Films and more...

2008-05-29T02:41:00.000-07:00

May 25, 2008

Scene Stealer

Indie Films, Coming to a Small Screen Near You

MORE than 3,600 independent features were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival this year, a record driven by inexpensive digital equipment and an abundance of film financing. But only a couple hundred of those movies will ever be distributed in theaters. Does that mean that almost 90 percent of indies have zero value?

The movie business has been grappling with that question as the number of specialty films soars but the number of screens stays roughly the same. The two big puzzles nobody seems able to solve are how to have more of these films seen and how to make money doing it. As it is, several thousand films produced each year — ranging in cost from a few thousand dollars to a few million — are just eating capital.

One of moviedom’s savviest executives thinks he has a solution.

John Sloss is one of the top sales agents for independent films. Mr. Sloss, 52, has handled the sale of such diamonds in the rough as “Little Miss Sunshine,” the perky 2006 film about a family traveling to a children’s beauty pageant. He sold the $8 million project to Fox Searchlight for $10.5 million, setting a festival price record that still holds.

Now Mr. Sloss and his New York company, Cinetic Media, are rolling out a new business called Cinetic Rights Management. The executive and his team — he just hired Matt Dentler, the highly regarded director of the South by Southwest film festival — will act as sales agents for filmmakers who have been left on the sidelines. And here is the twist: The goal is not exhibition in theaters but rather distribution via the Internet and other growing delivery routes like cable on-demand services.

The idea is to create value for that other 90 percent of independent movies, or at least for a good chunk of them.

“We’re going to make it our business to go to every portal, every mobile provider, every video-on-demand service and make the most aggressive deals we can,” Mr. Sloss said last week in a telephone interview from France, where he was working the Cannes International Film Festival.

The company will charge a commission that will vary depending on the type of film. (Mr. Sloss would not reveal his planned cut, but Cinetec takes between 7.5 percent and 15 percent on traditional deals.) While no single title is likely to deliver a windfall — unless it breaks through as an unexpected hit — the company is betting that the “long tail” of niche content on the Internet will, in aggregate, produce meaningful income.

The company has raised outside capital to help pay for the venture. To sign up clients, it has already gone back through five years’ worth of films that did not make it to theaters.

His new unit won’t focus only on cinematic obscurities. Distribution in new media is equally important for the upper echelon of indies — Cinetic’s primary business — and companies or individuals with film libraries, Mr. Sloss said. For instance, the company will shop the 1994 movie “Hoop Dreams” to Internet portals. “This will appeal to library holders who don’t want to employ a legion of people to go out and make deals with the 100, 200, 300 portals,” he said.

It’s an idea loaded with challenges, starting with how films deemed unsuitable for an art-house theater will gain notice online. Standing out among the hundreds of options on an on-demand menu won’t be much easier. So far, Web sites that offer movies have failed to gain much traction with consumers. And do people really want to watch an arty movie on a cellphone?

Cinetic Rights Management also isn’t the only game in town. Other players are sniffing around the area, including a couple of major Hollywood talent agencies. Niche companies like Without a Box, a Web-based service intended to help independent filmmakers submit their work to festivals, are also trying to change the way people obtain movies.

Mr. Sloss and his lieutenants also intend to help market the films that they sell to portals like Movielink.com. But Mr. Dentler, who will oversee this effort, gave few specifics.

“There are viral ideas and more traditional marketing ideas, tapping into the blogosphere and navigating traditional media,” he said.

The approach may sound sprawling, but some experts in online distribution think that the company may be onto something. Amazon figured out a way to bypass stores and take a boatload of books — some good, many awful — to the masses, letting consumers hunt and peck for what they wanted. Film snobs may hold their noses at “The Hamster Movie: The Director’s Cut,” but as YouTube has shown, the interest in such offerings can be shockingly high.

“Some films that didn’t get entry into the marketplace the traditional way might turn out to have some real artistic and commercial value,” said Brent Weinstein, a former talent agent who is chief of 60Frames Entertainment, a studio that focuses on short videos. “I suspect a good number of films that didn’t find fans in the community of cinema experts would be able to find an audience in this new digital media world.”

A shift in the way people consume media is forcing Hollywood to evolve. As more people have high-speed Internet access, and as technology companies like Apple work to make it easier to watch video on phones, and as cable giants like Comcast roll out elaborate on-demand services, movie theaters and DVDs are increasingly looking like just two of the many niches.

“Delivery is changing very rapidly,” said Robert Nathan, a Cinetic partner.

