for a young cameraman. After about fifteen years, I was about to move permanently out to L.A., where the main feature work was at the time. We were on the verge of going but in thinking about it, I realized that I wanted to do documentaries because that was really where my heart was. When I went in that direction, I let my income be cut in half and I’ve never regretted it for a second. It was the best choice I ever made, just to specialize in documentary.

Tom Hurwitz, ASC (TH): I grew up in New York City. I did more growing up in New York City than I planned. I went all the way through school in New York City, and then I went to college at Columbia. Over the years, I spent a bunch of time in California, on and off, living there at various times. Also, there were periods of time when I was bi-coastal. That was when I was shooting features and episodic before I decided to specialize in documentary. MEWShop: How did you get your start? TH: I graduated Columbia University in the middle of the Vietnam War, right when the country was tearing itself apart. I thought I wanted to do something about that. So, I didn’t go to graduate school, and instead, I became a full-time community organizer for about three or four years in California. I had some connections in New York, so when I started in film I started apprenticing here as a freelancer and I did that for about eight years. I apprenticed on various kinds of films, features, commercials and documentaries, as an assistant camera person and n

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MEWShop: Why did you decide to be a cinematographer? Was that something that you always wanted to do? TH: My father, Leo Hurwitz, was mostly a documentary director and editor. He was shooting a film in 1960 and I got to go with him for a few days and see what he and the DP did. It was clear to me n

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that cinematography was the best job in the world. I already loved photography, and cinematography seemed really fabulous. But, once I got to college it occurred to me that I liked it so much, that there must be something wrong with it – because, how could you like your life’s work that much? So, I decided that I really was supposed to be an English professor not a cinematographer. I majored in English and religion in school. This was fine because when I was going to college, there weren’t many undergraduate film schools. Even though I am totally thankful for my liberal arts education, when I finished college, I realized that I wasn’t supposed to be an English professor.

DP Tom Hurwitz, ASC on Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving the Police

TH: That’s a really good, big question. A documentary cinematographer has to be, first and foremost, a documentarian. They have to have the spirit of documentary. What’s the spirit? Well, that spirit is, really, first of all, that there is grandeur in every human being. It doesn’t just require status or station. A craftsperson – or, even an opioid addict, or a kid in school, or a dancer, or an actor. Everyone has a certain grandeur in them, and with that grandeur comes a story. So, it is seeing stories, and things that are on the top level of human endeavor – all around us. That’s one piece of the documentarian. The other piece is a sense of the importance of some form of social justice. Documentary films have that in their DNA, as crusading works for a just world. It doesn’t have to be overtly political. Of course, many great documentaries are not at all political. Some of them are just studies on places or events, or even just biographies. There is a spirit behind the best documentaries – that talks about what our best qualities as human beings can be and should be. I think the real documentarians love people and want to see a better world for them.

MEWShop: So, you would advise getting a solid liberal arts education first before film school? TH: Yes. Everything we do benefits from our ability to understand the world. If our understanding of the world is limited, then our work will be limited. MEWShop: Why did you switch from shooting scripted films to non-scripted? TH: I did love shooting fiction and it was a wonderful training in the craft. It’s important for me to connect to the script but many scripts did not connect with me. Some scripts were interesting and challenging, with a very good director and crew, but that was a small minority of the number of jobs I worked on. The rest were just day-to-day design problems - It just didn’t suit my personality. I’m much more interested in the world around me, and in people. I don’t think documentaries are superior to feature films but for me personally, it was the right choice to go back to making documentaries. They just suited me and the way my mind works.

MEWShop: What skills do you look for in your crew? TH: The first thing I look for in a crew member is seriousness, and attention. You have to be able to keep focused. It’s just essential. You also have to be serious

MEWShop: What are some of the qualities in yourself, and in others, that make one suitable to be a documentary cinematographer? n

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about learning, and about doing the best possible job. Those are not things that come easily to a lot of people. But they are central to the kind of work we do – because, you can’t hide in a big department in a documentary. We work with very small crews, at very close quarters. If you’re letting your mind wander, or texting when you should be concentrating, it becomes very clear, very quickly. The second thing is that in this industry part of your job is to keep up to date with everything that’s going on – what is new and to keep abreast of all the technical changes that are happening.

