As web moves to TV, child protection is key, but ISP-level filtering won't work
Written by Nic Wistreich
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20 December 2010
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internet and technology
So, Digital and Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has backed MP Clare Perry's calls to create a firewall of Britain to support the seemingly reasonable aim of protecting children from pornography (and potentially keeping adults from materials classified under the Obscene Publications Act). With the web now moving further towards the TV, the suggestion is not much of a surprise.
While it's tempting to dismiss it as an attempt for the government to filter the web so it can block a future Wikileaks - especially after Vaizey's Network Neutrality misfire - the discussion of how to deal with the difference between TV, where you can't say certain words before 9pm, and the web, which knows no limits, needs to take place. And as The Register - telling people to calm down - points out, Vaizey has suggested he doesn't want to legislate but wants to act as broker between industry and ISPs.
Indeed Vaizey was cautious when the issue was first raised by Conservative MP Claire Perry in the Commons on November 23rd, afraid of what he called a 'Twitter Storm', but in yesterday's Sunday Times he said he wanted to see the ISP industry introduce measures soon. To recap what Perry was calling for:
"I am asking for a change in regulation that would require all UK-based internet service providers to restrict universal access to pornographic material by implementing a simple opt-in system based on age verification."
Yet - as anyone who understands the web's structure will know - there is no 'simple opt-in system'. So asides from the censorship problems of blocking entire websites - spelt out well by the Guardian today, which points out that sites like Flickr, YouTube, Blogger and Tumblr all have adult channels - is the practical fact that the kind of filtering Perry and Vaizey are calling for just has never been proven to work - indeed research below suggests it could slow down connections by up to 86% while wrongly blocking millions of child-safe websites, and letting millions more child-unsafe websites flood thru.
There are three ways to crudely filter content by age:
- on websites themselves, putting responsibility on publishers;
- in browsers, putting responsibility on parents and those who control the web connection;
- and at ISP level, which requires the ISPs to track, review and filter all of their traffic thru some automated process.
Vaizey pointed out to Perry in the commons debate that a UK adult website was recently prosecuted for not providing sufficient adult content warnings on their front page (which in turn alerts browser blockers like CyberNanny). Perry responded that this is no help with foreign websites and suggested that most parents are either too busy to know how to install a filter in the browser - "through technological ignorance, time pressure or inertia or for myriad other reasons, this filtering solution is not working" - so the responsibility should be with the ISP.
To avoid parents having to take responsibility for what their children has access to (unlike alcohol, cigarettes, DVDs or TV in the home) Perry says the ISP should play a kind of gatekeeper nanny, filtering all content unless someone tells their ISP they are an adult, while presumably auto-filtering anything else that looks like it might be illegal under the Obscene Publications Act. And here is where many online have started to panic - it would surely just be a matter of time before other kinds of content got added - first suicide forums, racist hate sites, terrorism related content, then alleged copyright infringement perhaps. At such a point, the Internet would be a different place, subject to the whims of the government of the day. If a filter was in place it would be a challenge for MPs to avoid using it as a political tool, and it's hard to imagine in the long term during, say, student demonstrations them not blocking sites for protesters who 'may be planning violence', or sites which publish damaging leaked confidential documents.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves - right now, all that's happening is a meeting of ISPs and concerned parties, around a table, some time next month. And whatever the outcome of that, the simple issue is that ISP-level auto filtering doesn't work. As well as slowing down web connections considerably, ISP-level filters fail to block what they’re supposed to, and succeed in blocking what shouldn’t be.
It's a no brainer - how could can anyone other than a human distinguish between, for instance, scenes from Lars von Trier's Antichrist or Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ and material currently banned under the Obscene Publications Act?