At the same time, the machinery behind the two-decade boom in independent film is starting to break down. Breaking through has become harder as more independent films are made and distributed. In 2002, about 450 films were released theatrically. Last year, the total jumped to 600, mostly because of independent films.

More films are making it onto a limited number of screens because their total time on the marquee is shorter than ever. This means that independent films must find an audience at lightning speed, which requires heavier marketing. In March, the Motion Picture Association of America said the average cost of advertising a specialty film in 2007 had risen 44 percent over the previous year, to $25.7 million.

ALL of that marketing overhead makes studio specialty divisions look a lot like the mainstream divisions, prompting some companies to retrench. Earlier this month, for example, Warner Brothers shut down two of its specialty divisions, Warner Independent Pictures (“Good Night and Good Luck”) and Picturehouse Entertainment (“Pan’s Labyrinth”).

But Mr. Sloss is sticking with his trademark confidence. “This is going to be a very labor-intensive business,” he said, “but we think that in 5 to 10 years it could be the most significant revenue source of all.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/business/media/25steal.html?ref=business&pagewanted=print

2008-05-25T05:50:00.000-07:00

At Cannes, a mix of high expectations and inevitable frustrations

By A. O. Scott

Saturday, May 24, 2008

CANNES: On Wednesday morning festivalgoers - or at least the hordes of journalists who stumble into the Salle Lumière every day at 8:30 after a few hours' sleep and a hasty café au lait - were given a bit of a break. In a departure, there was no competition press screening on the schedule, which provided some of us with an opportunity to glance at the trades, have a second café au lait and rest our eyes in anticipation of a long night of revolutionary struggle.

Starting at 6:30 in the evening there would be two almost simultaneous screenings of "Che," Steven Soderbergh's nearly four-and-a-half-hour exploration of the life of Ernesto Guevara, the asthmatic Argentine doctor who became a leader of Castro's revolution and, posthumously, a boon to the T-shirt vendors of the world.

The expectations surrounding "Che" could hardly have been higher. Soderbergh, surprise winner of the Palme d'Or in 1989 for "Sex, Lies and Videotape," has emerged since then as one of the most protean and interesting of American filmmakers, exploring an astonishing range of genres and styles with consistent skill, intelligence and audacity. Not every movie has been great, but they have all been different. And not many directors would follow commercial froth like "Oceans Thirteen" with a digitally shot, Spanish-language epic about a Marxist militant.

In the weeks before this year's competition slate was announced, "Che" was the center of much speculation. It was in; it was out; it wasn't finished; it was two pictures; it was one. The version shown in the Lumière was a single movie, without opening titles or closing credits (so maybe not quite finished). There was an intermission, during which sandwiches were passed out to the hungry audience.

The halves of "Che" are mirror images. The first, though it flashes back to Guevara's early acquaintance with Castro in Mexico and forward to his visit to New York for an appearance at the United Nations in 1964, is essentially the chronicle of a successful insurgency. It follows Castro, Guevara and their comrades from 1956 to 1959, through the stages of their war to overthrow the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and it dwells less on their motives and personalities than on matters of military procedure. With impressive coherence and attention to tactical detail, Soderbergh shows how Castro's initially tiny army fought its way down from the mountains of the Sierra Maestra and ultimately routed Batista's forces.

The second half, devoted to the guerrilla campaign in Bolivia in 1967 that ended in Guevara's death, is equally rigorous in its depiction of a failed revolt. Though Guevara tried, in a new context, to apply the strategic lessons of the Cuban revolution - concentrate on the countryside; cultivate popular support; maintain discipline and cohesion in the ranks - everything went wrong. And it turned out that Guevara's adversaries, the Bolivian Army and its U.S. advisers, had learned a thing or two about how to wage an effective counterinsurgency.

There is a lot, however, that the audience will not learn from this big movie, which has some big problems as well as major virtues. In between the two periods covered in "Che," Guevara was an important player in the Castro government, but his brutal role in turning a revolutionary movement into a dictatorship goes virtually unmentioned. This, along with Benicio Del Toro's soulful and charismatic performance, allows Soderbergh to preserve the romantic notion of Guevara as a martyr and an iconic figure, an idealistic champion of the poor and oppressed. By now, though, this image seems at best naïve and incomplete, at worst sentimental and dishonest. More to the point, perhaps, it is not very interesting.

But "Che" itself is interesting, partly because it has the power to provoke some serious argument - about its own tactics and methods, as well as those of its subject. Whether American audiences will have a chance to participate in that argument is, for the moment, an open question. The mood here among buyers has been extremely cautious, and as of this writing, distributors have balked at spending $8 million to $10 million (the reported asking price for "Che") on a 258-minute movie to be released in two parts, with subtitles.

