2019 Art of Cinematography ARCHIVE

On November 14, 2019, MEWShop's acclaimed speaker series returned for its fifth year with an evening devoted to the art of cinematography. On this evening we celebrated the craft of visual storytelling from the masters behind the camera - behind the scenes with some of the industry's best cinematographers in documentary & narrative films and exploring the process of bringing the look of cinema to the small screen in the golden of age of Peak TV.

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Schedule:

3:30 pm - Check-in

4:00 pm - Opening

4:15 pm - 5:30 pm - In The Moment: The Art of Cinematography in Documentary Filmmaking

Moderator: Jim Kamp (Producer)

Panelists: Tom Hurwitz, ASC (American Dream, Harlan County U.S.A., The Queen of Versailles, Wild Man Blues) & Claudia Raschke (RBG, God is the Bigger Elvis, Mad Hot Ballroom)

5:45 pm - 6:45 pm - The New Age of TV: Bringing the Look of Cinema to the Small Screen

Moderator: David Leitner (Director, Producer, and Cinematographer)

Panelists: Frank Prinzi, ASC (The Blacklist, Northern Exposure, Law & Order: Criminal Intent) & Tom Houghton, ASC (Elementary, American Horror Story, Rescue Me, 30 Rock)

7:00 pm - 8:30 pm - Behind the Lens: A Conversation with Oscar-nominated Cinematographer Dean Cundey, ASC

Moderator: Sean Weiner (Jacob Burns Film Center, Director of Creative Culture)

Panelist: Dean Cundey, ASC (Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Halloween, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Apollo 13)

8:30 pm - 10:00 pm - Networking Party & Tech Lounge sponsored by:

PLUS: All attendees will have a chance at raffle prizes valued at over $5,000 from our sponsors ZEISS, OWC, Shutterstock, Panasonic, Adorama & ProductionHUB!

2019 Panelists*:

Cinematographer Dean Cundey, ASC, earned an Oscar nomination as well as a BAFTA nomination for his work with Robert Zemeckis on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Additional collaborations with Zemeckis include Romancing the Stone, all three Back to the Future features and Death Becomes Her. He received Outstanding Achievement Award nominations from the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) for Hook and Apollo 13, the latter also receiving a BAFTA nomination.

He grew up in Alhambra on the outskirts of Los Angeles. Interested in film since before high school, he studied architecture and cinema at the University of California, but his interest shifted from production design to cinematography when he took a class taught by the legendary James Wong Howe, ASC. After graduation, Cundey worked in low budget films in various jobs, including as a lighting technician, a makeup artist, and a special effects technician. Initially, he worked as a Director of Photography on action and horror genre films with minuscule budgets. Cundey first attracted attention in 1978, when he and John Carpenter collaborated on the production of Halloween. Their subsequent collaborations included The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China.

His body of work spans a great variety of genres and includes the films Crazy Kind of Love, Walking With the Enemy, Freedom, The Girl in the Photographs, Diablo, Slamma Jamma, Jurassic Park, The Flintstones, Loony Toons: Back in Action, Garfield I & II, Sakura – The Blue Eyed Samurai, Whisper, and Jack and Jill. In addition, he has directed occasional narrative films and numerous
commercials.

Cundey received an Emmy award for his work on The Face, an artful two- hour PBS documentary on the history and role of art in the Christian Religion for WNET-TV.

Cundey first collaborated with producer Nancy Meyers when she directed The Parent Trap, then followed by What Women Want and The Holiday.

In 2014 Cundey received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.

He often teaches masterclasses around the world, having been to France, Mexico, Malaysia, Korea, South America, and Italy, among other places.

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Tom Houghton, ASC received an Emmy nomination for his DP work on the critically acclaimed FX television series Rescue Me starring Denis Leary, produced by Leary and Peter Tolan, in 2008, which he shot for seven seasons, through 2011. He also DP’d the CBS series Love Monkey starring Tom Cavanagh, Canterbury’s Law starring Julianna Margulies for Fox Television, early episodes of NBC’s 30 Rock, the 2012 MTV series I Just Want My Pants Back produced by Doug Liman (Bourne Identity) and did additional first unit photography on NBC’s Smash. Tom Houghton's most recent feature film, They Came Together, starring Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd and directed by David Wain, will be released by Lions Gate.

He has photographed episodes of American Horror Story-Coven in New Orleans and recently wrapped five seasons of the CBS show, Elementary in New York City.