In one of the main studies into the area, ahead of trying to implement a similar Australia-wide firewall, Australia's OFCOM, the ACMA, did research into the accuracy and impact of ISP-level filtering, called “Closed Environment Testing of ISP-Level Internet Content Filtering” which showed five big problems with ISP filtering:
- All filters tested had problems with under-blocking, allowing access to between 2% and 13% of material that they should have blocked;
- All filters tested had serious problems with over-blocking, wrongly blocking access to between 1.3% and 7.8% of the websites tested;
- One filter caused a 22% drop in speed even when it was not performing filtering;
- Only one of the six filters had an acceptable level of performance (a drop of 2% in a laboratory trial), the others causing drops in speed of between 21% and 86%;
- The most accurate filters were often the slowest.
If you were one of the 3 - 18 million inaccurately blocked websites because of ISP filtering (based on 231m websites world), who would you sue for loss of business? The government? The ISP? Meanwhile websites that auto-publish content, like Netribution, as well as web forums, would be at risk of being blocked automatically from the actions of one user - only the web giants who could afford constant 24-7 moderation would be able to survive.
The fact that children and teenageers have access online to images and video beyond my wildest imagination when I was that age has long troubled me, and a serious debate between ISPs, web and browser companies, content producers and end users is a good thing - especially as the web moves to the TV. It also troubled me when working in a primary school last year which had a strict web firewall,that it offered unlimited access to YouTube - which is filled with adult content - but not the website we'd built for the school, or the Vimeo videos embedded in those pages (until we spoke to a filtering help desk for 30 minutes).
So it's an important issue, but what must be avoided - after the chaos of the Digital Economy Act - is for an MP with rudimentary technical understanding to push thru an invented 'solution' to a genuine problem that bears so little relationship with reality they end up creating a heap of new problems - and alienating the people whose support would be needed for a solution to work.
Because the only solution that I can imagine working is the crowd-model, the - gulp - Big Society answer. A huge federated opt-in crowd-built database run by parents, teachers and concerned people ticking off websites and video safe for different ages, based on common guidelines. And then browser and operating system makers could hardwire a very simple way for parents to turn ON a filter for their children not showing anything that isn't on the ever increasing list for that age group. Crude, but more dependable than any of the other controls - and at the same time not absolving the parent from their responsibility over what their child can do at home.
What Happened? Sandip Mahal on stereotypes in British TV
Written by sandip mahal
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10 November 2010
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media and representation
For me television (and the 90’s) really started with Buddha of Suburbia, which had fully developed Indian characters that weren’t stereotypes to cringe at. Yes shopkeepers and arranged marriages were in there but it was done in a funny demented way that wasn’t patronising. I know there was My Beautiful Laundrette before it (from the same writer no less) but this was better. Add My Son the Fanatic which was years ahead of it’s time in terms of it’s subject matter, East is East (not my favourite but popular nonetheless) and then the ground breaking Goodness Gracious Me and after that…. Er that’s it.
We seem to have gone backwards again with Curry urchins on Eastenders, corner shop owners on Corrie (aka Currie?) and an ITV Call Centre comedy that seems to evoke Mind Your Language seeing as the latter had an LWT weekend slot. All this slow progress and progressive work has suddenly gone into reverse. Granted, we have Gurinder Chadha flying the flag but she is all alone out there and not much is being done to pan out the television schedules to reflect the diversity of the United Kingdom and when they do it’s with a resounding commercial and critical thump. I would estimate that we are 20 years behind American television we need to close the gap.
We need characters like the ones written for the screen by Hanif Kureishi rather than the caricatures in Eastenders and Coronation street. This can only be done by true talent spotting rather than diversity nights that the channels seem to be doing to ‘feel clean’.
Actors of colour like Dev Patel and Adrian Lester have already disappeared to America where characters are stronger, can we afford to lose more like them?
Exhibition and Distribution: dirty words?
Written by Laurence Boyce
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06 October 2010
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cinema
Laurence Boyce, regular Netribution contributor and former director of GLIMMER: The Hull International Short Film Festival, give his opinion on the worrying trend to ignore exhibition and distribution in the UKFC debate.
