The No Film School Podcast

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Charles Haine discuss discuss what the FCC's recent actions on Net Neutrality and the 600mhz band mean for filmmakers, along with the most bizarre and heartbreaking turns in the avalanche of sexual misconduct stories and how they're affecting productions everywhere. In gear news, we reveal some of the best Black Friday discounts for filmmakers. Charles also answers an Ask No Film School question about color grading for different outputs. As always, we also bring you the latest gear news, upcoming grant and festival deadlines, new indie film releases, weekly words of industry wisdom, and other notable things you might have missed while you were busy making films. You can see all the links from this show in this week’s podcast post at nofilmschool.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No Film School’s Liz Nord is joined by three directors who have taken on the challenge of telling character-based stories where their films center around the personal journeys of one or a small handful of subjects. Their characters couldn’t be more different—one is the tough guy frontman of a New York hardcore band, one is the first female Sharia Law judge in Palestine, and one is a woman who has started a traveling circus of cats—but the lessons the filmmakers learned and advice they share is surprisingly similar and applies to any filmmaker trying to tell a good story. Erika Cohn ('The Judge'), Ian McFarland ('Godfathers of Hardcore'), and Jacob Feiring ('Samantha’s Amazing Acrocats'), discuss how they pulled off their impressive films, and the bravery it takes to embark on such a project both behind and in front of the camera. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord and Jon Fusco discuss Drip, Kickstarter's bold new move for filmmakers, plus a field report from DOC NYC that reveals why it's become the American documentary festival to pay attention to. We also cover the first Oscars handed out this year, marvel at Agnes Varda's infinite wisdom, and say farewell to Oscar-winning filmmaker Debra Chasnoff, who died last week. Charles Haine joins us for gear news, including the new Lumix G9 from Panasonic, and answers an Ask No Film School question about the best way to up-res VHS footage. As always, we also bring you the latest gear news, upcoming grant and festival deadlines, new indie film releases, weekly words of industry wisdom, and other notable things you might have missed while you were busy making films. You can see all the links from this show in this week’s podcast post at nofilmschool.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We all know that getting your first film made is hard. With the added pressure of expectation, getting a second made can be even harder. And then there are the Julie Cohens of the world. Cohen is a documentary filmmaker who has completed and distributed 8 feature docs and 5 shorts in the past ten years, and won three Emmys along the way. And this is after a prolific career as a producer at NBC, where she produced more than 20 hour-long and two-hour programs for Dateline. Cohen’s latest, available on iTunes now just in time for Veteran’s Day, is called AMERICAN VETERAN. It tells the story of Army Sergeant Nick Mendes, who was paralyzed from the neck down by a massive improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2011, when he was 21. Liz Nord sits down with Cohen to discuss tips on speeding up production, how to reach niche audiences to market your work, and steps for sustaining your career in this unpredictable business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens when the community you’re filming doesn’t want you there? That is exactly the dilemma that faced celebrated documentarians Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady when they embarked on their latest project, the Netflix Original film 'One of Us'. The directing duo returns to the territory that garnered them an Oscar nomination in 2007 for 'Jesus Camp': extreme religious sects in America. In 'One of Us', we travel far from the rural Evangelical Christian summer camps of Jesus Camp to a very different world: the insular Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. The film focuses on three young people attempting to leave the community despite threats of retaliation. They are at different stages of separation but each is struggling to join mainstream America after having been raised strictly following daily religious mandates, speaking Yiddish, and with virtually no secular education. Because of sensitivities around their subjects and the community at large, Ewing, Grady and their cinematographers, Jenni Morello and Alex Takats, had to to develop all kinds of tactics and strategies for shooting very inconspicuously. Both the directors and DPs join No Film School's Liz Nord on this episode to discuss how they managed to film and craft such a sympathetic tale from within a notoriously closed community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever been at one of those parties where people talk about movies and Hitchcock comes up, but you’ve never seen any Hitchcock? So then you get all sweaty and start avoiding people’s gaze? It feels like everyone is watching you, the world is