This is one of the frustrations of Cannes, for American critics at least. We see lots of fascinating movies - not all good, but very few completely worthless - and then wonder if we, or our readers, will ever see them again. I'm not in the movie business, and not inclined to speculate with someone else's money. I do hope, however, that sometime in the near future I can take part in the long and contentious conversation that "Che" deserves, and also see how my own initial ambivalence about the film resolves itself.

I have a similar hope for Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York," a movie about which I am not ambivalent at all. Puzzled? Yes. Unsure of its commercial prospects? As I said, that's none of my business. ("Synecdoche" is another competition entry looking for love in a marketplace of commitment-shy distributors.)

But Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of "Being John Malkovich" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.

But though the ideas that drive "Synecdoche, New York" are difficult and sometimes abstruse, the feelings it explores are clear and accessible. These include the anxiety of artistic creation, the fear of love and the dread of its loss, and the desperate sense that your life is rushing by faster than you can make sense of it. A sad story, yes, but fittingly for a movie bristling with paradoxes and conundrums, also extremely funny.

Nothing in Kaufman's film happens as you might expect it to, even if his previous work had conditioned you to expect surprises. Cannes, meanwhile, has a way of disappointing expectations even as it confirms them. After last year's robust 60th anniversary edition of the festival, which yielded so many great movies (and quite a few sales), this one feels like a bit of a letdown.

It's not that the films are bad, but rather that many of the directors in competition have, with their previous work, set such a high standard. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, with two Palmes d'Or already on their résumés, arrived this year with "Le Silence de Lorna," an engrossing movie about the moral struggle of a young Albanian immigrant in Belgium. It's very good. Not a masterpiece, though, which is what the Dardenne brothers have conditioned us to expect.

And many of us were anticipating masterpieces from the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and from the Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, whose second feature, "The Holy Girl," was a discovery of the 2004 festival. Many critics insist that "Three Monkeys," Ceylan's new film (acquired for U.S. release by New Yorker Films), fulfills the promise of his earlier work, which includes "Distant" and "Climates." But in trying something new - using his austere, exacting sense of form to tell a ripely melodramatic story - he seems to have sacrificed some of the wit that made those earlier films so memorable.

Martel, in contrast, errs on the side of consistency. The obliqueness that made "The Holy Girl" so haunting feels coy and mannered in her new film, "The Headless Woman," the point of which seems to be to pass the mental dissociation of its main character on to the audience. But if Martel is in a rut, she may be planning to break out of it. An announcement came earlier this week that her next project, "L'Eternauta," will be a science-fiction movie involving an invasion of Earth by aliens.

If it comes to Cannes, such a radical departure will surely encounter some grumbling. How come these filmmakers can't stick to what they're good at? But then again: Why don't they ever try something new? You may get the Palme d'Or, but you still can't win. There's no pleasing some people. Which may be why we keep coming back.

Source: http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=13179125

2008-05-06T06:49:00.000-07:00

All You wanted to Know About Bheja Fry! (and its technicalities)..

Ranjeet Thadani (Rajat Kapoor), a bored, arrogant music company executive hurts his back the night he has found a prize catch for a weekly bring- your-idiot talent dinner hosted by his friends and him. He ends up spending the evening with this idiot, Bharat Bhushan (Vinay Pathak) who tries to help him get his wife (Sarika) back who left him earlier that day. The result is utter chaos let loose by the idiot, who cannot do a single thing without messing it up further. The plot turns around to be a series of mini disasters that leave Ranjeet's comfortable life in ruins. Call it the idiot's revenge!

