FORMER PANELISTS NEWS
Joan Churchill, ASC
Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2017 Panelist
February 2, 2022
Behind the Legend: A Candid Look at Haskell Wexler, ASC in Shoot From the Heart
Joan Churchill, ASC discusses her documentary portrait of mentor, colleague and friend.
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When Joan Churchill, ASC and Alan Barker set out to make a film about renowned Society member Haskell Wexler, their goal was first and foremost to create a portrait of the man — a look beyond the Oscar and ASC Award winner’s prolific and storied work behind the camera. “I don’t think we wanted to make a film about Haskell because he was a filmmaker,” Churchill says of the 25-minute short Shoot From the Heart, a title that Rita Taggart, Wexler’s widow, came up with. “We were making a film about a man who was a passionate activist, who never gave up hope for the world, and who was a mentor. He was an incredibly generous person.”
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Read full article here.
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Sam Pollard
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2017 Panelist
September 27, 2021
Filmmaker U Announces New Class on Documentary Film Editing with Oscar-nominated and Multiple Emmy-winning Director/Editor Sam Pollard
Filmmaker U (www.filmmakeru.com), the online education series that brings the best in the industry to aspiring filmmakers, announced today that acclaimed Director/Editor Sam Pollard will teach a course in Documentary film editing. Oscar-nominated and multiple Emmy-winning documentary Director/Editor Sam Pollard ("Four Little Girls," "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), will take students into the edit suite in an intimate journey through his career, techniques, relationships and decision making process from his storied work. His collaboration with Director Spike Lee and his recent ventures as a Director; will give students an unparalleled look into non-fiction storytelling. Topics include Structure, Directors and Editors Shaping a Film Pacing, Mood, Tone and Texture, Editing Audio, Editing, and much more.
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Read more here.
Joan Churchill, ASC
Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2017 Panelist
September 23, 2021
Joan Churchill, ASC to be Honored by DOC NYC for Her Exceptional Career
The cinematographer and director was one of the first to be invited into the Society for non-fiction work.
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DOC NYC announced its annual Visionaries Tribute honorees for 2021, bestowing Lifetime Achievement honors to Joan Churchill, ASC and director and educator Raoul Peck. Also honored will be Emmy-winning director, producer and cinematographer Peter Nicks, with the Robert and Anne Drew Award for Documentary Excellence; and Chi-hui Yang, senior program officer for Ford Foundation’s JustFilms Initiative, with the Leading Light Award.
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Read full article here.
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Carla Gutierrez, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2019, 2021 Panelist
September 10, 2021
A Window to the Unknown: ‘RBG’ and ‘JULIA’ Editor Carla Gutierrez Talks About the Power of Documentaries, Women’s History, and Building Community
Carla Gutierrez hasn’t always had the connection with filmmaking that she does now. “I didn’t watch many films growing up at all,” she tells me. Born and raised in Peru, theatres were scarce and expensive. But after immigrating to the United States at fifteen, one documentary shown to her in college captivated her in a way that would continue to drag her in until it became her lifeblood.
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The film followed the relationship between an immigrant girl and her teacher in the 90s as a policy change in California would force teachers to report their undocumented students to authorities. “I felt connected to the story. I was a very privileged immigrant; I was never undocumented, I always had papers. But it really resonated with me.”
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Read more here.
Eugene Gearty
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2013, 2024 Panelist
January 2, 2021
Sound Design with Eugene Gearty: Learn sound design from one of the best
Review Replay: Sound is very much the most under appreciated part of production, whether that's documentary or feature films. But the job of the sound designer is essential. Sound Design with Eugene Gearty will make you appreciate the discipline even if you are in other areas of production.
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I'm going to preface this review with a recommendation, and that is that even if you are a budding director, in fact especially if you are a budding director, you should view this course.
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Read more here.
Kevin Tent, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2018 Panelist
December 7, 2020
Kevin Tent Elected President of American Cinema Editors
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American Cinema Editors (ACE) has elected a new leadership team. Kevin Tent, ACE is the new president succeeding Stephen Rivkin, ACE who has served in that capacity since 2016. Per ACE bylaws, Tent will serve a two-year term.
