This article was written by Susan Gerard.

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small?

We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers.”

Read the rest of this article from SF360.

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“Digital media is changing the behavior of all moviegoers, but it’s doing so very differently for varying age groups.

That’s what a group of around 100 online and studio marketing executives, as well as journalists, learned yesterday at a presentation of data from a study of 3,582 moviegoers, about 43% surveyed in person at theaters and the rest online or on the phone.

The study was done by Stradella Road, a marketing consulting company started by former New Line executive Gordon Paddison, whose current clients include Peter Jackson and 3-D projection company RealD.”

Read this article from LA Times.

The Ten Commandments of Filmmaking
How to Work (and Survive) in the
Film and Television Industry
by Peter D. Marshall

This article is from Mike Jones Digital Basin.

“Sometime ago as part of research I was doing into trends in cinema production I was directed to a website called http://cinemetrics.lv/ which sort to collate raw data about the average length of shots through the history of cinema. Using a custom tool it allowed for a mathematical dataset to be compiled of how many cuts and how long those cuts were during the course of a feature film. What results is a very interesting set of graphs dealing with editing trends over the past century.” Read rest of article.

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TECH TALK - “Tech will be impacted by economy and environment in 2009″ by Greg Hughes. Toronto Business Times – January 2, 2009.

“As we’ve seen in past economic downturns, movies offer a cheap (well, sometimes) form of escape from the unpleasant realities of the world. This being said, filmmaking in the Digital Age has been a difficult business in the past several years. Aside from not keeping up with the Internet’s effect on the business, the red-hot product of 2009 – the Blu-Ray disc – is bound to entice more people to switch to HD and stay at home more often (especially since the U.S. is switching over to digital television broadcasting only in February).

Like the publishing industries, movie-going is gradually shifting to a more “value-added” approach, or rather more bang for your buck. This has never been more apparent than with a potential killer app for Hollywood that may result in a potential Renaissance for the industry: 3-D filmmaking.

As more theatres like AMC’s Yonge and Dundas cinema go fully digital, next-generation 3-D technology is poised to re-define the movie-going experience. Several films are being released in 2009 with a 3-D format, culminating in superstar sci-fi director James Cameron (Titanic, Terminator 2: Judgment Day) releasing his long-anticipated 3-D film Avatar in December. Expect 3-D to make a major impact in 2009, not just from a technological perspective, but from a business one, too.” Read rest of article here.

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CultureLab is a full service research agency that focuses on the multicultural young adult consumer. Our segments of focus include Asian American, Urban Hispanic, African American and Urban White 18-34 year olds. We tapped into our network across the country to come up with our trends to watch for in 2009. Our clients include general market advertising agencies, corporations, beverage marketers and government entities.

CultureLab is an agency that specializes in creating emotional connections between brands, youth and young adults.

Click here to read CultureLab’s 20 Trends to Watch For in 2009. Pay close attention to #’s 14, 15, 18, 19, 20.