From the Director Sagar Bellary

I watched The Dinner Game by Francois Weber at an international film festival in the year 1999 and I was floored by its dry wit and exemplary story of an idiot. I was quite impressed with the contemporary French cinema standards and felt ashamed at the level of comedies that were being made in the Hindi film industry. Little did I know at that time that my debut film would be majorly inspired by it! After working on two low budget films like Raghu Romeo and Mixed Doubles both directed by Rajat Kapoor, I was quite convinced that the only way to make a film without any strings attached is to make it within an amount which the producer is confident of recovering, irrespective of the commercial success the film enjoys in the cinema halls. With Rajat I had learnt the art of executing low budget films without compromising much on technical quality. To make a film as such you need a fine screenplay that justifiedsthe money rather than money justifying the screenplay. And yes, a good film needs great technicians and great performers, who would be ready to work for peanuts! Fortunately I was breeding in an environment where many talented people - actors and technicians really wanted to do something different! Thus interacting with marvelous actors like Vijay Raaz, Sadiya Siddiqui, Saurabh Shukla, Ranvir Shorey, Konkona Sen, Vinay Pathak, Rajat Kapoor and great technicians like cinematographer Rafey Mahmood, audiographer Resul Pookutty and editor Suresh Pai, I realized I would be a fool not to utilize this pool of talent. Mixed Doubles was a great hit and it was very close to my heart as I have worked on every little stage of its making. While watching it in with an audience, the experience of people laughing at exactly the right points as planned by the director mesmerized me. I knew that people just wanted to laugh. Everybody was too stressed out and they needed a vent. It was also that time of the year when the Indian Idol singing competition had reached a new crescendo. Anybody and everybody was a singer! Even the Hindi film industry was only churning out sex comedies or “bhankas” genre films that relied on slapstick humour, double entendres and flesh show. It was also that time of the year when many new directors made their debut films which were really bad. It was as if art had been held hostage by media savvy individuals wanting to be celebrities using the power of a medium. I was burning to make my film as somewhere I had this idealistic belief that I would set things right!When we decided to adapt the French story I was looked down upon by everybody with the same contempt that I carried for DVD-directors. My task was uphill! Thankfully Sunil Doshi, the producer was quite convinced. But he was more convinced with me rather than the screenplay. He told me that he is putting his money on the jockey not the horse! Bheja Fry was originally called Ding Dong Baby Sing a Song and was initially conceptualized and planned for television and to be shot on 16mm but I am happy that finally not only could I make it on 35 mm but also the film is soon to get a full-fledged theatrical release. Suresh Pai the editor was the first person to receive the concept note in order to get a reaction. He was quite impressed and that encouraged me that I was on the right track. I really wanted to adapt the story rather than copy a film. A few understood me, the others, well I simply did not let them bother me. I had a film to make!I always knew that my idiot was a singer and that his name was Bharat Bhushan. I had a friend in college who was a bad singer but always broke out into a song without realizing that he is making a fool of himself. Also, in Raghu Romeo, Vijay Raaz sings a song looking at the moon while Maria has gone to the toilet. All these factors assimilated to create Bharat Bhushan who was planted in the plot of the French story. Situations changed and so did the dialogues. Of course, the French story did not cater to Indian sensibilities. So we doctored the entire plot and began to weed out the weak links the story had. Arpita Chatterjee and me would have hours of telephonic conversations on the screenplay. She wrote the initial draft which became the basis of all method. Initially Anurag Kashyap was supposed to write the dialogues but he was burdened with Guru and his own films. He did not manage to find time. But I did have a great session with him and was enlightened by many of his perspectives to the story. He liked my choice of cast and it was he who suggested me to think of Sarika as Rajat’s wife, a masterstroke in retrospect. Anurag also contributed a few brilliant script based nuts and bolts that enriched Bheja Fry. But the credit of the actual mad dialogues must go to first timer Sharat Kataria – also assistant to Rajat on Raghu Romeo, a Jamia graduate. He brought in much of the whacky humour of words and turned around a few situations to new scenes. A lot of contribution also came from Vinay Pathak and Rajat Kapoor. So each shooting day was a workshop where everything was assessed to as it is basis and scenes were rewritten keeping in mind the improvisations. The assistants had a tough task. I was always at top of the things and not even a single word could be altered without my consent. I was very sure of what I wanted. I was very clear of the rhythm of my shots, where to pause and hold and when to speed it up. Sharat came to the shoot everyday. That made things a little easier. All my actors were such good performers that I never went more than three takes. But I shot extensively. I covered the same scene from various perspectives and camera angles almost making it a two camera shoot setup. Many mistook that for my insecurity of being a first time director. Parixit Warrier the director Of Photography who is also a batch mate from the film school and a very good friend made this magic possible for me in the shoot. Every shot was ready in 20 minutes. Gauging the amount of time given to him and the results delivered I am amazed at his craft. I wanted to get out of the gamut of Long shot, mid-shot and close-up and was tired of the usual boring over the shoulder shots. So we created a different pattern of lensing and extensively covered the scenes, gave full freedom to actors and devised shots according to their movements rather than make them move according to the shots. The result as expected was very good.

