Hallam Foe, Edinburgh 2000, Protagonist, Rataouille & Planet B-Boy "You know, everytime someone says they don't believe in cinema, someone, somewhere makes a sequel to a bad movie."  I'm slammed head first into multiplex A&E. Pulse falling, blood pressure dropping fast. I don't believe in anything any more. A sugar rush of Butterkist popcorn barely gets me into the trailers…

  If there's one thing more stressful than getting married, it's making a fully improvised comedy about the process in real time. Debbie Isitt, writer and director, kept a diary of the making of her film Confetti, an extravaganza of jealousy, nudity, ball boys....and improvised dialogue.   Coventry. September 2002 I first decided to make a wedding come…

well....its quite a mad story.... it all started when I was planning to make a short film -'eating out' - in August 2003... managed to get my actors, crew, location, camera, lights etc all via favours but still needed £200 or so to feed everyone and get us all through the 2 day shoot.... which was a problem until a friend called me saying she had a new job as cre…

From Glasgow-based Phase IV, behind the long gestating Simulation feature, comes an interview with Mark Gorzynski, Silhouette Technician behind Eon Production's Quantum of Solace, who speaks about his work, his family and silhouilmaking. [video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO3hg_tEVgk 600x400]

Last year I built the website for a new documentary due to premiere this year about the issue of land-grabbing in Africa. I'd first been introduced to the production team at an remarkable week as part of the Swim Lab, and been struck silent as the director, Joakim Demmer, explained in plain terms how while we are sending billions in aid to countries like Ethiopia, we are also, inadvertently, he…

“Our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers.&rd…

All is clear now. The middle east crisis. Homer Simpson vs Ned Flanders. Almost every fight I've ever had. Thanks Norman McLaren & BoingBoing. (this won the best animated short Oscar in 1952) {google}2976945051371832639{/google}   

Peter Finch in Network tells it how it is, remixed by videobeats/pixm.

 The only people who truly know how much blood sweat and tears go into the making of a feature length movie are those who have done it themselves. The effort required is also in indirect proportion to the size of the budget - the smaller the budget the greater will be the effort required.  This particular story is that of Neil Oseman ("Hereford's Stephen Speilberg…

  Uncover Favourite UK Film and TV Locations When I lived in Oxford a decade or three ago, it would have amazed me to imagine that my modest street in the working-class neighbourhood of Jericho would one day witness scores of escorted tour parties earnestly retracing the murder investigations of Inspector Morse. But at last this sign of the times has gained a name. Set-jetting is d…

I would like to say: when was the last time you gave antibiotics to a whale that had had no prior contact with humans and had swum to chelsea and was obviously a little stressed - and who doesn't get stressed in chelsea? when was the last time you did that? Never? Well why did you think now was the time to run an experiment? It's not like this whale shouldn't have had access to the best poss…

Thursday, March 19, 2009 To Whom it May Concern: Please in what city and country was the Church bombed in the movie The Reader, where 300 Jewish Woman died.  Are the only survivors Ilana and Rose Mather? Does anyone know if the name of her book is Memoir?  Is this book still in print? Best Regards, Sharon Corr

The Defence Medical Services Department (DMSD), part of the Ministry of Defence has appointed iceni Productions to produce a unique Defence Nursing web video project. The year long project will see the Midlands based video production company iceni, filming Defence Nurses across the UK giving a fresh perspective on the world of Nursing within the Military.  The nursing video, which will be ava…

So I decided to give myself the Christmas break - from just after boxing day until the 9th of January when I returned to work to tryand get Netribution 2.0 up online. I ordered one of the most boring christmas presents in memory - Larry Ulman's 'PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites' and proceeded to teach myself some basic PHP, beynd what I'd hacked for the www.ukfilmfinance…

"In 1744 a simple experiment was conducted in Sweden to reproduce the underlying cause of the Aurora Borealis in a laboratory, what we would now think of as a room. A small hole in a shade "the size of a large pea" let through a ray of sunlight that then was refracted through a prism. The small patch of light broken into a spectrum of colour…

The man who once forced to Klaus Kinski to take direction at gun point has been shot at during an interview with the BBC. The bizara incident is reported on the excellent cinematical.net Werner Herzog shot with air rifle during interviewPosted Feb 8th 2006 11:02PM by Jay Allen Filed under: Documentary Just in case you haven't gotten your quota of movie-related bizarre today, here's one…

Well this festival left me reinvigorated for what a film fest can be. Excuse me if I spiral off into hyperbole, but the programme, the people and style of fest just don't seem to fit in with the way that everything else seems so hyper-defined and funding-box-ticking, it was just programmed really imaginatively and diversely. It felt instinctive and well informed. In short, totally cool.   I…

From LazyFilm: There are only two things that can make any motion graphic artist flinch and that's rotoscoping and chroma keying. Why? Mainly because both processes are time consuming and arm numbing. However despite all these, rotoscoping and chroma keying still remains to be very important in the industry we move in. Which is why, lately, software companies are launching new…

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

Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 - April 5, 2006) helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years, and attempted to integrate art and life by blurring the separation between life and art, and artist and audience. He has published extensively and was Profess…

the horror film franchise is still surprisingly resilient and not really showing signs of slowing (some would say that the current incarnation has outstayed it's welcome). The question i ask is if there is space for a real rough and ready old school horror film that does what it says on the tin? The last good horror for me was Outpost. It didn't make you think too much and had a great genre story…

It is so easy to forget the human stories behind the daily news headlines. BoingBoing has pointed to a couple of great films appearing this week. One from the BBC sees Rageh Omaar, who after a year of wrangling got to film freely inside Iran, and which shows a world a million miles away from the normal footage of angry people protesting. The other, more disturbing yet similarly touching series…

'Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you' Ray Bradbury   Dear Tom, It has been a while. I forget whose turn it is, but for sake of ease I shall both ask and answer my own question - a simple one. Where am I? It is a device, more than a question, to uncork my tongue as I sit here, in Paris's Gare De Lyon. Life shakes its stuff around me, and I shudder inside with the wearines…