Providing a write up for the Edinburgh Film Festival 2011, which came to a close yesterday, is not straightforward for me – Edinburgh is my adopted home of 28 years, and taking pleasure and pride in its cultural events is part of why it’s a great city to live in. But whether or not we wanted it, press coverage prior to the festival launch on 15th June was sharp, even nippy: the…

Amateur: barely a few letters from Auteur - but what, in our social media world, is the difference? If there was a dividing line of the 51st Krakow Film Festival, it was between the crowed-sourced YouTube world of Life in a Day and the personal journeys of documakers turning their lives and experiences into art. Less a debate between high and low art, as between the home movie and the knowingly…

Two and a half weeks may be a little late to begin writing up the Open Video Conference, but then my first essay, penned in the few days after, discussed Pirate Bay at some length and even mentioned Michael Jackson and Brian Newman and so is now largely irrelevant. But with our new Tweeting Netwitbutions, perhaps this is the time to sign up fully for the more anti-knee-jerk Slow Blog Movement - i…

Writer, actor, director, conscientious objector, uncompromising activist and - by all accounts - much loved and utterly decent person, Harold Pinter was not just a great contributor to our times, but a real inspiration. In the below video he talks about art, truth, politics and the Iraq war, as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literatrue in 2005. {myspace}2574205{/myspace} "the…

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. Co…

Dan - man with a Cannes Van Plan, has posted the first Rogue Runner Cannes update to his website. The show - shot over 12 hours and edited in 8 - runs on alternate days on his site and sponsor LoveFilm. Latest episode now online.

  At a time when international cinema and DVD revenues are declining and TV audiences are dwindling, why would a young company spend time signing up distribution rights for all sorts of independent content from all over the world? The answer might elude, confuse or scare many of the traditional media giants, but this is exactly what Wysiwyg Films is doing - and why? Because they looked t…

Well this festival left me reinvigorated for what a film fest can be. Excuse me if I spiral off into hyperbole, but the programme, the people and style of fest just don't seem to fit in with the way that everything else seems so hyper-defined and funding-box-ticking, it was just programmed really imaginatively and diversely. It felt instinctive and well informed. In short, totally cool.   I…

There's not been a new post here in over four years, so maybe Netribution's 21st birthday today is a good time to update on a little expirment with "Web Monetization" (their zee, not ours). Web Monetization is a way to donate to the sites you visit without needing to have a separate subscription for them or even having to hit a donate button. After signing up with a provider (at the moment there…

Thursday, March 19, 2009 To Whom it May Concern: Please in what city and country was the Church bombed in the movie The Reader, where 300 Jewish Woman died.  Are the only survivors Ilana and Rose Mather? Does anyone know if the name of her book is Memoir?  Is this book still in print? Best Regards, Sharon Corr

Have a slightly madver 2008

Muto is a rather neat stop motion graffiti in Buenos Aires and Baden, by the artists collective BluBlu. Thanks Ann, for forwarding, it seems a cross between Rinpa Eshidan and that Mark Ronson video, with a whole life of its own.

unicorn chaser

Power, Corruption and Laughs. This was Danish director/protagonist Mads Brugger’s route through the failed state chaos that reigns in the Central African Republic in his documentary satire The Ambassador, premiering in the UK at Edinburgh International Film Festival this week. Tackling deadly serious subjects that involve diplomatic immunity, old colonial interference and blood diamonds dredges…

  "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…

It is so easy to forget the human stories behind the daily news headlines. BoingBoing has pointed to a couple of great films appearing this week. One from the BBC sees Rageh Omaar, who after a year of wrangling got to film freely inside Iran, and which shows a world a million miles away from the normal footage of angry people protesting. The other, more disturbing yet similarly touching series…

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…

  It's 3 AM in central London - dark and quiet except for the odd car and the hum of generators huddled round the outside of Westminster Cathedral. But here, inside, light is flooding in through the windows as though it was midday. And in the minds of the 150 or so people here it is midday and this isn't London, it's the Escorial Palace in Spain in the year 1588. King Philip…

  Your film is almost done. All you need is that scene in the pyramids. Or on a submarine. Or in space. A seat on NASA's next shuttle is out of the budget, though. What's a desperate director to do? Build your own virtual set, of course...     Nick Jushchyshyn will show you how. And at less than $30, chances are it can be done on even the tightest of budgets. He posted the s…

Jon H from Finland at JonHs.net has pulled together a remarkable list of 9-11 related documentaries online. All are free to watch and most are created by unfunded groups and individuals. There's a few extreme conspiracy theories but it's is still an impresive collective example of citzen filmmaking. So much seems to have happened in the five years since Tom ran up the stairs…

It should have won an Oscar for best animated short, but its use of copyrighted images prevented that (albeit printed onto paper and folded into origami shapes). When I briefly met Virgil Widrich, whose Copyshop did stretch to Oscar glory, at the Hull International Short Film Festival, he thought that Fair Use laws would be enough for this film to get a US release and Oscar nomination. But…

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…

  "Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes." Robert Altman The man behind such diverse and acclaimed films as Shortcuts, M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville and Gosford Park - Robert Altman - has died in a Los Angeles hospital aged 81. “Maybe there's a chance to get back to ... grown-up films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic valu…