The No Film School Podcast

The docu-fiction hybrid genre isn't necessarily a new thing. In fact, there are some festivals that are entirely devoted to those films that blur the line between what is real and what is written. It's the liberties in which the filmmakers choose to blur the lines where the real magic shines through.    Kristoffer Borgli, director of the SXSW standout DRIB and guest on today's episode of The No Fi...

NFS Writer Oakley Anderson-Moore talks with the talented artists behind Felix & Paul studios, one of the leading VR production companies in the film world. The cinematic quality that is a hallmark of their projects is very uncommon in these rudimentary days of VR. Virtual reality has been excelling in the realm of documentary because exhibiting an immersive experience of a location goes almost han...

When attending film festivals, there is no more exciting prospect than catching a screening of a midnights shorts section. These are generally made up of the strangest, and in many ways, the most innovative projects accepted. They are playgrounds for exploration, coming from filmmakers who are absolutely fearless in exploding the themes and neurosis of their own daily lives. And SXSW selects the b...

In this week's episode, co-hosts Jon Fusco and Emily Buder discuss what's causing major panic in the studio world, why (and how) you should use Facebook to promote your movies, and why it may finally be time to concede to HDR. We also hear from Richard Kelly, writer/director of 'Donnie Darko,' about how his cult classic scared off distributors at Sundance and then flopped at the box office, and Ch...

Before "Ramblin Freak'," Tacodeli employee Parker Smith had made only one movie featuring sound. The three three-time film school dropout was stuck between a rock and a hard place after realizing his internship at The Austin Film Society was little more than the theater job he had left in Boulder, Colorado to make a name for himself in Texas. Now, the task of making your first feature is a dauntin...

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Emily Buder dissect Netflix’s balancing act between the indie and studio worlds, and how indie theater guru Tim League threw down the gauntlet against the streaming giant. We also cover why getting your film graded F could be a good thing, according to IMDB, and a sad goodbye to indie film producer Robin O’Hara...

This week, we’re kicking off our SXSW coverage on a particularly high note. That’s because this interview features arguably the best voice we’ve ever had on the podcast in Nick Offerman, and also one of the best laughs we’ve ever had on the show in actress Trieste Kelly Dunn. They are joined by acclaimed indie director Bob Byington to discuss the creation of Infinity Baby, a film that premiered to...

Co-hosts Jon Fusco, Emily Buder, Oakley Anderson-Moore and Liz Nord have been running all over downtown Austin, Texas for the past week to bring you insights from America's coolest film event, the SXSW Film Festival and conference. In this episode, we forego our regular show format to share in-depth festival coverage, from keynotes with the likes of Rogue One director Gareth Edwards and legendary...

In today's episode of The New Film School Podcast, writer Oakley Anderson Moore talks with two DPs. Her guests are Andrew Ackerman, who shot the brilliant, colorful underwater documentary "Chasing Coral," and Ante Cheng who DPed the nuanced black and white narrative Gook, set during the 1992 LA riots. While the style of productions are practically polar opposites of each other, from underwater tim...

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Emily Buder give the secret to shots that smoothly pan from dark to light and introduce a filmmaker whose work has started a global conversation. We celebrate Women’s History Month with Ava DuVernay’s Twitter takeover. We also get advice from four-time Sundance director Tiffany Shlain. Later, we preview this wee...

In this episode of the No Film School podcast, Emily Buder sits down with David Ethan Shapiro, CEO of Starlight Studios, and Jacob Schulsinger, editor ("Force Majeure," "Antichrist"), to discuss their Sundance premiere, "Come Swim," Kristen Stewart's experimental short film. We talk the merits of film school and why it's important to recreate that creative atmosphere in your career, the secret to...

In the 50th episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco and Emily Buder share our final conversation with Bill Paxton and advice on getting your actors to tear up on camera. We discuss what the Academy Awards can teach us about producing, along with this year’s indie-oriented results from both the Oscars and the Film Independent Spirit Awards, and how Netflix is alrea...