ing the ability to reframe shots from what you originally had envisioned when you were shooting in the moment. Now, all of that is really elementary in terms of what’s going to happen, but CGI seems like it is going to become, really, the dominant form of filmmaking. I believe it will become that for at least a certain level of budgets. It may involve using actors made of data. I have no idea what cinematography is going to look like the moment they can change the key light from one side to the other, or all the other things that one can do digitally. Right now, all that often looks a bit phony and often doesn’t work very well. It is especially much better in a documentary to have things actually look real. Goodness knows what’s going to come down the pike. I know that people are working very hard to give as much control as possible to production. The moment we stop being a central part of what we produce as documentarians, we’re just factory labor. Of course, we live in an economic system right now which is directed at making people have as little control over what they do as possible. So, I am very happy that it is not my generation to end up being dependent upon what happens in the next ten or 15 years.

MEWShop: Where do you see the production industry evolving over the next five years? TH: Oh, my goodness. I have no idea. That level of prognostication, I just can’t do. I do know that I’m really, really happy that I’m not starting out in the industry now. I came up in a time when if you shot film, you were a magician, and nobody knew what was going on between you and the celluloid that was going through the camera. They depended on you to tell them what it was going to look like and to make it right. That was a very special place to be in. It made for a certain amount of anxiety, but it was much better than everybody having an idea about what things should look like and even, now with digital cinema, hav-

MEWShop: What project are you working on now? TH: I’m doing a couple of films that have a lot to do with dance, which is a sub-specialty of mine throughout my career. I’m finishing up shooting a film that we’ve been shooting all over the world about dance in praise of God. It’s a wonderful project. I’m working on two films that I’m directing. Another project that involves dance, which is a film about Bill T. Jones who is one of America’s greatest living choreographers and an amazing person. It’s a film about the challenge of art in the face of catastrophe. The other film is about the struggle to integrate New York City’s public school system. n

DP Tom Hurwitz, ASC on Cradle of Champions

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ZEISS CINE LENSES ZEISS LENS METADATA TECHNOLOGY EMPOWERS DPs TO FOCUS ON THEIR ART

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SETTING THE LOOK The production team used a RED DSMC2 Monstro outfitted with ZEISS Supreme Prime lenses. After seeing the lookbook, Quyen Tran was certain that shooting in large format would lend itself to the ominous narrative. In Stucco, Janina Gavankar’s character battles with agoraphobia, so for Quyen “it was important to show the relationship of the protagonist to the house that is trying to engulf her.” Using wider lenses for select

Photo by Cleigh Reed

Photo by Gustavo Austidillo

up with filmmakers Janina Gavankar (Actor, Co-Director), Russo Schelling (Co-Director), and Cinematographer Quyen Tran to create Stucco. Quyen, who was recently named one of “Variety’s 10 Cinematographers to Watch,” lensed this horror short film, which is reminiscent of slow burn thrillers from the seventies, but uses innovative technology to transport the story to modern day. Producing partners RED Digital Cinema and EFILM round out the team

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close-ups of Janina and the framing possibilities of a larger format allows viewers to really experience the tension of her supernatural surroundings. Leveraging ZEISS eXtended Data (XD) technology on-set enabled Quyen with more time and creative freedom for lighting and collaboration with the actors and directing team. “With the RED Monstro and the data from the Supreme Primes, we were able to get all the lens data onto the negative, which was really exciting,” said Quyen, “Which means that on set, we have more time to light and to focus on other things.” Based on Cooke’s /i technology which records key lens data such as focus length, T-stop, and depth-of-field, XD technology provides two additional columns of frame-accurate information: shading and distortion, an ideal tool for VFX intensive workflows.

lens metadata tool from ZEISS. We just plugged it into our process line, it just happened automatically in the background. Basically, the robot did it for us.” MAXIMIZE YOUR POST SPEND “Having this lens data is pretty phenomenal,” says Caleb, “We get everything from the lens.” ZEISS’ robust plugin for Nuke allowed the artists to reapply lens vignetting and shading characteristics on any node with guaranteed accuracy, and to the foreground or greenscreen background separately – saving time and money. “Many times I’ve spent many hours trying to undistort lots of shots. It can be time consuming and you’re never really sure that it’s actually working until you finish the project,” said Gene, “so it was nice to have these plugins that just made it easy.” Joachim Zell, who is credited as the film’s Imaging Scientist played an integral part in developing a custom cutting-edge workflow using the ZEISS XD technology. “I don’t want to necessarily make money in post production by creating lens grids by hand, it doesn’t have to be like that. We want to work on the creativity and want to help a movie look more beautiful rather than working on the technical basics.” Experience the ease of using ZEISS eXtended Data plug ins and metadata capability on your next shoot. Contact the team at the ZEISS Cine Lens Demo Center (cineshowroomla@zeiss.com) and schedule your workflow demo to meet the needs of your upcoming project. n

