Future of Film Technology: February 2012

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

To us, it’s all about the storytelling. If the story grabs, it doesn’t matter what form it takes – books, radio, TV, cinema, games or yet-to-be-categorized interactive media –it’s all about the story being told.

As times and technologies change, content creators have many more readily-available options for how they tell their story. But as technology makes production and distribution both more accessible and much more competitive, storytellers are finding themselves in a heated competition for audience attention. As a result, the filmmakers of tomorrow must more than ever consider their audience and how a story will reach them before making important choices about the content itself.

Today, at Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy (where we teach), students are making traditional, narrative-style movies with large crews using digital film technology; creating 3D promos for corporate promotion and public display; and developing interactive, web-based content for a new kind of online audience.

Digital Domain - Human Reel

WETA Character Design

New Film Technology Grant Information

Production support is offered annually to an individual artist project for film and video, radio, sound art, or computer-generated art. The project can be a combination of media, including but not limited to, work for tape, installation, single-channel work, or interactive disc formats. Individual Artists supports projects utilizing production methods and tools ranging from the simple to state-of-the-art technologies. Grant amounts range from $5,000 to $25,000.

The Council extends equal consideration to a wide range of artists and genres. Electronic media artists or filmmakers who wish to collaborate with artists in other disciplines may apply for production support. Priority is given to projects that emphasize the collaborative process and whose goal is to produce a distinctive work resulting from the meeting of disciplines. Production support is not provided for projects that take another discipline as their major focus or aim to provide straightforward documentation of another art form.

Organizations may not impose a fee on artists for submitting their applications. However, given the responsibilities involved, organizations sponsoring projects in this category may charge up to 7% of the grant to help cover administrative fees and services if a project receives funding. This expense must be reflected in the project budget submitted in support of the application.

Funds from this category cover expenses related to any of the production phases, with the exception of out-of-state travel expenses, and include the following:

Pre-production includes expenses related to research and development, scriptwriting and archive searches. The director must initiate pre-production requests.

Production includes expenses of shooting, equipment rental, stock, crew, field or studio recording, processing, synthesis, creation of software and hardware specific to the artwork, and personnel.

Post-production includes completion expenses such as flatbed or facilities rental, effects, sound mix, captioning for the hearing impaired, and editing salaries that are incurred up to and including the first release print/master tape or equivalent.

New Media Film Festival Update

We are very proud to announce that the Machinima Expo is partnering with the New Media Film Festival to provide mutual support and promotion within each festival. The New Media Film Festival is a live, 2-day celebration of New Media in all it’s forms.

The New Media Film Festival, which takes place in June in Los Angeles, will be create a new Machinima category and all jury nominated films for the Expo will automatically be entered to compete for prizes and screening.

Founder Susan Johnston, a successful Hollywood veteran, approached us with being sister festivals to each other and we love the idea. Thank you, Susan! We love the New Media Film Festival moto “honoring stories worth telling” and have incorporated the idea in this year’s Expo.

One very cool aspect of the festival is that the panels and the awards ceremony are streamed live on the net every year! Although it would be a lot of fun to attend, you don’t have to if you can’t make it. Be sure to check out the “web series superstars” panel, which was great! All of last year’s panels are available for free at the New Media Film Festival Youtube channel.

We at the Expo feel our partnership with the New Media Film Festival will provide more opportunities for machinima filmmakers to share their works and to network with New Media professionals.

Oliver Stone on New Film Tech

LAS VEGAS, Jan. 10 (UPI) -- U.S. film director Oliver Stone said the progression of technology was not necessarily a friend to those who tell stories on film.

Speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Stone said he watched his children watching a film on the diminutive screen of a cell phone, while "trying to multitask."

The experience, he said, was a bummer, "very depressing to people like me," the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

Stone and directors Michael Mann ("The Last of the Mohicans,") and Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge!") were anachronisms at the show, which is all about what the future will bring, the Times said.

Luhrmann bemoaned the fate of film classics converted to Blu-Ray technology, which may reveal ropes used to hoist a flying Peter Pan, for example.

In contrast, Luhrmann also said he was "fantastically optimistic" about technology and was exploring using 3-D for a new version of "The Great Gatsby."

Mann also said he was curious what 3-D might add to a dialogue-oriented drama, the Times said.

