The ITVS Indie Roundup

A curated list of indie news and recommendations from ITVS’s Rebecca Huval. 

It’s #FollowFriday! Here are the TV and film aficionados who made Time magazine’s 140 Twitter feeds to follow of 2013. Filmmakers of all stripes are encouraged to apply to San Francisco Film Society’s six-month and year-long FilmHouse residencies. Though Bay Area dwellers are given priority, anyone older than 18 with a video budget less than $3 million is eligible! Early deadline: April 22. 

The latest installment in MIT Open Documentary Lab’s “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code?” series is an interview with Hugues Sweeney of National Film Board of Canada. He encourages doc makers to team up with techies: “The time is for collaboration—get contaminated. What we call a ‘webdoc’ today is not about putting a doc online but using the web for all its storytelling capacities—its grammar.” 

Occasionally, indie filmmakers feel isolated. Abstract painter Agnes Martin has inspirational words for the solitary artist: “The best things in life happen to you when you’re alone.” Kartemquin just added some ancient gear to its “equipment graveyard”: The Auricon Sound-On-Film Recording Amplifier. “In spite of being obsolete, obscure, and something that Kartemquin never even used, it taught us about one more way filmmakers could record sound on film and fleshed out a little more of Camera #1's history,” Kartemquin writes. Relatedly, Kartemquin produced a video ode to its early days of cinema verite, and the penny-pinching camera that made it possible: the custom-made 16mm crystal-sync General Camera No. II.