The Clown in the Soup: How to Negotiate

So few people know how to sell themselves or what they have to sell. To some, it’s naïveté, timidity, insecurity or a disgust with having to sell anything, period.

Some try to sell things they do not believe in and all too often, it's themselves or their talent. “Are you experienced?”

“I did this, I did that.” But, even then, a lot of people sell themselves short.

When negotiating, think of yourself as an asset to a company. Remember that what you do for a company is most important.

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THE DIVIDED SELF

Nine years ago, Todd Solondz took home the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for his second feature, Welcome to the Dollhouse. The film earned more than $4 million at the box office and made the press-shy writer-director an icon of the indie movement.

Solondz, never embraced the spotlight, resisting media-friendly characterizations of his work and the “geek chic” label that came with it and he later refused even to be photographed.

For his new film, Palindromes,Todd cast eight actors in the lead role and then took on both sides of the abortion movement. Good thing he didn’t have to answer to any investors.

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STORE WARS

Not long ago in a supermarket not far away...

In a great movie spoof from The Organic Trade Association (OTA) and Free Range Studios ("The Meatrix"), vegetables and other organic foods star as famous "Star Wars" saga characters in a short film promoting healthier eating without pollution and pesticides.

Cuke Skywalker, Obi Wan Cannoli, Princess Lettuce, Ham Solo, Chewbroccoli, C3Peanuts, and Tofu D2 take on Lord Tader and The Dark Side of the Farm.

SEE STORE WARS...

BRING IN THE CLONES

The Original Star Wars Kid Video seen by millions of fans has spawned more than 106 clone videos. Many of these "inspired" clips are still avaliable for Internet viewing as Ghyslain's parents bring legal action to have them removed.

Original REVIEW: We can all recognize ourselves in this infectious footage of a Canadian youth at play. Ghyslain's innocence and joy are delightful. Seen through multiple takes, his increasingly frenetic performances are rousing and amusing.

GO TO THE CLONES...

Origins of Independent Film Makers

In the beginning, there were only independent filmmakers...

Thomas Edison is often credited with the invention of the motion picture in 1889, but a U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1902 concluded that Edison had not invented the motion picture. The decision stated that he had only combined the discoveries of others. His systems are important, nevertheless, because they prevailed commercially.

Europe was actually ahead of the United States in the development of the car and filmmaking. George Melies of France was an imaginative cinema artist and wizard. In one of his most famous films, he leads an intrepid group of explorers to the moon in a big shell shot from a cannon. By the early 1920's, over two thousand or more films had been made!

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World's First "Independent" Filmmaker

In the beginning, there were no studios.

An "independent" worked on his own, then tried to sell or distribute his film, the same as today.
Eadweard Muybridge, in 1870, at Sacramento, California began experiments where he shot successive frames to show motion in animals. In 1877-78 an associate of Muybridge devised a system of magnetic releases to trigger an expanded battery of 24 cameras, then his short films were 24 frames long.

He made what were the first short films. Muybridge, by 1883 had produced over seven hundred sheets of successive frames of animals, women, children birds and anything else he could get in front of his camera. He was the first "Indy" filmmaker of the modern world.
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The Original 'Star Wars Kid' Video

An exuberant Canadian teenage Star Wars fan recorded his Darth Maul-inspired light sabre-twirling improvisations, only to unexpectedly see them become an Internet phenomenon.

Watch the original Star Wars Kid tape which has spawned many spoofs and creative edits. Unauthorized Web posting of the footage, believed viewed by millions, has brought legal action from the boy's parents.

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SEE THE ORIGINAL STAR WARS KID...

Five Stages of Beer

Independent Film Award Winner “The Five Stages Of Beer” is as scrappy and likable a digital film as it is clearly stretched upon a paper-thin budget.

If you don't have a lot of money to spend, you better damn well write a plucky little screenplay. Words are free; the key is stringing together some interesting ones.

Five Stages of Beer is about the relationships of a group of people centered around their meetings at the local bar. Then again, a story about people at a bar?

Let's see...Cheers?

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3D Films

3-D Films have been around for some time and they have always attracted a following. "Ghosts of the Abyss" and "Spy Kids 3-D" are some of the most recent theatrical films.

Bwana Devil, released in 1952, was the first full-color 3-D film, and started the craze.

Below is a actual "frame", one every 24 times a second, from "House of Wax", 1953, with Vincent Price, one of the most played 3-D films.

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THREE TIMES

Three Times by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao Hsien is his sixth bid for the Cannes Palme d'Or.

Three Times relates a series of three love stories which, although they take place at different points in time (1966, 1911 and 2005), are played by the same couple of actors (Shu Qi and Chang Chen).

"It seems to me that by contrasting love stories from three different times, we can feel how people's behaviour is circumscribed by the times and places they live in," explained Hou Hsiao Hsien. This work, whose Chinese title would literally be translated "Our Best Moments", happens to draw upon the director's own memories.

