The Confluence

The New Normal – How Our Production Community Is Adapting To Covid – Cast Iron Studios

We will be making a series of blog posts on a variety of production businesses here in Oregon – we want to know what creative options have been put in place to offset the disruption that Covid-19 has caused.

Like so many other businesses, the Oregon production community has been hit hard by the havoc that Covid-19 has wreaked. Many community partners have come together to provide up-to-date information on safety procedures and new protocol guidelines that are being improved upon on all the time.

Remembering Anne Richardson

Our community lost someone this week who has given us all laughter, entertainment, education, friendship and a deep connection to our history. Anne Richardson grew up in Portland and continued to give back to our community for all of her life.

Amongst so many other things, Anne started and directed the annual Oregon Film History Conference, presented by Oregon Cartoon Institute which she co-founded in 2007 with her husband, Dennis Nyback. This annual conference was an event we were not only happy to attend every year, but also sponsor in a small form.

Ashland Is On The Oregon Film Trail With Two New Signs!

The 18th and 19th signs on the Oregon Film Trail are now installed in the City of Ashland – they celebrate the town’s starring role in “Wild” and the historic Oregon Shakespeare Festival as inspiration for “Coraline”. The signs are now located in the Downtown Plaza, and at the intersection of Pioneer Street and East Main Street in front of OSF’s Black Swan Theatre and the Ashland Chamber of Commerce.

Historic downtown Ashland featured prominently in “Wild”, the highly acclaimed 2014 film adaptation of the best-selling book, starring Reese Witherspoon as Oregon author Cheryl Strayed.

#EOFF2020: Watch With Us!

La Grande, Ore – Eastern Oregon Film Festival will be celebrating its eleventh year of independent film and music programming VIA La Grande, Oregon on October 22-24, 2020.This year EOFF joins a trend that we are all becoming more accustomed to – online delivery via a virtual cinema partner.

Working along with presentation platform EVENTIVE, Festival staff have labored to ensure that the delivery of the film program is as accessible as possible to all of our members and pass holders.

“Tell Your Story” Grant – A Residency Opportunity For Portlanders – Now Accepting Applications

Tell Your Story Grant.

This single $10,000 grant will be awarded to the City of Portland BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, Person of Color – including but not limited to Latinx, Asian American, and Pacific Islanders) creators or creative teams for a virtual-residency in order to develop, explore and/or shoot story(ies) applicants want to tell in any film format they choose.

The connections, insights, experience, access to physical office space (at the Oregon Film Office, if needed), and consultations with strategic supporting and contributing sponsors, will be made directly available to each of the winning creators for a period of six months.

How the Classic #OregonMade Film “Coraline” Came To Be Set In Ashland, OR

“Coraline,” the first feature created by Hillsboro-based animation studio, Laika, was released in 2009 to much critical acclaim and box office success. Recently, Oregon Film reached out to the film’s screenwriter and director, Henry Selick, to find out how the movie, based on a book by Neil Gaiman, came to be set in the small southern Oregon town of Ashland.

Selick said, “I began writing my screenplay for “Coraline” years ago at my home in Northern California.

Horror Film Festival Celebrates Lucky 13th Year – Streams Online

Southern Oregon’s 2020 Killer Valley Horror Film Festival (KVHFF) celebrates it’s lucky #13 this year, but for the first time ever, it will not be hosted live. In previous years this festival celebrated independent filmmakers with in-person screenings, filmmaker meet-and-greets, and an awards ceremony in Ashland, OR.

This year, the 2020 Killer Valley Horror Film Festival launches officially on their website at 3am, Oct. 9th (the witching hour) and runs through midnight of Nov. 1st, 2020 (as the Day of the Dead makes way for All Soul’s Day).

Virtual Production, Utilizing Unreal Engine, At Picture This In Portland

Marrying game-engine technology to virtual production techniques cracks open an expansive new world of creative filmmaking and business opportunities.

Virtual production, utilizing Unreal Engine, a video game rendering technology, and immersive LED screens, will be the new driver for innovation in cinematic storytelling enabling a creative flexibility previously unimaginable.

The first production to truly take advantage of this revolution, and helped create it, was The Mandalorian, on Disney+.

And now this technology is in Portland.

This innovative workflow was used to film more than half of “The Mandalorian” Seasons 1 and 2, enabling the filmmakers to:

greatly reduce on-location shoots
capture a significant amount of complex VFX shots with accurate lighting and reflections in-camera
simultaneously integrate and manipulate live-action and computer-generated assets
actors work in an actual virtual environment–combining advantages of location shooting with CGI imagination.

S3 of “Shrill” – Underway This Fall

Season 3 of “Shrill” will start shooting this fall in the greater Portland area. This successful Hulu comedy series is based on the book “Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman” by Lindy West, who also co-created the show along with Aidy Bryant and Ali Rushfield.

New Portland-Set Narrative Podcast Series

The limited-run narrative podcast series Short of Breath is a small-scale socioeconomic thriller focusing on problems relevant to contemporary working-class American life. While rooted in real human interactions, the series has the tenor, structure, and tempo of a melodrama and thriller.

Set in the days leading up to the election of Donald Trump, Short of Breath follows Olissa, a single mother in her early 30s who loses her factory job in the series’ first scene. It’s terrible luck and even worse timing.

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