Fresh DV has posted a podcast with filmmaker and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is an organizer of and presenter at The Conversation, coming up next week (October 17 and 18) in Berkley, California. Below you can watch Shlain discuss her new project, “Connected: A Declaration of Independence.” And as noted in my post below, The Conversation is offering a special discount to Filmmaker readers who would like to attend the event. Click on the links here for more info and to take advantage of the discount.
As noted on Jon Taplin’s blog, one of his students, Russell Newman, with the Annenberg Research Network on International Communication, has “compiled a list of the main presidential candidates’ views on hot-button political topics about media and technology such as media ownership/consolidation and network neutrality.” Click on the link to compare the candidates’ views on Net Neutrality, Media Ownership and Consolidation, and other topics.
New models, new forms of storytelling, convergence, how we will make money, how we will make art — being an independent filmmaker or investor or producer right now is all about talking. Being part of the dialogue. Taking part in the conversation. Appropriately, then, Scott Kirsner of the CinemaTech blog, Ken Goldberg, Tiffany Shlain and Lance Weiler are co-hosting The Conversation/The Future of Cinema, Games and Online Video: New Tools/New Distribution/New Rules at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California on October 17 and 18th. The official spam: This October, pioneers at the forefront of change in cinema, video, games, […]
Back in 1995 Ted Hope wrote a full-throated and trenchant critique of the indie film business for Filmmaker that was entitled “Indie Film is Dead.” It’s either sad, funny, curious or fascinating (take your pick) that much of what Hope wrote 13 years ago still applies today. (If you haven’t read this piece, I really recommend hitting the link and taking a look at it.) I thought of this piece today while reading something on his Truly Free Film blog — a report from a panel discussion at the Woodstock Film Festival. First, from the old Filmmaker piece: The film […]
Filmmaker 25 New Faces writer/director Antonio Campos is written up in the New York Times today by Dennis Lim. About his new feature Afterschool, which plays at the New York Film Festival: Afterschool, which Mr. Campos called a “present-day sci-fi film,” wrestles with a strange and relatively new fact of life that we have barely had time to process. We live in a world where, he said, “it feels like YouTube has been around forever and will always be around.” For more from Campos, visit the Filmmaker Videos page, where our friends from Filmcatcher have produced for us a short […]
KAT DENNINGS AND MICHAEL CERA IN DIRECTOR PETER SOLLETT’S NICK AND NORAH’S INFINITE PLAYLIST. COURTESY SCREEN GEMS. For all the current talk of the sky falling on American independent cinema, you don’t have to look any further than Peter Sollett’s recent experiences to see how tough things have become for even the most gifted indie writer-directors. Thirty-two-year-old Brooklyn native Sollett grew up in an Italian-Jewish neighborhood in Bensonhurst and studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1998. In 2000, he directed and co-wrote, with his partner Eva Vives, the short filmFive Feet High and Rising, about […]
As you might have noticed from Scott’s post yesterday, we really like Joshua Safdie‘s The Pleasure of Being Robbed. So we have no shame in letting you know again. Head over to our Filmmaker Videos section where Evan Louison and David Woolner of Coin-Op Pictures have sent us a promo they co-directed for the film. It opens today at the IFC Center in New York. But in all honesty, Robbed was one of our favorites from this year’s fest circuit and hope it does well.
Coin-Op Pictures’s Evan Louison and David Woolner direct this short promo for Joshua Safdie‘s debut feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed, which is out in limited release this weekend. Click here to see video.
Every week newsletter subscribers receive an email from us in which we link to key stories from the blog and the website from the previous seven days, highlight various pieces of news and festival deadlines, and in which I write a brief Editor’s Letter. I tend to write stuff that I don’t post elsewhere on the site or in the magazine, and it’s free to join — just subscribe by typing your email address in the box at the left. I’m posting below the letter from this week’s newsletter as I used it to plug two great movies opening this […]
Rex Crum at Marketwatch reports: The Copyright Royalty Board on Thursday left unchanged the amount record companies will pay songwriters for the sale of CDs or digitally downloaded songs. The three-judge panel said the record companies will continue to pay 9.1 cents a song, while the National Music Publishers Association had sought an increase to 15 cents a song. Apple Inc. and other online music stores had opposed the potential price increase. Additionally the CRB set a payment rate of 24 cents each for songs sold as ringtones for cellphones.