BRITDOC 08: 23rd-25th July, Keble College, Oxford.

BRITDOC is the bespoke documentary film festival connecting international funders, distributors and filmmakers, from the Foundation behind such films such as We Are Together and Black Gold. 

The festival this year boasts a double theme: Comedy and Music. Director Larry Charles (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Borat) will be attending for a masterclass and key-note speech, while special musician guests include Mercury Prize nominee Nitin Sawhney and acclaimed composers Michael Nyman and Jonathan Dove. 

From LazyFilm:

There are only two things that can make any motion graphic artist flinch and that's rotoscoping and chroma keying. Why? Mainly because both processes are time consuming and arm numbing. However despite all these, rotoscoping and chroma keying still remains to be very important in the industry we move in. Which is why, lately, software companies are launching new products that aim to lessen the pain in rotoscoping.

Here we will talk about the Top 5 best rotoscoping softwares currently available that deliver accurate and fast mattes.

"In 1744 a simple experiment was conducted in Sweden to reproduce the underlying cause of the Aurora Borealis in a laboratory, what we would now think of as a room. A small hole in a shade "the size of a large pea" let through a ray of sunlight that then was refracted through a prism. The small patch of light broken into a spectrum of colours then traveled through a medium of turbulent air directly above a warmed glass of aquavit. The resulting image landed on a screen a few short feet away and looked like what was seen dancing in the sky on many long Swedish nights, nature's sublime entertainment in the real pre-history of cinema."

Continued here. An Animate Projects commission for Channel 4 in association with Arts Council England. Awarded Best Film at Cutting Edge at the British Animation Awards 2008. Thanks FMG.

Sorry for the shortage of updates recently, I've watched too many inpsiring films in the past few weeks, with not enough time to do them justice with a good enough review. And after seeing Wall-E on Thursday - towards the end of an enlightening Edinburgh - business as usual doesn't seem possible either. In the meantime here's the award winners from Sunday's ceremony.

EuroStar's Somers Town won the £20,000 Michael Powell Best British Film Award, a film directed by Shane Meadows through a £500k financing deal set up by ad agency Mother, the company behind the Orange Film Funding Board adverts.

This year’s Michael Powell Jury were actor Danny Huston (Ivans Xtc) as president, international producer Sigurjon Sighvatsson (ZIDANE: A 21st CENTURY PORTRAIT); Orange Prize nominated author Scarlett Thomas (The End of Mr. Y); Golden Globe Best Actress nominee Joely Richardson (NIP\TUCK) and acclaimed director Iain Softley (INKHEART; K-PAX).

The Jury citation read: “It is a great pleasure to recognise SOMERS TOWN as the freshest, most imaginative, maverick work deserving of the Michael Powell Award. After viewing an impressive selection of films and a long deliberation we the Jury unanimously agreed that the award would go to SOMERS TOWN.” 

Full winners and jury comments below

From Bolazno HQ: 

We are pleased to inform you that new deadline for the festival subscriptions is 15th July 2008!:

- 5th NO WORDS - International no-dialogue short film competition.
In this competition, the film/video must be understood through the strength of the images only. Music, sounds, environment background noises, etc. are accepted. Films/videos without dialogues, about any topics, produced 2006, 2007 or 2008 can be submitted.

- 40th OPERE NUOVE - Short film competition for italian films.
Competition for italian filmmakers, italian producers or films in italian language only.

- 4th SHORT FILM EXPERIMENT - Short film competition for experimental films.
Experimental short films produced 2006, 2007 or 2008 can be submitted.

Free entry for all competitions!  Total prizes amount: € 5500

NEW Deadline for all competitions: July 15th 2008

For further information, and for the online-submission of your works we invite you to visit our website: www.bolzanoshortfilmfestival.it

Radar's first music video commission hits the front pages!

RadarMusicVideos.com is a new social network that gives filmmakers worldwide the chance to pitch for music videos. Now 3 months old, their first completed commission has just gone online where it's secured front pages on the mighty YouTube, Dailymotion and Viddler. 28 Costumes, the band who commissioned the video for £500 are ecstatic; "we're really happy with the video, Will and George (the filmmakers) were great to work with and we're over the moon about the coverage we're getting, it's amazing"

Radar Music Videos is an innovative social network combined with a commissioning & promotion agency. The 800+ members worldwide, many of them multi-award winning filmmakers, pitch on music video briefs. It's a service catching on quickly with record labels, management and unsigned bands alike. Budgets range from $10k/£5k to $1400/£700. Some briefs are performance led, others are open, making production possible anywhere from Argentina to Zambia. 

