"Jet"

Jordan Chesney made "Jet" (The Screenplay) instead of writing an actual screenplay. He shot it for 200 bucks, in one day.

Months later he filmed everything all over again, but with a $10,000 budget and four days to shoot. Yeah, he made the same film twice. This is the second one.

    Facebook    IMDb    Website    Vimio    

Orson Welles - 1938 Radio Broadcast - "War Of The Worlds"

Here it is, in full. The 1938 Radio Broadcast of H.G. Wells's science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds.

The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938 and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds.

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated "news bulletins", which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a 'sustaining show' (it ran without commercial breaks), thus adding to the program's quality of realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated. In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage. The program's news-bulletin format was decried as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast, but the episode secured Orson Welles' fame.

Distribution of Australian films

Sandy George

There are three major distributors of Australian films in Australia: Madman, Hopscotch and Village Roadshow. 

Representatives from each of these took part in a Q&A at CinefestOZ in Western Australia on 24 August 2013. The event was reported in Screen Hub by Sandy George, the venerable film journalist.

Here are a few quotes from that session. ________________________________________________________________________

Seph McKenna (Roadshow Films):

It’s competitive and we are an English-speaking market up against the Hollywood juggernaut, which puts incredible amounts of money into film. If Australians had $150 million to spend, they could compete against Hollywood films, but we can’t afford it.

On the (Australian) features that Roadshow acquires, which are budgeted at $8-15 million, we spend an average of $40-$50,000 on the trailer and one-sheet. The studios are spending $6-8 million on their trailers and their one-sheets. We are outgunned, a speedboat against aircraft carriers, which means that when we do have films that find an audience—like Red Dog, Bran Nue Dae, The Sapphires and Animal Kingdom—it really is an incredible achievement. The bad and good news is that we have to be twice as good and work ten times as hard as the people in Hollywood. It’s hard to make films of that calibre, hard to tell stories that good. You’ve got to be at the top of your game and you have to have a little bit of fairy dust sprinkled on top.

We might get the best horror script and it’s terrifying, but we know we are not a horror market in Australia. If a horror film makes a $100 million in the States, it makes 2-5% pro rata here. The average for most films is 10%. You’ve got to be aware of your audience. What we see from the data is that the audience tends to be older, at least in the first instance, and female driven. If you see something for young adults, you know you have to be that audience’s first choice at the cinema or you lose. You don’t get a second chance. Hollywood is never going to give us Red Dog, so when I’m looking for Australian material, I’m looking for something that Hollywood is never going to give us, because if they are going to give it to us they are going to do it with bigger stars and more money.

We might have been deprived of Red Dog and The Sapphires because they didn’t get an international sales agent, and that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. I would require an international sales agent or a local distributor, one or the other.

We’ve made a series of uplifting films that have connected with audiences. We are on the right track. I want to see us continue to release high quality films, and, five or ten years from now, to see excitement when an Australian film is coming out—from all demographics, not just older audiences.

Nick Batzias (Madman):

There’s a lot of great films out of the US, France, the UK, and they make a shitload more than us. We’re not seeing the shit French films—well, we are at markets. We act as a filter between those shit films and you guys. The 10-15% rule of what works (in Australia) is about right. If we are making 25 here, and you run those numbers, two or three pop theatrically and that’s it.

By the time they’re two years old, a lot of Australian films will have had two millions sets of eyeballs on them, but that happens across TV, DVD, Pirate Bay, as well as at the cinema. And they’re all equally valid ways of consuming content although they each return different amounts to the producers. The expectation that two or three of those are going to work theatrically is probably a bit unrealistic.

There were any number of reasons why a film that deserved to do better didn’t:  Timing, the zeitgeist, people not wanting to go and see an Australia film, competition on the opening weekend, footy finals, an election, it rains, or it doesn’t stick early enough. If the multiplexes are on board and you’ve put a film out on 80 to 100 prints you have got 10 days, that’s all. It’s as cut-throat as that.

It’s one thing to hear that a film grossed $6 million and say, wow, that sounds good, but if the distributor has spent $2 million releasing the film you’re not seeing a cracker of it, because a third gets returned to the distributor, and is split with investors. Some of our most profitable films, Australian and otherwise, grossed $500,000 at the box office, but we only spent $70,000 each releasing them. Some have grossed $2.5 million, but cost $800,000, so don’t come home to rest until they’ve been sold to television and some DVDs have been sold.

I’m happy to delight and shock (audiences). It’s about having great projects that make sense. If it isn’t great on paper, there’s a really slim chance of being great at the end. Projects have to be incredibly compelling and how that is assessed varies from genre to genre.

Rachel Okine (Hopscotch Entertainment One):

We recently talked about whether we should pull back on the number of Australian films we were releasing. It is so much easier to go to a market and buy a film from another country. We looked at Hopscotch’s history and the two most successful films we’ve ever released theatrically are both Australian (Mao’s Last Dancer and The Sapphires)—so we sat down and did some homework, and I urge all of you to do the same. We printed out the top 100 Australian films of all time from the Screen Australia website and broke them down into the sorts of films that really excite Australian audiences from a cinematic perspective, and a pattern did seem to emerge.