slowly closing in and you get so claustrophobic and insane that you feel like you want to scream? Us neither. Funnily enough, the experience of watching Psycho for the first time feels exactly the same way. So now that you know what you’re in for, it’s time to stop making excuses and just watch it. Right now. Or rather, after you’ve listened to this podcast and before you go see Alexandre Phillipe’s illuminating documentary 78/52. This documentary defies the mere convention of looking back at an entire filmmaker’s career and it takes an even deeper focus than just examining one film. Instead, Phillipe focuses on one scene. Psycho’s infamous shower scene, which had 78 camera setups, 52 cuts and took seven days to shoot. In many ways, examining this one scene provides us with more insight on Hitchcock’s filmmaking than if we were to look at his resume as a whole. Jon Fusco sits down with Phillipe to discuss Hitchcock’s legacy, what Psycho has to say about his tendencies as a filmmaker, and plenty more interesting facts that will place you firmly in the realm of Hitchcock expert. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Charles Haine get in the mood for Halloween by sharing some of No Film School's best horror filmmaking tips from the likes of Jeremy Saulnier and Rob Zombie. We discuss a lens so good that it got its own Emmy (plus this year's other Engineering Emmy winners) and why there's an uncertain future for Amazon Studios. We also say a sad goodbye to Oscar-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally. Gear news includes Sony's 42 megapixel beast, the a7R III, and Charles answers Liz's Ask No Film School question about migrating a project from FCP6 to Premiere. As always, we also bring you the latest gear news, upcoming grant and festival deadlines, new indie film releases, weekly words of industry wisdom, and other notable things you might have missed while you were busy making films. You can see all the links from this show in this week’s podcast post at nofilmschool.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ruben Östlund has never been one to shy away from difficult themes. That's not to say that the themes he presents his audiences are controversial or difficult to watch. It's more that they're difficult to fully comprehend. Östlund's ability to translate his thoughts to screen, however, is unrivaled among his contemporaries. "The Square" is certainly one of these pictures. Östlund explores what exactly the concept of 'trust' means in a modern society where paranoia is the dominant human emotion and catastrophe seems to await us around every new corner. The Palmes d' Or winning film centers on Christian, a curator at a renowned modern art museum in Sweden. One day he is robbed in blind daylight and his ensuing decision to track down the thieves sets off a series of events that cause his life to descend into chaos. No Film School's Jon Fusco sat down with Östlund at the New York Film Festival to discuss his mind-bending new feature. They cover everything from how to make a two-and-a-half hour movie breeze by at a lightspeed pace to what Östlund (a teacher himself) feels is the most important part of film school. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Charles Haine predict what the Harvey Weinstein fallout could means for future film sets and discuss some steps being taken by the Academy, the PGA, and other film institutions to combat sexual misconduct in the industry. We also share a ton of news from Netflix, including the company's plans to release 80 original films in 2018. In gear news, we reveal how filmmakers can use Microsoft's new GPU, and Charles answers an Ask No Film School question about renting a 360 stereoscopic camera. As always, we also bring you the latest gear news, upcoming grant and festival deadlines, new indie film releases, weekly words of industry wisdom, and other notable things you might have missed while you were busy making films. You can see all the links from this show in this week’s podcast post at nofilmschool.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steven Spielberg is the highest grossing directors of all time, with over 50 influential titles under his belt. And yet, do we really know Spielberg? After all, he rarely does public appearances or gives in-depth interviews. Perhaps the director was just waiting for the right moment to tell his life’s story and the right person to tell it to. Fortunately, that time has come, and that person is our guest, Susan Lacy. As executive producer of the PBS series American Masters, she produced 250 films exploring the lives of America’s most influential cultural icons. For the new HBO documentary ‘Spielberg', she turned her hand to directing. Lacy interviewed Steven Spielberg for over 30 hours collectively, skillfully pulling out threads from his own life to weave together the film’s thesis: though he’s not known as a “personal filmmaker", there’s a part of Spielberg in every film he makes. In this episode Susan Lacy joins No Film School’s Liz Nord and the film’s editor, Deborah Peretz, to discuss how they managed decades-worth of archival and new interview material, and what they learned from Spielberg and his movies in making this one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices