I love Maria Popova’s site, Brain Pickings. It’s an endless source of interesting ideas. She has also helpfully provided an online bookshelf so you can explore all the amazing books she consumes so voraciously. She often posts videos and cool stuff about the history of film, for example this post on Grierson: A Documentary About the Filmmaker Who Coined “Documentary.” Basically, I’m urging you to subscribe to the blog and follow her on Twitter without further ado. “Brain Pickings is…

A huge congratulations to everyone who won last night at the 2010 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking but more importantly, congratulations to everyone who had a film nominated and to all those who have made and supported docs over the past year. The nominee line-up was pretty darn great and included films I have really loved: Loot, Episode 3 Enjoy Poverty, The Way We Get By and Mugabe and the White African for example. As co-chair AJ Schnack said,…

This is currently up on Shooting People: Under the Freedom of Information Act, NASA released details of all the films held on the International Space Station. At Shooting People, we feel that Bachelor Party, Cheaper by the Dozen and Forest Gump don’t provide sufficient brain nourishment for the astronauts. Your mission Shooters is to provide us with your suggestions. Which films do you think belong amongst the stars? Would you like to see Man on Wire replace Man on Fire?…

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the quote below from C.P. Scott’s A Hundred Years essay, written in 1921. Scott was Editor of the Manchester Guardian (now just The Guardian) for an extraordinary 57 years from 1872 until 1929 and he wrote A Hundred Years to celebrate the centenary of the paper: Comment is free, but facts are sacred. “Propaganda”, so called, by this means is hateful. The voice of opponents no less than that of friends has a…

Demos, the “think tank for everyday democracy” in the UK, has recently published a report on the Video Republic which I recommend reading. The report, which focuses on young video creators in Europe, is primarily concerned with online video and it makes some strong arguments about the power of the Video Republic in the digital age: “Music, television and film companies no longer hold a monopoly on the way content moves between people.” It also outlines why this must be…

Just a heads up that I am also blogging over on the Shooting People TOOLS blog about the new(ish) digital, webbified world of production and distribution. Check it out for a link to download the Shooting People/BAFTA Short Sighted book of contacts for filmmakers making shorts (including some tips for filmmaking in a Web2.0 world written by moi), plus lots of other good stuff: most recently links to the Peter Broderick indieWIRE articles on new distribution strategies and The Film…

Belated congrats to my friend and Shooting People colleague, Jesse Epstein, for being one of the “25 new faces of independent film” in Filmmaker Magazine. In addition to getting to pose in a big red truck for Filmmaker, her film 34x25x36 is also playing in the YouTube screening room. Ms Epstein is awesome. Still from 34x25x36

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…

Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir looks at the year in indie film and focuses on the changes that new technologies and consumer viewing habits are bringing to the theatrical marketplace. As VOD and download technologies become more popular and portable platforms become ever more sophisticated, the industry is changing at a pace that induces motion-sickness in most people over the age of 15. Meanwhile, aficionados of “challenging” films are finding new ways to get their arty fix. Predicting the end of moviegoing…

Marc Andreessen has written an interesting post about how the writer’s strike may accelerate a shift of power from the studios to the talent. He argues that the entertainment industry is shifting toward the entrepreneurial model of Silicon Valley which means that the creators will also be the owners of their product. I think many of the points he makes are very prescient but all this talk about free this and free that glosses over the time and talent that…