Similar to the 'video essay' Iran a Nation of Bloggers by Kate Tremills at the Vancouver Film School,  comes this effective new short animation/essay, Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip, from Leo Murray and the Royal College of Art about the planetary tipping point. From his website : It’s much, much later than you think This really isn’t about polar bear…

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…

Do you know those moments where everything seems larger than life? Where the taste of baked beans rivals haute cuisine? Where the hazy sunlight and slow summer pace make you feel so much lighter you could have lost a stone in weight. It's as if the great post production supervisor in the sky has decided to apply a luminosity filter, upped the brightness and contrast, balanced the audio…

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…

  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’s not often that you hear a director ask an actor, “Can we get a few grunts from you? Can you just get that grunting? Okay, now how about some heavy breathing? And where’s Zombie Number Two? We need you!” So begins a hectic day of filming a five-minute thriller for the Sci-Fi-London 48-hour Film Challenge.   Director Vicki Psarias , who won last…

A new plugin allows you to embed video from sites like YouTube, Google, Current.tv or Vimeo into postings. It takes a little while to get your head around, but it's worth the effort if you want to programme your own web page. To embed videos to your content use the following Mambot Strings per video provider. Do not include the space after the first curly bracket - that's incl…

Added a story about Bad lad film after my first successful attemopt to upload and somehow managed to lose it in the system. Tried uploading a false story and it made the front page. It seems that the truth, in this case, will simply not out. Andy was looking over my shoulder and asked whereabouts he would upload his Carnals? Do we have somewhere they can be put as yet?

It was an inspired idea – creating a feature around the ultimate fantasy of a girl from village India dreaming of Bollywood stardom and to fulfill it, running away with The Truck of Dreams, the mobile cinema that rumbles around the dirt roads that pass for off-the-beaten-track in rural India. It was a dream also for London-based director Arun Kumar, a first feature with global themes, financed a…

  Music videos The End of the World  REM's The End of the World As We Know It sung by George W Bush {youtube}V3CmXGKXOmk{youtube} Familjen - Det snurrar i min skalle Swedish Grammy nominated mashup of archive evangelists to Familjen's music. {youtube}QfU-4Y4_akY{/youtube}  Mashups The Vadar Sessions Before Star Wars, James Earl Jones starred…

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

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…

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…

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…

Aimed at first time visitors, Shizana Arshad and Laura Horowitz at 6 Degrees Film have put together a Cannes Guide containing information on the festival itself, how to submit your film and obtain accreditation along with useful numbers and info... What do you need to know about attending the Cannes Film Festival? What should you expect? Who gets accreditation? Find out the answers to…

 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…

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…

As talks restart in an attempt to end the US Writers Guild strike, commentators are discussing whether the dispute will drive more writers and talent out of the studio system and onto the web. It is one thing to win a doubling of DVD royalties, from four cents to eight, and a share of web advertising, as with TV (the main WGA demands); but another altogether to actually own, or co-own the show…

“The reality is a single stream only amounts to 0.003p, which means I would need millions of streams to earn at least the minimum wage” Ayanna Witter-Johnson, singer-songwriter Last weekend The Guardian published some great insights from 25 figures across the music world around the state of subscription-streaming, as Spotify passes 155 million Premium subscribers and ahead of a uk.gov report…

In recent time there is great headway in photo industry. Modern technology has changed the entire process of photographing. Gone are the days of analog imaging. We are in the era of digital imaging. However, over and above digital imaging, there is nowadays the use of computer in photographing. Some photo software can be run in computer to make room for all types of image manipulation. Co…

If the 80's were epitomised by the Action film and the 90's were the domain of the more thoughtful independent film, then the early 21st century could easily come to be defined by the dominance of the comic strip adaptation. Ever since 'X-Men' and 'Spider-Man' hit the cinemas, Hollywood has been desperately trying to find the Next Big Thing. Even multi-award winning directors like Sam Mendes and…

So that's it then, four years to the day almost, since issue 99 went out, so it's been a while.With this new architecture it has not been too bad. Not a lot of midniht oil burning, although Nic looks to be a little jet-lagged when it gets to tea-time.There's no chance of Netribution losing its non-London centricity either, since our cotributors are well spread from the Smoke to the Shetland Islan…

Screenwriter and script reader Danny Stack has written up 11 commandments for script readers on his blog. Even if you don't get paid to read, it provides quite an insight into the life of those who write those painful rejection letters. Eg: 7. All Scripts are the Same, but Some are more Samey than Others A lot of scripts follow the generalised style of screenwriting and so-call…

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…

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…