Are you an aspiring film professional who has already banged your head against too many doors and is starting to feel like the whole stupid idea was a pointless waste of time and you’d have been better off becoming a plumber? Can you see how your entire creative and professional world could change if only you could get yourself some better friends, meet some people further along with their career and get some solid one to one advice about the…

After last year’s late-to-the-party love affair with This American Life (which still continues I should add – I would never jilt Ira Glass!), my 2008 paramour is Re:Sound, a radio show presented by the Third Coast Festival on Chicago Public Radio. It’s a collection of radio stories from around the world, stories that “you can’t hear anywhere else, unless you live everywhere else.” I’ve been listening to the podcasts and have discovered some real treasures, fantastic stories, mainly documentary, about…

Is anyone using Twitter actively? Do you find it useful? Do you find out about cool stuff through Twitter? Or is it just more noise, less signal? Personally I’m a little addicted but I’m not sure if it’s a good, productive addiction or a bad, waste-of-time, distracting addiction. It’s a little like being at a big dinner party and trying to have lots of different conversations at the same time and never quite getting to the point.

Paul Harrill over on Self-Reliant Film has compiled a great list of resources about the Red One digital camera – from forums and wikis to training videos and software. Great quote from Steven Soderbergh on the Red website: For me, this is Year Zero; I feel I should call up Film on the phone and say, “I’ve met someone.”

So once again Radiohead have pioneered a new and interesting model for distribution To celebrate this week’s single release (we still have those in England) Radiohead have broken up the song ‘Nude’ into pieces for you to remix. For those of you who enjoy this sort of thing, you can buy the separate components or ‘stems’ (bass, voice, guitar, strings/FX and drums) and remix your own version of the song. You can do this by adding your own beats and…

I was listening to Daniel Pink’s How Manga Explains the World talk from SXSW (I’m still not quite sure just what Manga explains but it was fascinating to hear details about how unbelievably popular it is in Japan) and he mentioned the new Howard Zinn graphic book A People’s History of American Empire. Here is an animated video, narrated by Viggo Mortensen, related to an essay Zinn wrote called Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn’t Teach Me About the…

I recently interviewed a few folk in the UK about making short films for an article I have been writing. My old friend Ashley Jones of Green Lions was kind enough to give me a really thoughtful interview about the work he has been doing recently so I thought I would post the whole thing here: When did you start making short films and what kind of films do you make? When we were kids, my brothers and I used…

Not that you can really see in these pictures but there was also a entire screenplay in German, gently being transformed by the rain into a single soggy lump. And also a business card from someone in the BBC Wales Sports Department.

A strange relationship with Paris. As both of you who check this blog regularly will have noticed, I’ve been away for the past month enjoying the peaceful bliss of not having broadband internet, not answering the phone and being barely able to understand what most people in the world are saying. It is surprising how nice it is to be uncomprehending. Massively frustrating at times too, even, for someone endlessly verbose like I am, depressing. However it is nice how…

There are some great narratives and docs screening at the IFFBoston later this month – it’s like a greatest hits list with no doubt a few new gems thrown in. The full list is here but here are some of my picks (my comments in italics): Narrative Features AUGUST EVENING (John Cassavetes Award Winner at the Spirt Awards earlier this year) directed by Chris Eska Reminiscent of the works of Ozu, August Evening follows an aging undocumented worker, Jaime, and…