longest continuous (uncut) shot in cinema history?

. The long tracking shot (one continuous take) has been a cinematic marvel and a calling card of sorts for directors ever since Orson Welles opened Touch of Evil with one long tracking shot.

It's true that the advent of steadicams and digital editing have helped today's filmmakers do what their predecessors only dreamed of, but the long tracking shot continues to be one of the most impressive feats of cinematic magic out there. Scorsese used it extensively in Goodfellas, Alfonso Cuaron used a particularly long shot to show the chaotic nature of a shootout in last year's Children of Men and even Alfred Hitchcock used the technique, filming Rope in only 10 total shots.

Those shots were all impressive, but the record-holder for longest tracking shot goes to Aleksandr Sokurov for his 99 minute shot in Russian Ark. Yes, the famed Russian filmmaker actually shot his entire movie, chronicling 300 years of Russian history, in one take.

Film Festivals as Markets

The main film festivals are also markets, helping the acquisitions executive spot unsigned films that could be picked up. This is the place where you and your sales agent can start to cash in on the buzz that you have worked hard to create through screenings at smaller festivals.

There are five major markets, spaced throughout the year:

European Film Market in Berlin in February.

American Film Market (AFM) in Santa Monica in February.

Marche International du Film in Cannes, France in May.

London Film Festival, in October.

Mercato International Filme e Documentario, in Milan, Italy, also in October.

Finished product vs short clip
If you are trying to sell a movie to potential distributors, it helps if you have a finished product; surprisingly, up to 80 per cent of films submitted to Sundance are incomplete. However, incomplete projects are bought in special forums at most of the main film markets. For example, the Independent Feature Film Market each autumn in New York attracts buyers who are able to see special screenings of partially completed work. Incomplete movies are inevitably less attractive because the producer usually asks for completion funds, but distributors are well versed in deciding whether to buy based on just a small section of a film; even in full screenings, potential buyers make up their minds from just short sections of a movie and may leave midway through in order to attend other screenings.

Goran Paskaljevic

The first comprehensive American retrospective of the films of Goran Paskaljevic (b. 1947, Belgrade), one of Europe's most respected directors, featuring new 35mm English-subtitled prints of thirteen features and two shorts by the director. Though Paskaljevic's films are narrative-based, they are driven by restless, idiosyncratic, and all-too-human characters, and often veer off in surprising and fanciful directions. Paskaljevic finds the extraordinary in the reality of the everyday, and his realism, informed by the political transformations he has witnessed, is inflected with irony. He has written, "The beauty of film for me is its closeness to life. And if it is going to reflect life faithfully, it has to draw on metaphor, just like poetry."

Seven golden rules to remember for writing in films.

• Assume a conversational tone by using short sentences and an informal, approachable style.


• Engage your audience emotionally; make them care about both the people and content of your production.


• Provide adequate logical structure; let viewers know where you're going, which concepts are key, and when you're going to change the subject.


• After making an important point, expound on it; illustrate it.


• Don't try to pack too many facts into one program.


• Give your audience a chance to digest one concept before moving on to another.


• Pace your presentation according to the ability of your target audience to grasp the concepts.

biggest gross on Christmas day?

When you think of movies that had huge box office days in December, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings movies come to mind, but neither one of them came close to nabbing the title of top Christmas day grosser of all-time.


Nope, ironically, the movie that grossed the most money on one of the biggest family holidays of the year is none other than the dysfunctional tome Meet The Fockers. That's good news to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, the only comedy opening this weekend.


With such new movies as National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Charlie Wilson's War and Sweeney Todd, one thing is for certain, this weekend will be a busy one at movie theaters.

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My film is an attempt to represent the most profound and diverse human emotion: love. Love is a very tricky subject. With love as the subject, one can communicate essential messages with ease. The audience drops its defenses and agrees to look into the reason and mode of communication of the storyteller. In my film I have tried to capture the emotional journey of two lovers. The film starts with an intriguing insight into the pain of a man in love, only to find out that he has lost the chance to love. Although his love is alive in vivid memories of his lover, the woman who has sown the seeds of this love has disappeared into the abyss of time. The film is to communicate the fact that love comes in unfamiliar packages. A small and seemingly insignificant gesture can upturn the whole meaning of one’s life. The choice of the accompanying song is to show the intensity of the lover’s pain and the deep impact of this love in his life. Although my film is a cliché about unconditional love, I have nevertheless chosen this subject because love is one human emotion that never ceases to grip and surprise us. I believe filmmaking is all about clear communication. You are a good filmmaker when your audience can see your imagination crystal clear on the screen.

What’s a codec?

