The Scottish games developers behind the highly controversial yet critically acclaimed Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City have announced first week sales of $500m, on over six million copies. The figure - with $310 on the first day - not only sets a record for video games, beating Microsoft's Halo 3, but surpasses that of any entertainment product, with the violent-crime-pays game also boosting flagging sales of the Playstation 3 and XBox consoles by up to 50% in the week.

It's a long way from Lemmings - the try-to-save-as-many-lives-as-you-can game - which brought the developers to prominence in the early 90s. Then based in Dundee and called DMA, the studio was approached by Nintendo to be part of the 'dream team' for the launch of the N64, but ended up in 'development hell' on their N64 title, Body Harvest, so turned their attention to creating the first Grand Theft Auto for the PC. It was a similar fusion of driving game with roleplay narrative, except the body harvesting aliens were replaced with more straightforward criminals and joyriders.

A series of acquisitions has left Rockstar North under the ownership of Take Two Interactive, who in turn are currently under a hostile takeover bid from video games giant EA, trying to buy them for $2billion. But the developers of Grand Theft Auto - and other controversial titles such as Bully (be a school bully) and Manhunt (be a, erm, mass murderer) are still based in the UK, with offices in in Edinburgh and Leeds.

For its blend of sex and violence in high-rendered 3D, the Trainspotting of the video-game world has received wide criticism and calls from conservative Christian attorney Jack Thompson in the US to ban the game, who even took to writing to the mothers of Take Two's executive board pleading for them to make their sons act. The ability to not just pick up prostitutes in the game, but to run them over, maim and kill them after virtual sex has caused widespread concern, especially with the game released in the same week that the new UK Criminal Justice Bill made it illegal to own images that contain "an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person's life" in a sexual context (one also wonders if this will apply to Basic Instinct and Bond film GoldenEye). 

The publishers argue that it is up to the players to decide what they do in each game - it provides the means for players to runover countless civilians, or attack prostitutes, but it is their choice. Furthermore, they say that the game has received unparalleled high critical acclaim with many reviewers describing it as the game of the decade, and some pointing out psychological maturity with the main character become increasingly unsatisfied with his brutal lifestyle as the game continues. Either way, with the breathtaking graphics pushing the genre closer to reality, the critics are unlikely to move on, any more than the film industry is likely to stand back from a sector which makes so much money, and is largely free from piracy (in consoles, at least). Steven Spielberg just last week announced details of his first collaboration with EA - Boom Blox - a kind of tennis-meets-Jenga game for the Wii (pictured).

Digital Innovation in Film is a new initiative from NESTA and the UK Film Council, which will help drive growth in British independent film companies by encouraging them to take better advantage of new technologies.

NESTA and the UK Film Council are calling film companies, who want to explore the potential of online sales, distribution and marketing, to come forward.

How it works

The 'Digital Innovation in Film' project will team-up independent film companies with specialist partners to reach audiences in new ways.

The project is the first in a series from NESTA's Innovators Growth programme, which will explore ways for creative businesses to grow by exploiting new technologies.

Over the next few months, NESTA and the UK Film Council will select up to 10 film companies from across the UK to take part in the project. They will be involved in workshops and receive one-to-one support from partners to explore emerging opportunities for new revenue streams.

Getting involved

If you are a film business and would like to be considered for participation in the project, please download the application form.

If you are a potential partner and would like to be considered for participation, please download the tender document.

Film Source LA have posted up a few useful tools for filmmaking for your computer. These work on Dashboard on a mac, tho PC equivalents can probably be found.

Sun Position - which lets you input any location, time and date and kicks out the suns position.

Weatherbug - a pretty comprehensive weather widget with windspeed and access to local webcams to take a quick look.

Film Calculator Widget - they designed this so you can input footage-frame rate-film type and amount of tape needed.

A future of TV free from the monopolistic control of a single company or country has moved a step closer with the launch of Miro 1.0. Miro is two things - a far more powerful web video manager and viewer than siblings iTunes, Windows Media Player and Joost - and it's open source and developed by a non-profit company. This means there should be no privacy invading ads based on your private user data, clunky DRM or attempts to sell you anything - including lousy TV.

I've just downloaded and installed it, and already can search and download YouTube vids, HiDef channels and DailyMotions, subscribe to ZeFrank, BoingBoingTV and National Geographic, manage all the video on my machine, create playlists and so on.

Best of all its open source so if the Participatory Culture Foundation ever took their eye off the ball and became the Big Evil Web Video Censor that Google and Yahoo seem OK with becoming, because the software is open source anyone else could pick up and continue. If you care about freedom of speech and are involved in web video as a viewer or maker you should check this out and get a copy.

A new public art ‘mobile blogging' website - called the Big Art Mob - is now live. The site at www.channel4.com/bigartmob is designed to build a web-based resource and community ahead of next year's Big Art Project television series on Channel 4 and with a life well beyond the broadcast.

[‘Mobile blogging' involves sending photos, text and other media direct from your mobile phone to appear within seconds on a widely accessible website.]

