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Random selection…
i have spent the last 6 months trying to make a small impact on my website with my content that hopefully is something different to what is offered by the established networks (as i have no budget there will be cracks here and there in the quality) and seeing as i am not handcuffed by the censorship and regulatory boards my material can be inflammatory if need be depending on what i am thinking a…
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]
Photographer
and writer Julian Richards wanted to make a documentary film and had a
rare opportunity to study and film Tuareg nomads of Mali in
Saharan Africa. He readliy agreed to share some of his experience with
us. With The Nomads is an intimate, unromantic portrait of the Tuareg
herders of the Sahara Desert and asks: Can they survive the 21st
Century?
Below you will…
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…
With a new chair this year in the shape of Scotsman, Alex Graham, presiding over a delegate list now 2,500 in number and Aussie Heather Croall still proving to be an assured hand in the Director’s role, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012 is still on a steady and upward trajectory. Funding and making docs is tough territory but in these financial anni horribili the festival itself succeeded in not only keepi…
As the season finally closes in on us, for those tired of the same
old re-runs on TV or wanting to avoid the family warzone of the living
room and watch TV on a computer under your bed - or better still are
looking for films to share during the post-dinner
web video show-off - I've pulled together some of our favorites of the
year.
In the first bundle I've focussed on anima…
"The mother has challenged the Anjuna polica head on and got the backing of the Goan state minister - a remarkable achievement"
BBC News informs me that the mother of Scarlett Eden Keeling - who was horribly murdered in the neighbouring beach to here on Feb 18th - - has five children and had left her alone while she went off travelling with her boyfriend. The DailyMail.co.uk says in fact she…
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…
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…
21 Minute Film School
Have you ever had a desire to make a movie? If so, set 21 minutes of your hectic life aside and read on!
1. The Idea for a film
Ever have a great idea for a movie? Sit down and see if you can decide which character’s eyes we see the story from (the point of view aka P.O.V.) This is likely the main…
Come in come in. Is anyone there?Just lost a whole page of data when I went to upload it. PHUT. gone, finito, marrungad, kaputo. I was logged in, but when the upload completed it told me I could not have access to that page without being registered and shuit me out! And my data went west, wasting a whiole precious hour of work Oh boy am, I not nice to know at the moment..... I have some…
Amateur: barely a few letters from Auteur - but what, in our social media world, is the difference? If there was a dividing line of the 51st Krakow Film Festival, it was between the crowed-sourced YouTube world of Life in a Day and the personal journeys of documakers turning their lives and experiences into art. Less a debate between high and low art, as between the home movie and the knowingly…
In the rush and work pressures surrounding filmmaking, it's all too easy to overlook some essentials, but these are often the factors that can lift a film from the mundane level to the exceptional. James MacGregor's notes reveal some of the secrets of real film craft.....
Storytelling on Screen
Your focus is on telling the story, not just o…
Producers are different things to different people, making this
question difficult to answer. There are no detailed job
descriptions and no two producers handle their jobs in exactly the
same way. Is it any wonder that both audiences, and many
'insiders', are bewildered by the proliferation of producer
credits in films?
The producer credit has often…
This year has seen something of a resurgence of interest in the political movie with 'Good Night. And Good Luck' and 'Syriana' both doing well both critically and financially. In contrast, the British Film Industry hasn't produced a political film since the late eighties. One man aims to change all that. Tobias Blennerhassett has produced some of the most successful films ever produced in this co…
"Filmmaking is a chance to live many lifetimes." Robert Altman
The man behind such diverse and acclaimed films as Shortcuts, M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs Miller, Nashville and Gosford Park - Robert Altman - has died in a Los Angeles hospital aged 81.
“Maybe there's a chance to get back to ... grown-up
films. Anything that uses humor and dramatic valu…
Writer, actor, director, conscientious objector, uncompromising activist and - by all accounts - much loved and utterly decent person, Harold Pinter was not just a great contributor to our times, but a real inspiration. In the below video he talks about art, truth, politics and the Iraq war, as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literatrue in 2005.
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"the…
Anyone
trying to gain employment in the Britain's film industry knows how hard
it can be getting a foot in the door. Three years at film school and
all the enthusiasm and determination in the world still can't guarantee
you a job in an industry that measures success in terms of who you have
worked with and what films you have worked on. Here's a story that
shows how one aspiri…
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…
With
more people in Britain now watching TV on digital sets rather than
analogue, this seems a fitting time to revisit what the BBC's digital
chief had to say about the future for the industry that he foresaw.
This is the text of the speech by Ashley Highfield, Director of BBC New
Media & Technology, at the Royal Television Society on Oct 6 2003
I was reading an article…
On a day where celebrities seemed to dropping like flies, it's a shame that the obits for British scriptwriter Troy Kennedy Martin probably won't be as extensive as they should be. Needless to say the man was a man who had a hand in helping to create and write some of the best UK TV shows ever made including 'Z-Cars' and 'The Sweeney'. His TV shows helped pave the way for intelligent genre fare…
Writer Simon Rose on Getting His Story to the Big Screen
I can't be the only writer who, after sitting through umpteen appalling movies, has thought, "Surely I can do better." By 1994, I was itching to write a screenplay, but a subject eluded me. Then I heard about Graeme Obree. This down-at-heel Scot built a revolutionary bicycle from scrap and washing- machi…