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Podcasting Ponders Audio Quality

Podcasts, a hybrid of radio and blogging, are the latest buzz on the internet!

The homebrewed radio programs can be downloaded and listened to at one's convenience, using iPod (hence the name) or some other portable device.

Many think of it as Tivo for radio--but the difference is that Tivo records professionally produced broadcast programming, whereas anyone with the most primitive of computers can make a podcast and be heard. As a result, the concepts of audio standards and sound quality have gone out the window even as the format is gaining popularity.

There are a lot of people who are still setting up a mic in the middle of a table and using that to capture four or five people's voices for an interview."

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Star Wars Revelations

Surrounded by fans, George Lucas, who hadn't been to a Star Wars Convention in 18 years, made an appearance at the Boston Con and also detailed plans to bring Star Wars to the small screen by way of a 30 minute animated show as well as a live action show.

One ultimate Star Wars fan is Shane Felux, a digital designer based in the Washington, D.C. area and the principal and sole employee of Panic Struck Productions in the D.C. area. Shane spent the last three years working on a Star Wars fan film that eclipses almost every fan film that have been dedicated to Star Wars.

His film, Star Wars Revelations is 40 minutes in length and features some of the coolest animation and greatest effects seen in a fan film. What is really mind blowing is that since Felux released Revelations on the Internet two weeks ago, it has been downloaded nearly one million times, including more than 300,000 downloads for the DVD version of the film, which sits at around 3.5GB.

Shooting off and on over the course of two years with a Canon XL1s DV camera that he bought on eBay, Felux was able to shoot a total time of two and a half weeks. The film was assembled in Felux's basement with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 running on a white box 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB RAM, a dual head Matrox graphics card and an NVIDIA Geforce card. He also had 2TB of data storage .

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Radio turns to Variety

The posters that hang on the walls of the broadcasting booth at Nine FM are as eclectic as the music the radio station plays — Pink Floyd and Aerosmith next to the Marx Brothers, the Rat Pack and the Beatles.

Radio stations promising an anything-goes mix of pop and rock hits are springing up across the country. The variety format is, in part, a way to appeal to listeners used to loading their own iPods with music from different genres — or to keep those thinking about switching to satellite.

But more than that, it's a mea culpa to music lovers who started tuning out as their favorite stations shrunk their playlists in the 1990s, leaving the same old songs to play hour after hour.

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Sound Advice: The Natural Approach

We live in a world of interesting sounds. From the clatter of a train crossing to the clamor of an auction, unique sounds await a featured spot in your next video. Of course, if you didn't mean to record it, the sound is just extraneous noise.

Sorting the desirable audio from the unwanted is a bit of an art and something many video producers either forget or simply ignore. Some producers use everything that was recorded in audio that accompanies the accepted picture portions of their production.

Realizing that the sound with the video is just as important, it's time to look specifically at how it can enhance your production and even save your bacon from time to time.

What is Nat Sot? Natural sound or "nat sot" is simply the sound of the world.

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Jedi HD Tricks

On Using the Force of Next-Gen High-Def

It’s no secret that director George Lucas is the most vocal — and most successful — advocate of fully digital feature production and working for him is one of the most challenging jobs any visual effects supervisor or engineer can take on.

While Episode I was shot in HD, Lucas snuck in a very short scene shot on film. The second of the series put the early 24p HDCAM CineAlta cameras from Sony through their paces. With Revenge of the Sith the crew took a leap into a much richer color space with the new generation of Sony RGB recording.

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Bruce Brown's On Any Sunday

Long before Jeremy McGrath and Ricky Carmichael became household names due in part to their skills in the world of Supercross motorcycle racing, there was Mert Lawill and the Classic motorcycle film from director of Endless Summer.

Similarly there is Malcolm Smith, a living legend in the world of motocross who still races the Baja 1000, and Steve McQueen, known for performing his own stunt driving in the movie Bullit, widely praised as one of the most exciting car chase scene in movie history.

All three share the spotlight in Bruce Brown's On Any Sunday DVD , which is widely regarded as the first film about motorcycles and motorcycle racing.

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Singing the Blu's

Everyone is waiting for the Next Big Thing in storage, with too many people convinced that: a) it’s Blu-ray; b) it will be here shortly and c) it’s going to give you huge/cheap/high-quality video storage.

Blue disk technology (either BD or HD) is good and it will give you storage capacity of 25GB single layer, 50GB double layer. Folks in Japan and other areas of the Pacific Basin have been buying BD recorders for about two years and have not only paid dearly for the hardware but also the cartridge discs.

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ANIMATION FOR VIDEOGAMES

Next-generation platforms are affecting the way today's videogames are designed and animated, changing their primary software packages, emphasizing richly-detailed characters and expecting a leap in animation talent.

"In the past, game animators would have been required to make a good run loop, to make a good dying loop, but now we're asking for hitting the mark and hitting the point where the lighting works well, and basically creating drama," says a lead programmer for Digital Extremes, who's working on a next-gen title. "Before it was just creating plausability, [now] we want to create a sense of dramatic purpose."

