On December 5th, 2018; MEWShop's acclaimed speaker series returned for its fourth year with an evening devoted to the art of cinematography. This event celebrated the craft of visual storytelling from the masters behind the camera - from behind the scenes with some of the industry's best cinematographers in documentary & narrative films; to exploring the process of bringing the look of cinema to the small screen in the age of Peak TV.
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Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Schedule:
3:30pm - Check-in
4:00pm - Opening
4:15pm - 5:30pm - "In The Moment: The Art of Cinematography in Documentary Filmmaking"
Moderator: Hugo Perez (Neither Memory Nor Magic, Lights Camera Uganda)
Panelists: Alan Jacobsen (Strong Island, Finding 52) & Martina Radwan (The Final Year, Inventing Tomorrow)
5:45pm - 6:45pm - "Behind the Lens: A Conversation About the Work and Vision of Cinematographer Bruce Logan, ASC"
Moderator: Snehal Patel (Producer & Director, ZEISS - Sales Manager)
Panelist: Bruce Logan, ASC (Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, Tron, 2001: A Space Odyssey)
7:00pm - 8:30pm - "The New Age of TV: Bringing the Look of Cinema to the Small Screen"
Moderator: David Leitner (Director, Producer, and Cinematographer)
Panelist: Robert McLachlan, ASC, CSC (Game of Thrones, Westworld, Ray Donovan, The Affair)
8:30pm - 10:00pm - Networking Party & Tech Lounge sponsored by
$49 General Admission
2018 Panelists*:
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MASTER STORYTELLERS
TECHNOLOGY PARTNER
SUPPORTING SPONSOR
ORGANIZATION PARTNERS
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Director of photography Alan Jacobsen photographs narrative and documentary projects with an authentic, natural eye and sensitive curiosity.
Jacobsen’s most recent acclaim is for shooting director Yance Ford’s Strong Island, which was nominated for the 2018 Academy Award for Best Documentary and won the 2018 Primetime Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Documentary Filmmaking. Focusing on the violent death of Ford’s brother, Jacobsen was both director of photography and associate producer on the project. The film features long takes and a camera which never pans or tilts.
Strong Island also won the Sundance Special Jury Prize and has received nominations for a raft of other accolades, including Best Documentary Film at both the Berlin International Film Festival and Black Reel Awards.
Jacobsen recently finished shooting Finding 52 for Josh Zeman and Adrian Grenier. The feature-length documentary highlights the search for the world’s loneliest whale and is due for release in 2018. He is also lensing a feature documentary with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama.
His films for two-time Oscar-nominated director Marshall Curry, Racing Dreams and Point and Shoot , both received the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. Racing Dreams documents three young competitors in the World Karting Championship, while Point and Shoot follows an American’s journey to fight in the Libyan Revolution. The Tribeca Film Festival jury described Point and Shoot as, “a film that makes its own rules.”
Jacobsen earned a Best Cinematography Award nomination at Sundance Film Festival for his work on Toe to Toe with director Emily Abt. His other documentary credits include: The Trials of Daryl Hunt, which was nominated for the Sundance Grand Jury, Independent Spirit, International Documentary Association and Emmy awards; HBO’s Emmy-nominated Journalist and the Jihadi; and Election Day, which was broadcast on POV.
Jacobsen is based in New York.
David Leitner is a director, producer, and Emmy-nominated DP (Chuck Close: Portrait in Progress), with over eighty credits in feature-length dramas and documentaries, including eight Sundance Film Festival premieres. These include his own Vienna is Different: 50 Years After the Anchluss, Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business, Sandi Dubowski’s Trembling Before G-d, the Oscar-nominated documentary For All Mankind, for which he spent nine months at NASA’s Johnson Space Center restoring original 16mm lunar footage, and Memories of Overdevelopment, a Cuban follow-up to 1968’s film classic, Memories of Underdevelopment. For over 25 years, as DP, he has photographed hour-long documentaries on iconic writers, artists, and architects for New York’s Checkerboard Film Foundation. Subjects include Brancusi, Picasso, James Salter, Joel Shapiro, Sir John Soane, Ellsworth Kelly, Milton Glaser, Daniel Libeskind, Dorothea Rockburne, Peter Eisenman, Roy Lichtenstein, Eric Fischl, Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, and Sol LeWitt. Leitner is also an author, columnist, motion picture technologist and industry consultant. From 1977-1985 he was Director of New Technology at DuArt Film & Video in New York, where he created innovations in optical printing, cine lens testing, film-to-tape transfer, and played a key role introducing Super 16 to the U.S. He is a Fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Bruce Logan, ASC is a two time Emmy Award-winning writer/director, a director of photography, editor, visual effects supervisor, and colorist. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Director’s Guild of America, and the American Society of Cinematography.
He has worked with such legendary directors as Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Robert Wise, John Frankenheimer, William Friedkin, George Lucas, Jonathan Demme and Joel Schumacher, and Terry Gilliam. He is best known for his work on the seminal science fiction movies of the last half-century.
Born in London, he became a self-taught animator and was hired by Stanley Kubrick to work on 2001: A Space Odyssey gleaning his first screen credit. He came to California in 1968 and worked as a DP and Visual Effects Supervisor on films, including Tron, Star Wars -Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Trek, Airplane, Firefox, The Incredible Shrinking Woman, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Also, Bruce is a Director/DP of award-winning commercials for Pepsi, GE, Visa, and Chevrolet. He has also made music videos for Prince, Madonna, Rod Stewart, Aerosmith, Glenn Frey, Hank Williams, Jr. Bruce’s new film Lost Fare, which he wrote, directed and produced; had a theatrical run in August and was released last month on Amazon Prime and Google play.