WETA Digital Creatures

WETA BTS of Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Movies That Technology Killed - Part 2

The Bonfire of the Vanities

A few years ago, there was a whole series of movies, like Grand Canyon and Doc Hollywood, that involved innocent people whose lives were changed forever when they made a wrong turn off the freeway, all sired by The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Tom Hanks found himself far from his Manhattan penthouse. GPS eliminates all that; nobody ever gets lost anymore. Nobody drives through bad neighbourhoods without global positioning systems these days. If you don't have GPS, you're an idiot. And if you're an idiot, you deserve to die.

The Talented Mr Ripley

Matt Damon doesn't look anything like Jude Law. He just doesn't. Facebook, YouTube, Google, the whole shooting match would just blow Damon's pathetic little masquerade right out of the water. You're not that talented, Mr Ripley.

Goldfinger

James Bond would know in advance to be on the lookout for Odd Job's deadly chapeau because Q would have seen one of these hats for sale, dirt cheap on eBay.

Jaws

Sharks, even humongous great whites, aren't that hard to kill. That's because sharks are dumb. Still, if at first you don't succeed in ridding your otherwise congenial summer resort of a ravenous great white, you simply convene an impromptu gathering of resourceful, experienced shark hunters on Twitter and your problem's solved. It's not a case of, "We're going to need a bigger boat." It's, "We're going to need a bigger flash mob here in Amityville."

The list of motion pictures whose plots get deep-sixed by modern technology goes on and on. Silence of the Lambs. Die Hard. Memento. Scream. And any movie where little kids or damsels in distress are hiding in closets or basements or under the bed won't work anymore because at some point their smart phones will make that annoying "powering down" beeping sound and Chuckie or the Beastmaster or the little girl from The Ring or Al Pacino will know exactly where they are. If you're smart enough to turn off your phone before you hide under the bed, you'd be smart enough not to be in that house in the first place. Or smart enough to text the FBI before you dive into the linen closet.

Here is the central paradox in all this: directors have no problem getting an audience to believe in ghosts, vampires, succubi, extraterrestrials, poltergeists, gremlins, wizards, giant worms, latter-day dinosaurs or rustic werewolves who seem to have unlimited access to steroids; all that is deemed perfectly logical and believable. But it is impossible to get anyone to believe that a character in a horror film or thriller would not be armed with the technology needed to foil the depredations of his rampaging, bloodthirsty stepfather.

Matrix Bullet Time Footage

Movie Plots that Technology Killed

The Ring

Both in the Japanese original and in the very fine American remake, everyone who looks at a creepy videotape dies within seven days because a scary little girl comes slithering out of the television and scares them to death. VHS is now obsolete, so this would never happen today. DVDs are on their way out, too. Maybe if people downloaded the film illegally from some server in Holland, the creepy little girl would only kill the guy running the file-sharing system first, making law enforcement officials everywhere happy. But even in this scenario there might be problems because a lot of people watch illegally downloaded videos on their cell phones and even the creepiest little girl would have trouble slithering out of a screen that small. As soon as she made her appearance, menaced parties could just remove the sim card or chuck the phone into the river. They're not expensive. Realistically, if The Ring were made today, the creepy little girl would probably upload her film onto Netflix and a million people would get an unexpected visit from her. Meanwhile, thousands of film buffs would blog that Ringu was a much better horror film, because Japanese streaming services are scarier than Netflix. Everyone knows that.

The Spiral Staircase

In this classic 1945 thriller, a mute housekeeper (Dorothy McGuire) is unable to call the police and tell them that she is trapped inside a spooky, isolated mansion where she is being terrorised by a murderer who knows she cannot speak and is not that handy with her fists. Email, smart phones, texting, tweeting, what have you render the entire plotline obsolete. Luckily, nobody makes these kinds of movies anymore anyway. They're offensive to mutes.

One Missed Call

In Takashi Miike's excellent 2003 film – the 2008 American remake is not quite up to snuff – innocent Japanese kids get phone messages from beyond the grave warning them that they are next in line to die a horrible death. Phone messages make great cinema, due to the evocative power of the human voice. But One Missed Text? One Missed Tweet? Just not the same. Another thing: In more than one Asian horror flick, photographers developing film in their dark rooms get murdered by people who unexpectedly come to life during the developing process. Those days are gone. Thanks, digital camera.