(EDIT: Since being published, this article has also appeared on the Encounters International Film Festival website at www.encounters-festival.org)
A recent letter to Sight And Sound from the British Federation of Film Societies pointed out a crucial omission in many of the discussions surrounding the demise of the UK Film Council. Whilst its importance in the production of UK films has been justifiably analysed, it’s significance in the exhibition and distribution within the UK cannot be understated. Either directly or through Regional Screen Agencies, the UKFC has part funded almost all of the film festivals in the UK from the likes of the London Film Festival to dozens of regional festivals bringing movies and events to local communities. The aforementioned British Federation of Film Societies has received UKFC funding for a decade to help bring cinema to rural areas and give people access to film that they otherwise may be denied. It’s P&A fund has helped small films increase the number of screens they’ve been able to book whilst magazines such as Little White Lies have received funding from the UKFC’s New Publications Fund. With support such as this in danger, there is a huge chance that – in the UK at least – audiences are going to be denied the opportunity to experience a wide ranging choice of films from the UK and beyond.
Benefits of Photoshop Services from Clipping Path Service providing company
Written by Atiqur Sumon
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22 September 2010
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internet and technology
In recent time there is great headway in photo industry. Modern technology has changed the entire process of photographing. Gone are the days of analog imaging. We are in the era of digital imaging. However, over and above digital imaging, there is nowadays the use of computer in photographing. Some photo software can be run in computer to make room for all types of image manipulation.
Consequently, photo business is becoming lucrative. Many people have rushed into the business. Despite the existence of many photo companies, not all the companies are of the same standard. One of the best graphics services in the entire photo world is Clipping Path. The clipping path service providing company has continued to improve greatly in the quality of photo treatment services they deliver to their clients. The company has now a great number of clients. This is largely because of the excellent services delivered by clipping path service providing company. You stand to gain a lot from clipping path service if you do all your photo treatment works in the company.
What you will benefit from clipping path service providing company
Quality work: Clipping path service has distinguished itself from other photo companies in the quality of work they deliver to their clients. Even though there is nowadays improved system of photographing, but for more standard work that will stand the test of time there is need for experience workers. Clipping Path services are supplied by an offshore outsourcing company that has a team of well trained and dedicated experts that handle all photo work with ease. The management of Clipping Path Service providing company knows the importance of working with qualified workers. They constantly trained their worker to be more knowledgeable in all photo techniques known to the photo world. Experience and proficiency are the chief criteria for employment in clipping path in activities. Secondly, to maintain high quality photo services, Clipping Path Service providing company has introduced high quality control system.
Low cost services: Besides delivering excellent and unbeatable quality photo works, clipping path delivering company has greatly reduced the prices of all their photo treatment services. This makes all their services affordable to their clients. In addition to cheap services, in their payments are made after services. Clipping Path Service providing company predicated on trust and honesty. There is also volume discount in all photo service activities as well as clipping path. Besides this types company believe in satisfaction of their clients. The satisfaction of their customers is their chief concerns. This is unlike other company that put premium on money instead of customer satisfaction.
Quick Turnaround: Clipping Path Service providing company has never been found wanting in delivering work on time. Most of the time, team of experts finishes their works before the agreed time. Besides delivering work on time, they will always keep in touch with regard to the status of your work.
24 hours services: Clipping Path Service providing company runs a 24 hours system of services. There is immediate reply to email and calls. Besides, you can get quotation within an hour. Besides the above, you stand to gain easy and flexible services. This service providing company maintains huge amount of image processing capacity all the moment.To get more idea about clipping path service providing company visit www.clippingpathindia.com and www.clippingpathspecialist.com .
Vingle: Wikipedia history
Written by Nic Wistreich
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23 July 2010
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evolution
Just found this, made me smile.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Apple Computer has applied for a trademark on the term 'Vingle'.
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A '''vingle'' is a [[portmanteau]] of ''video'' and ''single''. The [[neologism]] refers to [[music video]]s that can be [[audio mixing|mixed]] by [[VJ]]s in the same way that [[DJ]]s mix regular [[single (music)|music singles]].
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The iPod maker filed for the trademark with the United States Patent and Trademark Office on October 7th 2005, under three distinct categories.