Robert McLachlan, ASC, CSC, was born in San Francisco. He became involved with photography and film at an early age thanks to an artistic father. He studied Fine Arts at the University of British Columbia and then Film and Communications at Simon Fraser University. Upon leaving college, he founded OmniFilm Productions in Vancouver, Canada in 1979. Here he produced, directed and photographed many documentaries including numerous award-winning environmental and conservation films for Greenpeace; as well as the BBC and NFB. His other work at this time included 350 TV commercials between 1980 and 1990 before pursuing dramatic cinematography exclusively.
Since then, Robert has moved on with unusual ease between television and theatrical films of all sizes. In the process, winning many awards and amassing hundreds of credits including close to 50 Theatrical and television movies; as well as over 550 episodes of Television that include MacGyver in the late ’80s and the groundbreaking, Millennium in the mid90’s. Recently he shot what is regarded as the most famous episode of TV ever - best known as “The Red Wedding”, in addition to the biggest episode of TV ever made, "The Spoils of War." Both of these episodes are from the international phenomenon, Game of Thrones. His other TV credits include Westworld for HBO and Showtime’s critically acclaimed, Ray Donovan. Along the way, he has returned to wearing both Director and cinematographer hats on the movies The Golden Compass and Dragonball Evolution on their second units and more recently he has directed episodes of Ray Donovan.t
This year he was nominated for his 5th American Society of Cinematographer’s award since 1998 (three times for his work on the television series Millennium, for the television film High Noon and again this year for Game of Thrones.) He was also nominated for two Emmys for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series on Game of Thrones for the episodes "Dance of the Dragons," and "Myhsa"; as well he has won ten Canadian Society of Cinematographer’s Awards in Documentary, Theatrical and Television Drama categories and the CSC/Kodak New Century award for Contribution to the Art of Canadian Cinematography in 2006.
Robert belongs to both US and Canadian camera unions and also holds DGA and DGC cards. He has been a member of the CSC since 1985 and was honored with membership in the hallowed ASC in 2002. The company he founded in Vancouver now employs over 36 people in addition to production crews and is one of the largest in Western Canada. He is currently acting as supervising cinematographer, producer, and episode director on Ray Donovan season 6 in New York City.
Snehal Patel is a film and television professional with over two decades of experience creating content and adapting new technology. He started the first Canon Bootcamp in Los Angeles during the Canon 5D DSLR craze and has over twenty years of experience in cinema. Snehal has lived and worked in Chicago, Mumbai and Los Angeles as a freelance Producer & Director. He was a camera technical salesperson at ARRI, and currently works as the Sales Manager for Cine at ZEISS. He represents the Americas for ZEISS and is proud to call Hollywood his home.
Hugo Perez is a filmmaker and writer whose work often focuses on his Cuban heritage. Perez is Producer and Director of the feature documentary Neither Memory Nor Magic narrated by Patricia Clarkson and Viggo Mortensen, as well as Summer Sun Winter Moon that had a national PBS broadcast. Perez recently served as Executive Producer of Rodrigo Reyes feature documentary Purgatorio that was broadcast on the PBS series America ReFramed, and David Felix Sutcliffe’s documentary Adama that aired on PBS World. Perez’ film Seed was part of ITVS/PBS groundbreaking original online science fiction series FutureStates. He is the recipient of the Estela Award for Documentary Filmmaking presented by NALIP as well as the Rockefeller Foundation/Tribeca Film Institute Emerging Artist Fellowship. Perez has studied storytelling with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, collaborated with Pulitzer prize-winning novelist William Kennedy, and served as a guest artist for acclaimed theater director and artist Robert Wilson.
He is currently working on Lights Camera Uganda a documentary chronicling 2 years in the life of Wakaliwood.
Martina Radwan, a native German, based in NYC for over twenty years, has been the cinematographer for award-winning documentaries and features for over a decade.
Her most recently award-winning documentaries include Inventing Tomorrow, The Final Year, The Family I Had, The Eagle Huntress, The Promised Band, and Chicken People. The 2012 Academy winner for Best Documentary Short and 2013 Emmy winner for Best Documentary Saving Face by Daniel Junge and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, earned her a 2013 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Cinematography: Documentary and Long Form. She also shot the Missing People, Through A Lens Darkly, Watchers of the Sky, Hot Coffee, WIlliam Kunstker: Disturbing The Universe, Beautiful Darling, as well as Ferry Tales, a 2004 Academy Award nominee, directed by Katja Esson.
Her narrative work includes Under Construction, by Rubaiyat Hossein, the first female Bangladeshi director, The Killing Floor, a thriller produced by Doug Liman and Avi Arad and the horror film Train, a Millennium Films production, both directed by Gideon Raff; Singapore Dreaming, one of the first Singaporean feature productions and the winner of several international awards; RAIN, the first indigenous film of the Bahamas, by Maria Govan; and Flanel Pajamas, by Jeff Lipsky. She was also an additional camera operator for the film RBG. In 2018, Radwan became a member of the Academy.
Radwan is currently working on her first feature-length documentary as director/producer.