“The reality is a single stream only amounts to 0.003p, which means I would need millions of streams to earn at least the minimum wage” Ayanna Witter-Johnson, singer-songwriter Last weekend The Guardian published some great insights from 25 figures across the music world around the state of subscription-streaming, as Spotify passes 155 million Premium subscribers and ahead of a uk.gov report…

"This is a short film about my job as a Projectionist. I am quite proud of this film, mostly because I’m so proud of my job – it seems like a fulfilment of my childhood romantic notions of what I wanted to be when I grew up. Nonetheless what it most discernibly omits is how truly magnificent all the other staff are who work there too. It is dedicated to the other projectio…

Sheffield Documentary Film Festival wound up on Sunday, with a brief interlude before the Scottish Documentary Film Institute hosts the Edinburgh Pitch on Tuesday and prior to the Edinburgh Film Festival officially kicking off on Wednesday. Filmtastic week. As was probably part of the rational to shift Sheffield to June (which it has wanted to do for almost 4 years), many of the commissioners who…

Method acting is a technique used by many leading Hollywood actors. Everybody from De Niro to Hoffman uses it. One of the leading teachers of method acting working today is Arnold Bloomberg of the Bloomberg Academy of Drama in New York. Dr Andrew Cousins, went to learn more. AC: What is your fundamental approach to acting? AB: For me acting isn't just about pretending to be somebody else. It's…

Sheffield Doc/Fest wound up on Sunday night after 5 full-on days. Capturing a flavour of the event overall did mean sacrificing time spent in screenings, but I caught two films up for a Special Jury Award; Clio Barnard’s The Arbor (premiered at London Film Festival in October) and Jeff Malmberg’s Marwencol (premiering in the UK at Sheffield). Neither won, although Barnard’s film did get the…

  How Do I Sell My Film Part 2 - Delivery Format Netribution and film distributors WYSIWYG have joined forces to present on-line WYSIWYG's Filmmaker's Toolkit.... Okay. So you now know who will watch your film. Well, that means you can also estimate how many people you have as potential audience. That gives you an idea of how much money you can spend. It also tells yo…

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…

Forget Buddhism, Kabbala, and Scientology - there's only one religion that the Hollywood A-list want to be seen to be worshiping these days - Knowledgology. It began five years ago when the Reverend Doctor-Professor Solomon Profundis set up The Knowledge Hub, a spiritual retreat where burned out celebrities could recharge their batteries and at the same time broaden their religious horizons. Her…

{source}<object width="700" height="525"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://www.theonion.com/content/themes/common/assets/onn_embed/embedded_player.swf?image=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theonion.com%2Fcontent%2Ffiles%2Fimages%2FKAFKA_AIRPORT_article.jpg&amp;videoid=94031&title=Pragu…

'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…

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} 

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…

  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…

  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…

Screenwriter and script reader Danny Stack has written up 11 commandments for script readers on his blog. Even if you don't get paid to read, it provides quite an insight into the life of those who write those painful rejection letters. Eg: 7. All Scripts are the Same, but Some are more Samey than Others A lot of scripts follow the generalised style of screenwriting and so-call…

 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…

The day Greg Dyke was pushed out of the BBC was a grave one for both the corporation and broadcasting in general, yet Mark 'the scissors' Thompson was reportedly seen that day skipping around the Channel 4 office where he had been Chief Executive for barely a probation period, gleeful in the news that the top job of broadcasting could finally be his. And now, the Big Picture thinki…

  Sunflower3 - from vimeo's danLinfield

“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…

Caine, Hopkins, Connery, Finney, Attenborough, Guinness, Mills, Gielguid, Olivier. Names that epitomise the very best in British acting talent. But one name towers above them all; Sir Wilberforce Reddington. He made his first screen appearance as Willy Reddington playing Third Cockney Urchin in 'It's a Right Bloomin' Caper Alright' in1937. From then on his face became a familiar fixture on Briti…

So, Digital and Culture Minister Ed Vaizey has backed MP Clare Perry's calls to create a firewall of Britain to support the seemingly reasonable aim of protecting children from pornography (and potentially keeping adults from materials classified under the Obscene Publications Act). With the web now moving further towards the TV, the suggestion is not much of a surprise. While it's tempting…

The first London Brazilian Film Festival hit town last week with the warm and vocal audience participation of the city's expat community, and a couple of cinematic gems. You get the sense that organizers ‘Inffinifo' want to express that there is so much more to Brazil, and it's cinema, than the sex, violence and poverty stereotypes reinforced by its big hits over recent years. However, and despi…

From the ever dependable BoingBoing comes details of Brain Water, a exquisite Mayazaki-esque short 3D animation from Johann Poo, by way of Jason Li. I like its illustration of the power of playful communication. Incidentally - in light of recent revelations about Vimeo's terms of service, Lumiera's Raffaella Traniello brings news of Vimeo's answer to her in their forums that they are working on…

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]

  Bader Ben Hirsi could make quite a screenplay out of his experience directing the first feature film ever made in Yemen, the ancient land at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. His results though, have impressed the Arab world, who are bound to be his sternest critics. Ben Hirsi's film has just scooped the Grand Prize at the Cairo Film Festival. James MacGregor, who has spent ma…