In a breakthrough year for virtual reality, No Film School’s Liz Nord sits down with four Sundance filmmakers who learned to get past convention and embrace creating in VR. Each of their fascinating projects are cinematic, but they're certainly not cinema—which didn’t stop them from premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Guests Lily Baldwin of 'Through You', Rose Troche of 'If Not Love'...

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Emily Buder weigh in on how "independent film" should be defined, and share results of our big shootout between the Alexa Mini and Epic-W Helium. We also discuss how the inaugural American Independent Film Awards are helping to redefine awards season, how indie cinemas are banding together nationwide for a cause...

Welcome to the world of modern filmmaking—a place where anyone can make anything at any time and put it online pretty much anywhere. Whether or not people actually watch it? Well, that's a different question. With the democratization of film comes the democratization of exhibitors, and in today's new media landscape, the number of platforms through which a filmmaker can show their work can be over...

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco and Emily Buder reveal which cameras shooters are looking to buy this year, and help you avoid on-set arrests. They discuss the dominance of Panasonic's GH5 in indie filmmaker buzz, while ARRI's Alexa rules over the Academy's Sci-Tech Awards and film sets everywhere. The show covers the potential neutering of net neu...

For all intents and purposes, the Sundance Film Festival is the Holy Grail for many short filmmakers around the world. Need proof? Just take a look at the number of entries to this year's competition: 9,000. It would take an army to sift through that much content. Or at least a highly dedicated and skilled team of programmers. Even with that sort of team in place, it seems like there has to be som...

No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Emily Buder discuss this year’s crop of filmmaker-helmed Super Bowl spots, and debate whether or not participating in America’s biggest day of ad spending helps aspiring directors. Plus, it’s a bumper week for new lenses, awards season marches on, and we say goodbye to tripod innovator Lino Manfrotto. In Ask No Film School, Charles Haine gives tips...

Yiddish is a language developed among the Jewish population of Central Europe in the 9th century as a mix of their Biblical Hebrew, and the German and other modern languages of the day. Before World War II, it was spoken by upwards of 13 million people. Today, in the US, it is estimated to only be spoken by less than 200,000. The scarcity of spoken Yiddish today makes it an especially unusual choi...

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Emily Buder discuss the Netflix acquisition of Oscar-worthy Mudbound, the highly charged SAG Awards, how the first two weeks of Trump’s term are shaking up the film industry, and which cameras and lenses were most popular among Sundance cinematographers this year. In Ask No Film School, DP Shane King clues us in...

This week, No Film School producer Jon Fusco sits down with Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion, co-directors of Bushwick, a film that premiered in Sundance’s Midnight Section. The premise for a Neo-Civil War film in America may have seemed insane a decade ago when Millot and Murnion first came up with it; now, it doesn’t seem so far-fetched. Brittany Snow plays Lucy, a student on her way home to Bus...

This episode of Indie Film Weekly brings reports from the ground on the movies, the acquisitions, and the suspected Russian hacking of independent cinema's beating heart. Co-hosts Jon Fusco, Emily Buder, Oakley Anderson-Moore Liz Nord have been hitting the snowy sidewalks of Park City, Utah, for the past week, to bring you all the most fascinating stories from America's preeminent independent film...

Producer Jon Fusco kicks off The No Film School Podcast's Sundance coverage with an incredibly important (and timely) discussion on how documentary film can be utilized as a powerful call to action. "Whose Streets?" picks up moments after the murder of unarmed black teen Michael Brown at the hands of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson. Through a harrowing collage of guerrilla-style filmmaking a...

In this episode of Indie Film Weekly, we preview the best that Sundance 2017 has to offer, and reveal why RED's Helium 8K is even better than we thought. No Film School co-hosts Liz Nord, Jon Fusco, and Emily Buder discuss the biggest festival buzz, and the films and filmmakers we're most excited to cover as we head to Park City, Utah, to bring you news and interviews from the Sundance Film Festiv...

In the emerging field of virtual reality filmmaking, there are still lots of basic questions about how best to tell a story in VR, which projects even make a worthwhile story in 360, and what conventions from traditional filmmaking that we need to throw right out the window to help pave the way for this medium. On this episode, I speak with some smart people who have been grappling with these ques...