Hallo Panda Trailer from Blaine Brothers on Vimeo. Tonight’s your first chance to hear how Panda is shaping up as a feature script… please come.

As you will see if you scroll through the recent entries in this blog, outside influences have been pushing my thoughts towards the thorny issues of duration in story telling. Though inspired by conversations with other people, I’m probably especially aware of it because of the script that my brother and I are currently engaged with. As the keenest readers will know, we have been writing a feature length version of our award winning cinema extreme film “Hallo Panda”. When…

No, for once, I’m not just banging about Branchage (though I’m not saying it’s not) but my last post here about the length of shorts has sparked up this question on the Shooting People Filmmaker’s Bulletin… > Hi What are the 6 top festivels in the opinion of the SP > readers are the ones that REALLY count and what is THE ideal > length for a short? Coould we have some views please? Best > Charlie Salem And in…

The brilliant Ingrid Kopp has just written an fantastic piece about the arts economy on her blog (always just a mere click away on my blogroll in the corner….) So if thoughts of Art and Survival are weighing as heavily on your mind as they are on mine – take a moment to read this: http://shootingpeople.org/fromthehip/2009/11/25/what-is-independent-film-worth/

This is an article I wrote for a UK publication so that’s why I’m talking about £s. Would love feedback so please comment away! What is independent film worth? The Strange Economy of the Arts. I recently discovered that there is an academic field called cultural economics. They have an association, a journal and a bi-annual conference. I know this because I have become obsessed with the economics of independent filmmaking. I have become obsessed because I have been spending…

As keen readers and those of you able to scroll down to earlier entries will know, last week I took part in the third brilliant Shooting People Branchage Film Surgery at the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. We watched a bunch of increasingly brilliant films and with Phil, Hannah and James, I did my best to think of helpfully critical things to say about them. A nice upshot of these events are the people you meet at them. In the…

I was recently told a story which goes, in some small way, to lead ones thoughts toward the differences between short and feature length narratives. I met an old friend of mine and conversation turned to a mutual acquaintance we both still held in some passing contempt. Though nothing but a decent human being, our acquaintance was also, the last time I saw him, the sort of smugly high achieving young go-getter that brings out the worst in me. He…

Been pretty wrapped up in writing for the past few days which not only takes most of the energy that I otherwise spill in blogging but also reduces the amount of stuff I actually have to write about. Don’t get me wrong, the stuff Chris and I are doing at the moment is better than good and were you to read the pages you’d think us a pair of swells, but the actual creative process is just a pair of…

Doing our best to stop it turning into Strictly Come Filmmaking (a title which suggests entirely the wrong sort of movie), Phil, Hannah, myself and maestro of ceremonies Mullighan will be performing mouth-to-mouth on some arresting short films at The Hospital in Covent Garden tonight from 6.30pm. Not only will it be full of gems of filmmaking advice it’s also good fun, especially if it’s not your film that’s dying on the slab. So put on your best Branchage brogues…

Warm your soul by following this unwieldy link – http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nrxkp/Archive_on_4_Radio_Hollywood/ to the BBC iPlayer and this week’s edition of The Archive Hour which tells the story of the Lux Theatre… No, I’d not heard of it either but apparently in the Golden Age of Hollywood, before TV, the Lux Soap company fostered and unlikely alliance with the studios and sponsored a radio show which staged new productions of big screen hits. The most amazing thing is that as well as…