Tangerine, a breakout hit from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is full of surprises. There’s the subject matter: transgender prostitutes working in a not-so glamorous part of Hollywood. And there are the characters: flinty, funny, nobody’s victim. But the story behind the camera is as surprising as what’s in front of it. Particularly because the camera used to shoot Tangerine was the iPhone 5S.

Plenty of amateur films have been shot using iPhones, but by all reports, this is the first movie at the Sundance Film Festival to be shot almost entirely on an Apple device. It was a decision that indie writer and director Sean Baker made to accommodate the film’s small budget. But you’d never guess the camera, to look at it: Tangerine was shot in a widescreen, 2:35:1 aspect ratio, and its camera zooms through the streets of LA with a fluidity you’d never expect from a handheld device. And yet despite his camera of choice, Baker says the iPhone made for a good partner. “It was surprisingly easy,” Baker says. “We never lost any footage.”

Read More @ The Verge.com

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Since going public just over a decade ago, Netflix has changed the rules about where, how and when TV shows and movies get watched. And more recently by making huge bets producing some of the most creative, dynamic and critically acclaimed series on “television”  in-house, Netflix has also redefined how shows gets made in the first place. In a field as competitive and risky as producing world-class original broadcast content, how has such a young company managed to find so much success?  It’s all in the algorithm. And its name is Ted.

by Tim Wu, The New Yorker:

[excerpt] … Studios and television networks have long made decisions about what to produce based on the intuitions of a limited number of executives. Television studios have Nielson ratings, and movie studios have box-office sales, to help guide them. But those are relatively simple metrics, and notoriously unreliable; as the screenwriter William Goldman famously said, “nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddamn thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.” As with the arrival of sabermetrics in baseball or the rise of pollsters in politics, the potential for the quants to change the industry—to really figure out what people want to watch—is clear.

Netflix and its chief content officer, Ted Sarandos, have been the most outspoken proponents of data-driven programming, which they say was behind the company’s biggest successes, such as “House of Cards” and “Orange is the New Black.” Soon after the début of “House of Cards,” David Carr, writing in the Times, pronounced that “Big bets are now being informed by Big Data.” In 2013, Kevin Spacey, the star of the show, said that Netflix had come to him and said, “We believe in you. We’ve run our data and it tells us that our audience would watch this series. We don’t need you to do a pilot. How many do you wanna do?”

Read More @ The New Yorker.com

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