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The word was coined by a group of VJs in [[London]] in late [[2003]].
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The first filing describes Vingle as: "Telecommunication services, namely, electronic transmission of streamed and downloadable audio and video files via computer and other communications networks; providing on-line chat rooms, bulletin boards and community forums for the transmission of messages among computer users concerning entertainment, music, concerts, videos, radio, television, film, news, sports, games and cultural events; web casting services; delivery of messages by electronic transmission; provision of connectivity services and access to electronic communications networks, for transmission or reception of audio, video or multimedia content;"
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The word was coined at the ''This Is Clip Hop'' party during [[ResFest]] 2003 [http://www.res.com/], organised by the audio-visual artist collective [http://www.0point1.com/parties/ "0.1"]. Vingles were subsequently seen in 0.1's launch party for [[Hewlett Packard]]'s [[HyPe Gallery]] project [http://www.hypegallery.com/].
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A second filing describes Vingle as an audio entertainment service that may be available in its retail stores: "Retail store services in the field of entertainment, namely, musical, audio and audiovisual works and related merchandise, provided via the internet and other computer and electronic communication networks; data storage and retrieval services; computerized data storage services; electronic storage and retrieval of documents, data, images, audio, video and audiovisual works; information, advisory and consultancy services relating to all the aforesaid"
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An example vingle would be [[Hexstatic]]'s ''Timber'' [http://www.ninjatune.net/videos/video.php?type=qt&id=10].
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A final filing is more vague, describing Vingle as "Computers; computer hardware; computer peripherals; hand held computers; computer terminals; personal digital assistants; electronic organizers; electronic notepads; apparatus for recording, transmission and reproduction of sounds, images, or other data; portable and handheld digital electronic devices for recording, organizing, transmitting, manipulating, and reviewing audio, video and still images files; magnetic data carriers; mobile digital electronic devices; telephones; computer gaming machines; monitors, displays, keyboards, cables, modems, printers, videophones, disk drives; cameras; computer software; computer software for use in authoring, downloading, transmitting, receiving, editing, extracting, encoding, decoding, playing, storing and organizing audio, video and still images; computer software for DVD authoring; prerecorded computer programs for personal information management; database management software; computer programs for accessing, browsing and searching online databases; blank computer and consumer electronic storage media; computer and electronic games; user manuals sold as a unit with the aforementioned goods"
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0.1 began work on http://vingle.org/ vingle.org] as a community site for sharing music, video and completed vingles through a "web based public asset repository and trading system (PARTS) specialising in visual music", [http://shootingpeople.org/home/viewcard.php?act=act&card=25527&message=143264] going so far as to create a launch event at the [[Leeds Film Festival]] [[2004]]. [[As of 2005]], the vingle.org site has not been launched.
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All three filings were submitted on October 7th.
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[[Apple Computer]] has applied for a trademark on the term [http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1321].
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''History''
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The phrase vingle was coined by a group of VJs and audio visual artists in London in autumn 2003 to describes visual singles which combine video and audio and could be played and mixed in live club settings. Although it did not describe itself as such, the first true vingle is most likely Hexstatic's Timber video single. The first use of the phrase vingle to describe such work was at the This Is Clip Hop closing night party of ResFest 2003 at Motion in Embankment, London (see http://www.0point1.com/parties/index.html ) featuring Hexstatic and organised by the AV collective 0.1. Vingles were subsequently seen in 0.1's launch party for Hewlett Packard's HyPe Gallery project.
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0.1 soon began work on vingle.org as a planned community site for sharing music, video and completed vingles through a 'a web based public asset repository and trading system (PARTS) specialising in visual music', going so far as to create a launch event at the Leeds Film Festival 2004 (see http://shootingpeople.org/home/viewcard.php?act=act&card=25527&message=143264 ) although the site has not yet launched.
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A lesson in how to profit from the free for the film industry
Written by Nic Wistreich
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19 June 2010
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Finance
A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other bits of software - or the whole bundle of extensions with a year of updates for $99. Plus there was a discount code of $20 floating around. It took me about five minutes to decide to make the payment.
