FILM

Betacast, Protein's new film channel, is putting on the UK Premiere and after party for Beautiful Losers with Nike, BFI and the Patchwork Pirates. It's going to fun so you should all come. Get your tickets now.

It doesn't get more video tech than this. Radiohead have just premiered their music video for the song "House of Cards" on the Google Developer site.

I was asked to write this piece to accompany the MuVi programme for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival music video programme and awards this year. It was a great follow up to being on the jury in 2007, and an opportunity to think of the current big narrative and aesthetic trends in the area.
Conceptually Yours

This week, YouTube launched The Screening Room, an area of the site that will showcase eight new short films every month, and the occasional full-length feature. In the first crop are films written by Miranda July, directed by cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, and starring Kevin Pollak.From the press release:People will be able to communicate directly with filmmakers to share thoughts, exchange opinions with fans, and provide honest feedback using YouTube's features to comment, rate, and share films. The YouTube Screening Room will also include a "Buy Now" button, allowing filmmakers to link to websites selling DVDs and digital downloads of their films, as well as a High Quality player, which offers users the best viewing experience possible.YouTube is sharing ad revenue with filmmakers based on how many people watch their work, explains Sara Pollack, who manages the company's filmmaker relationships.

Special effects innovator Stan Winston died on Sunday, at 62. He'd won four Academy Awards for his work in movies such as 'Aliens' and 'Jurassic Park.' Here's the LA Times obituary.I interviewed Winston in 2005. He told me that he was "a storyteller and an artist first." "For me, the way that I've been able to have had the chance to innovative technically is to think innovative thoughts artistically. The art has to come in front of the technology."Making a movie, Winston told me, "is the most collaborative art form of all time. Every artist is not only an artist, but a tool for another artist, and at the top of that food chain is the director."We talked a lot about his collaborations with James Cameron and Steven Spielberg ...

Sony Pictures Television is launching a new series on the Web, 'Angel of Death,' with the hope that it'll do well later as a DVD. Budget is $1 million, and it'll be shown in eight-minute chunks online, according to the Wall Street Journal.From Sarah McBride's piece:In addition to generating some ad revenue on the Web, Sony hopes that launching the show online will translate into strong sales for the DVD, much as a good start in theaters builds DVD sales for feature movies."We're not expecting to make all our money back in that initial [online] window," says Sean Carey, senior executive vice president, Sony Pictures Television.Key for these bigger-budget Web series will be getting them distributed on lots of sites, and sparking some geniune Internet buzz around them. (I feel like the only things I heard about 'quarterlife' and 'Prom Queen' was from mainstream media articles about them.)

When Amazon sold out of Kindle e-book readers after just a few days, I was skeptical: they'd never announced how many were available in that first production run. Was it 100? 1000? A million?Now, we've got the same situation with Roku's new $99 set-top box that delivers "Watch It Now" streaming movies from Netflix: they're sold out, according to the San Jose Mercury News, but no one will say just how many were available.So does it matter that Roku is "sold out" of its set-top box? Or is this just a PR gambit to make the device seem "hot"?(Or maybe it's a manufacturing snafu: Roku says it'll take six to eight weeks to clear up the backlog, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal.)

I first experienced a live dot matrix symphony back in the Nineties at a Sonar festival, Barcelona. It’s nice to see James Houston has revisited this concept and ramped it up on both a auditory and visual level to create another pop promo which validates the conclusion of the essay I wrote for the Oberhausen Short Film Festival on the currently pervading influence of video art on music video.
Elements in video used so effectively to create a binary performance:
Sinclair ZX Spectrum - Guitars (rhythm & lead)
Epson LX-81 Dot Matrix Printer - Drums
HP Scanjet 3c - Bass Guitar
Hard Drive array - Act as a collection of bad speakers - Vocals & FX
& vintage Oscilloscope for additional visual pleasure

re:frame launches today - an effort to digitize important and rare movies and make them available as DVDs or digital downloads. It's an initiative of the Tribeca Film Institute, and the partner for delivering the downloads and DVDs is Amazon.com.The NY Times writes:The approximately 500 works initially available range from the works of the filmmaker Sally Potter, beginning with her 1979 short “Thriller,” to collections of little-known documentaries from various archives. Some of those will be available to purchase only on DVD, because rights are controlled by commercial distributors.

