Shine a Light.

The joke that Martin Scorsese seizes on throughout his megawattage Rolling Stones concert movie, Shine a Light, is that the band's members have been asked 'How much longer can you stay together/productive/alive?' every year since Mick Jagger was a soft-faced boy who looked barely out of grammar school," writes David Edelstein in New York. "In the old days, Jagger seemed to be taunting us - or, more likely, his stuffy British headmasters and their blue-haired wives - by parading around the stage as everything most fearsome, the cock of the walk as a huffy black androgyne. Now he taunts us with his stamina.

Dear Film Noir Fans,

Our latest update must begin on a sad note, as we observe the passing of two men important to the legacy of film noir.

The first is Richard Widmark, who died last month after 93 years of wonderful accomplishments.
Widmark was one of those actors whose emergence heralded something entirely new in the movies, something emblematic of noir but distilled into one performer--the guilty thrill of finding "badness" both sexy and sinister. Widmark allowed audiences to delight in his villainy, and American movies grew up a bit when he showed that a character could be simultaneously attractive and repulsive. That dichotomy was, and remains, an essential aspect of noir's allure.

Secondly, Much harder to take was news of the death of our friend Arthur Lyons, one of the great modern writers of crime fiction, who for the past seven years was the producer of the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival. Art came from a Hollywood family (his father was a well-known restaurateur) and he knew and loved show business, exemplified by the incredible amount of time and energy he devoted to bringing old-school stars to his annual summer festival.

Simon Pegg confirms potential 'Star Trek' sequels

In news that will turn every Trekker a nice shade of cerulean blue, Simon Pegg confirmed in an interview with MTV Movies Blog that he's signed on for three Star Trek movies.

In fact, the concept of signing on for multiple movies caused him some trepidation at first.
"I thought about it for a bit because you have to commit to a series of films and that puts you in a situation where the studio has some control over what you do. I called up J.J. and I said, 'the idea is amazing but I'm worried.' And he said, ‘what's the worst that can happen? We hang out every three years and make a fun film?'"
According to MTV Movies Blog, Pegg signed on for three movies. Of course, any potential sequels would be dependent on their predecessors being a box office hit. Of course, with the streak that director J.J. Abrams is on, I don't think that will be a problem.

What is the biggest money-making foreign language film of all time?

Director Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ is the biggest non-English language film at the box office. The movie, spoken entirely in Aramaic, made over $370 million at the box office domestically. The Chinese action movie Crouchgin Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is number two on the list with $128 million.
Another great foreign language film, The Kite Runner, hits DVD this week. The movie, directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, this year's James Bond movie), is based on the best-selling novel of the same name.

5 Important Video Codecs You Must Know

video codec is a device or software that enables video compression and/or decompression for digital video. Digital video codecs are found in DVD (MPEG-2), VCD (MPEG-1), in emerging satellite and terrestrial broadcast systems, and on the Internet.

Below are 5 Must Know Video Codecs and their features

H.263 – use for video conferencing

This codec is a good choice for the business community. It’s ideal for a video conference where you do not need high-quality pictures and where audio is going to take priority. It is best with low movement films, so a more or less stationary talking head is going to be just perfect. The data rate for thiswould be small, but much quality is lost. Perhaps the only use of this codec is if you wanted to send aquick version of a film for viewing by a co-worker; you may not worry too much about the way it looksas you just want quick feedback.

Cinepak – use for CD-ROMs

This is a good, well-established system which works best with small image sizes. This codec is outperformed by many others, even though its small picture size, at 120x90 pixels, is now getting bigger as computers improve. It is better used on low-end machines but is not usually the first option for web film, being more suited to CD-ROMs. A big advantage with this codec is that it allows the sender to customize settings throughout a film, so you can apply heavier compression to places where there is notmuch movement but lighter compression to where you need more detail on screen, perhaps during anaction sequence. This process avoids ‘data spikes’, where sudden increases in data cause a movie to stopplaying on the user’s PC because too much data is needed.

3. RealG2 – good for web work, not for other uses

This codec is widely used on the web. It uses ‘temporal scaleability’, which means that the result forthe user is smoother than others even on a wide range of computers or devices. This means movies encoded with it play at a high frame rate for fast processors and low for slow ones. This codec is hard to beat in terms of the number of users who may have access to it on the web and the ease with which the rest can download it (for free).