The power in next-gen console platform games is just too much to ignore — even computer games makers are putting out their titles for consoles. See how the next gen is changing all facets of videogame animation production...

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THE DATE

Genre: Short Film Comedy: THE DATE

A chance meeting in a bar could become something new and exciting, or maybe not.

Notes: Shot in exisiting light, using async sound. I wanted to tell a story using what we see, not what is written. A try at a situation we've all been through, with a twist...

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My Big Fat Independent Movie

"My Big Fat Independent Movie" is a feature comedy that includes spoofs of some of the indie film world's most renowned movies such as "Memento," "Pulp Fiction," "Magnolia," "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," "Amelie," "Run Lola Run," "El Mariachi," "The Good Girl," "Pi," "Swingers" and many others.

The story follows Johnny Vince (Darren Keefe), a hipper-than-thou swingin’ hepcat and band trombone player. Two talkative hitmen, Sam (Neil Barton) and Harvey (Eric Hoffman), mistakenly believe Johnny to be the third member of their gang, assembled by their evil crime boss to pull a "botched robbery" in Las Vegas. Along the way, they take a beautiful hostage – the lovely, desperate and lonely cashier Julianne (Paget Brewster). Little do they know that she will forever changes their pathetic lives.

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Time Compiles List of 100 Greatest Films

What would a list of the greatest films of all time be without "North by Northwest?", "Annie Hall," "Bicycle Thief" or "Apocalypse Now"?

Time magazine movie critics Richard Schickel and Richard Corliss have compiled an unranked list of the 100 greatest films. It was posted Sunday on www.Time.com.

Included are traditionally acclaimed flicks like "Lawrence of Arabia," "Casablanca" and "Citizen Kane," as well as more atypical choices like "Finding Nemo," "Star Wars" and the 2002 Brazilian gang story, "City of God."

Disagree? Schickel says that's the idea.

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Belgian film 'The Child' wins Cannes's coveted Palme d'Or

"The Child," a Belgian drama about a petty thief who sells his baby son, won the
Cannes film festival's prestigious Palme d'Or award at a red-carpet ceremony.

The movie, by director brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, triumphed over a field of 20 other pictures by a veteran pack of American, European and Asian film-makers.

The Cannes jury, headed by Sarajevo-born director Emir Kusterica, awarded its runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, to "Broken Flowers," a melancholic road movie starring Bill Murray as a man looking for a son he is told he fathered decades earlier.

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'Broken Flowers,' hard roads

In what seems to be a sequel to his role in ''Lost in Translation,'' Bill Murray searches among his long-lost lovers for the son he never knew in cult director Jim Jarmusch's ''Broken Flowers,'' screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

"Broken Flowers" could break Jarmusch out of the art house, but admirers may question the film's overly conventional approach. It skips merrily along the surface with its over-the-top vignettes but never seems to arrive at a destination.

Nevertheless, the journey is more than half the fun as every actor attacks his role with relish; and sometimes a little mustard...

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IN MY LIFE

Films that usually don't make the big screen with wide area distribution...

IN MY LIFE is a dark comedy about Wes - an average nice guy whose life is coming to an end…at the age of 23. Wes learns that the terrible cough he’s had for months is terminal cancer and only has a short time to live.

He doesn’t want to burden his friends and family with the tragic news and instead of spending the rest of his short life in a Los Angeles hospital, he decides the one thing he must do is tell his best friend, Alison, that he loves her. Easier said than done, since Wes has always been afraid to tell Alison his feelings.

Ever since he met her in the women's bathroom in college, it's been excuses, excuses. Of course he's hinted at his love for her, with dumb jokes and excessive giggling. But now, this is serious business and it must be done in person. So Wes begins a road trip to see Alison.

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The Cameramen

A happy couple is using 16mm cameras from a rare 1932 issue of Movie Maker, a sophisticated magazine for the amateur filmmaker. They also had 8mm and by the 1930’s the amateur filmmaking scene was in full swing.

People using these cameras made short films that were sold and screened at amateur film clubs as the major film companies made bigger and bigger productions. These were the first young independents coming to life along side the birth of the studio system.

In the early days, there were three major elements; the cameras, the cameramen and the story
and there were plenty of interesting things around to film. Stories naturally followed visual opportunity. A simple story, a small crew, cast, a director and a location and you had a film. But somebody had to record the story onto the film.

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Blurring the Lines

Tim Miller talks about parlaying commercial success at Blur Studios and creating a 3D feature from ROCKFISH.

It’s been a decade since Blur Studio opened its CG facility in the Southern California beach town of Venice. Its founders had left jobs in the high-end Unix business of visual effects to set up a PC-based facility of their own.

It’s no secret that Blur’s ultimate desire is to make animated features and word is out that Vin Diesel’s company has optioned a feature version of Rockfish.