Codecs are all designed to work on two fronts: temporal and spatial y of using the internet for vidcompression.the only viable way of using the internet Tjay TtTta That means they both compress the picture in terms of the amount of information used, but do this in different ways. Beyond this, there are other ways to compress further, by reducing colour quality, audio, pixel rate or frame rate.

Within these two formats, codecs are found in either hardware or software form. Hardware codecs are fast and more efficient but more expensive, and require that the receiver of the images has the same codec device. Software codecs do not have the same quality as hardware versions but most are available free on the Internet, and are more widely used on editing programs.

There are two ways of compressing a film. Here’s how it works:

Temporal compression: Temporal compression takes out lots of information that you don’t miss by comparing the individual pixels in a frame-for example, if a frame looks almost the same as the last, perhaps with the same background colour, it recognizes this and hangs on to only those bits of information that differ from what was in the first frame, called the key frame. All other frames after the key frame it names "delta frames" and only starts a new key frame when the scene changes significantly. In this way, it manages to remove much information and reduce the overall file size.

Spatial compression: Spatial compression works differently: it still looks for data that appears more than once but instead of studying each pixel, it divides up the whole picture into blocks of pixels. It looks for patterns of repetition within these blocks, enabling it to map them using much less data. Pushed too far this can result in blocky, jagged looking images but it remains a powerful, if unsophisticated, compression solution.

Make A Movie With Microsoft MovieMaker

Capture Your Clips
The first step in using Moviemaker is to capture your clips. Start the program and after it starts, capture your video from your camcorder. You can do this by clicking the tasks icon and choosing Capture Video, or clicking File => Capture Video.

Arrange Your Clips

The next step is to use the storyboard in Windows Moviemaker to arrange your clips. In the film industry a storyboard is known as a series of panel sketches showing how the different scenes in the movie will play out, and in what order.

Microsoft Moviemaker uses the same concept: its storyboard is where you’ll set your clips in the order that you want. First make sure you’re in storyboard mode by clicking View => Storyboard. Then, begin by looking for your clips in the Collections panel. If you don’t find them, click on the Collections box and select your clip.

Once it’s in the panel area just click and drag your clip to the storyboard below. You can preview a clip in the Moviemaker monitor window at any time. Just use the VCR-like controls at the bottom of the window. Save your work, and move the clips around until they’re in the order you want. Save your work again. If you want to rename your clips to something meaningful, just right click and choose Rename.


Edit Your Clips
First, switch to Timeline view by clicking the Show Timeline button above the Storyboard, or by clicking View => Timeline. In place of the Storyboard boxes you see something that looks like a filmstrip.

To edit, double-click on a clip to let it play in Preview mode, and then choose Clip => Set Start Trim Point, where you want the clip to begin. This is the start of the clip. Now, to set the end of the clip double-click it again, and then choose Clip => Set End Trim Point. The clip will be trimmed, with extra footage removed. Do the same for the other clips, then save your work in Microsoft Moviemaker.

Add Some Transitions


To begin, let’s toggle back to Storyboard view by clicking the Show Storyboard button just above the timeline. Alternately, you could click View => Storyboard from the menus. To access transitions, from the menus click Tools => Video Transitions. You’ll see a whole list of transitions in the Collections Panel of Microsoft Moviemaker. You can preview a transition by double-clicking it, and watching it play in the Monitor window.

Now, how do we apply transitions to the clips? You’ll notice that there are smaller boxes separating the clip boxes from each other. This is where you drag your transitions from the Collections Panel onto the clip. You can use the VCR-like controls on the Monitor to view how your movie will play with the transitions. Remember, however, that with transitions, more is less. Be subtle, and you’ll make an effective presentation.

Add Some Background Music

Your production would not be complete without background music and narration. To add music in Microsoft Moviemaker, in the Tasks pane choose Import Audio or Music and select your files.

If you want to add narration, just toggle to Timeline view and find an empty space in the audio track for your narration. Then click Tools => Narrate Timeline. You now have audio both in the original video clips, and in additional tracks that you created.

To adjust the audio levels in your clips, right-click on any clip in Moviemaker and adjust volume, fades or mute if you desire. If you want to balance how the music works with your clip audio, click Tools => Audio levels and adjust with the slider.

Create The Final Output
Now is the moment you’ve been waiting for! You’ll create your final output. In the Tasks Pane of Moviemaker you’ll see a list of output options under Finish Movie.

You can send to web, write back to digital video, save to CD, save to your hard, and so forth. Select the one you want to use. A wizard will come up, guiding you through the rest of the output creation process.

Depending on your selected output, you will be prompted for certain specs to supply. If you send to web, for example, Windows Moviemaker will want to know what your audience’s likely Internet speed and method of access will be like.

Operation Filmmaker.