DIY Motion Motorized Slider

New Motion Control Slider

New LED Film Lighting Technology

Peter Jackson to shoot The Hobbit with new film technology

The prequel to the blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy will be shot in 3D at 48 frames per second, twice as fast as the industry standard of 24.

The move breaks with nine decades of cinema tradition.

Sir Peter likens the moment to digital CDs supplanting vinyl records, claiming the technology will produce "hugely enhanced clarity and smoothness" and more lifelike images.

Announcing the decision on his Facebook page, he says: "Looking at 24 frames every second may seem okay, and we've all seen thousands of films like this over the last 90 years.

"But there is often quite a lot of blur in each frame, during fast movements, and if the camera is moving around quickly the image can judder."

The Oscar-winning director argues that the technique will enable audiences to comfortably watch two hours of 3D footage without getting eyestrain.

He said Warner Bros production studio supports the move, amid predictions that 10,000 cinema screens will be capable of showing the new format by the film's release date of December 2012.

"We are hopeful that there will be enough theatres capable of projecting 48fps by the time The Hobbit comes out, where we can seriously explore that possibility with Warner Bros," Sir Peter said.

Most modern digital projectors could be adapted to the task if their servers are given software upgrades.

An industry-wide move to the higher speed also has a strong advocate in James Cameron, who directed the 2009 science fiction epic Avatar in 3D.

Cameron has said he is planning to shoot the sequel Avatar 2 at 48 frames per second.

But the development is likely to upset film purists, who Sir Peter says will criticise "lack of blur and strobing" -- what one industry commentator has likened to art historians lamenting the loss of grainy, characterful darkness when an Old Master canvas is cleaned.

"There's no doubt in my mind that we're heading towards movies being shot and projected at higher frame rates," Sir Peter said.

"It looks great, and we've actually become used to it now, to the point that other film experiences look a little primitive."

Shooting of the £315 million Hobbit, in which Martin Freeman from The Office plays Bilbo Baggins, started last month at Sir Peter's Wellington studios.

"99 Deaths By" Short Film

NY Times Article about the decline of "FILM"

A few weeks ago I traveled to a college on Long Island to give a lecture — in other words, to stand up in front of a room full of people, ramble for a few minutes about movies and movie criticism, and then spend the rest of the hour answering questions. It was the middle of the day, and the audience was composed, in what looked like roughly equal numbers, of undergraduates and older students enrolled in continuing education courses. Half of the people were 25 and under, the other half 65 and over, leaving me smack in the generational middle and, as it happened, bouncing vertiginously, from one question to the next, between the future and the past.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/movies/film-technology-advances-inspiring-a-sense-of-loss.html?pagewanted=all

Short Film Screening Dates for "Future Shorts" Festival

03-Nov	Sweden	Malmo	Inkonst
03-Nov	Spain	Madrid	Utopic Us
04-Nov	Sweden	Gothenburg	House of Win-Win
05-Nov	Australia	Byron Bay	Forbes
11-Nov	Finland	Rovaniemi	Kauppayhtiö
11-Nov	Finland	Helsinki	Dubrovnik (Helsinki Short Film Festival)
13-Nov	USA	New York	Tacombi
14-Nov	UK	London	Hackney Picture House
15-Nov	Russia	Ekaterinburg	Salut
15-Nov	Finland	Pori	Kulttuurikulma
15-Nov	UK	Bournemouth	Pavillion Dance
17-Nov	Russia	Moscow	35mm Cinema
17-Nov	UK	London	ShellsuitZombie - The Castle Pub
18-Nov	Russia	Moscow	Formula Kino "Gorizont"
19-Nov	Russia	Moscow	Formula Kino "Gorizont"
19-Nov	Australia	Castlemaine, Vic	Theatre Royal
20-Nov	Australia	Perth	1Up Microcinema
20-Nov	Australia	Port Headland	The Courthouse Gallery
20-Nov	Russia	Moscow	Formula Kino "Gorizont"
20-Nov	Kyrgyzstan	Bishkek	Business center "Russia" (17th floor)
21-Nov	Russia	Moscow	35mm Cinema
21-Nov	Australia	Kalgoorlie, WA	Goldfields Arts Centre
22-Nov	Russia	Moscow	35mm Cinema

Future of Film Technology