To reverse this process, psychologically: if at the beginning I had learnt about a good piece of software costing $80 I would probably have ignored it and looked for something cheaper or free. Instead, because I got something very powerful at no cost, that I could try out, I decided to trust the software developers to make something even more incredible at a price.
It reminided me how the film and creative businesses who succeed on the internet will be those that find a way to first offer something incredible for free, and then offer something even better that is worth paying for.
Music is pretty much there. Listen to a song on MySpace or Spotify or wherever, and like it enough to pay £25 to see the artist in concert. Radiohead made more for pay-what-you want In Rainbows than their previous three albums combined, and followed with their largest tour in years. The same with books - Cory Doctorow's and Paulo Coelho's sales famously rose after they began to offer the full texts online for free. For film tho we have a significant challenge. The non-free experiences worth paying for are merchandise, DVDs and going to the cinema. DVD sales are in decline, while merchandise and cinema releases are typically reserved for bigger budget releases.
This is why the news that Franny Armstrong's Age of Stupid made £110,000 (over $160,000) through non-theatrical exhibtion - eg screenings in community groups, schools, town halls and conferences - is worth paying attention to. She not only probably made more money for distributor-free exhibition than anyone in British film history, but also got people to promote her film endlessly for free (the same people who had previously funded it's production, often). At the same time, while Franny didn't offer the full film on the web, she created a huge universe of free content that could be watched and read online, as well as a compelling narrative from the film's inception (and first public mention here on Netribution) through it's record-breaking fundraising through to it's legendary release. GoodScreenings.org - launched last week in partnership with the ever dynamic BritDoc - seeks to bring the system to more films and filmmakers and builds on the famous work of Jim Gilliam and Robert Greenwald in re-conceiving exhibition.
Multi-platform business training - August 2010
Written by Laura Almellones
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27 May 2010
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cinema
from Laura at the Media Business School
Multi Platform Business School is a five-day workshop for producers of audiovisual media to enhance their skills in building business models for the development of 360º - content, the financing and marketing of linear and interactive formats and the distribution in more than one market.
The Digital Creative Economy - five suggestions for Vince Cable & Jeremy Hunt
Written by Nic Wistreich
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13 May 2010
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Studio 2.0
While there is some hint that the new British coalition government will follow through on the Lib Dem policy of rescinding the rushed and hated Digital Economy Bill to let it get full and appropriate scrutiny, I would imagine that many new cabinet members are grateful to Ben Bradshaw and Lord Mandelson for pushing through an unpopular piece of legislation as a parting gift and saving them from having to implement it themselves.
However the expected consequences of the Act on the healthy and profitable parts of the digital economy (from coffee shops with wifi to iPhone developers), essential for any kind of economic recovery or new growth, means the new government should at the very least reconsider the last government's approach to the problems of piracy and the promise of the digital economy. It may be that the OFCOM guidelines currently being discussed can exempt public wifi, scrap website blocking and push the three strikes option further into the future. But it may end up being smoother to introduce a new Act in 'DEAct's place, closer to Lord Carter's original recommendations before Mandy yachted with David Geffen and amended the public consultation. For what it's worth, I outline below five points that I think should be held in mind when shaping policy or campaigning in this area.
1. The Sky is not Falling
DVD and Music revenues are currently rising (DVD up 31% Q1, UK music sales up in 09, digital royalties rise outstrips CD fall). Indeed, file-sharers using the Pirate Bay apparently spend 75% more each year on music and film than non-filesharers (£77 as opposed to £44 pa).
2. Hollywood is stalling on providing legal alternatives
There are very few legitimate, comprehensive and competitive film streaming or download services: iTunes has less films than Tescos and getting your film on there is very hard (plus it costs more than my video shop, which makes little sense). Penalising consumers before the content industry has offered proper download solutions de-incentivises the studios to collaborate on these solutions - indeed shortly after the Bill went through, Hulu.com dropped plans to launch in the UK. Currently there is a lot of delay from the studios over technology as all of them want to control it. Piracy may be the most effective motivator to get them to release a legitimate alternative - ie. without filesharing we probably would never have had music industry agreement on Spotify.