In the wake of "Operation Iraqi Freedom," American actor Liev Schreiber had an idealistic notion: to rescue an Iraqi film student from the rubble of his country and bring him to the West to intern on a Hollywood movie (Everything Is Illuminated). It promised to be a heartwarming tale, a small victory out of the troubled mission of the U.S war in Iraq. But as in the war itself, "good" intentions yielded unintended consequences, and even this operation doesn't go according to plan. Director Nina Davenport becomes personally involved in Schreiber's charitable effort, and soon finds herself embroiled in a complex moral quagmire and all-consuming power struggle between filmmaker and subject. Operation Filmmaker is an engaging, sometimes comical political parable, taking the viewer on a riveting ride from Baghdad to Hollywood.

"No man is an island"

John Donne's statement "No man is an island" could fittingly describe the art of filmmaking, which involves a team of artists and craftsmen, each with a clearly delineated role. Though each member of the filmmaking team has a specific job, no one works in a vacuum. Their collaborative efforts combine to produce the final film, and this reciprocity in the creative process often produces singular works.

street light

Dear reader,I would like to use this platfoam to promote good cinema.Please watch the film and give your comment.





Words From The Maker.
I am cameraman for TV channel. Yes this is my first short film; literally I have done everything from direction, camera. I have written the dialogues & story, produced too. Both actor are my friend whom I told them one hour the before shoot & showed them reference of al pachino’ film scent of woman for blind character I know I could have given that electrician uniform but no money. This film could have been lot better with lot of help & little bit money but never the less will do better one next time. the quality in youtube is very low resolution than actual final film.

Wax

Wax is a high performance and flexible free video editing software program. It started out as a college project, and has since grown. Wax is good for both home users and professionals. It can be used as a stand-alone application, oras a plug-in to other video editors. The software also features unlimited video and audio tracks with top-down compositing.

It is a high performance and flexible video compositing and special effects software. The idea for Wax is to be very general purpose and flexible in video compositing and effects, so that you can compose your dream video sequence with ease everytime.

Wax can create 2D & 3D special effects and can work in two modes - as a standalone application which would appeal for home users/beginners, and as a "plug-in" to video editors/NLEs which would be more useful for professional editors. Currently Wax can work as a plug-in with Sony Vegas®, Pure Motion EditStudio and Adobe Premiere® and work for integrating with various other NLEs is in progress.

Hey, look! It's the new 'Indiana Jones' poster

May 22 isn't too far off. That's when we'll get to see the next (and perhaps last?) Indiana Jones movie -- Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Paramount has released the official poster for this long-awaited fourth film in the franchise. You can see it in all its glory below.

Spanish Cinema

For all those who - frequently and with abandon - toss out the dismissive phrase, "It's only a movie!", and for others who claim that no movie can approach the breadth and depth of "real life," here comes Solitary Fragments (La Soledad) as one of - perhaps the - best corrective you'll encounter. This is not a documentary, although it possesses the feel and sound of one, if not the look. Most of us by now know that, while the documentary may be truthful, it can also be biased and judgmental, coming, as it does, from a single viewpoint and often taking in a single character, subject or event. But La Soledad is a narrative feature.

films

Films, also known as movies, motion pictures, flicks, the pictures, and the cinema, are undoubtedly the most influential art form of the 20th century. From the early days of Hollywood to the high-tech cinema of today, the silver screen has projected our dreams and fantasies, presented both glamour and works of social conscience, and served as our collective memory.

what to consider when purchasing a camcorder?

The basic attributes to consider when purchasing a camcorder are

Firewire/IEEE 1394 support

Lens Quality

LCD Size

Optical Stabilization System

Digital Still Image Capability

the first attribute (Firewire support) is absolutely critical. Never buy a digital camcorder that does not have Firewire support . The other attributes like lens quality, LCD size and optical stabilization are nice to have but should not matter if you are just an average home user.


The last attribute - digital still image capability - gives you the ability to shoot pictures just like a digital still camera. I personally think there's no need for this feature, as it jacks up the price tag way too much. I'd prefer to get a basic videocam and a proper digital still camera separately if I want to both shoot videos and take still pictures.

2007 ALL ACCESS SCREENWRITING COMPETITION

Dear Reader,

There are just 8 days to go until the entry deadline for this year's All Access Screenwriting Competition!


You can choose to take advantage of an extraordinary opportunity for talented screenwriters to open the door to Hollywood and its deal-makers and have your work submitted to participating companies that have already requested the top three Winners.


Additional prizes for the winners include software giveaways, cash, and special exposure to the winner.


There are plenty of other opportunities and prizes to go around, with five finalist prize packages and random entry prizes.

Snake Eyes in 'G.I. Joe' comes true

Ray Park has been cast as Snake Eyes in 2009's G.I. Joe movie. Park is best known for his role as Darth Maul in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.

