Now here is outside-the-box, appealingly anti-social advertising. From Burger King comes the Whopper Sacrifice campaign, described here in Ad Week: It’s a common problem for anyone who joined Facebook some time ago. You look at your friend list and wonder who these people are. Burger King wants to help consumers do something about it. The fast-food chain has released the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook. The app rewards people with a coupon for BK’s signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook’s news feed […]
“What if Sundance isn’t about the sales anymore?” asks Stephen Zeitchik in a Hollywood Reporter piece that’s worth reading for its take on the festival and the current acquisitions market. In it he mentions several films that are screening directly for executives instead of heading towards Park City, and he summons up the following vision of the festival (which is a lot like how it used to be a long time ago): But what these breakouts show is that the fest’s main value might now lie in the classic indie model, in which little money is spent and little is […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 6:15 pm — Holiday Village Cinema IV, Park City] Afghan Star is a documentary about a TV show of the same name. It’s a powerful TV format we all know — a version of Pop Idol — but in a country that most of us don’t: Afghanistan. With the backdrop of warfare and Taliban repression (they banned music and used to impale TVs on spikes) you certainly wouldn’t expect to find a TV music talent contest. But Afghan Star: The Series is now one of the most potent forces of change the country has. You […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 3:00 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] The story of my film, Boy Interrupted, was not affected much by recently changing digital technology. If anything, the film is a throwback to conventional documentary filmmaking; straightforward chronological storytelling – no tricks. Authenticity was our guide. The goal was to tell the story of my son Evan’s bipolar illness and suicide in as factual a manner as possible, with home movies and first-hand interviews bearing witness to our experience as a family. I love the self-contained and mostly humorous videos I see on YouTube and Facebook and […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 9:00 am — Temple Theatre, Park City] The hardest thing about making documentaries is finding a story inside your material — it’s just so much harder than scripted material. And so what you find are a lot of documentaries that are written in advance; that is to say that the filmmaker knew what he or she wanted to say before beginning shooting. So you feel a kind of steering going on, and therefore a falseness. The other extreme is that you see documentaries that have no story at all. The filmmaker saw something interesting, they […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 16, 8:30 am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Johnny Mad Dog is based on a novel by Emmanuel Dongala. At first, I wrote a faithful adaptation of the book following the same narrative construction, which was centered on two main characters: Johnny, a 15-year-old child soldier, and Laokolé, a 13-year-old girl who runs away with her family. They are in the same situation in the last days of a civil war in Africa. The same unit of time, place and space. Two roads which cross paths, two different points of view, two destinies. Once this […]
From a press release I just received from Film Independent: Today Film Independent and Netflix announced the immediate launch of the Netflix FIND Your Voice Film Competition, which will award one aspiring first-time feature filmmaker the means, guidance and resources to make a full-length, narrative film. The winner of the competition, who will own all rights to his or her film, will be determined between now and July 2009. In addition to production resources needed to make the film, the winner will receive a $150,000 cash production grant funded by Netflix, plus turnkey resources like film stock, processing, camera rental, […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 15, 6:00 & 9:30 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] My producer and I make clay-animated biographies (or “clayographies” as I like to call them). As with all my films, my latest stop-motion animation, Mary and Max, has a simple plot and the structure is nothing too elaborate or terribly clever. I used to shudder at the thought of calling them formulaic but in many ways they are. My aim as a writer-director is to create a rich and engaging story and then tell it well. I do not obsess over plot and structure and I […]
Below I posted John August’s take on the new iMovie HD, introduced this week at Macworld Expo. Now, the New York Times‘ David Pogue weighs in. He’s mixed/positive on the update, saying that it fixes some of the previous version’s deficiencies while ignoring others. But while most filmmakers don’t use this consumer-level application, I can’t help but think that one new iMovie development may reshape some no-budget filmmakers’ creative arsenals: Now, longtime readers may recall that I absolutely hated iMovie ’08. It wasn’t iMovie at all; Apple completely junked the beloved iMovie that had served it well for years, and […]
If you’d like to impress your date with your taste and erudition — and thumb your nose at all your downsizing friends — you can buy a pair of tickets to what is the toniest movie fundraiser ever. From Quintessentially.com: The Alloy Theater Company will present a stunning recreation of one of the most amazing classical menus ever created, featuring the most decadent tastes from late 19th century Paris, and immortalized in the Academy Award-winning film Babette’s Feast, at Thomas Keller’s world-renowned Per Se restaurant. Taking place on Friday, January 9 at Per Se (10 Columbus Circle), Keller’s interpretation of […]