In 2006 we wrote here about this new idea of crowd-source financing to fund films, which had funded a few short films – a couple of years before IndieGoGo and Kickstarter took off. We'd followed the growth of a new website 'craze' called YouTube, that was making the industry sit up sweaty, followed their first feature filmmakers Arin and Susan and written about alternative exhibition as Secret Ci…

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…

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…

With a new chair this year in the shape of Scotsman, Alex Graham, presiding over a delegate list now 2,500 in number and Aussie Heather Croall still proving to be an assured hand in the Director’s role, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012 is still on a steady and upward trajectory. Funding and making docs is tough territory but in these financial anni horribili the festival itself succeeded in not only keepi…

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…

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…

“Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.&rd…

Submitted article from Zenia Mai Enriquez: Can you outsource video post-production work?  Can outsourcing efficiently provide the cost advantage benefit without sacrificing quality?    The outsourcing industry is booming and it is expected to grow even further in the coming years. Driven by improved yet low-cost telecommunication capacity and the upswing of technology…

  If there's one thing more stressful than getting married, it's making a fully improvised comedy about the process in real time. Debbie Isitt, writer and director, kept a diary of the making of her film Confetti, an extravaganza of jealousy, nudity, ball boys....and improvised dialogue.   Coventry. September 2002 I first decided to make a wedding come…

 The only people who truly know how much blood sweat and tears go into the making of a feature length movie are those who have done it themselves. The effort required is also in indirect proportion to the size of the budget - the smaller the budget the greater will be the effort required.  This particular story is that of Neil Oseman ("Hereford's Stephen Speilberg…

  Music videos The End of the World  REM's The End of the World As We Know It sung by George W Bush {youtube}V3CmXGKXOmk{youtube} Familjen - Det snurrar i min skalle Swedish Grammy nominated mashup of archive evangelists to Familjen's music. {youtube}QfU-4Y4_akY{/youtube}  Mashups The Vadar Sessions Before Star Wars, James Earl Jones starred…

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…

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…

The beaches of Goa are a bit like the United Nations, so many pepople from around the world, so many ambassadors of peace. They mostly seem lovely wise souls who will probably one day run companies and countries. Meanwhile in the US a very real battle continues, the ultimate in a way. And it is a battle which - if the Clintons push it too hard, could perhaps split the Democratic party…

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…

Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 - April 5, 2006) helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years, and attempted to integrate art and life by blurring the separation between life and art, and artist and audience. He has published extensively and was Profess…

  I've worked as an actor on a number of film sets and with a wide range of directors and filmmakers.  It's an exciting place to be and when you hit the scene right, there's no better feeling in the world; despite shooting out of chronological order and out of emotional continuity.  Each day, each scene, each take, brings its own challenges for the actor - and when you're tackling…

That's a wrap; wind reel and print - but did you remember about the trailer? It's often the last thing a filmmaker thinks about, but it might be the first indication anyone has of what the feature is about, how good it is and whether or not to spend some of their hard earned pay on going to see it next week. It's your pitch to the punters, so let's make it a good one. Here's how. A trailer should…

  A record number of films are getting release in British cinemas without any cuts being needed to get approval. Figures released by the British Board of Film Classification show that during the past decade less than three percent of the 4,951 films released into cinemas had to have cuts in order to achieve the classification they wanted.   This is a substantial fall from the…

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…

  Tom Swanston Reports from  the NORDIC CO-PRODUCTION FORUM Haugesund, Norway  21-23 August 2006 This year the beautiful coastal town of Haugesund, Norway was host to the first ever Nordic Co-Production Forum, held from 21st to 23rd August. The town is situated on a long sea inlet in the South West of the country, a 45-minute flight from Oslo.   The…

 The first time. I can never forget that. Shunted to the outskirts of town to watch Robert LePage juggle love and war in his heartstopping multimedia devised play the Seven Streams of the River Ota, which would eventually run at 7 hours by the time I last saw it at the National, years later. Stuart Lee and Richard Herring in pre Jerry Springer the Opera days chumming with Jenny Eclair…

unicorn chaser

  Owen Thomas the producer (and now distributor) of the UK's first DV feature, the acclaimed One Life Stand, directed by May Miles Thomas, offers advice from his foray into DVD distribution on How To Sell Your Film (Not Your Soul)           Six years ago everyone was talking DIY filmmaking - how digital tools would revol…

  Sunflower3 - from vimeo's danLinfield