Park's performance as the barely audible Sith apprentice is the perfect foundation for Snake Eyes. After all, the mysterious G.I. Joe character is a martial arts-trained soldier known for his stealth abilities. Snake Eyes also happens to be a mute.

The Scotland-born Park, himself a world champion martial artist, also played Toad in the first X-Men movie. There is talk he'll star as the martial arts comic book hero Iron Fist in his self-titled movie.

Park becomes the second actor cast for G.I. Joe. We carried the news previously that Sienna Miller would star as Baroness, the evil Cobra's intelligence officer.

Billy The Kid

I’m not black, I’m not white, not foreign…just different in the mind – different brains, that’s all…" explains 15 year-old Billy in Jennifer Venditti’s provocative coming of age film. Billy's intuitive commentary and intimate verité footage reveal a unique attitude as he responds to a painful childhood, first time love, and his experience as an outsider in small town Maine. By turns humorous and disturbing, this portrait challenges the viewer to look beyond labels and contemplate the future of a teen still in the process of becoming.

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS

Giuseppe De Santis (February 11, 1917 - May 16, 1997) was an Italian film director. One of the most idealistic neorealistic filmmakers of the 1940s, he made films punctuated by ardent cries for social reform

He was first a student of philosophy and literature before entering Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. While working as a journalist for Cinema magazine, De Santis became a major proponent of the early neorealist filmmakers who were trying to make films that mirrored the simple often tragic realities of proletariat life using location shooting and nonprofessional casts


De Santis unites a cinema instinct of the highest order and a deep directing wisdom. In Tragic Hunt (1947), Bitter rice (1949), No peace under the olive trees (1950) he transfuses his curiosities for a rural world, theater of conflicts and tensions represented in the characterizing key of an adjourned and sophisticated fiction of appendix, soaked of democratic contents. Bitter rice marks the explosion of an erotic bomb in the Italian cinema, Silvana Mangano, in whose footsteps a squad of florid and seductive beauties , defined curvaceous women because of their attributes, will oust the stars' dominion survived to the war uproars.

A Little Fable

"Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it.

Breathless original poster

Breathless shocked contemporary audiences with its bold visual style and editing—much of which broke the rules of classical Hollywood cinema. Most notable of its innovations were jolting jump cuts and hand-held camera.

Test Your Imaginative Faculties

Dear reader the above image is trying to tell a story. Try sharping your creativity and see if you can think of a good story which matches the above image.

TRIVIA QUESTION

What movie script did Quentin Tarantino sell in order to finance Reservoir Dogs?

Quentin sold the script for True Romance to Warner Bros. for the WGA minimum at the time of $50,000. He used the proceeds of that sale to finance his first full-length feature Reservoir Dogs.

Starring a veritable who's who in Hollywood including Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Gary Oldman, James Gandolfini, Brad Pitt, Christopher Walken and Samuel L. Jackson, the movie also featured Jack Black's film debut, but his role was cut from the final film.

True Romance is one half of a larger script written by Tarantino and Roger Avary. The discarded half was later turned into the feature length film Natural Born Killers. Tom Sizemore, who celebrates his birthday today, played a cop in both movies and lost out to Steve Buscemi for the role of Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs
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Patricia Arquette's character of Alabama is mentioned briefly in one of Mr. White's flashback scenes in Reservoir Dogs. Tarantino's original intention was to have Alabama join up with Mr. White and live a life of crime.

ERRORS AND OMISSIONS INSURANCE

E & O insurance is insurance that will be required for the film separate from the standard insurance for accidents, shooting days, etc. The purpose of this insurance is to assure your investors that they will be protected in case the production is sued for slander or improper use of a copyright.

Some examples of what Errors and Omissions concerns can be found in "Too Many Locations", "Specific Music" and "Uniforms, official Vehicles".

Basically you have to keep in mind that if you use a brand name, feature a still (or moving) photograph, a celebrity's name or likeness, or virtually anything in your script that you have not invented specifically for the film, the producer will be required by the insurance company to get written permission from the company or individual to use it. On the other hand, the insurer may judge that such use will not infringe on any copyright, etc., and therefore permission would not be necessary.

If for example you write a scene that has "Nancy" reading a National Geographic magazine, the producer will need the written permission from National Geographic, and might also need written permission from the photographer. The permission could take weeks or even months. For whatever reason, they may not grant permission, and if they don't, but it is vital that "Nancy" be reading a magazine about geography, then the art department will have to mock up a magazine cover, which will take more time and money.