BusinessWeek Online has a nifty piece about documentary filmmakers taking control of their own distribution. The lead example is a film called 'What's Your Point, Honey?', which I hadn't heard of...but apparently has been doing well in New York.John Tozzi writes:...[L]ike musicians who shun record labels to sell their music themselves, anecdotal evidence suggests documentary filmmakers—already an entrepreneurial bunch—are foregoing the conventional path of shopping their films to a distributor. They're skipping such deals and using the Internet to get their stories in front of people who want to hear them."Indie filmmakers are getting a little bit less afraid to say no to somebody with all that power, because other new channels are opening up," says Amy Sewell, co-director of What's Your Point, Honey?

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the opening of the very first drive-in cinema in Camden, NJ, created by Richard Hollingshead, Jr. To mark the occasion, Wired has a photo gallery of drive-in images. NPR has a story about dead drive-ins coming back to life. The Niagara Gazette covers the Western New York Drive-In Movie Society, which aims to support the nine theaters that survive in that part of the world.I'm planning to hit the Mendon Drive-In this weekend.Here's the great site Drive-Ins.com, which has a comprehensive database of open (and closed) drive-ins...

The NY Times tech blog, Bits, has some excerpts from an interview with Sony CEO Howard Stringer that are worth a look.One provocative snippet:Mr. Stringer was asked whether movie downloads would soon make Blu-ray discs obsolete. “I don’t think in this country it’s going to be competitive,” he said, noting that most broadband services are so slow in the United States that it can take 10 or 14 hours to download a high-definition movie. “Blu-ray is really gathering momentum.”Stringer also muses about delivering digital versions of Sony movies to Sony televisions -- even before their DVD release. David Gallagher notes, "...[H]e indicated that the company was considering new ways to combine its hardware with its content to bolster its profit margins in markets that are becoming commoditized."

Screenvision and Verizon Wireless are getting together later this month to test an audience survey technology together, in 10 US cities. The idea is to encourage movie-goers to text message votes about their favorite music to the screen, where they'll see the results tallied (amidst the rolling series of pre-show advertisements.)News of the deal is here and here.If you're at a theater that's showing pre-show ads, I suppose it can't hurt to have more to do than just sitting there passively...though I do worry that this will make it seem OK to be text-messaging *during* the movie.

Last Friday at the Making Media Now conference in Boston, I ran into Slava Rubin of IndieGoGo, and we sat down for a quick chat about how things are going with the site, which aims to help filmmakers raise money for their projects. (I've previously compared several of the sites trying to do this.)(Aside: In much of the video, my nose looks like it is auditioning for the part of "The Nose" in a remake of Woody Allen's 'Sleeper.')Before we shot the video, I mentioned to Slava that earlier in the week, I'd received yet another e-mail from yet another new site trying to help raise money online for films.

Renting movies and watching them within 24 hours is great for people who:- Never fall asleep during a movie- Don't have children- Don't receive phone calls that interrupt a movie- Don't ever remember that there's a live broadcast (like a sporting event) that they'd rather be watching, mid-way through a movieBut a new partnership between TiVo and Disney dictates that, while you can now rent some Disney movies and have them delivered directly to your TiVo, you must watch them within 24 hours. If you start at 8 PM, they vanish by 8 PM the next night. Here's the Variety coverage.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Akimbo was one of the first set-top boxes that tried to use an Internet connection to deliver "long tail" content. While it wasn't possible for just anybody to send their video content to an Akimbo user, the company was open to doing all sorts of deals with all sorts of aggregators. They were truly ahead of their time.But Akimbo realized it was going to be hard to build a significant base of users of a new piece of hardware (the "TiVo problem"), and switched to a different strategy: peddling the content library it had put together to other companies. That didn't work out, and now Akimbo is calling it quits, according to GigaOm and NewTeeVee.I wrote about some of the challenges facing Akimbo in 2005, for Release 1.0 (PDF here.)

The NY Times runs a feature today about John Sloss and Cinetic Rights Management.Brooks Barnes writes:John Sloss is one of the top sales agents for independent films. Mr. Sloss, 52, has handled the sale of such diamonds in the rough as “Little Miss Sunshine,” the perky 2006 film about a family traveling to a children’s beauty pageant. He sold the $8 million project to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million, setting a festival price record that still holds.Now Mr. Sloss and his New York company, Cinetic Media, are rolling out a new business called Cinetic Rights Management. The executive and his team — he just hired Matt Dentler, the highly regarded director of the South by Southwest film festival — will act as sales agents for filmmakers who have been left on the sidelines.