4. Sorenson – good all-rounder

This is a really good, high-quality codec and looks better than most at a screen size of 320x240. It’sa good solution for movies that are going to be viewed over broadband connections, but some editions (notably the Developer Edition) cater for the other users by enabling scaleable streaming. One aspect which puts many people off using this codec is the length of time it takes to encode a movie in this way,but it remains the method of choice for most short movies, for the web and CD.

5. Intel Indeo 4 and 5 – good, but mainly for high power

With this method of compression you get a good result with high picture quality, but it is only viablefor high-powered PCs or Macs. Version 5 allows for progressive downloads. Intel’s codec is generally better than Cinepak, but cannot match the picture quality of the Sorenson.

Continuity in non-narrative films

Non-narrative movies demand a very different approach to narrative. They require that you embed continuity as a part of the whole structure of the film, not as an afterthought during filming.

Non-narrative movies such as music videos, abstract movies and multimedia projections used in live concerts are particularly susceptible to looking fragmented. At their most out of control, they look like you are channel surfing, looking at a number of clips of movies by different people. Of the following ideas, the more effective ones are those that are part of the planning and shooting stages rather than those placed over the film in post-production.


Methods of ensuring continuity in non-narrative film

Single filter effect (edit software filters, not camera filters)If your editing software has special effects that you can use to alter the look of clips – for instance, to make them change colour, stretch or change contrast and tone – you could apply one of these to the whole film, or at regular points. Restrict yourself to one filter only.

Tracking
A tracking shot – where the camera moves while it shoots, tracking the action – can make a good way of connecting shots. Decide on a constant speed of tracking and stick with it throughout the film. To enhance the effect, keep to one direction in the screen – for example, left to right. For example, you could show a slow, left-to-right movement of the camera along a beach, cutting then to a similar constant shot along a busy street


360-degree movement
This device is particularly effective in linking shots. Decide on the height of the camera and the speed of the camera as it moves, then shoot everything while moving 360 degrees around the subject, at every location, throughout the film.

Common space

This involves including an object or space in the background that is present in each shot, and could be as simple as a fireside with picture frame. This is commonly used in scenes with dialogue where it is useful to be able to locate two actors within the same space by showing some common space or object in each actor’s frame. In a non-narrative film you could choose a single prop that is present throughout.


Transitions

At the editing stage, you will need to decide how you cut between scenes. The most common – the straight cut and the cross dissolve – could be developed by trying something a little more noticeable. An example could be to fade fast to white as the picture cuts, suggesting flash photography.

The length of the shot

A style of editing that uses short cuts, with a high turnover of clips, will encourage the viewer to see these clips as linked in some way, even if the subject matter is not. Therefore, we tend to see a montage sequence consisting of a lot of quick images because the diversity of images needs to be balanced by speed of perception. But what is a ‘long cut’ or a ‘short cut’? In this case you could think of a quick cut as half a second or less and a slow cut as anything from three to five seconds, but your subject matter will dictate how fast your cuts will be.

Motif

In non-narrative films, a motif can be used with some thought to what kinds of objects or colours add to the overall theme of the movie. For example, in an interpretation of the word ‘anger’, we could justifiably use the colour red as a motif in the film. To stand as a motif you would have to see the object or colour recur often enough to be noticed. Alternatively, you could use images of a clenched fist or a brick hurtling towards a window, letting us see more and more of it as the film proceeds.

Linked imagery

For this idea we could take a look at Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). After a lengthy start where we see ancient pre-human apes, Kubrick needed a way of jumping tens of thousands of years into the future without disrupting the flow of the movie. If ever there was a time to use a continuity device, this was it. His response was to have the camera follow a bone thrown high into the air, and immediately cut to a similar-shaped, bone-like spacecraft, occupying the same space in the frame. This is a daring way of connecting two shots that could not be more dissimilar, visually. While shooting, you could look for parts of the scene that visually resemble a part of another, with the aim of linking the two later.

Sound

This is a last resort method of connecting shots and is not the most effective way. A single piece of music is dubbed over the whole film as with a music video. If you want to use sound in this way, try to use a particularly noticeable home-made soundtrack of sounds, rather than music, and one where you have altered the sounds or looped them, producing a repetitive, rhythmic effect.