The Exorcist

The story may seem bland and simple on the surface but there is much more going on inside than just a hidden ghost. Instead it presented to an audience that had grown up in a modern society that their worst fears still had a place. The era for many people was between the modernism of the sexual revolution and the conservatism of a more religious observant past. One part of the population had written off the devil as an embarrassing myth or boggey man, the other part still believe him to be real. The entire first half of this film follows that dilemma before concluding that it is in fact a devil inside her.

The battle that followed was for something that most of society still believed in at that time. It was a battle for the soul of the victim and the fear of the rescuers losing theirs. Most partically the self doubting priest. Note the ending. And if someone as holy as a priest can be dragged in by a devil what hope does the rest of us?

Anyway the fear of eternal damnation is a primal fear and perhaps even an escapable thought. The presentation of a devil that wants the soul only to defile it and torture it is shown by the way it defiles and tortures the victims body.In every way it is horror of the imagination and psychology more than the visual.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini is usually remembered as one of the most important of the directors who emerged in the second wave of Italian postwar cinema in the early 1960s but, within Italy itself, Pasolini was always much more than just a distinctive and innovative filmmaker. By the time he came to make his first film, Accattone, in 1961, he had already published numerous collections of poetry, two highly-acclaimed novels, had collaborated widely in cultural-literary journals and firmly established himself as one of Italy's leading writer-intellectuals.

In the 15 years that followed, before being brutally murdered in 1975 — and always inspired by what he himself called "a desperate vitality" and a "love of Reality" — he made a dozen feature films and half a dozen shorts, wrote, translated and sometimes directed theatrical works, published several further collections of poetry, two volumes of critical essays, painted some 40 canvases and, through his numerous articles in journals and his caustic columns in daily newspapers, became the loudest dissenting voice in Italian political and cultural debate.

Intensely passionate and iconoclastic, often paradoxical and contradictory, Pasolini was almost certainly, as Zygmunt Baranski has written in a recent critical reappraisal, Italy's major post-war intellectual.

So is noir a genre or a style?

Depends on your own philosophy. If you think movies are defined by their themes, then you probably think of noir as a genre. If you define films by their visual look and tone, then to you noir is definitely a style. Here's my take: If a private eye is hired by an old geezer to prove his wife's cheating on him and the shamus discovers long-buried family secrets and solves a couple of murders before returning to his lonely office - that's detective fiction. If the same private eye gets seduced by the geezer's wife, kills the old coot for her, gets double-crossed by his lover and ends up shot to death by his old partner from the police force - I can say with complete assurance: you are wallowing in NOIR.

kill the Writer's Block

Writer's Block is nothing more than a confusion of two different states of mind: the Flow state, where you produce new text, and the Editing state, where you evaluate and polish what you have written."

The reason WB is such a killer is that most of us have done far more reading than we have writing, and spend far more time in critical analysis of finished, polished work of the masters than in experiencing our own early drafts. So when we try to create text, we measure our first draft efforts against the polished work of the world's great writers. Immediately, that "this is garbage!" voice goes off in your head, and you have a block.


It is said that novice writers must work through a million words of garbage before reaching their true voice. How in the world will you ever get through it if you constantly judge every word? If you will learn to turn that voice off, you will learn a massive and important lesson about the structure of the human psyche.

Tribute to stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen

Ray Harryhausen refined and elevated stop-motion animation to an art. His Dynamation technique of matting animated creatures into live-action settings revolutionized the use of stop-motion animation in visual effects.

Ray was a master of his medium, applying skills as diverse as sculpture, illustration, painting, optics, history, and acting. Take any of his best-known creatures - The sword-fighting skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, the Cyclops from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, or Clash of the Titan's Medusa, for example. Ray conceived and designed each shot; sculpted, cast in latex around an articulated metal armature, painted and detailed the stop-motion puppet; staged and lit a miniature set of his construction; and infused it with poetic animation. Lacking any practical pre-visualization tools, he knew if a shot succeeded only after the film was developed. He executed his shots single-handedly, working months at a time, in tiny converted storefront studios.

Beyond the sheer spectacle of his films, Ray never lost sight of the realities of commercial filmmaking. Shot in exotic (and cheap) locations with local crews, his techniques were tailored to deliver effects on time and on budget. His business sense led to scripts both visually rich and commercially viable, and kept him consistently employed from 1953's The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms until his retirement after 1981's Clash of the Titans.
The Ray Harryhausen Creature list emphasizes Ray's work in feature films. Not included are his early Mother Goose shorts; test reels and unrealized projects; and some stop-motion effects shots (such as the discus toss in Jason and the Argonauts), live-action effects (like the Iguana stand-in dinosaur from One Million Years B.C.), miniatures (including the Mysterious Island balloon), makeup & prosthetics, and animated replacements for humans caught in creatures' clutches. Ray Harryhausen deserves further credit for his groundbreaking work in composite effects, demonstrated to great effect in The 3 Worlds of Gulliver.

Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award.

MoMA's Department of Film, in collaboration with Independent Feature Project (IFP) will screen the five nominees for the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award. The nominees were selected by senior members of the Filmmaker editorial staff and a MoMA film curator. The five nominees represent this year's best American independent films on the festival circuit that have yet to be picked up for theatrical distribution.

Off The Grid: Life on the Mesa. 2007. USA. Directed by Jeremy and Randy Stulberg. With little resources and no electricity, a group of outcasts live their version of the American dream on a sixteen-mile patch of barren land in New Mexico. Beautifully rendered by brother-sister team Jeremy and Randy Stulberg, this documentary explores the lives of the people who make up the Mesa, where police are not wanted and firearms are a necessity. After getting over the bizarre lifestyle decision these people have made, the viewer begins to respect them: people who are not looking for pity or assistance, but just to be left alone to live off the land and enjoy the country they love so dearly. 70 min.


August the First. 2007. USA. Written and directed by Lanre Olabisi. With Ian Alsup, D. Rubin Green, Kerisse Hutchinson, Joy Merriweather. A powerful drama in which old tensions resurface—and a family is torn apart—when a son invites his estranged father in Nigeria back to the United States for his graduation party. First-time feature director Olabisi, who shot August the First almost entirely in his mother's suburban home, is remarkably attuned to the language and behavior of middle-class American life. 81 min.


Mississippi Chicken. 2007. USA. Directed and photographed by John Fiege. The U.S. poultry industry, located in the American South, has been recruiting Latin American workers, largely undocumented, to work in their plants. Communities of immigrants now dot the landscape, but remain susceptible to exploitation and abuse by employers, landlords, neighbors, and the police. The lives of workers are shown through the eyes of those who live in a Mississippi trailer park adjacent to a processing plant. Filmed in Super 8mm, the saturated color of Mississippi Chicken provides a textured glimpse of lives most U.S. citizens know little of, as well as uniquely capturing the shimmering light of summer in the Deep South. 82 min


Frownland. 2007. USA. Written and directed by Ronald Bronstein. With Dore Mann, Mary Wall, Paul Grimstad, David Sandholm. A self-described "troll from under the bridge," the painfully awkward Keith Sontag spends his days selling coupons door-to-door and his evenings trapped in a squalid apartment situated in some particularly hellish outer ring of New York. With the most basic elements of human communication a struggle, Sontag lurches through an uncaring city, attempting to aid a suicidal friend, evict an unctuous roommate, and simply attain some measure of self-respect. With Frownland, Bronstein has made a bold and bracing film that is both a hilarious black comedy and a ragged love letter to an earlier era of independent film. Both the film and its singular hero are raw

Loren Cass. 2007. USA. Written and directed by Chris Fuller. With Kayla Tabish, Travis Maynard, Lewis Brogan. Set against the backdrop of racial unrest in 1996 St. Petersburg, Florida, Fuller's striking debut feature presents a trio of disaffected, angry, and frequently bored teens who yearn for change but mostly just drift and hook up in lonely diners and nocturnal parking lots in this "dirty, dirty town by a dirty, dirty sea." Precisely shot and sound-designed, Loren Cass fully evokes a state of aimless frustration and barely suppressed rage that extends its relevance far beyond its particular period setting. 83 min.

AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition)

Advanced Video Codec High Definition is a high-definition recording format introduced by sony and panasonic. It can use numerus storage media, including 8 cm recordable DVD discs, a hard disk. The format is to compatible with other handheld video camera recording formats, particularly HDV and MiniDV.
AVCHD uses an MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) video codec. AVC's better compression (compared to the older MPEG-2 codec of HDV) lets it record video of the same quality of MPEG-2 but in less space. The audio track can be stored as uncompressed 7.1 linear PCM or compressed AC-3 5.1. The compressed audio and video data are encapsulated in an MPEG-2 Transport stream called BDAV. This stream format and most of the structure of AVCHD are derived from the Blu-ray Disc BDMV format. Consequently, AVCHD recordings can be played without modification in most set-top Blu-ray Disc players, such as the Sony BDP-S1, Panasonic DMP-BD10, and the PlayStation 3.
AVCHD supports a variety of resolutions and aspect ratios, all the way from 480/60i to 1080/24p "Full HD" with 1920x1080 pixels in 16:9 aspect ratio. The typical maximum bit rate for HD recordings is ~24Mbps when recording to hard disk or flash memory and ~18Mbps for when recording to DVD. This results in 3MB or 2.25MB used per second respectively. (which is about 6 minutes of recording for every GB of storage
Sony claims the format has a total storage time on a MiniDVD of about 20 minutes of high-definition video using "average" bitrates. By comparison, today's 8 cm discs can store 30 minutes of standard-definition MPEG-2 video, and MiniDV tapes can store a full 60 minutes of either standard-definition DV or high-definition (HDV) video. At the maximum resolution, a standard 8cm DVD will hold just 15 minutes of material. The newer dual layer disks will hold 27 minutes. AVCHD camcorders using hard disks or flash memory such as SD or MemoryStick overcome this constraint and typically offer USB connections to access their content
Among the touted advantages of AVCHD over MiniDV tapes is random access, since AVCHD does not need to be fast-forwarded or rewound as on tape formats such as MiniDV. For advanced users, however, digital video-footage is rarely edited in-camera anyway; instead, it is transferred entirely to a computer, where the operator uses video editing software. So random access is less important to some professional users but may prove valuable to professionals in electronic news gathering.
The biggest problem with editing and converting these files is the sheer amount of resources they require—decoding and re-encoding AVC is much more intensive than, say, MPEG-2. Furthermore, AVCHD employs long-GOP frame storage, which while space-efficient, introduces problems into editing and decoding of material. Even so, just as MPEG-2 was originally taxing to home PCs, even needing special PCI decoder cards, AVC's challenges will be overcome with time, especially on multi-core CPUs