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Lillian Benson, ACE was re-elected as secretary, with Anita Brandt Burgoyne, ACE, Dorian Harris, ACE, Sabrina Plisco, ACE, Tatiana Riegel, ACE, Andrew Seklir, ACE and Rivkin all serving on the board of directors, alongside associate board members Mark Helfrich, ACE, Michael Ornstein, ACE, Terilyn Shropshire, ACE and Troy Takaki, ACE. Board members are also elected to two-year terms. They will all be joining the existing board of Carol Littleton, ACE as VP, Stephen Lovejoy, ACE as treasurer, and board members Jacqueline Cambas, ACE, Maysie Hoy, ACE, Bonnie Koehler, ACE and Mary Jo Markey, ACE. The election results were revealed at the ACE holiday party, held virtually this year due to the pandemic.
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“Kevin has always been a fierce supporter of ACE, first as a board member and now as president. We could not be more excited and proud of this new leadership team that ACE members have elected and look forward to working together to continue with our organization’s mission statement of illuminating and advancing the craft of film editing,” stated ACE executive director Jenni McCormick.
Read more here.
Kirsten Johnson, ASC
Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2016 Panelist
December 3, 2020
Kirsten Johnson Welcomed Into ASC Membership
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Her work includes the critically acclaimed documentary features Cameraperson, Dick Johnson Is Dead, Citizenfour and The Invisible War.
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New Society member Kirsten Johnson says that her work “stems from deep interests in cinema language, the power of the camera and the ethical complexities of filming.” She attended Brown University — where she studied fine arts, literature and society — before studying cinematography at La Fémis in Paris, France.
Johnson has served as cinematographer on a number of award-winning documentary features, including Citizenfour, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature; The Invisible War, which was nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar; and Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which won Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. She was also an additional camera operator on Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. For their camerawork on The Oath, Johnson and director Laura Poitras were awarded the Excellence in Cinematography Award for U.S. Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
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Read more here.
Martin Ahlgren, ASC
Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2017 Panelist
October 3, 2020
ASC Welcomes New Member Martin Ahlgren
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Coming from a family full of engineers, new Society member Martin Ahlgren was expected to attend KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. But the young man, who was born in Scotland to Swedish parents and grew up in Stockholm, instead chose to attend a 16mm film course. “From a young age I was always working on some creative project: drawing comic books, writing long serial stories [or] editing a role-playing fanzine,” Ahlgren says. “As a teenager, I started making short films on the family’s Hi8 camera, and this soon consumed me.”
During his film course, the young man directed a short film that took him to festivals in Italy and the Czech Republic. Following this, Ahlgren served in the national military and attended Stockholm University for a year before attending School of Visual Arts in New York. It was there that he realized he was most interested in the visual aspect of storytelling and decided to focus on cinematography. He photographed some 25 student films during this time, which led to an ASC Karl Struss Heritage Award honorable mention.
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Read this full article here.
Jonathan Oppenheim
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2014 Panelist
July 20, 2020
Jonathan Oppenheim, Editor of ‘Paris is Burning,’ Dies at 67
Documentary film editor Jonathan Oppenheim died July 16 in New York City, Sundance Institute confirmed to Variety. He was 67 and had been battling brain cancer.
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“Jonathan began his life in the arts as a painter which informed his sensibility in film,” his wife, Josie Oppenheim, wrote in a statement. “He was a talented and highly original painter but documentary film was his chosen medium. The collaborative dynamic while not always peaceful was one aspect of the work that Jonathan loved.”
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Read the full article here.
Alan Heim, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2013 Panelist
January 17, 2020
Cathy Repola and Alan Heim Receive Top Honors at ACE Eddie Awards Gala
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Later in the evening, Heim received the ACE Career Achievement award.
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In addition to creative awards honoring editing craft, Tina Hirsch joined Heim in receiving a Career Achievement Award. The annual Golden Eddie was presented to producer Lauren Shuler Donner.
“From my first editing class at the City College in NY I have been in love with editing and the camaraderie of the cutting room,” Heim told the audience in accepting his award.
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“I was asked to join ACE when I was living and working in New York City. I joined because I felt it would help make me a part of a larger editing community. And it did. I ran for the Board of the Editors Guild, I guess, so I could fill in whatever free time I had outside the cutting room,” Heim said, to appreciative laughter. His legendary career includes such films as “All That Jazz” and “Network.”
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Read this full article here.
