Authors — Randy Astle
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Story Hack: Beta, Part 3
(Read parts one and two.) I’m sitting deep inside the bowels of the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center on West 65th Street. The Story Hack got off to a friendly start around 10:00 this morning with an orientation by Aina Abiodun, Mike Knowlton, and Film Society of Lincoln Center Executive Director Rose Kuo. We made sure everyone was on the same page and were told our final wild card, the Emily Dickinson quote “Fortune befriends the bold,” which has to be included in every hack. Aina’s opening thoughts also laid down the gauntlet when she said that our work in these […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 28, 2012 -
Story Hack: Beta, Part 2
In just under eight hours, the first hackathon dedicated exclusively to narrative transmedia gets underway at Lincoln Center; here’s Part 1 about what it is and who’s sponsoring it. There are seven teams of four, so 28 participants total, and if the other groups are anything like my team U.S. Maple, they’re all already feeling tired and well worked. I’ve written sample bibles and transmedia proposals before, as evidence of my versatility as a writer and ability to work in transmedia, but I’ve never finished an actual project. So this Story Hack is my first chance to develop something cross-platform beyond […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 28, 2012 -
Story Hack: Beta, Part 1
Anyone interested in transmedia in New York City needs to know about StoryCode. Mike Knowlton and Aina Abiodun, seen below with their team, originally founded it as a transmedia Meetup group, and then last year transformed it into a nonprofit dedicated to cross-platform storytelling–the first such organization in the world. They continue to sponsor monthly meetings to discuss recent transmedia projects, and now for the first time they’re sponsoring a narrative transmedia hackathon. Hackathons, which come from tech culture, have become a popular venue for transmedia designers to develop their work, but this is the first hackathon to explicitly showcase […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 22, 2012 -
Kony 2012, Viral Videos, and Documentary Ethics
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s Kony 2012, the half-hour documentary by the organization Invisible Children that’s swept the Internet this week. It’s about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been terrorizing the region around northern Uganda for a quarter century; a particular emphasis is on Kony’s notorious practice of kidnapping children and forcing them into military service. The film was posted on YouTube last Monday, and as of this writing it’s chalked up 62,172,848 views. Those kinds of numbers are impressive, and the people at Invisible Children, including director Jason Russell and two other American filmmakers who […]
by Randy Astle on Mar 10, 2012 -
Storycode and Game of Thrones
All eyes may still be on Park City, but there’s still enough happening back here in the Big Apple to keep indie film lovers busy. One event was Tuesday’s presentation by Steve Coulson, Creative Director at the marketing firm Campfire, about the transmedia campaign he spearheaded for the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones last year. The event was organized by Storycode and hosted by the Film Society of Lincoln Center in the intimate Howard Gilman Theater. Because of the detail of some of his material Coulson asked that his presentation not be simulcast or recorded, but some of the […]
by Randy Astle on Jan 27, 2012 -
The Best Animated Films of 2011
It’s a good time to be making animated films, enough so that even regular indie filmmakers may want to sit up and take notice. Animation has always been on the cutting edge of film artistry and technology, and in a year that saw innovative use of motion capture, rotoscoping, CGI, and 3D (in documentaries, no less), an animated picture may be indie film’s next big thing. 2011 was also exciting because it gave us a wide open field for cartoons. For over a decade Pixar has dominated feature animation, but there’s now room for newcomers and underdogs to enjoy their […]
by Randy Astle on Dec 29, 2011 -
Lightworks Revamp Just Around the Corner
Postproduction is in a state of flux. As is well known by now, Apple’s latest Final Cut Pro iteration left a lot to be desired for professional editors, and competitors Avid and Adobe were quick to step in and lure away Final Cut users. And now the newest competitor is also the oldest. Lightworks, one of the first viable nonlinear editing systems when it was first released in 1989, has been used by luminaries like Thelma Schoonmaker and has racked up a number of Oscars and other awards, including a technical Oscar and Emmy for the system itself. It couldn’t […]
by Randy Astle on Nov 29, 2011 -
Editor Tariq Anwar on the Art of Postproduction
Thursday night EditShare sponsored a seminar with Oscar-nominated film editor Tariq Anwar at the Florence Gould Hall on East 59th Street in Manhattan. Despite rain the evening was well attended by writers, directors, and especially editors, and Anwar’s presentation — basically a low-key Q&A session moderated by Manhattan Edit Workshop’s Josh Apter — was fun and informative. Here are a few thoughts he shared. Anwar got into filmmaking somewhat accidentally, starting by driving a truck then getting work as an assistant director. After doing a great deal of yelling at crews, he decided “the cutting room was the most civilized […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 30, 2011 -
Actress Sues IMDb for Revealing Her Age
It was bound to happen. An unnamed actress has filed suit against IMDb for revealing her real age. The actress, known only as “Jane Doe” in the suit against Amazon.com, IMDb’s parent company, is seeking $75,000 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages, plus lawyers’ fees. The alleged misconduct occurred after the actress signed up for IMDbPro in 2008; as filmmakers know, this is a different process than creating a public profile (or having one created for you), which had presumably already been done. Soon after joining IMDbPro, she saw her actual age on her public profile. Since […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 19, 2011