FILM FESTIVALS

There are now more than 2000 film festivals world wide, and the number grows each year. Festivals used to be free. Most now charge for entry - anything from $10 to $50. Those that encourage mass applications may merely have found a lucrative way to finance their festival. Be warned, and be aware that research is the key to finding the right festival for your short film.
www.withoutabox.com is a good place to start. This US based site facilitates registered members to apply to festivals online. Members can make as many applications to festivals as they wish (they still have to pay the entry fee, but Withoutabox acquires discounts at many festivals).
At Withoutabox, film-makers can track their submission status, find fests that fit the film, even get email reminders for upcoming festivals. There is a message board for film-makers to network, and an online guide for creating a Press Kit. Follow the link to see the PRESS KIT for Greta May.

The Life and Death of a Pumpkin

Final Cut supports RED camera

The Apple Gazette announced a number of key features for Final Cut Studio 2.
One key upgrade is its support for 4K video (4,096 x 2,160 pixels) and in effect support footage that originated from the RED camera (the RED camera stole NAB in 2006).
More info: FCS2 will cost $1,299, or $499 for an upgrade from FCS. FCP users can upgrade to FCS2 for only $699. Final Cut Studio 2 will be available next month.

Video Editing

If you intend to capture and edit any of your video footage, a computer system is a must.I'd recommend the eMachines T3985 desktop PC. This is a powerful computer with an affordable price tag. The Intel Pentium 4 2.93 GHz processor, combined with 512 MB of DDR memory and a 80 GB hard drive, gives you the power to handle almost every video editing task. An excellent choice for those who are just starting out in video editing.

Change The Speed Of Your Videos

Have you done video editing and wondered if you can slow time down? Sort of like a 'slow motion' sequence you see in the movies. Well, not to worry, with the video software out there, this can be easily done. Two of my favorites are iMovie and Movie Maker. They have excellent effects that anyone can use to adjust the speed of video footage.
For iMovie, you should look at the video effect 'Fast/Slow/Reverse'. This effect adjusts the speed of your video clip. You can also make it play in reverse for all sorts of interesting results.
For Movie Maker, there are video effects like Slow Down, Speed Up, Half and Double to let you play your video at different speeds.
So the next time you have a need to change the speed in your videos, try out the above tools and see what happens.

The Nanny Diaries

The husband and wife team that brought us the innovative American Splendour (2003) has worked together again for a more conventional comedy with The Nanny Diaries. The film satirises a tendency among some of the extremely wealthy of Manhattan's Upper East Side who, courtesy of their husband's huge income, can afford to both not work and pay others to raise their children.Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney play Mr. & Mrs. X, Scarlett Johansson plays Annie the Nanny and Nicholas Art plays Grayer, the X's young son. The performances are acceptable enough, and there is some genuine humour, but the writing felt clumsy to me, and fell into stereotypical cliché. Johnasson has potential with comedy, but while the clumsiness of her role in Woody Allen's Scoop melded reasonably with the narrative and style of the film, it doesn't quite gel in this film. Maybe that's a weakness in the direction or editing - I couldn't really tell. It just didn't quite work for me.There wasn't enough material to engage an audience for over 90 minutes and the film would have benefited by having some 15 minutes cut to bring it to this length. The film basically is a single joke that gets too repetitious as time wears on. The aspect that bothered me the most was a convenient and emotionally tidy ending. This may not concern a more conventional audience, which should find this enjoyable enough. Good for a bit of light but forgettable entertainment.

