"Is a very powerful love story. There is man. There is woman. Man falls over. Woman falls in love. Man wears funny hat. Oh no! Is woman dying of disease? Yes. Then man fall over some more. She get better. They get married. The end." Roberto Benitio is best know as the Italian comedian and film maker who directed ‘Wasn’t World War Two Fun?’ which swept the board at the Oscars two years ago. He c…

Hollywood cult film director and producer, Frank Q Dobbs, has died at 66. Dobbs, a Texan who loved writing Westerns, became a legend in the Texas film industry. He died from cancer. Dobbs was from Houston, and though he spent a lot of time in Hollywood, he often preferred to film in his native Texas. An old colleague described him as a real friend to the Lone Star State. "Frank…

Sydney Pollack, director, actor and writer, has passed away from cancer aged 73, and surrounded by his family. Link to LA Times obituary , Wikipedia page, IMDB page. Pollack was a friend and business partner to Anthony Minghella, who also sadly passed away earlier this year. Back in 2001, filmmaker and blogger Tim Clague caught the two legends in conversation at BAFTA, republished below…

  Legendary producer Verity Lambert died yesterday - one day before the 44th anniversary of the airing of her first production on the 23rd November 1963 - the BBC's iconic Doctor Who. Lambert cast William Hartnell in the title role and established the show's format which has endured to this very day - a centuries old alien wandering time and space with his companions in his Police Box-shape…

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…

I arrived for once a little early, as the last gold balloons were being lifted into place. I decided to walk the block, attempting to hide my game industry noobiness with some assertive power walking. Ah a river. I will gaze across it with a sense of confidence, a metaphorical eye on the future. All is fine. So as I was scribbling this blog in a cafe in Bristol, the guy opposite told me "I never…

Part 1 - Three reasons why the Digital Economy Bill will damage British businesses Part 2 - What can be done? Five steps the UK content industries could take to offset piracy losses A few weeks ago I chatted with a single dad in his 40s, working in a brewery. He's a biker, Sun-reader and towards the right politically, hating to see his taxes used to fund free school meals or asylum seekers. Ne…

  Sunflower3 - from vimeo's danLinfield

  Tom Swanston Reports from  the NORDIC CO-PRODUCTION FORUM Haugesund, Norway  21-23 August 2006 This year the beautiful coastal town of Haugesund, Norway was host to the first ever Nordic Co-Production Forum, held from 21st to 23rd August. The town is situated on a long sea inlet in the South West of the country, a 45-minute flight from Oslo.   The…

It should have won an Oscar for best animated short, but its use of copyrighted images prevented that (albeit printed onto paper and folded into origami shapes). When I briefly met Virgil Widrich, whose Copyshop did stretch to Oscar glory, at the Hull International Short Film Festival, he thought that Fair Use laws would be enough for this film to get a US release and Oscar nomination. But…

It's taken me a while to gather my thoughts about the Second Open Video Conference which took place at the start of October in New York. It featured a vast mix of people and organisations interested in the future of video online - from tech and web shapers to creatives and lawmakers - there's not many places where you can end up round the table with implementers from the W3C, the Firefox and Safa…

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…

  "Most of the independent films that we have seen or heard about suffered from one problem: finance. Some have come and gone because the young independent producers have failed, and are still failing to source the big budget required for production." Sound familiar to you? It certainly will if you are a filmmaker in Bulawayo. It looked strangely familiar when it caugh…

In 2006 we wrote here about this new idea of crowd-source financing to fund films, which had funded a few short films – a couple of years before IndieGoGo and Kickstarter took off. We'd followed the growth of a new website 'craze' called YouTube, that was making the industry sit up sweaty, followed their first feature filmmakers Arin and Susan and written about alternative exhibition as Secret Ci…

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, and for collaborating with director Stanley Kubrick on the film of the same name, has also died at his home in Sri Lanka.Clarke served in the&nbs…

The new Tax Relief system for British films offers producers up to 20% of their budget in cash. The system replaces Section 42 and 48 which offered a tax break of up to 40% and also introduces a host of quite complex new clauses to limit and define which films are eligible for relief. Love it or hate it, it is a piece of legislation which will effect not just which films get made in the UK in th…

The day Greg Dyke was pushed out of the BBC was a grave one for both the corporation and broadcasting in general, yet Mark 'the scissors' Thompson was reportedly seen that day skipping around the Channel 4 office where he had been Chief Executive for barely a probation period, gleeful in the news that the top job of broadcasting could finally be his. And now, the Big Picture thinki…

A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other…

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…

2005 was a turning point in the entertainment industries, the year that Hollywood's tried and tested methods of reaching the masses finally had tio give way - to iPods, TiVos and Xbox 360s. What lessons will 2006 bring? The lesson of changing markets, that's for sure. The best admission of that came from NBC Universal TV chairman Jeff Zucker; "The overall strategy is to make…

Red Bull's Flug Tag is back on the 7th June 2008, and they have kindly given E4 an offcial entry birth. The idea is to make your own flying machine, and well basically fly into the seprentine.  Now E4 want their own fans to represent them at the Flugtag. One lucky team consisting of four fans will be E4's offcial team at the big day. They will design, build and pilot the craft …

Jon H from Finland at JonHs.net has pulled together a remarkable list of 9-11 related documentaries online. All are free to watch and most are created by unfunded groups and individuals. There's a few extreme conspiracy theories but it's is still an impresive collective example of citzen filmmaking. So much seems to have happened in the five years since Tom ran up the stairs…

Roy Disney, nephew of Walt and general protector of Disney, has passed away. I was lucky enough to meet Roy in 2000 at the Belfast Cinemagic Conference, and it has stood as one of the more memorable encounters of my working life. I was quite nervous beforehand yet without need - he was warm and genuine in his convictions, unassuming with a quiet strength. [Netribution, Dec 2000] Roy worked for…

Dan - man with a Cannes Van Plan, has posted the first Rogue Runner Cannes update to his website. The show - shot over 12 hours and edited in 8 - runs on alternate days on his site and sponsor LoveFilm. Latest episode now online.