from The Bay Net.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s fifth annual film series, Out of Bounds: Feminist Films and Filmmakers, will focus on the work of women filmmakers and women’s filmmaking collectives. It kicks off with Yun Suh, who will screen her film “City of Borders” at 8:15 p.m. Monday, Feb. 6, in Cole Cinema in the college’s Campus Center, and answer questions afterwards.

Read the rest of this article from The Bay Net.

Sign up now for your own FREE monthly subscription to “The Director’s Chair” filmmaking ezine and get the first 30 pages of my 220 page Film Directing Multi-Media Online course, “The Art and Craft of the Director Audio Seminar.”

I’m Peter D. Marshall and I created this film directing blog in 2007 as an online movie making resource center for Independent Filmmakers like yourself.

(As of February 4, 1581 film making posts have been published on this blog!)

For over 38 years I’ve worked (and survived) in the Film and TV industry as a Film Director, Television Producer, First Assistant Director and Creative Consultant. (See IMDb Credits.)

In 1999, I started my website, ActionCutPrint which has grown into one of the top film directing websites for Independent Filmmakers on the Internet today featuring online movie making courses, film directing articles, film and television books and filmmaking workshops.

In 2000, I started publishing my free monthly film making ezine, The Director’s Chair which is currently read by over 6000 filmmakers in 105 countries around the world. (You can read 125 back issues here.)

To fulfill my goal of mentoring and teaching, I developed several filmmaking workshops that I have presented over the past 18 years: from Canada to Singapore to Dubai. I am also a directing instructor at the Vancouver Film School.

So if you want to keep up to date on the latest Online film and television resources, please Bookmark this Page Now or Subscribe to this blog to read daily film making articles written by myself and other film makers from around the world.

by Jackson Chan.

The iPhone Film Festival will host a screening and Q&A this Friday evening at Macworld | iWorld with an international group of filmmakers who go beyond using their iPhones to capture a pet’s adorable antics or a favorite song at a concert — these filmmakers see their phones as a tool to tell a story. More than 800 films have been submitted to the festival, with the requirement that the film’s footage was shot entirely on an iPhone. A select group of filmmakers will be debuting their new films, and their festival-winning shorts will be screening as well.

Since the iPhone introduced video recording as a feature, a new breed of independent filmmaking has emerged. The short films highlighted at the festival exhibit a lushness that belies the diminutive size of the camera the footage was shot on. With the introduction of 720p HD video recording in the iPhone 4, and subsequently 1080p in the iPhone 4S, filmmakers can shoot high-quality footage on a shoe-string budget. Furthermore, many accessories, such as lens attachments and camera stands, are available for the iPhone, adding to the filmmaking capabilities of the device and allowing for different effects and steadier shooting.

Read the rest of this article from All Voices.

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by Jeff Mays.

Decades from now, Roland Laird wants My Image Studios LLC to be mentioned in the same breath as legendary Harlem venues like the Apollo Theater.

Scheduled to open in June, the $21 million film screening, performance space and restaurant will be dedicated to African and Latino culture.

“We want to be the premier space for culture and entertainment for the African and Latino diaspora,” said Laird, CEO of My Image Studios or MIST. “We want it to be Harlem’s living room.”

The three separate theater spaces with stadium seating can be transformed into one 250-seat area for plays or spoken word performances. It can also be configured into a 320-person banquet hall.

There will be a fully equipped editing room and a 132-seat restaurant featuring world cuisine with outdoor seating at a $20 tp $25 price point. At capacity, the entire space, located at the Kalahari Condominiums at 40 West 116th Street between Lenox and Fifth avenues, will hold up to 800 people.

Read the rest of this article from DNA Info.

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by Greg Jericho.

This week Rupert Murdoch has decided to take to Twitter to let us know all about his views on movie piracy.

His tweets have provided some nice nuggets of amusement that have been akin to your father telling you he’s heard about this thing called the information superhighway and wanting to know if you have heard of The Google.

The context for his tweets has been the bill before the US congress called the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). You know the act will do absolutely nothing to actually stop online piracy because of the standard rule that the more explicit an act’s title, the less likely it will achieve those aims.

The notional target of SOPA is file-sharing, but its current wording is so broad (and I advise you read Bernard Keane in Crikey for greater detail) that if passed the US government could do such things as shut down YouTube if it contained “pirated video”; or force Google to not link to sites that may allow one to download illegal content. (I should say the US government could “try to shut down” – because they won’t succeed). In protest against the bill, today at 4.00pm Wikipedia will shut down for 24 hours.

