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Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy spent eight years working on the script for their feature film debut, Amazon’s “Blow the Man Down,” about a pair of sisters who go deep into the underbelly of their New England hometown to cover up a crime. But the filmmakers’ relationship dates back further than that — to the days when they were shooting shorts and making music videos on Coney Island.

Finding the look for Netflix’s new four-part series “Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker” was something costume designer Karyn Wagner describes as “being in heaven, and a smorgasbord of design.”

Syfy fantasy series “The Magicians,” about a group of college students who travel through time and worlds to battle wildly imaginative creatures, draws to a close April 1 after five seasons, having taken viewers on a Harry Potter-meets-video-game thrill ride. Knowing that this is the end of the run gives MastersFX founder and president Todd Masters and his team one last chance to showcase the program’s most popular characters — using their own magic to deliver the makeup effects. 

In only its second year, Made in Her Image — a nonprofit, incubator-based workshop that teaches short filmmaking, start to finish, to girls of color ages 8 to 18 — has given more than 200 prospective filmmakers the chance to see themselves in a profession historically reserved for white males. 

Everyone wants a piece of the superhero genre’s oversize box office, which can engender a certain sameness among wannabe blockbusters. But standing out amid the well-defined brands of Marvel and DC is a challenge Sony’s “Bloodshot,” which bows in theaters March 13, met with a high-energy, realism-based approach to its 1,500 visual-effects shots.

For Kahleen Crawford, casting director for BBC and HBO series “His Dark Materials,” being successful at her job requires a gut instinct mixed with a bit of magic. “A lot of it is psychology,” she says. “You have to apply different parts of your skill set to different people in different projects.”

Kelly Reichardt’s signature minimalism permeates “First Cow,” a good-natured friendship tale — enmeshed with a subtle critique of capitalism — set in the mid-19th-century Oregon Territory.

Phillip Boutte Jr., assistant costume designer for Mattel and Netflix’s upcoming “Masters of the Universe,” has worked tirelessly for well over a decade to establish himself as a concept artist whom costume designers and studios are eager to work with.

Though Pixar’s “Onward” is set in a fantasy world, its characters embody real-life qualities and virtues. In the film, out March 6, two elf brothers, voiced by Tom Holland (Ian) and Chris Pratt (Barley), try to use magic to bring their father back from the dead. When the attempt short-circuits, they embark on a journey to complete the conjuring before the 24-hour clock to save him runs out.

What is more comforting for a man who is grieving: a world of puppets or immersing one’s self in the seemingly simpler time of the 1960s? For Jeff Piccirillo aka Mr. Pickles (Jim Carrey) of “Kidding,” it seems to be the latter.

When Richard Bryce Goodman was a young man, his wide-ranginginterests included photography, music and philosophy (his father, Paul, was a sculptor friend of the artist Henry Moore), but it was a present he received while growing up in Baltimore that seems to have had the biggest influence on his career arc.

Black History Month is a sacred time for me as a filmmaker as I reflect on those who walked the hard road so ours could be easier. I find inspiration in their journey, which reignites my passion to carry on sacred storytelling traditions and continue to show the world the incredible contributions of the black Americans who came before us.

Jane Austen’s “Emma.” is a world of elegance and refinement; its story centers on class distinction and the power of vanity, and how those cause tension between friends and lovers. The challenge for costumer Alexandra Byrne and production designer Kave Quinn to help director Autumn de Wilde deliver her vision of the classic, which hits theaters Feb. 21, was to create a landscape that was simultaneously sumptuous and defined by specific rules. 

In service to the director’s visionon a project, production designer Nelson Coates is an artistic pied piper. “You want to [construct] a visual arc and take people on that journey,” he says.

In one of the final episodes of the second season of Hulu’s “Shrill,” Annie, played by Aidy Bryant, says, “It’s such a hunt to find cool clothes for fat women.”

Prior to working on “1917,” special effects artist Tristan Versluis had designed no more than five or six corpses. But Sam Mendes, director of the WWI drama, which has garnered 10 Oscar nominations, needed Versluis, who picked up one of those noms in the hair and makeup category, to create 30 corpses and dead horses, all at different stages of decomposition.

The directors of this awards season’s documentary hopefuls explain the ticking hearts at the center of their shortlisted films.

Makoto Shinkai’s “Weathering With You,” which tells the tale of a young boy who falls for a girl with the power to stop ceaseless rainstorms pounding Tokyo, marks the first time an anime has been chosen as Japan’s foreign-language Oscar entry. 

In film history, there’s never been a project like the nine “Up” British documentaries, which have presented unique challenges for director Michael Apted and editor Kim Horton as they follow the lives of British individuals in seven-year intervals. Horton, who has edited the films since the 1984 “28 Up,” says, “It’s probably the greatest thing I’ve ever done. Michael refers to it as his life’s work, and I see it the same way.”

To deliver the “anti-hate satire” of “Jojo Rabbit,” the story of a German boy who idolizes his own particular vision of Hitler before slowly learning the truth, director Taika Waititi followed a simple philosophy when it came to assembling his crew: “I like working with nice people.”