A SEAMLESS PIPELINE RED’s latest firmware update allows camera encoding of the lens metadata directly into the video footage, eliminating the need for an external box. Quyen’s DIT, Michael Romano, used Pomfort Silverstack on-set to extract ZEISS eXtended Data out of the R3D files then generated a ZEISS Lens Correction File (.ZLCF), a text file containing all lens data for every frame needed for VFX. Using ZEISS’ injection software, the video footage and .ZLCF were inserted into an open EXR file sequence for VFX Artists Gene Warren III and Caleb Knueven to begin their work on the short film. The lens metadata for shading and distortion was able to ride along in the EXR file. “It’s actually on a frame by frame basis,” said Imaging Scientist Joachim Zell, speaking of the freeware, open source eXtended Data plug in from ZEISS. “It was the first time we used this n

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DP CLAUDIA RASCHKE TALKS SHOOTINGTHE RBG DOCUMENTARY At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a lengthy legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But the unique personal journey of her rise to the nation’s highest court has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans – until now. RBG explores Ginsburg’s life and career. DP Claudia Raschke answers a few questions about working on the film.

and stood my ground insisting to only be hired for my artistry and not because I had a camera package. A female DP in the feature film industry was a rare sight and often considered too weak to carry the camera, or without the stamina to last a long day, and too emotional to handle the pressure on set, or too soft-spoken to call the shots. I was fighting the lack of confidence in women throughout history, but I kept following my passion. I have now worked in the film industry for 30 years, shooting feature films with complex lighting setups and feature documentaries with extensive cinema vérité challenges. It has been a great joy to

PRODUCTIONHUB (PH): How’d you get involved with the RBG documentary? CLAUDIA RASCHKE (CR): When I started out as a DP in the biz in 1988 everyone advised me to buy my own camera gear or I would not get hired as a female DP. I refused to buy into it

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DP Claudia Raschke shooting the film RBG

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flipstock Enough 4k and HD videos to make your head spin. Visit shutterstock.com/footage

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opportunities. Therefore, I like to spend as much time as possible on location scouts, imagining the possibilities, talking it through with my directors. PH: Can you talk about some of the shooting techniques you used? CR: Every interview had to capture

the character’s nature and visually connect them with the location they were in. I chose the camera angles for each location with great care, imagining broad strokes of naturally looking soft light in conjunctions with bright dashes and highlights to let the eye settle in on each interview subject recounting an anecdote about RBG. Shooting with two cameras meant to light for two angles and carefully craft the images to work together in harmony. Therefore, all interview setups have a slight movement to them. Having the camera angle breathe with motion bridged intercuts and represented the flow and wandering of their thoughts.

Justice Ginsburg and Jimmy Carter, c.1980. Photo, in RBG, courtesy of Magnolia Pictures/ CNN Films.

witness that more women are pushing the doors open to produce and direct films. These women are tough, super focused and know what they want. The RBG directing and producing team, Julie Cohen and Betsy West, were already convinced about my expertise in cinematography but also wanted to create an opportunity to have an all-women team to represent the strength of leadership to echo RBG’s equal rights fight throughout her life. The minute they offered me the job, I was on board knowing that we would make an excellent team.

Cinéma Vérité scenes with RBG had to be as unobtrusive as possible to ensure authenticity. It was our goal to show her nature and magnificence. For this, I worked with mostly natural lights in vérité situations and a set of Canon’s zoom lenses. As a Vérité shooter, one needs to quickly evaluate a location’s sweet spots and downfalls for lighting and grasp the scope of the situation to capture the most cinematic storytelling coverage. As a former dancer, I rely on my internal sense of choreography to film a scene. Each character has a unique movement which correlates to what role they play at a given moment. With RBG I had to learn to move around without disrupting her focus or limit her thinking space. Timing was everything.