3. The Digital Economy is not the Information Economy
Facebook, Google, Flickr, Twitter, etc (ie the centre of the Digital Economy) build their businesses around the intellectual property of their users; they depend on people sharing their own IP, without limit or compensation, to sell adverts against. They see little or no difference between a content producer who tweets, blogs, shares a link, mashups, photoshops, comments or makes an album or feature film as they're all advert opportunities, and there's nothing to presume that the quality of the content equates to the demographic value of the viewer to advertisers. Few professional web-native content creators - if any - would risk the backlash from trying to sue one of their fans (just as Oasis wouldn't sue someone who jumped the fence at Glastonbury for lost ticket sales).
4. Legitimate free content is just as much a threat to producers
Content creators distributing online must compete with a near-infinite amount of free and legitimate video, growing at an exponential rate. While Hollywood has committed itself to prosecuting and criminalising its potential audience, the British film and video industry may not have the luxury of being able to alienate potential cinema-goers and DVD-buyers. It is unlikely that the competition for attention online will be won by those companies that display the most bullying and aggressive behaviour (unless they have the new Batman or James Cameron film) and the British industry would be sage to study how the Pay-What-You-Want experiments of Radiohead (3 million sales of In Rainbows, avg £4 price) and the Humble Indie Game Bundle (which has just taken over $1m in one week) have done so well from of the 'Buskers Hat' model.
5. Even if piracy stopped, lots of people will lose their jobs (and need to retrain)
Part of the root of Hollywood's panic is the threat - not from pirates or even free legit content - but of technology replacing the bulk of their jobs. Social media makes marketing departments redundant, getting a trailer cut is less of a priority when dozens of YouTube fans will make one themselves, digital distribution replaces not only buyers and planners, but video rental shops and DVD designers. Filmmaking still needs a large team, but sales, marketing and distribution needs a smaller, more savvy breed of wired, serial networkers fluent in all digital media forms. Avoiding job losses is as unlikely as YouTube videomakers paying union rates. Much of the attitude from legacy Hollywood and the unions is that 'if we get governments to legislate hard enough, the realities of doing business on the Internet in the 21st Century will go away'. While ridiculous, this is an opportunity for British companies to make a head-start in building the future infrastructure and services that support the Digital world we're approaching. One where attention is such a scarcity that few, if any, artists would add barriers such as payment or court summons to stop people 'spending' their time on their work, and instead will build their business models around the slipstream of such activity, once the user is engaged.
I hold little hope that our new government will listen to this and similar arguments from those across Britain's digital economy; personal contact with my local MP, the House of Lords enquiry, lobbyists, a union head and Digital Minister Stephen Timms amounted to nothing during the last parliament. That said, the Liberal Democrats did vote against the Bill, while Tory MPs such as Bill Cash and John Redward were highly critical of it (and surprisingly well informed). If we simply implement it as it is, the new global digital economy will continue to be driven by Sweden and California, unlikely to get similar legislation soon, with the UK - behind only two of the 250 most popular websites in the world - becoming a 'quaint' and frustrated digital backwater.
Crossing the Pond: Ten Tips for Making it in LA
Written by Alan Denman
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24 April 2010
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cinema
Ever considered trying to launch your film career from LA? Concerned about the outcome of the next British election and considering your options? Alan Denman was a pivotal part of the London indie film community, notably as Chair of the Screenwriter's Workshop and Head of Development for Euroscript until he left to the US in 2004. Tom Fogg interviewed him here, long ago, and indeed when I started working for Shooting People he offered me free desk space. Now, with his wife Ayesha Walker (pictured below), he runs Stinging Bull Films from Hollywood and has already made his first feature.