Good films do badly all the time and bad films do well all the time so I don’t think it’s anything to do with the quality of the film.

Whenever we think a film is great we make a play for it. We might turn them down because the script isn’t good enough, the director’s work is not good enough, there is not enough money available to make it well, the cast isn’t saleable enough, or it’s a genre that audiences aren’t interested in. Will only do four Australian films per year or less because they are a big strain on the whole distribution team.

It is a pitfall when people go into their first feature too quickly and they haven’t done enough shorts, or enough television. Having that assurance in terms of a first-time directors’ previous work is one of the big things we look for, and life is too short to work with people that you don’t like. They are the two big things outside the audience question.

It is not necessary for them to be made for a big budget like The Great Gatsby, but there was a certain scale of ambition in terms of the scope of the themes that they were exploring and the emotional response they were trying to elicit from their audience. Over and over we saw that these stories had a big heart and an element of exuberance—and pace too.

_______________________________________________________________________

Here are a few other comments from the session.

• Okine also drew attention to the high number of true stories in the Top 100 list, including true crime, films adapted from well-known source material, whether a television series or a book, and material that tugged at the heart strings, whether because of a wedding or a dog.
• She also noted that films that played strongly in the regions—and Red Dog is a perfect example—were more likely to be box office gold, yet regional areas were under-served in terms of what projects were developed, perhaps because most filmmakers are in cities.
• All three distributors are wary about which Australian films they support because of how much they drain resources—time, money, emotional energy, and how long it takes to get a return on the investment. The average cost of prints and advertising (at $7,000-$8,000 per screen) adds up very quickly if a film is going out on 100 plus screens.
• All three made the point that they don’t have an Australian film quota. Australian and international films are judged side by side, and the films they see or that are pitched to them at Cannes, or the American Film Market, or other markets, have already got a choice of trailers and artwork. Finished films are a much safer bet.
• Counting everything on the slate—whether Australian films, international projects that they’ve signed for in advanced, finished films at festivals, or projects they are tracking—Okine estimates that 1,000 projects are on the radar each year. Yet they only have capacity for 30.
• Asked for what she looks for when projects are pitched to her by first-time filmmakers, Okine says Hopscotch has to fall in love with their previous work and the team has to be people that Hopscotch wants to work with.
• Batzias said Madman had a “no dickheads policy” when deciding which two or three films they decided to support per year, out of the two to three projects that land on their desk every week.
• Madman have other criteria, too: It has to have a strong script that can be realised on the screen and a unique voice. We have to love the team and want to work with them for five years, and we have to feel the budget is appropriate.
• First timers have directed nine of the last 10 Australian films connected to Madman.
• McKenna says Roadshow gets about 150 Australian projects on its doorstep per year. When he reads scripts he “pays attention to his pulse” and to his emotional response—and whether that emotional response correctly matches the genre! But there are other factors at play too.
• At the end of the session, Screen Australia head of development Martha Coleman stood up and said that 50 of the 81 films supported by Screen Australia since 2008 have been invited to A list festivals. It was a powerful substantiation of the high regard with which Australian films are held overseas.

________________________________________________________________________

Read the entire article here.

"The Me Bird"

Stratastencil as a technique was devised by Javen Ivey for his Pratt Institute film My Paper Mind, who was himself inspired to create the additive animation process after seeing David Daniels’ strata-cut work.

While Ivey’s creation came together physically through the painstaking X-Acto knifing of construction paper, the tree loving 18bis employed a mixture of green screen footage, After Effects and a ‘light use’ of paper for their echoes of action short, as can be seen in this making-of video.

Stratastencil    Tutorial

Interview with Yolanda Beasley

Yolanda Beasley lives in Toronto, Canada. She had careers in advertising and acting in Canada and the UK, before producing a one-hour stage play for the Toronto Fringe Festival. These days she runs a screenwriting advice enterprise, Write for Hollywood.

I met Yolanda on Twitter and took the opportunity to ask her some questions.
________________________________________________________________________

• Where were you born/where did you grow up?

I was born in Northampton, England and came to Canada with my parents when I was ten months old. I grew up in Oshawa, a suburb of Toronto. It has a reputation for being a working class town because it has been dominated by General Motors for the past 100 years, but it was a great city to grow up in. It gave me a very innocent childhood which I treasure.

• What kind of a family did you grow up with?

My dad is English and my mom is Finnish and I have a younger sister who’s Canadian. My dad is very traditional, entrepreneurial and ambitious. My mom comes from a very musical and creative family, and is a visual artist. As kids, my sister was always more outgoing, creative and adventurous and that rubbed off on me. We’re very family-oriented, I think partly because we were so far removed from our relatives in Europe. My parents constantly told us to ‘go do something productive’ and that kind of stuck with me. My sister and I were always creating things: plays, movies, games.

• What was your first paying job?