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Dark Crystal Sequel Gains Power

Variety reports that the Jim Henson Co. is in the planning stages for a sequel to its 1982 fantasy cult classic, DARK CRYSTAL.

David Odell (THE MUPPET SHOW) and Annette Duffy are writing THE POWER OF THE DARK CRYSTAL.

The film set to start filming this fall will combine live action, animatronic characters and CG animation for release in the early part of 2007.

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WONDER YEARS

After a six-year hiatus, Gregg Araki has returned to feature filmmaking with Mysterious Skin, a haunting story about childhood sexual abuse.

Araki’s new film, Mysterious Skin (due out in May from Tartan Films), uses cinematic form to explore sexuality. Mysterious Skin (based on the novel by Scott Heim) is the first work that Araki has adapted rather than created himself. The story depicts a sexuality of trauma rather than liberation.

In the film, two boys from Kansas — Brian Lackey (Brady Corbet) and Neil McCormick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt of TV’s 3rd Rock from the Sun fame) — were both sexually abused by their Little League coach (Bill Sage) when they were eight, and both have devised very different coping mechanisms.

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HOME MOVIE

When asked if he’s making a transition between film critic to filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz grows slightly defensive. It's an inevitable question he’ll face along the festival circuit.

Home is Seitz’s assured debut feature after years of writing reviews for the Newark Star-Ledger and NY Press. “I don’t see why we need to think of it in either/or terms,” Seitz replied. “There are several people who make movies and still write about them regularly, often critically, including Bilge Ebiri, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Schickel and Godfrey Cheshire. To me, filmmaking is an extension of criticism, expressed visually rather than in words.”

Made on a shoestring budget in Seitz’s duplex apartment in Brooklyn, Home is a vivid existential collage of love and loss.

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GUERRILLA STYLE

Profiles of five new independent films in production.

"It’s the story of one man’s journey through New York City during a crisis of personality and politics,” says Jed Weintrob about The F Word, a fiction/doc hybrid set and shot during last summer’s Republican National Convention.

Distribution vet Jeff Lipsky left his latest venture, Lot 47, in late ’02 and spent the last year completing Flannel Pajamas, the follow-up to his 1997 directorial debut Childhood’s End.

“It’s a conceptually interesting and arty horror film shot in Texas at Christmas for very little money,” says producer Isen Robbins (Brother to Brother) about RunAway...

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A very independent director

Stephen Frears didn't have a passion to be a director - until he got bored with studying law.

He fled his boring career in law to work in the theatre. He fled the theatre to work in movies and television. Now he's fleeing being pinned down as an artist, an auteur, or anything else that smells of pretentiousness.

The British director has a reputation for being circumspect, for not giving the kind of answers that pack neatly between quotation marks.

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Demo Reels, Portfolios and Interviewing

Recruiter Pamela Kleibrink Thompson gives the down-and-dirty dos and don’ts of demo reels, portfolios and interviewing.

Whether you are new to the industry or an experienced veteran, this article will give you tips on portfolios, demo reels, and interviewing, as well as how to research a company using the Internet.

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Living The Future Today

Nancy Cartwright follows the sage advice of Charles F. Kettering, regarding the future — the place where we all will be spending the rest of our lives.

Best known as the voice of spiky-headed Bart Simpson on The Simpsons, she has voiced dozens of cartoon characters in her career that has spanned more than 20 years. Currently she can be heard as the voice of Rufus the Naked Mole Rat on Disney’s Kim Possible and Chuckie on Rugrats and All Grown Up.

I will see you all there!

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Lipstick & Dynamite, Piss & Vinegar

The First Ladies of Wrestling (2004)

Ruth Leitman's documentary ia a highly entertaining and frequently fascinating effort. It profiles the lives and careers of six female wrestlers and their experiences during the heyday of the sport in the 1950s.

The film concentrates on six women, two of whom, unbelievably, are still involved in wrestling even though they're older than 80.

They include the Fabulous Moolah and the Great Mae Young, still wrestling and now living together with their midget sidekick Diamond 'Lil Gladys, "Killer Gillem," who went on to a career wrestling alligators and bears, Ida May Martinez who ran away to join the sport to escape her abusive family, Ella Waldek who later opened a detective agency and the beautiful Penny Banner who wanted to learn how to defend herself after nearly being date-raped at the age of 16.

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MOVIES may PREMIERE at Wal-Mart?

Hollywood executives think DVDs should be released quicker to combat the growing threat of piracy and they predict that the day may not be far off when some major films are available on DVD at the same time as their theatrical release.

"Your premiere may be at Wal-Mart," chairman and chief executive of Warner Bros Entertainment Barry Meyer, said. "In some territories movies make more money on DVD than in cinemas."

"Right now theatrical is the main way we set values in these movies, and video is the first aftermarket," Mr Meyer said during a discussion held as part of the Milken Institute Global Conference on Wednesday.