The Big Art Mob invites people to help make the UK's first comprehensive map of public art by sending photos (and text, video or audio, if they so desire) to do with public art straight from their mobile phones. Using a combination of Google Maps, a geo-coding facility  and ‘tags' (i.e. labels/keywords - created by the senders and viewers alike), these photos and moblog ‘posts' will collectively form an interactive map to celebrate and preserve the country's wealth of public art.

"Might we not prefer to build worlds that encourage those same values and skills we wish them to exercise in the real world?"

Virtual worlds threaten 'values'

Opening the Virtual World Forum in London, Lord Putnam, one of the architects of current British film policy and an Oscar winning producer, has talked of the dangers of companies creating immersive worlds aimed at children, with many worlds rewarding children for consumption, as opposed to developing useful life skills or qualities.

"Inconvenient experiences don’t have Web-scale potential, and platforms which monetize the gigantic scale of the Web is the only way to compete with the control you’ve lost, the only way to reclaim value in the music* industry."

(* publishing / software / film / media )  

Yahoo's Music exec Ian Rogers this week gave a presentation to the music industry saying that Yahoo will no longer support DRM or restrictive practices from record labels. (via BoingBoing).

"Want radio? No problem. Click play, get radio. Want video? Awesome. Click play, get video. Want a track on-demand? Oh have we got a deal for you! If you’re on Windows XP or Vista, and you’re in North America, just download this 20MB application, go through these seven install screens, reboot your computer, go through these five setup screens, these six credit card screens, give us $160 dollars and POW! Now you can hear that song you wanted to hear…"

9 billion films were watched online in July 2007 in the US alone, according to the latest figures from comScore Networks. The figure is up from around 7 billion in March, with 134 million people each watching an average of 181 minutes of video during the month.

Interestingly, just 27% of clips watched were through Google/YouTube, which nevertheless far outstripped its rivals - Yahoo nabbed a distant second place, serving up 4.3 percent of the clips, while Fox Interactive Media (MySpace), came in third with 3.3 percent. Viacom (3.1 percent) and Disney (2 percent) rounded out the top five. Google also ranked first in July in unique video viewers with almost 68 million, followed by Fox Interactive (35.8 million), Yahoo (35.3 million), Time Warner Inc. (26.6 million) and Viacom (22.6 million), comScore said.

That means over 50% of films watched online on either very small video sharing/hosting sites or on people's own sites.

World Peace day to launch new free web channel, although only on Joost

From Peace One Day founder Jeremy Gilley:

I am writing to you from the international film project Peace One Day, which I launched in 1999 to document my efforts to create the first ever annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence with a fixed calendar date. In 2001, Peace One Day achieved its primary objective. The United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution formally establishing an annual day of global ceasefire and non-violence on the UN International Day of Peace fixed in the global calendar on 21 September – Peace Day.
    
Since then, with the backing of world leaders, Nobel Peace Laureates, corporations and countless individuals around the world, Peace One Day has been working to raise awareness of Peace Day and to engage all sectors of society in the Day’s peaceful observance in accordance with the resolution. On 21 September 2006 there were activities in 200 countries, directly involving 27.6 million people.

"Humans are migratory beasts and as soon as they figure out that they’ve been locked-in-they’ll rebel."
Marc CanterAs Facebook faces a lawsuit from uni-peers of founder Mark Zuckerberg claiming he stole the idea from them, Wired publishes a debate of why Facebook - and other social networks need to be open. With social networks evolving into operating systems for how you stay in touch with your friends and family - as  well as share and consume media - the advantages of an open system (like the web itself) over a closed system, controlled by one company (like Microsoft) are pretty clear.

That said, given the size of the social capital which networks such as facebook and myspace create and earn from their users (through ads), it may only be a matter of time before the web creates its own more open alternatives, as Dan Farber suggests on ZDNet (who also points out that Marc Canter has long been talking about this). A campaign for 'transportable identity' has been started by Nick O'Neil on his unofficial Facebook blog. To paraphrase someone, information is like water, always running towards the biggest, most open ocean, corroding whatever stands in  its way. Personally I must admit to be a little addicted to the 'book, but I'm ready to move on if (when) it becomes part of some big multinational media behemoth. Sooner or later a user-owned and run system will evolve, and we can finally talk about web 3.0. If only someone, like a public agency, would invest in creating an open source / open standards social network, with the same sort of backing MyFilms received. (For those interested in trying to start one up, Wired has published a Wiki on how to build a Facebook using open tools).

Imagine having to use a different TV set to watch every TV channel - one for Channel 4, one for Sky, one for Viacom channels. Because every media company wants to control the user interface for online video, that's the current future we're looking at, with Amazons UnBox player for films bought from Amazon, iTunes for films downloaded from Apple, and so on. The only way round it would be if all of them collaborated on a single player - tho small producers would doubtless get left out in the long run. And even then, as Cory Doctorow rightly says, online video is too important to leave in the hands of one company. 

