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Random selection…
As the season finally closes in on us, for those tired of the same
old re-runs on TV or wanting to avoid the family warzone of the living
room and watch TV on a computer under your bed - or better still are
looking for films to share during the post-dinner
web video show-off - I've pulled together some of our favorites of the
year.
In the first bundle I've focussed on anima…
Last year I built the website for a new documentary due to premiere this year about the issue of land-grabbing in Africa. I'd first been introduced to the production team at an remarkable week as part of the Swim Lab, and been struck silent as the director, Joakim Demmer, explained in plain terms how while we are sending billions in aid to countries like Ethiopia, we are also, inadvertently, he…
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…
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…
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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…
In Britain we like our television scriptwriters to be lovably eccentric -
think the anarchic Paul Abbott, the flamboyant Russell T Davies or the
wonderfully indiscreet Andrew Davies.
In the US, TV dramatists are a more serious breed altogether.
"It felt like it had to be some sort of thriller, like the original The
Day of the Jackal with Edward Fox a…
Earlier this week I was kindly invited to see the re-opening of Alan Bennett's The History Boys at the Wyndham's Theatre. It was a case of a friend of mine having to go along for a national daily newspaper to get a morsel of something (something, anything, a crumb of gossip, just get someone to say something, anything) to put in their diary pages the following day. The m…
The beautiful music of Elgar could be heard amongst scrap metal, bin bags and shrieking gulls yesterday as players from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played a recital in their most unusual venue ever - a London rubbish dump.
The special concert was held to promote the new Channel 4 series
Dumped, which starts on Sunday night (Sept 2nd, 9.00pm) and sees elev…
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…
I stumbled across some of my old writing still online on Netribution from over two decades years ago that was so bad I wanted to cancel myself before anyone else had a chance to. I was scrolling down my old year 2001 design for old raw HTML Netribution pages untouched in 20 years, and still looking much like it did then (other than screens are much bigger so there's a lot of left/right padding)…
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…
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…
the horror film franchise is still surprisingly resilient and not really showing signs of slowing (some would say that the current incarnation has outstayed it's welcome). The question i ask is if there is space for a real rough and ready old school horror film that does what it says on the tin? The last good horror for me was Outpost. It didn't make you think too much and had a great genre story…
Come in come in. Is anyone there?Just lost a whole page of data when I went to upload it. PHUT. gone, finito, marrungad, kaputo. I was logged in, but when the upload completed it told me I could not have access to that page without being registered and shuit me out! And my data went west, wasting a whiole precious hour of work Oh boy am, I not nice to know at the moment..... I have some…
As talks restart in an attempt to end the US Writers Guild strike, commentators are discussing whether the dispute will drive more writers and talent out of the studio system and onto the web. It is one thing to win a doubling of DVD royalties, from four cents to eight, and a share of web advertising, as with TV (the main WGA demands); but another altogether to actually own, or co-own the show…
Just before lunch yesterday I read of a report by the WWF that the number of species on the planet has reduced by 31% in the last 35 years. If the planet continues at its current pace of using natural resource, by 2050 two earths would be needed to meet current demand, with an almost inevitable consequential environmental collapse.
Then while munching away on my fried eggs on toast, I read…
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…
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 ha…
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…
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…
The opposite of Ultimate Improv's NYC Grand Central Station freeze, with a wink to T-Mobile's Liverpool Street Station antics. To promote a Flemish reality TV show.
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…