PH: What was your favorite part of the project? CR: Shooting documentaries is most inspirational to me because no two stories are alike. Each experience gives rare access to someone’s inner sanctuary. Each experience as a documentarian causes a shift in the paradigm and each new day of shooting a documentary is an unexpected treasure that will ultimately open one’s mind to new possibilities. For me, that is pure gold. It’s my true inspiration that I hold on to. Mostly my mind is drawn to look at lighting, contrast ratios and framing for each situation I encounter, no matter if I’m waiting somewhere, sitting in a subway or walking down a street, I’ll catch a glimpse of perfect alignment and hold on as long as the story allows for it. You can’t plan for it, but you have to be alert, to see these n

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PH: How did you have to work with lighting for this doc? n

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view background canvas to be lighted. Setting up the key light is always done in conjunction with the naturally occurring window or door to another room in the background of my frame. Then I determine my contrast ratio. With the key light in place, I set up wrap around fill, a possible edge light, maybe some negative fill, followed by multiple highlights that connect the space to the character. Once lights are roughed in, I review quality and intensity of lights, as well as shadow angles and altitude of lights. Finally, check zone levels for both cameras to match, set T-stop and focus, review if highlights let the eye flow through the frame resting on the subject in its carved-out character-driven space. It might sound like I have lots of tools to play with, but my

RBG speaks with students from the film RBG. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures/ CNN Films.

CR: First of all, location scouts are

essential, either in person or via photos. They can make or break your cinematic ideas. Keep in mind that documentaries for often can’t spend any money on renting lights. Therefore, I spend time on pre-scouts. I need to know compass orientation for windows, power limits, time of day set for the interview, and obstacles like large unmovable items that will limit my lighting space.

Before I set up lighting, I build my camera to view different angles considering shifting influence of natural light from windows and any other wild cards that could make the window source a possible problem (cars zipping by throwing flashes of reflective lights from the sun, or bright sun lighted green lawn which reflects too much green color through the window). Both cameras get set up once I have pinpointed two promising angles to work with including the relative field of n

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lighting kit consists of a small documentary lighting package. Lighting is totally dependent on the location and its glory. That’s why I pre-scout everything. n Article first published on ProductionHUB on May 10, 2018.

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PANELISTS AT SIGHT, SOUND & STORY | THE ART OF CINEMATOGRAPHY n

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Jim Kamp is an award-winning non-fiction visual storyteller and producer whose work has been seen in leading editorial and broadcast venues. He is currently managing director of content for www.sugaredstudios. Jim also hosts and produces the video podcast www.zeissfullexposure.com showcasing the work and processes of filmmakers and photographers.

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ducer Nancy Meyers when she directed The Parent Trap, and continued working with her on What Women Want and The Holiday. Cundey received an Emmy award for his work on The Face, an artful two- hour PBS documentary on the history and role of art in the Christian Religion for WNET-TV. In addition, he has directed occasional narrative films and numerous commercials. In 2014 Cundey received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers. He often teaches masterclasses around the world, having been to France, Mexico, Malaysia, Korea, South America, and Italy, among other places.

Cinematographer Dean Cundey, ASC, earned an Oscar nomination as well as a BAFTA nomination for his work with Robert Zemeckis on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Additional collaborations with Zemeckis include Romancing the Stone, all three Back to the Future features and Death Becomes Her. He received Outstanding Achievement Award nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) for Hook and Apollo 13, the latter also receiving a BAFTA nomination. He grew up in Alhambra on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Interested in film since his teenage years he studied architecture and cinema at the University of California, but his interest shifted from production design to cinematography when he took a class taught by the legendary James Wong Howe, ASC. After graduation, Cundey worked in low budget films in various jobs, including as a lighting technician, a makeup artist, and a special effects technician. Initially, he worked as a Director of Photography on action and horror genre films with minuscule budgets. Cundey first attracted attention in 1978, when he and John Carpenter collaborated on the production of Halloween. Their subsequent collaborations included The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China. His body of work spans a great variety of genres and includes the films Crazy Kind of Love, Walking With the Enemy, Freedom, The Girl in the Photographs, Diablo, Slamma Jamma, Jurassic Park, The Flintstones, Loony Toons: Back in Action, Garfield I & II, Whisper, and Jack and Jill. Cundey first collaborated with pro-