Vanja Cernjul, ASC, HFC
Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2016 Panelist
August 14 2018
Capturing Crazy Rich Asians with the VariCam Pure
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Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy-drama film, which is based on the best-selling novel by Kevin Kwan, and tells the story of an Asian American woman who meets her boyfriend's family, only to find out they are one of the richest families in Singapore. The Warner Bros film was directed by Jon M. Chu (Now You See Me 2, G.I. Joe: Retaliation) and features an all Asian cast, including Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Ken Jeong, Michelle Yeoh, and many others. It is the first Hollywood studio film to feature Asians in leading roles since director Wayne Wang’s 1993 film, The Joy Luck Club.
The film was shot by cinematographer Vanja ÄŒernjul, ASC, HFC (The Perfection, The Deuce, Marco Polo) with VariCam Pure cinema cameras . ÄŒernjul discovered cinematography at film school at the University of Zagreb, Croatia. After graduation, he became a cameraman for international news outlets like the BBC, CNN, and NBC during the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia. “There was no internet available to us in 1991, so we had to distribute all the footage from the location to the networks via a satellite link, which was very expensive,” explains ÄŒernjul. “There was also a great time pressure because it didn’t matter how amazing your footage was if it wasn’t delivered before deadline. That taught me a lot about in-camera editing and shooting under various conditions, always utilizing available light.”
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Read this full article here.
Anne V. Coates, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2016 Panelist
May 9, 2018
Anne V. Coates, Admired Editor of Acclaimed Movies, Dies at 92
From The New York Times By Margalit Fox
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-Anne V. Coates, an English surgical nurse who forsook her calling to perform surgery on some of the best-known motion pictures of the 20th century, earning an Academy Award for film editing in 1963, died on Tuesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 92.
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Her death, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital, was announced on Twitter by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
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One of the most celebrated film editors of her era, Ms. Coates won an Oscar for her work on “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), the enduring drama directed by David Lean and starring Peter O’Toole. (The film won six additional Oscars, including best picture.)
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In a six-decade career that took her from England to Hollywood, Ms. Coates worked with some of the best-known directors of her time, including, besides Mr. Lean, Michael Powell, Milos Forman (who died last month) and Sidney Lumet, receiving four more Oscar nominations along the way.
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Sidney Wolinsky, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2015 Panelist
February 8, 2018
Sidney Wolinsky Reflects On Shaping "Water" With Director Guillermo del Toro
Editor earns his 1st career Oscar nomination, 7th ACE Eddie Award nod
From Shoot Online By Robert Goldrich
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Editor Sidney Wolinsky, ACE first worked with director Guillermo del Toro on the pilot for FX Network’s The Strain, a series which del Toro created and for which he served as an executive producer. Their fruitful collaboration prompted del Toro to again gravitate to Wolinsky for a feature cut from fable cloth and set during the Cold War era of America in 1962.
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That story turned out to be The Shape of Water (Fox Searchlight), which has garnered assorted accolades, including 13 Oscar nominations and a DGA Award win for del Toro. The film introduces us to a janitor named Elisa (portrayed by Oscar nominee Sally Hawkins) who works in a hidden, high-security government laboratory. Elisa is a mute, trapped in a life of isolation. Her life, though, takes on hope when she and co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) discover a secret classified experiment--a hybrid man/sea creature with whom Elisa makes a special connection. Elisa and this amphibian man (Doug Jones), who too is mute, fall in love.
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Included in the mix of Oscar nominations for The Shape of Water are Best Picture, Director and Editor. The latter marks the first career Oscar nom for Wolinsky who also garnered for The Shape of Water his seventh ACE Eddie Award nomination (the other six all being for his television work, including wins in 2003 and 2008 for The Sopranos).
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Jerry Greenberg, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2013 Panelist
December 23, 2017
Jerry Greenberg Dies: Oscar-Winning ‘The French Connection’ Editor Was 81
From Deadline By Bruce Haring
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The film editor behind one of the most famous car chases in movie history has died. Jerry Greenberg, whose work on The French Connection won him an Academy Award for film editing, died Friday after a long illness. He was 81.
The French Connection car chase featured Detective Jimmy Doyle (played by Gene Hackman) chasing a criminal who has commandeered an elevated subway train. It was shot on busy city streets in New York with no traffic control or proper permits, although the NYPD helped close some, but not all, intersections.