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Scorsese's Color Homage

If you are lucky enough to find yourself in Martin Scorsese's private screening room discussing the history of color feature film processes, he will undoubtedly school you on such movies as Follow Thru, an little known 1930 film about golf that illustrates the limitations of the early Technicolor two-strip, dye-transfer process by showing golf courses with blue grass.

“I was particularly fascinated by color when I went to the movies as a young person. In particular, I was obsessed with the notion that movies offered viewers different forms of color during my formative years in the mid-1940s."

“The entire art form (of filmmaking) is changing, so it makes sense to use new tools. Films as we know them will no longer be made the same way now that we have the kind of control with digital intermediates and digital rushes. I will always prefer film. But on the other hand, as I look back (on The Aviator), I realize I made many judgments on this film based solely on digital rushes and digital projection. I'm sure I will shoot an all-digital movie eventually. It's a different tool, and it's about time I tried it.”

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Robert Rodriguez Returns to 3D HD

After his digitally complicated HD movie Sin City hit cinemas, director Robert Rodriguez returned to the 3D genre with Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3D.

Using the model for his previous feature, Spy Kids 3D: Game Over, in 2003, Rodriguez returned to 3D HD. His two efforts place him right alongside James Cameron at the cutting edge of using high-definition technology to make 3D, feature-length, theatrical movies.

The Vince Pace/Cameron-designed Reality Camera System tapes performances (in this case, on a greenscreen stage) using two customized Sony HDC-950 cameras. In a specially designed rig, the camera sensors are placed 70mm apart in order to capture left-eye and right-eye imagery for later blending with CG environments and other elements during the post process.

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"Star Wars" spawned a galaxy of technologies

After filming the first "Star Wars" movie with special effects that were anything but special, George Lucas spent millions to develop a complete digital editing system to populate his sequels with armies of virtual X-wing fighters. Then, he virtually gave it all away.

"We were 10 years ahead of the commercial reality," said co-general manager of Lucas' computer division during the mid 1980s. "He inspired some very worthwhile ventures ... but the innovations weren't close to paying for themselves."

Famous for saying "I'm not a venture capitalist," Lucas sold many of his technologies for cheap - technologies that would later appear in home stereos, cell phones, medical imaging devices and virtually every Hollywood studio, driving billion-dollar companies and employing thousands of people.

Apple Computer Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs paid $10 million for the discarded Lucas team that became Pixar Inc., and the movie company went on to make $3 billion at the box office.

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40 Million Minutes to Live

60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, that’s, um, 1,440 minutes… times 365 days per year… that’s 525,600 minutes… times… hunnh… an average life expectancy of roughly 76 years, so that’s… 39,945,600. Let’s agree to call it 40 million minutes. Yep, that’s it. That’s what we get.

Hmm, don’t we spend about a third of that time snuggled up with Mr. Sandman? All right, divide by three… that comes to about 27 million sentient minutes. Of course, if you’re reading this column, the clock is already rolling. So, my rapidly aging amigos, what exactly do you DO with all those free minutes the Great Timekeeper put on your card?

Good deeds/great works? Contemplation? Sex, drugs and rock n’ roll? Maybe you’d like to spend some of it watching cartoons. Hey, you just drained two more minutes! Quick… which ones should you watch?

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ALIEN PLANET

Start with a unique concept: What happens when we find life outside our own planet?

Discovery Channel brings viewers on a virtual mission in the future. No longer just the domain of science fiction, what could alien life really look like? Alien Planet dramatizes an exciting — and possible — answer.

The drama takes place on Darwin IV, a fictional planet 6.5 light-years from Earth, with two suns and 60 percent gravity. Having identified Darwin as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the mothership Von Braun and three probes: Balboa, Da Vinci and Newton. This unmanned fleet is responsible for finding and assessing any life-forms on Darwin IV.

Initially, the expectation is to find microscopic life, but the probes soon find themselves in the middle of a developed ecosystem teeming with life of all sizes. The viewer experiences Darwin IV through the "eyes" of the probes Ike (Newton) and Leo (Da Vinci), whose data is relayed back to the mothership and then communicated to Earth. The biological and atmospheric data from the probes and mothership are relayed to viewers through computer voice simulation and on-screen readouts.

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Unveiling the Xbox 360

Meet the three pillars of the Xbox 360 Vision: always high definition; always connected; always personalized.

Microsoft says its newest console doesn't just herald a new age of graphical realism -- it marks a significant, permanent shift in the way we'll relate to our entertainment. Aiming at mass market success on the scale of movies: a billion people at a time when consumer expectations for technology have never been higher.

No one's going to buy a device just for games, Microsoft's spokesman points out citing the convergence of cellphones and PDAs as an example.

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'Cinema is over'

British paper The Guardian snared an interview with famous French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who hardly ever talks to the press.

Godard, the original enfant terrible of the French new wave who turned 74 in December and lives in Switzerland has not lost his fire or taste for provocation.

"It's over," he says of cinema. "There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed." Godard continues to make films, the most recent being "Notre Musique."

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"Broken Saints" to be Released on DVD

This saga is almost 12 hours long, with the majority scored with award-winning original compositions.