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Tom Hurwitz, ASC is one of America’s most honored documentary cinematographers. Winner of two Emmy Awards, the Sundance and Jerusalem Film Festival Awards for Best Cinematography, Hurwitz has photographed films that have won 4 academy awards and several more nominations (most recently for Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, Dancemaker and Killing in the Name). His television programs have won literally dozens of awards, Emmy, Dupont, Peabody, Directors Guild and film festival awards for Best Documentary, over the last 25 years — most recently were Emmy Awards for Best Documentary Specials for the PBS show Jerome Robbins and the PBS series Franklin, on which Hurwitz directed the photography. Other award-winning films and programs that he has photographed include: Valentino: The Last Emperor, Harlan County U.S.A., Wild Man Blues, My Generation, Down and Out in America, The Turandot Project, Liberty, Dolley, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, for PBS; and I Have a Dream, for ABC; and Killing in the Name, and Questioning Faith for HBO. In addition, films that he has directed have won the Cine Golden Eagle (for Bombs will Make the Rainbow Break) and have been shown in festivals around the world. He is also a founding member of the faculty of The MFA Program in the Social Documentary, at New n

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York’s School of Visual Arts, and is a member of the Kamera Kollektiv NYC.

“Capturing the big and the small moments of the amazing world we live in feeds my passion for the art of cinematography. Equally important is that I bear witness to and document the unique stories that unfold before my eyes in a way that dismantles barriers, opens doors, and reveals the truth. I believe that filming intuitively, honestly and without inhibition is a journey that requires a compassionate heart and the ability to see and hear what lies beneath the surface.” Award-winning cinematographer Claudia Raschke is best known for her ability to bring the rich tones of the motion picture medium to a diverse spectrum of films, from highly stylized commercial endeavors to feature documentaries to lower-budget works of art. Among her many notable award-winning films are Particle Fever, Oscar-nominated God is the Bigger Elvis, Peabody Award-winning Black Magic, Oscar short-listed Mad Hot Ballroom, Atomic Homefront, The Freedom to Marry, A Sea Change, Oscar-nominated My Architect (add’l DP), Oscar-nominated Small Wonder (add’l DP), Oscar-nominated Sister Rose’s Passion (add’l DP) as well as indie features like Kiss Me Guido, The Last Good Time, No Way Home. Her most recent six-part documentary series for National Geographic will air Fall 2019 and her feature documentary RBG was nominated for an Oscar and has been screening in theaters around the world.

David Leitner is a director, producer, and Emmy-nominated DP (Chuck Close: Portrait in Progress), with over eighty credits in feature-length dramas and documentaries, including eight Sundance Film Festival premieres. These include his own Vienna is Different: 50 Years After the Anchluss, Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business, Sandi Dubowski’s Trembling Before G-d, the Oscar-nominated documentary For All Mankind, for which he spent nine months at NASA’s Johnson Space Center restoring original 16mm lunar footage, and Memories of Overdevelopment, a Cuban follow-up to 1968’s film classic, Memories of Underdevelopment. For over 25 years, as DP, he has photographed hour-long documentaries on iconic writers, artists, and architects for New York’s Checkerboard Film Foundation. Subjects include Brancusi, Picasso, James Salter, Joel Shapiro, Sir John Soane, Ellsworth Kelly, Milton Glaser, Daniel Libeskind, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Eisenman, Roy Lichtenstein, Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt. Leitner is also an author, columnist, motion picture technologist and industry consultant. From 1977-1985 he was Director of New Technology at DuArt Film & Video in New York, where he created innovations in optical printing, cine lens testing, film-to-tape transfer, and played a key role introducing Super 16 to the U.S. He is a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Emmy award-winning cinematographer Frank Prinzi, ASC, has been an active member of the New York film-making community for years. Frank’s eclectic credits range from feature films to television movies, from episodic to documentaries, commercials and short films. Some of his most notable work includes Living in Oblivion, The Best Man, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Frank also shot over 44 episodes of the hit show Northern Exposure, for which he was nominated for an Emmy twice, winning once. His other television work includes five seasons of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Life on Mars and The Blacklist. He has been a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, ASC since 2001. n

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Sean Weiner is a NY-based producer, filmmaker, and the director of the Creative Culture program at the Jacob Burns Film Center. He is a professor of film at Purchase College, a creative in the Private Cabin Collective, and a director for the Upright Citizens Brigade. His producing credits include Death Metal Grandma (NY Times Op-Docs, SXSW, Hot Docs), Nevada (Sundance, Vimeo Staff Pick, Oscar-Qualified), and Yves & Variation (BAMcinemaFest, Hamptons International Film Festival). These shorts were produced within the Creative Culture program which connects emerging filmmakers to creative careers through fellowship and residency opportunities. n n

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SIGHT, SOUND & STORY


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