Natalie Portman Launches Makingof.com

July 9, 2009 by S David Acuff
Filed under Around the Web, Headlines

This is a HuffingtonPost.com article by Brad Balfour about an innovative concept-turned-website from Natalie Portman which has become Makingof.com. It’s a behind the scenes video site that takes viewers onto various film sets — as if they had an all access behind the scenes pass to visit a friend for a day.

(EXCERPT) Oscar-nominated actress Natalie Portmanjoined her business partner and film developer/new media entrepreneur Christine Aylward to discuss the launch of their new website, www.makingof.com, at a special event in the Filmmaker’s Lounge during the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival. As they explained, the site is meant to be a gathering place and resource for filmmakers and fans of filmmakers alike. Their web project hopes to transform the way people view, enjoy, and participate in the filmmaking process.

As an accomplished actress, Portman has performed in such established plays as Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull andThe Diary of Anne Frank, and garnered her Supporting Actress Oscar nom for Closer in 2004.  She also graduated from Harvard University where she studied psychology. Later on she directed her first short, has actively supported various humanitarian and animal rights causes, and has been romantically linked with various actors or musicians such as neo-hippie Devendra Banhart. She is also an entrepreneur having started an aborted vegan shoe line (its partner company dissolved through this econ crisis) who is now launching this media company with Aylward as CEO. The two had met on a film set and came up with the idea of a behind-the-scenes, insiders-look web portal off-the-cuff during a dinner.

The following interview was drawn from the Q & A session after they announced the launch before a small group of film professionals; it is boiled down to Portman’s remarks and her response to several of my own questions as well.

Q: Why did you two start this website?

NP: Christine [Aylward] and I have been friends for a few years now and we were talking one night. I said, “I wonder why there isn’t a website that sort of encapsulates the experience of visiting a friend on a film set?” Because every time a friend of mine came to visit I was reminded about how exciting a place it is to work and was reminded about how little we all know when you’re just a movie-goer of all the different aspects that go into making a film.

The site is supposed to encapsulate that experience and give access to people who don’t have a friend that they can go visit on a film set. So they can say, “How did they do that?”

There are jobs that exist on films sets which people don’t even know about. We can give an insight into that and offer that experience for the serious burgeoning filmmaker. There’s this whole generation now of people who are making their own movies with youtube and similar sites. I’m sure that they want expert advice or the opportunity to see how it looks up close. So that’s the goal of the site, to extend that access to everyone.