Canadian director/writer/producer Brooke Burgess, the author behind the graphic novel "Broken Saints," announced his series’ official DVD release. Burgess, a former Electronic Arts Producer, began Broken Saints as an online graphic novel that uses Macromedia’s Flash to tell the dark, thought-provoking story of four strangers who discover that they are cryptically linked to each other and a techno-spiritual conspiracy to enslave humanity.

The idea was spawned to create something literate, graphic, and moving (emotionally AND spatially). A new style of Flash animation, anime-inspired artwork, poetic prose, and a haunting soundtrack were woven together seamlessly to create a mesmerizing new form of storytelling dubbed ‘cinematic literature’.

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Making Your First Movie: ‘Me and You and Everyone We Know’

Writer/director Miranda July, whose debut feature “Me and You and Everyone We Know” was a Sundance favorite this year, started her career as a performance artist in Portland, Oregon.

July received a lot of attention for her script, which interweaves a series of stories—a quirky performance artist pursues a recently divorced shoe salesman, a 6-year-old boy has a chat room flirtation with an unwitting middle-aged woman, a pair of teenage girls decides to test their sexual prowess on a willing neighbor, an old widower meets and falls in love with a woman in his retirement home—using the theme of loneliness to tie the loose ends together.

She worked hard to craft the material and had specific ideas about how it should be realized. But when it came time for her feature debut as a director, she knew she’d have to surround herself with some experienced filmmakers...

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New Process Captures Piano Recordings

Like programs to restore old photographs, this new program works with the piano!

Poor audio Recordings made years ago can now be transformed with a new program that captures and converts them into high-definition descriptions of the original performances that can be exactingly replicated using modern piano technology.

This process literally captures the pianist's original performance intentions, placing the listener back at the moment of creation and recreating a performance that may previously have been obscured by the limitations of the original recording.

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Straight Away

INDIE film ideas are all around us...

You've got the heartbroken DJ with the jealous Lover. There's the Girlfriend dreaming only of strollers and PTA Meetings. The Jeweler following through on a promise. And in the middle of it all is a former Athlete standing in everyone's way, even his own.

This is Straight Away, a film by writer-director Michael Evans and producer Jesse Ball.

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FRONTIER 1859

A different kind of game...

As I came to investigate what remains of old western Boomtowns, I courted a kind of high-school sweetheart. She led me on a chase through old vaults, libraries, maps and dark tunnels underground. I remembered where I had seen her before. She stared in movies and on TV.

Louis L'Amore danced with her, London, and Michener too. In her arms Twain found a future, J. Ross Browne and Dan DeQuille did to. The tales abound. You can still hear her singing on the radio, and in the desert she whispers in your ear like a phantom riding the wind.

From the perspective of hope, some see the Frontier wilderness as a place to begin again. From the perspective of home, it is "we were here first." Yet there should be room enough for everyone - so long as you don't take away from me, and I don't take away from you. Certainly we should see eye to eye on not taking more than we need - right? How much does anyone need? How much do you want? Who becomes the giver and the taker?

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TWIN PRINCES new 3D animation news

TWIN PRINCES a new animated project, recently displayed its preview in Singapore.

The animated promo received rave reviews and plaudits at the conference packed with entertainment industry executives from all parts of the globe. Toonz has inked an US $ 4.5 million dollar contract with Ani21 to produce the 'Twin Princes' television series.

The 6-minute promo, which features a blend of 2D and 3D animation, will be a curtain raiser for the 52 half hour episodes series.

Philippino singer VIENNA has completed the theme song. CLICK HERE to see Vienna's Congratulations billboard for writing and singing the theme song to the TWIN PRINCES animated motion picture.

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Sprockets Closes Record Breaking Festival

Sprockets Toronto International Film Festival for Children announced 11 awards in three categories at the Isabel Bader Theatre.

The curtain fell on the 8th-annual event with more than 20,000 children and family members, an increase of 20% from last year, seeing 87 films from 26 countries. "It's our best Sprockets to date. We're absolutely thrilled with the increase in attendance and the increased number of international guests."

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Kingdom of Heaven: MPC’s Sword and Sandal Hat Trick

Just when you thought you had seen the mother of all battles, Hollywood delivers yet another combat scene on an unprecedented scale.

After The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Troy and Alexander, fans of epic movies can gaze upon the sequence of the siege of Jerusalem in Twentieth Century Fox’s Kingdom of Heaven.

This new sword and sandal epic is brought to us by Ridley Scott, the filmmaker who single handedly revived the epic genre with Gladiator. Kingdom of Heaven tells the tale of a tormented young knight (Orlando Bloom), who embarks upon a life-changing journey to defend Jerusalem from the advancing troops of Saladin.

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Alienware Creates First-Ever Star Wars PC

Alienware announces the new Alienware Aurora: Star Wars Edition, the first-ever officially licensed STAR WARS PC. Aurora: Star Wars Edition systems are based on AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 processors and packed with exclusive STAR WARS content such as desktop skins, fan club membership and movie soundtrack samples.