BBC INNOVATION LABS

BBC's Innovation Labs programme is holding a launch day in Yorkshire. The initiative brings together BBC Commissioners and independent UK companies to develop and commission pioneering new products and services for the corporation.
Last year a number of Yorkshire companies benefited from developing projects with BBC Commissioners whilst taking part in the Labs. Screen Yorkshire funding will support Yorkshire and Humber companies who are successful in applying for the Labs.
The Innovation Labs will be launched in Leeds on 19th November at The Carriageworks. The event will outline the programme's concept, BBC technology strategy and potential areas of commission in addition to holding Labs workshops to give attendees an idea of what to expect if they apply to take part in the Labs.
This year participants will have the chance to have their work commissioned by executives from BBC News, Vision, Audio/Music, iTV, Nations & Regions and Mobile with applications open to 40 companies across four regions.
During the final stage of the programme participants will get the chance to pitch their prototype ideas to BBC commissioners, who will offer further development commissions for the best ideas at each Lab.

Meet The Commissioner - Next event 21 November with ITV

Meet The CommissionerAs part of our business support programme, Screen Yorkshire is hosting a series of Meet the Commissioner briefings for independent production companies and new media companies based in the region.
Due to the popularity of the series events that ran over the spring, we have lined up the following sessions for Autumn 2007.
For those of you haven't been along to one of these sessions before, these events are an opportunity to meet with commissioners face to face, to start building a relationship with the channel and to ask questions on a one-to-one basis. The commissioners will all be talking about the vision for their channel, the submission process, opportunities for specific slots, and will also be offering their perspective on cross platform opportunities

Multiple BIFA Nominations for Leeds Thriller Exhibit A

Following its Best UK Feature win at the Raindance Film Festival earlier this month, Exhibit A has now received three BIFA nominations, including Best Achievement in Production, Most Promising Newcomer (Bradley Cole) and The Raindance Award. The awards take place on 28th November. The film was supported by Screen Yorkshire's Production Fund.

Screen Yorkshire Launches Dynamic New Website

We've launched a brand new website with a clear user friendly focus, featuring online video content, panoramic location shots, podcasts, rss feeds - and all you need to know about the vibrant film, broadcast, interactive media and games industries in Yorkshire and Humber. To celebrate the launch, we're offering all our e-bulletin subscribers the chance to win a champagne package weekend in partnership with Residence 6* - please tell your friends and help us spread the news.

SHORT FILMS

The Foundation realizes that Short films are an important and integral part of all cinema produced in the world. In fact, 60 to 80 per cent of all films produced are actually short films. The Foundation also recognizes that India has no dearth of creative & artistic talent in the area of short film production. Unfortunately, there is no professional Body or Organisation in India, that can take Indian Documentaries / Short films to various International buyers / festivals / TV channels and so on.
This task of taking the work of Indian documentary and short film makers to the world and marketing it, is now being taken up by the Foundation's SHORT FILM DIVISION. It’s a big challenge but, there is also a big market out there waiting for such films from India.
To our surprise, TV Channels around the world commission documentaries and short films worth US $ 5,00,000 to $ Two Million, depending on the concept and place of execution. This commissioning is generally offered to the producers / directors whose work is already seen or used by the Channels. We present an opportunity to let the Foundation introduce you to them.
The Foundation has professional people with hands on experience on it’s Board and also as it’s collaborators internationally. We write this to say that a film maker like you is sure to benefit from all this, as much as the world is going to benefit from viewing your work.

Advantages of digital filmmaking

The future requires content to be of digital format because of broadband and theatres obtaining digital servers/ projectors. Content has to be developed for the global market to earn more revenue and, naturally, this requires knowledge of digital technology and efficient production techniques in the digital format.
The future will be triggered by three media -- IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) broadband, radio and mobile. The formats for viewing and hearing are different, but the nature of content required is the same -- digital. The future leaders in the industry will be those who will have and control content in different formats for different devices

films

The international entertainment industry is projected to touch a massive growth of US$ 1.8 trillion by 2015. Most of it is directed towards the Asian region, specifically India, which -- according to some recently published reports -- has the potential to grab an impressive amount of nearly US$ 200 billion!
India is the largest producer of films in the world. 934 films were produced in 2004 alone, with more than 3.1 billion admissions (those admitted to cinema halls). The industry's current worth is about US$ 1,256 million, which is expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 18 per cent for the next five years.
At this juncture, career opportunities are booming in this industry. With more than 9,000 studios and production houses across India, educational institutions will have to bring about the revolution of technology input into the Indian industry by teaching digital filmmaking, to improve quality, cut costs by more than 40 per cent and increase the range of deliverable formats, unlike conventional film making which is time consuming and much more costly.