the straight 8 2008 cannes film festival selection has been announced! 2008 has been a record year with 175 films made. on the 22nd may 13 films that even the directors have never seen before will have their world premieres in the packed out kodak apartment on the beach in cannes! were you selected? are you coming? how are you getting there? where are you staying? how are you feeling? share the joy, share the trepidation!
Jeremy Walker is taking the Summer, and possibly the rest of his life, off from film publicity. He has written a piece for indieWIRE reflecting on the nature of publicity (and the importance of good film stills!) Read it to find out more about what publicists should and should not do. For example: Filmmakers should not think about what goodies a publicist can “get” for them; rather they should think about how a publicist can integrate their film into both…
My friend and Shooting People NY Editor Jesse Epstein shot this and you should watch it. It’s funny and shows you some very crafty ways to get rid of all that leftover Matzah.
If you need a little help sorting out your RSS feeds from your Wikis then check out the videos on The CommonCraft Show. Lee LeFever explains the basics in a wonderfully clear way and will get you started with some suggested links to try out. Topics include: Twitter Social Networking Social Bookmarking Blogs Wikis RSS
Ah so, another week in the hectic life of a filmmaker and what have I done? Well, oddly, I’ve actually been doing something rather to the point. No, I’ve not been making a film, obviously not, I’m a filmmaker living in Britain and so I respect the legislation passed which underlines the fiscal principle that, like children in a newsagent, the economy cannot support more than two filmmakers working at any time. However no one can stop you writing. They…
Thanks to Agnes Varnum over at the Resources Blog for reminding me to watch the VPRO doc on Wikipedia. I heard about it via various tweets and blog posts from the Next Web conference in Amsterdam and finally got a chance to watch it earlier today. As a fan of documentaries I am fascinated by debates around the idea of “truth” and the endless unpacking of the nature and meaning of the word. But I am also aware that sometimes…
Films uploaded to Shooting People can now be embedded across the web (you can turn this option off when you upload your film if you don’t want it to be shared). Have a play and please give us feedback. Here’s the trailer for Paul Taylor and Teddy Leifer’s documentary We Are Together to show you what the player looks like.
I wrote about King Corn last year when it had its theatrical release. If you missed it back then, now is your chance to catch it on TV. The film is about two recent college graduates, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, who decide to move to rural Iowa to plant an acre of corn and follow it through the food production chain all the way to the dinner plate. Along the way they learn some rather nasty facts about the…
The kind of knee-jerk anti-Americanism you often get in Europe annoys me as much as knee-jerk anything else. It’s often simplistic, ill-informed, hypocritical, and driven by fear rather than thought. But there can be no doubt that there is a degree of cultural flattening taking place, and the culture usually flows in one direction only: out of the US (yeah yeah I know there are exceptions like The Office and The Beatles and The Queen). I miss the cultural differences…
We are continuing to improve our WATCH FILM tools on Shooting People with lots of exciting new developments to help our members upload and share their work. We have just introduced an embed tool and to show you how lovely it is here is the trailer for We Are Together made by Shooters Paul Taylor and Teddy Leifer, a wonderful documentary about a group of AIDS orphans from South Africa who form a choir. UPDATE: We’re working on this RIGHT…
