The Striking Stillness of 'The Revenant': A Video Essay

This breathtaking video essay showcases the best of The Revenant's quiet moments.

Life in the West in the 1800s was very quiet. Punctuated only by occasional warfare between Native Americans and settlers preaching Manifest Destiny, day-to-day living paralleled the rhythms of nature, with its streaming brooks, whooshing winds, rustling trees, and open plains.

As any true The Revenant aficionado can tell you, it's these moments of stillness that lend the film its majesty. DP Emmanuel Lubezski won an Oscar for rendering nature's sweeping stillness onscreen (using only natural light, of course), and now Tom Williams has compiled some of the film's most striking moments into a video essay that captures its essence.

Ryuichi Sakamoto's arresting score accompanies the visuals, which bring the haunting stillness of the 1800s Western frontier to life.

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J.J. Abrams, Joss Whedon, Alfonso Cuarón & More Want To Teach You How to Make Movies at Tribeca

Learn from the greats at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

If you were eagerly awaiting an opportunity to be in the same room as some of your favorite directors, the day has come. The 2016 Tribeca Film Festival has curated an eclectic lineup of Q&As with some of the biggest directors in Hollywood, as well as their more independent-minded auteur contemporaries. Panelists include J.J. Abrams, Andrea Arnold, Joss Whedon, Jodie Foster, Baz Luhrmann, Alfonso Cuarón, Tina Fey, Jodie Foster, Francis Ford Coppola, and more.

The best part? Some of the discussions are free. See below for the full lineup, courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival. And buy tickets to individual events here.

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The Lay of The Land: How Denis Villeneuve and Ridley Scott Create Mood With Landscape

If your landscape is just a setting, then you're using your landscape wrong.

In The Martian and Sicario, the landscapes are foreboding characters all their own. These two video essays by Ashley Perry show how Denis Villeneuve and Ridley Scott did it, and it all comes down to the formative setting.

As opposed to a neutral setting, in which the landscape is indifferent to the action or the characters, a formative setting seeks to express the character's psychology. As such, your setting should be working in service of dramatic action rather than just existing simply as the space for the action to unfold.

In Sicario, some of the most tense moments occur when nothing happens at all:

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The Script Reader's Checklist: 60 Things That Will Land Your Screenplay in the Trash

If you ever manage to get your script in front of a script reader, you're kind of lucky, but you're also kind of screwed.

Readers are notoriously known for dismissing scripts, tossing them for having a boring first paragraph, poor formatting, or less. (You really can't blame them — they have to comb through hundreds of those things.) So, how do you better your chances of getting a pass from one of these gatekeepers? Well, maybe knowing how they judge each one would help.

During his time working as a reader for different L.A. production studios, Oscar-nominated screenwriter Terry Rossio compiled a checklist to help him better evaluate scripts, and decided to share it on his blog. They definitely will help you know whether or not your script is headed toward the trash. Check it out below:

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How Luis Buuel Used Cinematic Interruptions to Capture Life's Absurdity on Film

If the director youre about to learn about seems enigmatic or incongruous, life is that way too.

The late surrealist director Luis Buuel loved to shake things up with his unique brand of cinema, especially in regards to class, religion, and conformity. To celebrate the day the great auteur came into this crazy, crazy world 116 years ago, we've decided to share a series of video essays from the Institute of Contemporary Arts (edited by Cristina lvarez Lpez) that explore his cinematic and narrative techniques. Check them out below:

These essays reveal several interesting concepts about Buuel's approach to filmmaking, mostly surrounding the dance he does between realism and surrealism, and though we could spend the rest of eternity unpacking them, let's focus on one in particular that is especially intriguing: the director's use of "interruptions" as a cinematic tool.

"Luring us into the deceptive charms of narrative as well as those of his character, Buuel undermines the stability of both attractions by turning interruption into the basis of his art." --Jonathan Rosenbaum (Sight and Sound)

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Left or Right? Why a Character's Lateral Movement On-Screen Matters in Film

If there's only one tenet of filmmaking you learn today, let it be that everything, everything in your film matters -- including the direction your characters are moving on-screen.

That's right. It matters whether your actors are moving right or left across the screen. Or whether your character appears on the right or left side of the screen. Or whether they are right-handed or left-handed. Why? Because -- science -- and psychology.

In the very educational video below, you'll get to learn about how different directions of character movements affect audiences the way they do, as well as why it happens.

I love this video because it touches on some very important concepts in aesthetics (basically the dictionary of mise en scene), namely spacial properties of objects, size, and movement. How does the size, movement, and placement of an object communicate to a viewer? What do they communicate?

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'Groundhog Day': How a Script Everybody Loved but Nobody Would Produce Became a Comedy Classic

It's Groundhog Day. Again.

When screenwriter Danny Rubin sent out his original draft of Groundhog Day to the studios, he knew he hadn't written a conventional studio film. In fact, he hadn't even written a romantic comedy. "Everybody called me in for a meeting," said Rubin, "and nobody wanted to produce it. What they said to me was, 'I loved Groundhog Day. Of course, we can never make it.'"

After a lot of development and collaboration with Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day became the screenplay that ranks #3 on the Writers Guild of America's 101 funniest screenplays ever written.

Danny Rubin walked through his journey with the story, screenplay and film of Groundhog Day at the 2014 Austin Film Festival. Thanks to AFF's On Story, you can listen to Rubin break down his script and film. If you don't have time to watch now, after the video, I've highlighted some key points from Rubin's presentation.

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