The systems are available in two versions, Dark Side and Light Side. Both feature breathtaking STAR WARS artwork on the cases. The Dark Side version features a case design that captures the imposing presence of Darth Vader and the rest of the evil Imperial forces in lifelike detail.

The Light Side system beautifully displays the vivid images of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, Luke Skywalker and the other heroic figures of the STAR WARS galaxy in full action.

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PARAMETRIC HUMANS

Over the past few years, the CGI industry has hit some pretty hard times.

Players have merged, been bought out or just vanished. Even Siggraph, the mother of all computer-graphics related conferences, has become a mere shadow of itself as the future looks pretty bleak.

Recent observations indicate that we may be at the begining of a new renaissance of our industry. And, 10 years from now, maybe the company stock you bought after reading this story will make you rich...

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How a TV Spot Comes into Being

(Or at least how it's SUPPOSED to work)

Long before a TV spot goes into production a number of steps occur. Since others here are far more qualified to discuss the particulars of production, this article will deal with the steps which precede the making of a TV spot.

First, the marketing division of the client (or in smaller companies, the individual(s) with responsibility for marketing) identifies one or more specific opportunities to sell potential purchasers, usually people defined as a specific or "target" market.

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NOWHERE MAN

An independent thriller as uncompromisingly dark as Nowhere Man presents a welcome opportunity to reset the benchmark for noir classics.

The plot is a sick riff on the 1950 classic D.O.A., in which Edmond O'Brien learns he's dying of a slow-working poison and races against the clock to solve and avenge his own murder.

Indie auteur McCann (Desolation Angels, Revolution #9) knows exactly what he's doing, eliciting scalding, tragic performances from his little-known players while maintaining an assured 80/20 balance between straight-faced thriller and pitch-black surrealist farce.

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Le Grand Role

Le Grand Role is an independent comedy/drama features Maurice, Sami, Simon, Elie and Edouard as still unknown actors in their late thirties.

With the major breakthrough he has been waiting for, Maurice gets a lead role in The Merchant of Venice! He rushes home to proudly announce the big news to his wife Perla, but Perla is very ill. Unfortunately, the part eventually goes to a famous American star.

Maurice doesn't have the heart to tell Perla, so with his friends' help, he will go all the way to make his wife believe that he still has the part, and he ends up playing the role of his life to protect her.

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Television Debut of "Honeybee" on TV One

R.A.P. Filmworks is pleased to announce that "Honeybee" will have its television premiere on TV One on May 7 at 9:00 pm EDT.

"Honeybee" was licensed by Urban Entertainment as part of a ten-picture deal with the new African-American cable network. “Honeybee” is an action/drama about a young black woman who pursues her dream to become a professional female boxing champion.

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Horror Flick ‘After Sundown’

This direct-to-video independent horror flick premieres at Billy Bob’s at 7 p.m., June 7, 2005 in Grandview, Texas.

“AFTER SUNDOWN” is the mysterious and remarkably detailed western gothic that mixes modern-day vampires and zombies with a gunslinging vampire from the old American West in pitched battles featuring startling special effects.

The producers describe the film’s eye-popping plot as “an action-packed story of a young woman who uncovers a dark secret, detailed in a diary found as an old cemetery is relocated to make way for a new subdivision.

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Sirius, Inventor to Bring Podcasts to Satellite Radio

Sirius Satellite Radio and PodShow.com have announced that Adam Curry, the "father of podcasting," will produce a special Sirius Satellite Radio program "Adam Curry's PodShow"that will broadcast the "best podcasts in the world" exclusively to Sirius subscribers.

This is the first collaboration between the two key players in two mediums in audio broadcasting--satellite radio and podcasting. Curry designed the digital tools that have made podcasting a worldwide phenomenon.

The 4-hour program will feature highlights and insights from the world of podcasting and will introduce Sirius listeners to a completely new range of worldwide talent and artists including the best new, undiscovered music.

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Three DPs/Three Cameras

Tips for Shooting HD in Prime Time

MAGIC WORDS: Efficient workflow, great images, on budget---not just for cost-conscious producers but for the cinematographers who paint and frame the images we see on television .

With a choice of HD cameras, videographers can now not only shoot high-def, but also make a more conscious and informed decision on which HD camera they pick, not just to meet the specific challenges of a TV project, but to integrate well into the creation of the aesthetic they’re going for.

Three cinematographers lensing three different TV series, explain why they picked the camera they did and what their experiences have been transitioning to HD production.

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BIG BROTHER is watching you...

SHADES OF "1984"...

The newly established Remington Technologies Division of Remington Arms Company has unveiled the Eye Ball R1, a wireless, baseball-sized device with real-time audio and video that rotates to provide a 360-degree visibility of an environment.

CLICH HERE to see what the EYE BALL R1 can do. CLICK HERE to learn more.