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Many of the chase’s near-collisions were unplanned, and director William Friedkin operated a car-mounted camera to avoid endangering his family-man camera operators from the hazardous assignment. Greenberg’s editing helped bring the chase to life.
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In his Oscars acceptance speech, Greenberg concluded by thanking “the New York City subway system.”
In addition to The French Connection, Greenberg was nominated twice in 1980 for his work on Kramer vs. Kramer and Apocalypse Now. In 2015, he won the Career Achievement Award from the American Cinema Editors.
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Dylan Tichenor, ACE
Sight, Sound & Story: Post Production Summit 2017 Panelist
December 21, 2017
What it was like to edit Daniel Day-Lewis' final performance
From Entertainment Weekly By Christopher Rosen
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Phantom Thread isn’t just a reunion between Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis, 10 years after There Will Be Blood. Anderson’s longtime friend and frequent collaborator Dylan Tichenor also returns as the filmmaker’s editor, following credits on Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.
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“Paul and I have been very good friends for 20 years, since we started working together. We fell out of sync professionally but I’ve always been around for the other movies,” Tichenor, who has also worked with Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums), Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain), Ben Affleck (The Town), and Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty), says. “I’ve seen the early screenings, I’ve talked to him about the scripts, even on the ones I didn’t end up cutting. So I feel like I didn’t exactly go away — Paul and I have been in touch the whole time.”
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But their reunion was sparked after a late-night chat about ideas for a possible feature, one that would become Phantom Thread.
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“He wanted to make a story about a couple whose relationship was the most combative thing. A love story about people who maybe don’t seem to like each other,” Tichenor, a two-time Oscar nominee, says. “That was the original idea. That was just a little kernel and we started batting it around and he got to the place where it sounded like a Hitchcock film. So we started talking about Rebeccaand Notorious. Then we started talking about plot and how to make sure we injected a plot into things — because Paul’s not a super big plot person. It percolated with him for a while. Once he decided to go back to Daniel with the story, which he decided early, Daniel became an integral part of it. That’s when it became a dressmaker, that’s when it became London, and that informed a lot of the movie. I think it’s a movie that started with a grain of something that, like everything does with Paul basically, and a pearl grew around it. I don’t think anybody could have guessed where it was going to go based on the first conversation.”
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Nancy Schreiber, ASC
Sight, Sound & Story: The Art of Cinematography 2015 Panelist
October 30, 2017
Schreiber to Receive Susan B Anthony Award
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The High Falls Film Festival is proud to present the 2017 Susan B. Anthony “Failure Is Impossible” Award to Nancy Schreiber, ASC in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the art of filmmaking as one of the few female cinematographers in the film and television industry. This award honors a woman in the film industry who has persevered in her career and triumphed over difficulties.
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Based in both New York and Los Angeles she was the fourth woman ever voted into membership into the prestigious American Society of Cinematographers and was recently the recipient of the President’s Award from the ASC, the first woman ever to receive this award.
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Schreiber is a Detroit native who, after receiving her psychology degree at the University of Michigan, moved to New York, working her way up from production assistant to gaffer to Director of Photography. She has compiled over 130 credits, an eclectic list of narrative film and television credits as well as music videos, commercials and documentaries.
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In spite of females representing only 3 percent of cinematographers working today, Schreiber’s career has spanned more than three decades. Her credits include the FX series Better Things, HBO’s The Comeback and the films Your Friends and Neighbors with Ben Stiller, Loverboy directed by Kevin Bacon, with Kyra Sedgwick, Sandra Bullock, and Marissa Tomei, The Nines starring Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy and
November starring Courteney Cox.
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She landed on Variety’s 10 Cinematographers to Watch, before taking home the coveted Best Cinematography award at Sundance. Schreiber has been nominated for an Emmy, an Independent Spirit Award and was presented with the Women In Film Crystal/Kodak Vision Award. She is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The award will be presented on Thursday November 2, in Rochester, New York, the home of George Eastman/Kodak and Susan B. Anthony. Past recipients include Angela Bassett, Rita Moreno, Lynn Redgrave, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, Candace Bergen
and Director, Agnieszka Holland.
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Information prepared by Lewis Communications: susan@lewiscommunications.net.