Gosh, what a long time it has been since I last posted on here. Sorry for the extra-long silence over the holidays. Anyway I am back and, like many others, I have been thinking a great deal about the challenges facing independent filmmaking in 2009.

I mentioned on my Shooting From The Hip blog that independent filmmakers are well trained in dealing with financial uncertainty and I hope that we can continue to work together to forge a creative path in 2009. Make sure that you add Shooters you have worked with to your profile on shootingpeople.org – this will make it much easier for you to find cast and crew for your films who have worked with people you already know and trust.

And here’s a new blog to add to your list if you want some solid information on how films actually get made. All About Indie Filmmaking is written by Jane Kosek, an indie film producer in LA, and is full of useful tips to help you find your feet in the industry.

Happy New Year!

Ted Hope’s new blog Truly Free Film is definitely one to add to your reader (if you haven’t started subscribing to blog feeds in a reader I highly recommend it – it saves time and allows you to keep track of loads of blogs and websites in one place. I use Google Reader but there are other options out there). I previously wrote about Hope’s Phoenix Rising speech here and his Truly Free Film blog follows on from this with excellent tips for filmmakers. One of his posts talks about what a bunch of luddites filmmakers can be and I have to say that I have found this to be mostly true and it’s a shame because there are some incredible tools out there for us to use now. Shooting People is celebrating its 10th birthday this week and in the last decade we have seen some monumental changes in terms of technology and innovation. It’s hard for filmmakers now because the competition is so fierce (and the budgets are often so low) but the ability that we now have to connect and collaborate with each other and our audiences is unprecedented.

In one of his posts, Hope linked to this excellent resource on social media by Beth Kanter (check out her blog on how nonprofits can use social media). I follow her on Twitter because her observations are often very relevant for filmmakers too. Twitter has become a useful tool for finding out about exciting things happening in the world of Web2.0, social media and technology – and I have been introduced to lots of great people and ideas through it. It is definitely worth investigating although it can also be something of a time-suck. You have been warned.

Catch up on some of them on The Film Panel Notetaker blog. All the good stuff is here including some really useful and indepth coverage of the No Borders International Co-Production Market presentation of the Case Study on Single Picture Financing with John Hadity, President and CEO of Hadity & Associates, Inc., a consultancy firm that specializes in risk management and production finance for film and television.

Of course you do! And Widgetbox is the place to go to. Thanks to Karina over at Spout for bringing our attention to this widget wonderland. This widget is great for spreading the love about your blog. They call it a blidget which is perhaps a grammatical step too far but it looks very handy. It allows people to embed the most recent posts from your blog on their MySpace/Facebook profiles, blogs etc.

Here’s one for this blog so you can see how it works :

Before embarking on your lovely new website, read this post from Brian Chirls on why he thinks you shouldn’t use Flash. He suggests setting up your website as a blog. Easy peasy.

This blog itself is a work in progress. We have set up a very simple blog for now but we plan to add lots of plugins and other good things as we experiment with what is possible. Would be great to hear about blog tools that you have found useful.

And of course there are always the blogs about blogging which are really great if you want some tips and tricks for your own blog. I like bloggingpro – and I haven’t really read it but I hear JohnTP is good too.