PBS to develop model HD systems for stations

With its digital transition nearly complete, PBS is ready to face the next hurdle: HD.

PBS has enlisted the aid of Sony to support and develop model HD production systems that member stations in any size market can easily adopt and implement. This pilot program, which starts this summer, will center on efforts to upgrade three PBS member stations to HD production operations at varying levels of investment.

Once completed, these stations will serve as models for the implementation of HD production operations at other PBS stations across the country. Other elements of this joint HD effort may include the development of a PBS certification program for HD operations, with Sony working closely with the pilot PBS stations to install new equipment and train station personnel. PBS currently has 349 member stations, but relatively few produce HD programming.

Ed Caleca, senior vice president for technology, operations, and distribution for PBS, hopes the model architecture will eventually lead to more stations contributing HD programming to the National Program Service.

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...and next THE FILM?

Orwell's dark visions in '1984' hit opera stage

The creators of a new opera based on the novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" did not have to work hard to make George Orwell's nightmarish vision of a loveless and brutal world resonate with 21st century audiences.

Technology used for surveillance and control, the denial of personal freedom, Doublethink, Newspeak and a seemingly endless war place a work written in 1948 firmly in today's realm.

Lorin Maazel, the American conductor and composer who began working on the opera in 2000, insisted he did not set out to create political theater...

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GLASSHOUSE

An imaginative indie filmmaker/artist, Andrew Zimbelman, combined paint on glass animation composited with digital animation and video to create this B&W film.

In a short period of time the film takes us to so many different types of spaces combining different animation techniques that add an extra aura to its quality of complexity and dreaminess.

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Digital Cinematography

AN INVITATION:

to subscribe to Digital Cinematography, the new magazine from CMP Information, publishers of Videography, Television Broadcast, Government Video and the Creative Planet Community sites.

To subscribe, please click here: www.dcinematography.com/subscribe

To download a PDF of the premiere issue, please click here:

IDA & Sundance Showcase Nominated Docs

"This is a fantastic opportunity for film enthusiasts to see all the documentary films nominated for the 77th Annual Academy Awards in both the feature and short categories," says IDA Executive Director Sandra Ruch.

"This year's nominated films are all insightful, engaging and entertaining. It has been another amazing year for the documentary genre, which continues to grow and gain momentum."

Crafting The Surreal Imagery of Northfork

The images in Northfork reflect a slippery, haunting quality. Things appear familiar yet strange and beautiful yet eerie. Black trenchcoated men, vintage automobiles and weathered wooden structures are often set as isolated focal points against a barren landscape of undulating hills and overcast skies. Rendered in shades of gray, the environment takes on a kind of abstract quality befitting the fable-like story.

An isolated western town in 1955 is about to be flooded by a newly constructed dam. An evacuation committee of six hired men is trying to convince the last remaining stubborn residents to leave, while an ill orphan lies dreaming surreal dreams in the care of the local pastor.

Crafting these images was the job of cinematographer M. David Mullen. Mullen's own storyboards are strikingly close to the images seen in the film, reflecting his firm grasp of the compositions and tone needed to tell the story.

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Torremolinos 73

Foreign filmmakers have lots to say and they seem to being saying it well...

Imagine being a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman just when the market is bottoming out. Your wife has just lost her job, you are 3 months behind on your rent and your boss has just given you an ultimatum - either make educational adult films for the Scandinavian market with your wife or you are sacked.

One film pays more than 150 encyclopaedias, which will be handy if your wife ever manages to get pregnant. Welcome to the surprisingly charming world of Spanish tragi-comedy Torremolinos 73.

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"THE MEDIUM IS THE MISSED AGE"

DV is not a revolution, it's a consumer frenzy.
DV is not cinema, it's not film. It's video!

It is yet another step in the evolution of small-format, low-budget video technology that began with Sony's 1/2" reel-to-reel portapak in the mid-sixties. The fact that the feature filmmaking community is drooling over DV illuminates the great divide that still exists between the worlds of film and video.

As any videomaker knows, the wonders of DV that filmmakers tout—small size, low cost, portability, spontaneity—have been around for years. The only difference is between analog and digital and, in practical terms, the differences are minor.

With Hi-8 you had dropouts—literally, oxide particles that would fall off the tape from friction. With DV you have digital artifacts—missing or distorted pixels. In editing with DV you have Firewire—almost no loss in image quality. With Hi-8 you have S-video—a semi-component signal that transfers an image almost indistinguishable from one digitized through Firewire.

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MAKE IT REAL!

Coke was just Coke until New Coke came along and made the old one “classic.”

And a clock was just a clock until technology made us reconsider time as either digital or analog.

Of course, it’s still just time being expressed in different ways. But think of how digital clocks make us newly aware of the properties of the analog ones — digital clocks may be more accurate and easier to learn to read but analog gives us a more graphic picture of time — a way to visualize a half hour, for example, that makes it more real.

So what can we learn from the beams reflecting off 2D, commercial CG-3D and new approaches to CG?

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