Miro, is a video player created by a non-profit foundation in America created under the open source GPL license, which basically allows anyone else to re-use it and adapt it for free. Better still it's an excellent video player. Search for and download YouTube videos? Manage video on your own machine and play and open ANY FORMAT? Subscribe to video podcasts and webisodes? Download legit BitTorrents. And because it's an open source system, there's lots of people building on it and improving it all the time (this system has been developed for years as 'Democracy Player') and you don't need to worry about hidden nasties like the Amazon EULA, which requests users to. The Participatory Culture Foundation, which develops it, has also created the Broadcast Machine, which makes it easy to run your own iTunes-subscribable video channel on your website.

Good news for anyone who is concerned about online video ending up in the pockets of one greedy media tycoon.

Vito Rocco's Goodbye Cruel World, produced by the UK arm of Partizan (music video whizzes and creators of The Science of Sleep and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), has won 60% of the vote in the MyMoviesMashup contest. Rocco will go on to direct his feature Faintheart with a £1m budget and guaranteed distribution. While not strictly an amateur, as MySpace sister paper The Times describes him, it's a cracking short film. I won't forgive myself for not getting an interview with Oscar and Palme D'Or winner Andrea Arnold while editing Shooting People's Wideshot magazine, but James did, thankfully, interview Rocco after I saw this film - supported by Film London and Screen East - win the Kodak Shorts audience award in 2003.

Sony's all-new XDCAM EX solid-state camcorder was first seen at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) show in Las Vegas where it was the most talked about product at the show. Crowds of people fought to get a glimpse of it.

The EX series is Sony's first solid-state only camcorder, not dissimilar in size and weight to previous Sony prosumer cameras such as the PD170, Z1, and V1 models,  but there the similarities end.

Bjorks' recent show at California's Coachella festival is described in BoingBoing (again) where she used the Reactable, 'a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface' which has to be seen to be believed. Basically a hi-level synthesizer with an interface simpler than playing lego it's one of a number of table top instruments that try and create a 'tangible interface' for electronic music.  

Apple® has unveiled Final Cut Studio® 2, a significant upgrade to the industry's leading video production suite that delivers new creative tools designed expressly for editors. Final Cut Studio 2 includes Final Cut Pro® 6, which introduces Apple's ProRes 422 format for uncompressed HD quality at SD file sizes and support for mixed video formats and frame rates in a single Timeline; Motion 3 featuring an intuitive 3D environment, paint and new behaviors; Soundtrack® Pro 2 with dozens of innovative tools for multitrack editing, surround mixing and conforming sound to picture; Compressor 3 delivering powerful batch encoding for multiple formats with a single click; and DVD Studio Pro 4.2 for SD and HD DVD authoring. Final Cut Studio 2 also introduces "Color," a professional color grading and finishing application for ensuring consistent color and creating signature looks.

LG has confirmed the UK launch of its dual-format Blu-ray and HD DVD player, the Super Multi Blue. The BH100, which plays both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, will be available from the end of May, priced at around £999.99. LG is the first manufacturer to bring this solution to market.

The Super Multi Blue incorporates interactive functions based on BD-Java, which allows advanced menus and functions to be displayed on screen while the content is playing in the background. However, as LG points out, the Super Multi Blue offers a greater level of menu interactivity for Blu-ray than when playing HD DVD discs.

The writers of Peep Show are handing the power back to the fans..

A competition has been created whereby fans are getting the opportunity to write their own scene of a romantic nature...

The best entry will be filmed and added to the series 4 DVD and be the ultimate Peep Show fan Prize...

Submit your story here

I've already started writing.....Catch Up!!

Sony has received the first orders for its new, top-end, digital cinematography F23 acquisition camera, with five F23 cameras going to equipment and rental company Band Pro in Munich and further orders in the UK and the Netherlands. The F23 is aimed at the top-end of movie-making, commercials and television production.

"The F23 is a new digital cinematography camera recording on 4:4:4 RGB HDCAM SR," says Richard Lewis, chief engineer, Sony Professional Solutions Europe. "The F23 has many useful features designed specifically for digital cinema production and high end commercials. It is a stand-alone camera that looks and feels exactly like a film camera. It means you can take your film camera off its tripod and replace it with the F23 and its really easy to use with all the same accessories."

Responding to overwhelming public demand, Apple and EMI announced at an event in London plans to release a number of EMI catalogue titles without the DRM software which dictates what can and cannot been done with  downloaded music. The move has implications for the film industry as producers weigh up how to release their films online.

Sony's Film Sale Back Door Platform

It certainly looks that way to us - writes Charles Arthur of The Guardian Technical - particularly after talking to Matt Brown, executive vice president of Sony Pictures Europe, whose job it is to persuade us all to buy Blu-ray media. Formerly with Dreamworks, and steeped in films, Brown declares that "the future is high-definition TV" and that the PS3 - which at £425 in the UK is steeply priced for a games console, but comparatively cheap for a high-definition player (Blu-ray players in the UK cost more than £500) - is "the ultimate home entertainment device". All of which you'd expect him to say. But talking to Brown, it's clear that Sony is happy to take its financial lumps in terms of losses in the games console market if it means guaranteeing a win in the high-definition video war. And the best way to do that? Lose money selling the players, and rake it back by selling the "software" - games and especially films. In the long term, Sony has far more to gain from winning the DVD format wars than it stands to lose in the gaming ones, since it could keep making the PS3 for the next decade.