1 of 2 Daniel Mendoza, right, the director of photography on “Forever Home,” and Sean Oliver prepare equipment on the set of “Forever Home" in September. Many local filmmakers are part-timers who mostly work on projects in their free time, or after they’ve secured financial support.
“Forever Home” is Oliver’s first feature-length narrative film, a haunted-house movie he co-wrote and co-produced with a friend during the pandemic. All the preproduction and filming took place in Arizona, which has become fertile ground for independent productions after years of neglect. In the following decades, productions filmed in the state included “3:10 to Yuma” , parts of “Psycho” and “Planet of the Apes” , and “Night of the Lepus” . The peak came in the 1980s, with such popular films as “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” parts of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Raising Arizona.” “Thelma & Louise” put the Grand Canyon in full frame in 1991, and “Jerry MaGuire” showed us the money in 1996.
A film office’s main role is to help productions by putting them in contact with potential crew and providing information on local amenities, such as specific locations to shoot, hotels to house cast and crew, and restaurants to cater. This also makes the area more attractive for prospective productions.“I inherited a hat and a pen, and not much more,” he said.
In an interview, Oliver, the Mesa-based indie filmmaker, talked about the freedom that comes from being small and “off the map.” Independent filmmakers have greater latitude to make the kind of films they want, such as a Western sci-fi series with vampires, by Michael Flores, which Oliver found among the mostly slice-of-life features in the LA Web Fest two years ago.
“We have so many stories of people meeting up at our festival and then ending up working together making films in the future and starting businesses,” said Jason Carney, the director of the Phoenix Film Festival. “What we do with the festival is try to breed that networking and that creative community.”
A major development that made the production of “Forever Home” possible were local connections he made in the industry — his bosses at Amoroma Productions, Daniel and Kellie Mendoza. They believed in Oliver’s idea enough to come on as producers, and Daniel acted as director of photography, the role in film production that handles everything to do with the camera and achieving the look desired by the director.
Arizona State University’s recently renamed Sidney Poitier New American Film School has been educating students for more than two decades. Although many have landed jobs in the industry, they’ve often had to leave the state to do so.
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