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WHAT’S IN MY INSTAPAPER: SUNDAY MORNING LINKS
Here’s what piled up in my Instapaper this week:
Director Armando Iannaccui on the proposed shutdown of the UK Film Council: An excerpt:
Here’s what happens when you try to make a film. You have no money, but you have an idea. You need people, helpful, experienced people, to guide you to where the money is, fit you up with the best sort of financial backing, who understand the film you want to make, can nudge it in a direction that will see it gets the audience it merits. That’s what the UK Film Council built up 10 years of expertise in doing.
When you make a film, you want to work in an industry that is knowledgeable and at the top of its game, allowing you to draw on all the home-grown resources available, in editing, studios, design, marketing, and so on. That’s what the UKFC did for the past 10 years, pouring the profits from its investments back into film resources and film training and education schemes, to nurture the next generation of film-making talents who are now coming to fruition.
How to hide on Facebook from “friends” you don’t like.
“Mistaking Noise for Signal,” a good blog post at Naked Capitalism about the Time magazine Afghan woman cover photo, photojournalism in the Viet Nam war, and our surfeit of information. An excerpt: “Message transmission is increasingly mistake for information content. As a society, we are clearly generating more meta information, more chatter about underlying events (witness this blog!), but how much of that is really just noise?”
Sony Pictures Classics’ Tom Bernard on empowering filmmakers at Indiewire.
A number of film people, including Nic Roeg and Andrea Arnold, discuss seeing “their first X-rated film” at The Guardian. The British definition of “X” is different than America’s, so some of the films discussed include M, Psycho and The Exorcist.
From Annalee Nemitz at io9: “How the Google/Verizon proposal could kill the internet in five years.” Her conclusion:
A burning vision of the internet in 2016: The public internet is basically overrun with 4Chan-like social networks that run very slowly and are drenched in advertising and spyware. You can watch some TV on the public internet, if you’re willing to wait through long “buffering” times and bad commercials. You can play casual games, especially if you want to fork over a few bucks. There’s webmail, though sometimes all your saved messages disappear – for “guaranteed backups” you need to subscribe to the special mail service via Googlezon. Plus, the only way to get to the public internet is with an unwieldy laptop, which sucks.
Most people go online with their mobiles. Anybody who wants to get access to games, movies, news, or other services online has to buy separate “special service” packages to make sure they run fast. Premium services guarantee you can watch movies on your Droid, or do your mail and calendaring on your Nexus SE234. An informal market in special service minutes springs up anywhere that people are too poor to get a mobile that does more than make phone calls.
Ironically, the public internet is the least public place online: It’s an antisocial space, a crumbling, unsupported legacy network, full of ads and graffiti. Googlezon has succeeded in creating a caste system in the online world, and the public is the lowest caste of all.
Coolhunting recommends useful film production apps. (See our list here.)
At the Guardian, authors, psychiatrists and neurobiologists debate Nicholas Carr’s thesis that the internet is rewiring our brain.
