Sunflower3 - from vimeo's danLinfield

How Do I Sell My Film Part One - DEMOGRAPHICS Netribution and film distributors WYSIWYG have joined forces to present on-line WYSIWYG's essential Guide to Film Distribution. We're both interested in building a strong industry for independent filmmakers. This means creating films that people want to see and buy. It does not mean sacrificing creative integrity, but it means business. To do the b…

Brilliant actor Paul Scoffield, star of A Man for All Seasons, the Crucible and Quiz Show, has also passed away.David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008) was an award-winning English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield won both an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award&nbs…

So that's it then, four years to the day almost, since issue 99 went out, so it's been a while.With this new architecture it has not been too bad. Not a lot of midniht oil burning, although Nic looks to be a little jet-lagged when it gets to tea-time.There's no chance of Netribution losing its non-London centricity either, since our cotributors are well spread from the Smoke to the Shetland Islan…

Producers are different things to different people, making this question difficult to answer. There are no detailed job descriptions and no two producers handle their jobs in exactly the same way. Is it any wonder that  both audiences, and many 'insiders', are bewildered by the proliferation of producer credits in films? The producer credit has often…

  How many notices have we seen from directors who have a great idea for a film, have written a script themselves and now ‘just’ need a producer to raise a hundred thousand to make it? What could be simpler? And let’s not forget that all-important incentive… no fee, but you’ll get a VHS copy of the film if, and when, it’s finished! Wow, as a prod…

"Is a very powerful love story. There is man. There is woman. Man falls over. Woman falls in love. Man wears funny hat. Oh no! Is woman dying of disease? Yes. Then man fall over some more. She get better. They get married. The end." Roberto Benitio is best know as the Italian comedian and film maker who directed ‘Wasn’t World War Two Fun?’ which swept the board at the Oscars two years ago. He c…

Sydney Pollack, director, actor and writer, has passed away from cancer aged 73, and surrounded by his family. Link to LA Times obituary , Wikipedia page, IMDB page. Pollack was a friend and business partner to Anthony Minghella, who also sadly passed away earlier this year. Back in 2001, filmmaker and blogger Tim Clague caught the two legends in conversation at BAFTA, republished below…

Do you know those moments where everything seems larger than life? Where the taste of baked beans rivals haute cuisine? Where the hazy sunlight and slow summer pace make you feel so much lighter you could have lost a stone in weight. It's as if the great post production supervisor in the sky has decided to apply a luminosity filter, upped the brightness and contrast, balanced the audio…

Open source is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, from the Cabinet Office now asking for it in government ICT contracts, to cyber-libertarians saying it heralds the start of a post-capitalist age. But what does it actually mean? And given how much of the for-profit digital world depends on open source - from Android phones to the Safari browser, Facebook’s servers to YouTube’s interfac…

  "Most of the independent films that we have seen or heard about suffered from one problem: finance. Some have come and gone because the young independent producers have failed, and are still failing to source the big budget required for production." Sound familiar to you? It certainly will if you are a filmmaker in Bulawayo. It looked strangely familiar when it caugh…

I woke this morning, at the godawful hour needed for my slow and pricey train ride to Hull , from a dream where I was a kid once more, back in my school hall at St Aidan's again. We'd just finished a double filmmaking lesson (probably inspired by watching M.Dot.Strange's awesome film skool on Ytube till the early hours) and were putting the chairs back to the sides with the teenage tedium of th…

'Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you' Ray Bradbury   Dear Tom, It has been a while. I forget whose turn it is, but for sake of ease I shall both ask and answer my own question - a simple one. Where am I? It is a device, more than a question, to uncork my tongue as I sit here, in Paris's Gare De Lyon. Life shakes its stuff around me, and I shudder inside with the wearines…

  Actor and documentary-maker Kenneth Griffith has died at the age of 84. He was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire and had been  a familiar face on TV and cinema screens since the 1940s, including the 1960's cult TV hit, The Prisoner. Griffith, who died at his London home, also made often controversial films on such subjects as the Boer War - on which he was an expert - an…

  How much do movie stars contribute to box office success? Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse researched the notion of "star power" to better understand how A-list players contribute to Hollywood's bottom line.   We can all understand at some level that stars in the worlds of film, sports, and even business create results. If you want big box offi…

From Glasgow-based Phase IV, behind the long gestating Simulation feature, comes an interview with Mark Gorzynski, Silhouette Technician behind Eon Production's Quantum of Solace, who speaks about his work, his family and silhouilmaking. [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO3hg_tEVgk 600x400]

A film Spike Jonze made after spendning a day with presidential candidate Al Gore in 2000 has just been released online.. given that Gore lost the election to only 500 votes, one wonders what impact this could have had on the election - and in turn the world today - had it been shown.  {google}29385328971143264{/google} 

  Award-winning actor and comedian Red Buttons has died at the age of 87 He was one of the first funny men to show that comedians could also be Oscar-winning actors. He won the Supporting Actor award for Sayonara (1957), in which he co-starred with Marlon Brando as a U.S. airman who embarks on a tragic romance with a Japanese woman. He was also a quick-witted master of his craft as a com…

It's taken me a while to gather my thoughts about the Second Open Video Conference which took place at the start of October in New York. It featured a vast mix of people and organisations interested in the future of video online - from tech and web shapers to creatives and lawmakers - there's not many places where you can end up round the table with implementers from the W3C, the Firefox and Safa…

Peter Finch in Network tells it how it is, remixed by videobeats/pixm.

We were chatting the other night about how the Death Star, for all its evil genius as a total killing machine, was really badly designed. I mean from a defensive point of view – a huge open port, with no gun turrets inside, leading to a big self destruct button. And Darth, despite all his Jedi training, is a pretty lousy pursuer of Luke. So we wondered if, at the end of Episode 3…

“Obscurity is a far greater threat to artists and authors than piracy” Tim O'Reilly Copyright law was originally created to settle a dispute between English and Scottish publishers in the early 18th Century and has grown today into a fundamental aspect of the creative 'business'. Some would argue that the development of copyright law has been driven by the needs of distributors to protect invest…

Dead pan and wry are often traits associated with the national character of Edinburgh International Film Festival’s own natives, the Scots. So it’s intriguing to witness Argentinian and Greek directors – Ana Katz and Filippos Tsitos respectively - tackling family drama or existential inevitability in a dry-as-a-bone manner. Whether Argentinians or Greeks are noted for irony is moot, but consideri…

The new Tax Relief system for British films offers producers up to 20% of their budget in cash. The system replaces Section 42 and 48 which offered a tax break of up to 40% and also introduces a host of quite complex new clauses to limit and define which films are eligible for relief. Love it or hate it, it is a piece of legislation which will effect not just which films get made in the UK in th…