- Sony Pictures is creating a new business unit to send live performances (pre-recorded live performances, that is) to digital cinemas, according to the NY Times, Variety, and Wall Street Journal. They're starting with a Cirque du Soleil show, 'Delirium,' and then moving on to the final Broadway performance of 'Rent.' The Times observes: "Sony is the first big studio to dip its toe into the arena, which until now has been left to niche players like Colorado-based Fathom Events, which simulcasts from the Metropolitan Opera." Some events will be offered in 4K digital projection...which should look super-sharp.- Tech reviewer David Pogue

- The WSJ, Wired, and TechCrunch all have news and reviews of a new $99 set-top box from Roku, which will deliver movies from Netflix. From the Journal:At $99.99, the Netflix set-top box is priced like a DVD player and is as simple to hook up to a television. A high-speed Internet connection can either be plugged into the box or the device can pick up a wireless signal.Netflix's new set-top box, made by Roku, will stream movies from Netflix's library directly to customers' televisions.Similar Internet-to-TV devices made by Apple Inc. and Vudu Inc.

David Lynch's 55 second short filmed with an original Lumiere camera. 40 international directors were asked to make a short film using the original Cinematographe invented by the Lumière Brothers, working under conditions similar to those of 1895. There were three rules:

[Via BoingBoing]

...but he hopes it isn't soon.From some Chicago Tribune Cannes coverage:"Making a film on celluloid," [Spielberg] said, is a threatened mode of expression."Digital cinema is inevitable. It's right around the corner. And someday," said Spielberg, "even I will have to convert."The official Cannes site has a slightly longer Spielberg quote that offers some more nuance:"The film is being released digitally on a lot of screens, about 300. Making a film digitally and releasing a film in the same digital process gives a beautiful image. It creates an extraordinarily clean, sharp image, but making a film on celluloid - as I’d like to do with all of my pictures –then transferring, releasing it, and projecting it digitally is a very inferior image.

Neil Feldman of In-Three sends a note this week with news that his California company just got the green light to "dimensionalize" its first feature, George Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead.' (In-Three uses custom software to turn movies shot in 2-D into 3-D.) According to The Hollywood Reporter, the project should be completed this year."We have been busy significantly speeding up, lowering the cost, and improving both the quality and capability of our proprietary Dimensionalization process for converting 2D content into 'perfect 3D,' Feldman writes.Of course, dimensionalizing 'Dawn of the Dead' is a slightly lower-profile project than doing 'Star Wars: Episode IV,' a 3-D clip of which was shown at ShoWest in 2005... but isn't it always the B-movies that gamble first on new technologies?

Hope this ok to post here

We've just put up two new funded video commissions up on Radar, open to all filmmakers world wide.

The first is for The Wave Pictures on Moshi Moshi. A small budget of £300/$600, but unbeatable credibility if you get the commission. Moshi Moshi are very influential in the UK and North America particularly. They've a reputation for sharp A&R, finding Kate Nash and Hot Chip very early on, and having a host of other influential artists on their label. They also have a reputation for finding and breaking new music video director talent (Nima Nourizadeh, Kinga Burza). Pitch deadline is 30th May

The second is for Norwegian band The Lionheart Brothers on Racing Junior Records. A production budget of £1,700/$3,400, the band are described as "Beach Boys harmony pop sounds suffused with the insistent druggy-drone of The Flaming Lips" -DROWNED IN SOUND. The brief is wide open to creative interpretation. Pitch deadline is 1st June.

Jaman, the Silicon Valley movie marketplace geared to indie content, is introducing ad-supported streaming this week. That adds a second revenue stream to Jaman's business model, which was originally built atop selling downloads and rentals of films.I don't think this is a surrender, indicating that downloads and rentals aren't working for Jaman, but it has undoubtedly been a challenge for the site to get visitors to hand over their credit card information... and ad-supported streaming makes it easier to simply start watching a movie that looks half-way interesting. Jaman will offer 100 ad-supported titles to start with.Here's the TechCrunch coverage ... and the official press release.