He also photographed Finding Amanda, written and directed by Rescue Me co-creator Peter Tolan and starring Matthew Broderick, Brittany Snow, Maura Tierney, and Steve Coogan. His other DP feature work includes the Warner Bros. release Fire Down Below starring Steven Seagal, Marg Helgenberger, Stephen Lange, Kris Kristofferson and Harry Dean Stanton, directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá; Houghton has photographed a number of independent features and shorts including By Courier directed by Peter Riegert, which was nominated for an Academy Award®, and “Jazz Night” directed by Wallis Nicita, starring Beverly D'Angelo and John Heard, which was presented as part of Lifetime Television's Third Annual Women's Film Festival. Houghton has also photographed major commercials for Federal Express, AT&T, MCI, Bloomingdale’s and Coke and has been a regular contributor to Saturday Night Live, shooting parody commercials with Jerry Seinfeld, Kelly Ripa, and The Olsen Twins. Earlier in his career, he photographed the feature-length documentary film The Beat Generation: An American Dream with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso, directed by Janet Forman.

Houghton’s film career began in high school at a local TV station in Redding, California. He attended London’s Slade School of Fine Arts and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in film from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Tom Hurwitz, ASC is one of America’s most honored documentary cinematographers. Winner of two Emmy Awards, the Sundance and Jerusalem Film Festival Awards for Best Cinematography, Hurwitz has photographed films that have won 4 academy awards and several more nominations (most recently for Dancemaker and Killing in the Name). His television programs have won literally dozens of awards, Emmy, Dupont, Peabody, Directors Guild and film festival awards for Best Documentary, over the last 25 years — most recently were Emmy Awards for Best Documentary Specials for the PBS show Jerome Robbins and the PBS series Franklin, on which Hurwitz directed the photography.

Other award-winning films and programs that he has photographed include: Valentino: The Last Emperor, Harlan County U.S.A., Wild Man Blues, My Generation, Down and Out in America, The Turandot Project, Liberty, Dolley, Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, for PBS; and I Have a Dream, for ABC; and Killing in the Name, and Questioning Faith for HBO. In addition, films that he has directed have won the Cine Golden Eagle (for Bombs will Make the Rainbow Break) and have been shown in festivals around the world. He is also a founding member of the faculty of The MFA Program in the Social Documentary, at New York’s School of Visual Arts, and is a member of the Kamera Kollektiv NYC.

Jim Kamp is an award-winning non-fiction visual storyteller and producer whose work has been seen in leading editorial and broadcast venues. He is currently managing director of content for www.sugaredstudios. Jim also hosts and produces the video podcast www.zeissfullexposure.com

showcasing the work and processes of filmmakers and photographers.

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.

Emmy award-winning cinematographer Frank Prinzi, ASC, has been an active member of the New York film-making community for years. Frank's eclectic credits range from feature films to television movies, from episodic to documentaries, commercials and short films. Some of his most notable work includes Living in Oblivion, The Best Man, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Frank also shot over 44 episodes of the hit show Northern Exposure, for which he was nominated for an Emmy twice, winning once. His other television work includes five seasons of Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Life on Mars and The Blacklist. He has been a member of the American Society of Cinematographers, ASC since 2001.

“Capturing the big and the small moments of the amazing world we live in feeds my passion for the art of cinematography. Equally important is that I bear witness to and document the unique stories that unfold before my eyes in a way that dismantles barriers, opens doors, and reveals the truth. I believe that filming intuitively, honestly and without inhibition is a journey that requires a compassionate heart and the ability to see and hear what lies beneath the surface.”

Award-winning cinematographer Claudia Raschke is best known for her ability to bring the rich tones of the motion picture medium to a diverse spectrum of films, from highly stylized commercial endeavors to feature documentaries to lower-budget works of art. Among her many notable award-winning films are Particle Fever, Oscar-nominated God is the Bigger Elvis, Peabody Award-winning Black Magic, Oscar short-listed Mad Hot Ballroom, Atomic Homefront, The Freedom to Marry, A Sea Change, Oscar-nominated

My Architect (add’l DP), Oscar-nominated Small Wonder (add’l DP), Oscar-nominated Sister Rose’s Passion (add’l DP) as well as indie features like Kiss Me Guido, The Last Good Time, No Way Home. Her most recent six-part documentary series for National Geographic will air Fall 2019 and her feature

documentary RBG was nominated for an Oscar and has been screening in theaters around the world.

Sean Weiner is a NY-based producer, filmmaker, and the director of the Creative Culture program at the Jacob Burns Film Center. He is a professor of film at Purchase College, a creative in the Private Cabin Collective, and a director for the Upright Citizens Brigade. His producing credits include Death Metal Grandma (NY Times Op Docs, SXSW, Hot Docs), Nevada (Sundance, Vimeo Staff Pick, Oscar-Qualified), and Yves & Variation (BAMcinemaFest, Hamptons International Film Festival). These shorts were produced within the Creative Culture program which connects emerging filmmakers to creative careers through fellowship and residency opportunities.