Alan has written for Netribution a fascinating and in-depth account of his experience as a Brit in LA, learning to speak 'American', getting a Visa, writing a sellable script, as well as ten tips for making it in a very different film environment. It's 4,000 words of insider gold-dust, and worth bookmarking and reading fully when you have the time.
Six thousand feet up in the San Bernadino Mountains of Southern California. Day One of Principal Photography: a long shot of our young lead actress walking along a deserted forest road. She goes ahead on her own – and suddenly screams. That wasn’t in the script, I think to myself. I look past her to observe a large brown bear crossing the set. Principal photography is suspended as she runs back to join the main party. Fortunately she hasn’t been mauled or eaten. Indeed, the bear seems not even to have noticed her. Nervously we all creep forward to watch the creature happily snuffling around in a neighbour’s garden before moving off. Such are the dangers, thrills and indelible memories of filmmaking.
I was there in California, a British director, shooting my first feature, which I had also written. The crew worked like Trojans, and the young American cast had so much energy it was impossible to persuade them to get to bed at night. Then in the morning they’d be up early to go through their lines with me and help rewrite my very British dialogue.
This was my first experience of how different filmmaking in America is. Though obvious to me now, coming then from the only culture I knew – Britain – it was a big surprise to realize how differently people spoke on the other side of the Pond. You think Americans speak English? Think again – they speak American, and I needed to learn their language. The first read-through of the script was a comedy of confusion. We might as well have been speaking French and Greek, for all we understood each other. In a combination of wisdom and desperation I gave them free rein to improvise. It worked. What resulted was dialogue that was vibrant and fascinating, something I could never have dreamed up in my drafty North London flat. It was, to quote my American cast, “awesome”.
I had been writing screenplays and making short films for ten years and had reached a sort of glass ceiling: I could have gone on making shorts in Britain, but what I really wanted to do was shoot a feature. So I wrote a micro budget, small-scale sci-fi thriller, a sort of “UFO Blair Witch” about young people in a remote place looking for aliens and disappearing one by one. My original plan – a very rough one – was to take a bunch of young actors to Cheshunt Marshes, a strange area outside North London with murky lakes and towering pylons, and, hoping for the best, shoot a semi-improvised script. Not a great plan, maybe. But then I sent the script to a good friend of mine who was studying screenwriting at UCLA, one of the big universities, in Los Angeles. There he passed on the script to a producer, who loved it and was himself looking for a project of that scale and budget to produce. The timing was perfect. Serendipity. Click.
And so, four months later, in the summer of 2003 I flew to LA and then drove out in convoy with the producer, cast and crew to the San Bernadino Mountains to direct my feature film, which, after much discussion and development, was now called Alien Game. The shoot was immensely hard work and at the same time hugely rewarding, a practical degree course in filmmaking compressed into four weeks. The skies were high, blue and empty, and the mountains epically spectacular. I loved being there. Thus in innocence and hope began my journey cross the Pond.
With growing self-belief and a magnetic curiosity towards Los Angeles, the heart of the global film industry, and the vast opportunities available it offers, my wife and I relocated there in the summer of 2004 and have been living there ever since....
Maligned Midnight Cult Classic
Written by sandip mahal
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14 April 2010
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cinema
There was a time up until the late 90’s where late night television cult oddities were shown to fill out the schedules. To most people this was just fodder but for some people this was THE place where b-movie fanatics discovered cult classics like Race with the Devil, or The Keep and the now forgotten classic Night of the Eagle with Peter Wyngarde. Appearing in the graveyard slots, these films were in their element for those who stayed up in the ungodly hour and are 200 percent better and scarier than anything released in recent memory.
In America there has been more of a foundation for cult movies like the Golden Turkey Awards and Joe Bob Briggs getting airtime. In the UK some took a masterly appreciation of the art form such as Alex Cox’s Moviedrome which started its movie night in 1988 on a Sunday evening with a great incisive intro. Previously tossed to the side classics were brought centre stage such as The Parallax View and various Robert Aldrich films with full appreciation but nowadays these films are rarely shown in these slots that are now filled with reality TV and cheap TV repeats.
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