Here’s a link to Current TV’s very smart “Survival Guide” for those who want to make short videos that can get played on the cabler. Lots of filmmakers and celebs, ranging from director Catherine Hardwicke to Sean Penn, tell you in short Quicktime films how to do everything from telling your story to taking good sound to getting the right clearances.
One of the more unusual indie film stories forwarded to us as Filmmaker is that of Minnesota producer and writer Christopher Harmon. Profiled here in the Minnesota-St. Paul Star Tribune, “Harmon can’t see, but he has vision. Can’t hear, but has imagination. Can’t move, but in his mind, he can dance and sing and dream about giving the rest of us films with messages of hope and triumph.” Harmon has a rare neurological condition called spino cerebellar degeneration which prevents communication and requires his use of a respirator to breathe. With writer Doug Klozzner, however, Harmon, who communicates through interpreters, […]
I linked to Joe Gratz’s legal blog below when discussing the 2257 regulations, but here’s something else interesting from his site: This discussion of the company TVMyPod.com, which will sell you a video iPod pre-loaded with your favorite DVDs (which you have to buy from them along with the iPod), getting around the video iPod’s digital-rights-management system. It’s basically just a company doing for you what you could learn to do for yourself in about ten minutes on the internet, but the idea that a market has sprung up for this is kind of interesting.
Joe Grat, over at his legal and intellectual property-oriented blog, writes about a setback for the Justice Department in its enforcement of the 2257 regulations, a set of record-keeping requirements designed, many feel, to severely hamper and restrict the adult entertainment industry on the internet. As few have pointed out, however, these regulations also regulate content by all manner of film producers, including independents, and, as I’ve been blogging throughout the last few months, the ramifications of these rules needs to be debated in the indie community. For now, the fight over 2257 is being waged by the adult industry’s […]
The folks at the literary magazine McSweeney’s have launched a DVD zine called Wholphin. The title has something to do with the way we’re supposed to have felt when we learned that “dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it.” Anyway, Volume One is included in the latest issue of McSweeney’s that’s on the stands, and it includes a bunch of should-be interesting stuff: a Spike Jonze film about Al Gore, a David O. Russell film about the first Iraq war, a short-film collaboration between Miguel Arteta and Miranda July, Alison Smith’s short film “The Specialist,” and something with John […]
Dennis Lim has a great half-page profile of writer/director Andrew Bujalski in the Sunday New York Times. Bujalski, who Matt Ross selected as one of our “25 New Faces” three years ago, has built up a big fan and critical base with his two features, Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. Lim uncovers some good stuff — I didn’t know, for example, that Chantal Akerman was Bujalski’s filmmaking thesis advisor at Harvard and that she instructed him to run down the hall one day after a possible performer. Lim ends the piece by discussing what the future could hold for […]
First there was inclusion of video in the iTunes music store, an now, with Friday’s announcement by Google, is the new Google Video Store, currently online in a beta version. For those slow to the party, here’s a good Los Angeles Times piece by Chris Gaither explaining Google’s approach, which allows producers to upload their own videos and set their own price for downloads and decide whether or not to allow copy-protection. (The copy-protected works on the site use Google’s proprietary technology and are annoyingly not transferable to video iPods.) Google is launching the service with 5,000 titles, including films […]
Via The Reeler comes this link to Jen Cheung’s interview with Brooklyn-based filmmaker Kareem Edouard in The Gothamist. Edouard has recently made a short doc, Bling: Consequences and Repercussions that takes a look at the abuse of young African workers in the diamond minds of Sierra Leone. It’s the subject tackled by Kanye West in his hit of last year, “Diamonds are Forever,” but Edouard fills in more of the blanks, aided by a v.o. from Public Enemy’s Chuck D. The film is downloadable by clicking on the link above, and Edouard’s site even allows it to be sampled in […]
I missed the event held last night at the Tribeca Cinemas by the makers of Street Fight, the engrossing documentary on the 2002 Newark mayoral race. Director Marshall Curry, one of our “25 New Faces of 2005,” followed Cory Booker as he challenged five-term mayor Sharpe James for the job and was shocked when James not only attacked Booker but also turned his ire on Curry as well. I guess the event must have been a kick-off to Booker’s 2006 campaign, but there’s no word yet on a film sequel. I hope Curry considers it. His films could be the […]
Cam Archer emailed to say that the website for his feature, Wild Tigers I Have Known is online. It premieres later this month at the Sundance Film Festival in the Frontier section. If you don’t know Archer’s shorts, you can get a glimpse of his style by checking out the site, which has the same hand-etched, artisanal qualities as his very intimate films. His is a film I’m really looking forward to at the festival.