I was sixteen and I landed my dream job at a clothing store. It was like I was living the total American high school life with the cool kid’s job. I didn’t last long, though. My boss didn’t like me and I ended up quitting about three months later.

• You moved from Canada to the UK in 1997, where you spent two years working in advertising. Why did you leave the UK?

I moved to the UK to get a career and to ‘find myself’ away from how others defined me. It was a tremendous growth experience and it showed me the value of doing what scares you. I had never lived in a city as large as London before and now I love big city life. I love London and plan to buy a house there one day, but I moved back to Canada to be closer to my immediate family. I felt like I needed to ‘establish’ myself somewhere and felt at the time that Canada was the better choice.

• When did you first take an interest in films/stories?

It’s easy to see when I look back. I think the first time I was interested in film was as a kid when my parents took my sister and me to see Superman (1978). I just dated myself, but it was the first time we had ever been to the cinema and the opening credits coupled with John Williams’ music blew my mind. But it wasn’t until I was watching The Sopranos and I saw the credit Created by David Chase, when I thought: “What a cool job”, but it still took me a few years to realize that I wanted to do that job.

• Given that your background is mainly in performance, why did you establish Write for Hollywood?

My background is in both performance and writing. I’ve been writing since I could put sentences together. I had poetry published in the school anthology at 8 and compiled my poems into a book at 12, gave it to my family as a gift. I wrote my first play at 13, my first novel at 17 and just kept on writing. I never took it seriously as a career option because my parents never took it seriously. I established Write for Hollywood in 2010 for several reasons. I love technology and was creating websites with Wordpress, dabbling in social media and studying app development. In 2009 I had a fair amount of success in my screenwriting, only to have it all fall apart a year later. It was devastating, so I established Write for Hollywood partly to remind myself of what I know and how far I’ve come, but mostly to share what I’ve learned with others so that they can benefit from my experiences.

• Have you had a mentor or are you a self-directed screenwriter?

I never had a mentor. I spent a lot of time searching for one, even in advertising, but I learned instead to be my own mentor. That sucks, actually. I made a lot of mistakes and took a lot of wrong turns, but I figured out how to get where I needed to be for now at least and that’s why I created Write for Hollywood. I wanted to be the mentor I was seeking. If I can help other writers avoid all the mistakes and detours I made, I feel like it was all worthwhile.

• What was your first spec script about?

I wrote a spec for Being Erica, which was a popular Canadian TV show. I wrote it because I really liked it and had an idea for it, but the advice I got from a Toronto literary agent was not to spec Canadian shows because no one reads them. I kind of knew that, but I wrote it anyway simply because I liked the show.

Oh—it was about Erica realizing she wasn’t a very good friend because she didn’t see that her friend was dealing with a major emotional crisis in college.

• What are three things you wish someone had told you about screenwriting when you were first starting out?

1. I wish someone told me how long it was going to take to get your first break, but at the same time, I probably wouldn’t have stuck with it had I known. Maybe I should rephrase that; I wish someone had told me the right path to take in order to get my first break faster.

2. I wish someone had given me clear feedback on what I wasn’t putting into my scripts to get them made. For a long time I was looking for someone who would tell me precisely what element they were missing and no one could tell me. Well, someone said she could... for about two thousand dollars.

3. I wish someone had told me I could have a career as a screenwriter or even just as a writer when I was a child. Had I known that screenwriting was even a career, it would have helped. Getting into it later in life is frustrating, but at the same time, I didn’t feel like I had anything to write about until then.

As with any ‘regret’, I’m still grateful for these experiences because they made me who I am today and I never would have started Write for Hollywood if I had been given a straight career path. I probably wouldn’t have stuck it out this long if I hadn’t already experienced corporate life. Every experience you gain is valuable.

• If you had to suggest just one screenwriting book to a newbie writer back in Adelaide, which one would it be?

Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting, by Robert McKee.

• What are your ten favorite movies of all time?

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
Superman (1978)
Pretty in Pink (1986)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Baby Boom (1987)
Back to the Future (1985)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)

• What’s next for Yolanda Beasley?

Absolutely no idea. I’m excited to see where things lead through Write for Hollywood, but I have various other side projects on the go too. I have a clear, exceptionally ambitious vision, but I’m discovering it’s best to keep my goal in sight, but be flexible on how I get there and enjoy the journey.

________________________________________________________________________

Facebook    Twitter    Website
 

How to Film a Dialogue Scene

Tom Antos is a film director and cinematographer with over twelve years of experience in VFX and animation. In this video he provides some basic instruction in the best ways to film a simple scene.

Learn how to avoid the most common mistakes that many people make when setting up a simple scene in a film. Learn all about proper framing, camera angles and the rule of thirds.

   Facebook    IMDb    Twitter    Website    YouTube    

"The Sandpit"

Here is a lovely slice-of-life short film, shot in Manhattan and Brooklyn by Sam O'Hare.

Shot as over 35,000 stills in Manhattan and Brooklyn using a 'tilt-shift' style, this film watches the pulses and rhythms of the city and its inhabitants from a different perspective.

     IMDb    Twitter    Vimio    YouTube