Read the rest of this article from ABC.net

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by Chandra Steele.

Every town has gone a little Hollywood this month. Cinemas are packed with theatergoers wanting to see esteemed Oscar nominees and this week’s Sundance Film Festival previews what could be the next gleam in their eyes.

One of the Oscar favorites, Hugo, is an uncommonly gentle film from Martin Scorsese that’s a love note to those who go to the movies and also to those who create them.

Whether it’s a recent fancy or a long-time fantasy of yours to make a movie, now’s the time. Most filmmaking tools are low-cost (or even free) and easy to use. Here’s what you’ll need to create everything from the opening scene to the end credits.

Read the rest of this article from PC Mag.

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from PR Newswire.

Are you passionate about sharing your documentary and having it broadcast on television? With just five weeks to go, TVO is calling upon Ontario’s new generation of documentary filmmakers to exhibit their creative skills with the introduction of the inaugural Doc Studio Contest.

TVO is challenging aspiring and accomplished filmmakers, artistic visionaries and amateur film buffs across Ontario to think about all that can happen in five minutes, and then to capture it on film. Inspired by filmmaker-in-residence Alan Zweig (Vinyl, I Curmudgeon, Lovable, A Hard Name), TVO’s Doc Studio Contest dares participants to reveal “Life in 5″ – a memorable moment, a shift in perception, a secret no one else could uncover – through an interview-based, five-minute film.

“Asking filmmakers to submit a documentary under five minutes in length forces them to hone in on the true essence of a story,” says TVO’s supervising producer, Jane Jankovic. “The Doc Studio Contest is all about capturing what moves us and illuminates our lives and our world. There are thousands of untold stories out there. I can’t wait to see what we get.”

Read the rest of this article from PR Newswire.

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from The Telegraph.

The cinema’s provenance lies in the silent movie. But stereotypes, like habits, die hard. Since 1927, when the first ‘talkie’, The Jazz Singer, was released, movie-goers have associated films with dialogue, sound and music. A successful film, in terms of the accepted stereotype, is one in which all these elements come together with images to tell a story that appeals to the emotions of human beings.

A silent film is considered a throwback in time: it has historical value but is unacceptable within the canons of modern cinema. Hence, film-goers in Britain have refused to accept the Oscar-winning film, The Artist. People have walked out of cinemas and some have been so outraged that they have asked for their money back. The Artist has raised the question: what is cinema?

The film is not only silent, it is also in black and white. This obviously does not match what large numbers of people expect from a movie that has been commercially released. They expect to be entertained and believe that without sound and without colour they have been short changed. This reaction only indicates that tastes have dramatically changed in less than a hundred years.

Read the rest of this article from the Telegraph.

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by Michael Phillips.

“It’s the death of shadows!” a gaffer, i.e., movie-set electrician, said to a Los Angeleno friend of mine. He was decrying how the digital filmmaking revolution had compromised the image quality (not to mention his own freelance employment) in feature filmmaking.

The death of shadows. That phrase, however hyperbolic, stuck with me. Could this be true? Is digital filmmaking really eliminating the sort of supple, evocative, high-contrast light and shadow we learned to take for granted on 35 mm film?

Though it’s too early to call the coroner, and though digital cameras improve by the hour, I do wonder what we’re losing as film rapidly recedes into our cultural memory, taking with it a richness of imagery digital may yet match.

Read the rest of this article from Chicago Tribune.

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from The Hindu.

Acclaimed film maker P.T. Kunju Muhammed has opined that Malayalam cinema was yet to free itself from its colonial behaviour.

Participating in a panel discussion on Malayalam cinema at Mahatma Gandhi University on Thursday, Mr. Kunju Muhammed said that the people were still yet to free themselves from the clutches of slavery in our outlook. “Unfortunately, our educational system has only strengthened this control in our thinking process that has been imposed upon us by the colonial powers.

The boundaries that we have created in our perception have been deep-rooted in our cultural perception and the process of film making. The film institutes in our country have been established in order to impart training in film techniques. However, in reality, these establishments have created a sense of inferiority complex that puts into doubt whether our standards are on par with those of the Western countries.”

Read the rest of this article from The Hindu.

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