ABC are calling for submissions to their documentary about the future of the Earth.

" In an unprecedented television and internet event, ABC News is asking you to help answer perhaps the most important question of our time — What will our world be like over the next one hundred years if we don’t act now to save our troubled planet?"

Earth 2100 includes an already active web game  and documentary to be shown in September of this year. In a way this builds on the ideas of the World Without Oil ARG.

 (via retheart )

Raindance presents on June 26th at 7.30pm

Live!Ammunition! at the Edinburgh International Film Festival

followed by an afterparty

hosted by Shooting People and Wallflower Press

HAVE YOU GOT A GREAT IDEA FOR A MOVIE? This is it! Your chance to pitch your movie idea directly to a panel of top British film executives. These are the people who matter. They are the people who buy and develop scripts – they are the people who decide what will be made and what won’t.

Cory Doctorow's latest novel, Little Brother, is available to download for free from his website, as well as remix, share and distribute to your friends. The book has just had its fifth week on the New York Times Bestsellers list under Children's literature, and entered Publishers Weekly chart - the first Creative Commons licensed book to do so. The book is set in a near-future dystopian 'database state' where civil liberties have been destroyed.

Doctorow has long argued against current media industry sales and distribution practices. I first came across his ideas after Shooting People 's Stu Tily forwarded me a now legendary speech he had given at Microsoft encouraging them to drop DRM from their music players - an idea now largely accepted across the music industry. Using Tim O'Reilly's maxim that obscurity is a greater threat for an indpendent artist than piracy (and that piracy is progressive taxation), Doctorow has long encouraged fans of his fiction to download copies, translate it, make their own covers (see pictured), and even reprint and distribute copies - provided it is not for profit. As one of BoingBoing's editors - one of the web's most popular blogs - such derivative works are guaranteed further exposure and most significantly the practice has not hurt his book sales, as the NY Times positioning demonstrates.

The main question for filmmakers is whether the model is transferable. A purchased book offers signficant advantages over a downloaded version: curling up with a laptop or ream of A4 sheets stapled together will never quite be the same. There is little visible difference on the other hand between a purchased DVD on a TV screen, against a downloaded copy, except for the convenience and time involved - and the packaging of a special edition.

But perhaps the reason so many people are buying Doctorow's book is less that they prefer it to the downloaded version they could blag for free, but because of the relationship he has built up with his core audience, nurtured diligently through BoingBoing. That engagement and communication also seems central to the approach of the few early web film distribution success stories; m.dot.strange, Four Eyed Monsters and Brave New Films.

For those wanting to learn more from the man, it's just been announced that Sheffield's B.Tween Festival - which I can thoroughly recommend -  have him as opening keynote speaker .

Celtx is a free open-source Canadian scriptwriting programme that connects with an online community where you can develop the script with other collaborators and writers. Unlike some of the other pretty cool free online scriptwriting tools, like Zhura.com, Scripped, PlotBot and ScriptBuddy - Celtx is a standalone piece of software so you don't need to be online to use it.  It has built in storyboarding, collaboration, casting and scheduling features - all of which can be shared online if you wish to build interest in your film, and boasts 250,000 active users.

It also has a rather neat feature whereby scenes you assign to a date in your shooting schedule will import all information about all associated characters, props and locations into the calendar and automatically produce a call sheet.

You can download a copy for Mac, PC or Linux.

From Silence: 

Get Connected, the charity that provides a helpline for young people, and digital advertising agency Silence are launching a website, Nobody's Perfect, for young filmmakers and actors to showcase their talents to professional movie directors and producers. They can submit film, music and scripts to win the chance of helping to produce 6 short films that address issues like self-harm, sexuality and bullying. 

"Get Connected provides a confidential phone, email and web-chat service for under-25s and this competition will let them communicate their feelings in a way that's relevant to them," says Chloe Darlington, External Affairs Manager at Get Connected. "We chose to work with Silence because of their unrivalled knowledge of the digital environment and their enthusiasm for attracting entrants and rallying the film industry."

British movie producer Nick O'Hagan (Fever Pitch, Wilde, Daylight Robbery) is supporting Nobody's Perfect by judging entrants and mentoring the winners. "I'm really pleased to be supporting this project," says Nick. "I feel passionate about finding ways to help young people express themselves through the arts. Hopefully we'll be able to uncover some exciting new talent."