Bheja Fry was shot within seven days, twelve nights over sixteen locations consuming exactly just 101 cans of 35mm raw stock. Though the film was shot with an extremely, extremely modest budget, its major challenge was being not looking like one that was! Which I would like to say, we have achieved.
When Suresh Pai edited the film the first cut was 95 minutes and he was extremely happy because the film had 'arrived' in its totality correctly. Suresh has always apprehensive about overly shot films which are butchered at the editing table to chart out a meaning. So in short, he felt that Bheja Fry had utilized its resources correctly! I met Sagar Desai when we were desperately looking for a good music director for Mixed Doubles. I have been actively involved in the production of the entire music score of Mixed Doubles. Sagar Desai is a genius. He has been there throughout the conception of Bheja Fry and through most of the screenplay discussions because screenplay writer Arpita Chaterjee is his wife. He knew the story well and had an excellent rapport with me knowing just knew what I like and what I wanted. The entire film was dubbed in Mumbai at Aradhana studios. But the entire sound post-production happened at Real Image Studios in Chennai. Tapas Nayak, the audiographer of the film, was a batch senior to me at SRFTI and had a great understanding of his medium. In the given budget we just could not afford Dolby surround. DTS offered us an excellent package deal and the dream of having 5.1 sound materialized. All the sound tracks were sent over to Chennai and the film was finally mixed and the exposed sound negatives and DTS discs were dispatched to Adlabs, where the film was finally printed. Bheja Fry is today ready to be served!A cinematographer friend and guide - Sanjay Kapoor told me right at the start of my film that it was going to be a journey of discoveries on every level – mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. It did sound like a platitude then but now that the film is ready I can surely say that it has been one hell of a bheja fry and yes, I have thoroughly enjoyed getting my brains fried making my first film!

Sagar Bellary is an alumnus of the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI), Kolkata with specialization in Screenplay Writing and Direction. He has directed a short film X and Y, been Chief Assistant Director on the feature film Raghu Romeo and Associate Director on the featurefilms Mixed Doubles and Mithya. Bheja Fry is his first feature film

Source: http://www.upperstall.com/bheja_fry.html

2008-05-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

From the Official blog of Photographer & Artist Dave Thompson

Friday, May 2, 2008

A rant
I’ve got to address this.
I hear way too many people mis-using the term "Footage" when talking about video. The term “Footage” when applied to digital stock video is wrong. “Footage” as it is properly used, applies to film, usually 16mm or 35mm, and is expressed in lengths, eg. 10 feet, 50 feet, one reel or two reels, etc. A reel of film is 1000 feet, or 11 minutes. Older movies, made from the beginning to the 50s, were timed in reels. If a movie was released at 10 reels, it was about 110 minutes long. I know this because I not only worked in film during the 80s, I also have a degree in film making. Video, either analog or digital, is expressed in units of time. Such as Hours:minutes:seconds:frames (Hence the term, SMTP Time Code for video editing) Film is expressed as footage, in the following units, reel:feet:frames For example, a film clip in 35mm, running 33 seconds at 24 frames per second, is 50 feet. A video clip of 30 seconds is just that, 30 seconds. When I took a video class in college, we were fined each time we used the term “footage” when we referred to tape. When shooting film, the camera operator advises the director he has 120 feet left, this means the director can only shoot up to a minute and 20 seconds of the next scene. If they’re shooting HDTV, the camera operator can report “only a minute left on the tape”. I just had to address this….

Source: http://dtphoto12.blogspot.com/2008/05/rant.html

2008-04-14T12:09:00.000-07:00

OLD PEOPLE MAKING FILMS

Film making is no big deal in our generation. Pensioners learn how to make movies in community centers. There are high schools where the art of communication skills are taught. Everyone with a digital movie camera can produce a film for a birthday party, an anniversary or a memorial service.

But frail elderly people making films in a nursing ward ??—that sounds like fiction. Nevertheless for the last eight years Miri Boker, an enterprising occupational therapist who also learned filming, has been producing movies with the patients in the chronic ward at Neve Horim in Jerusalem. Miri sees this activity as a therapeutic venture; the product (a completed film written and produced by the residents) is not the most important thing—“it’s the process that counts.”

However the seven films that have already been produced in this ward, as well as 23 other films that Miri has supervised in nursing homes all over Israel, are entertaining, enlightening and heart warming in their own right. Both the staff who are heavily involved in the production, as well as the family and friends who are invited to see the films are most impressed.

The procedure to produce a film usually takes months. The residents who are interested meet to plan out the various aspects of film making. The first step, according to Miri, is choosing a story, a plot and then writing the script together. For instance the first film ever produced involved someone who had lost the picture of her beloved husband. Instead of turning to the staff of the ward, she asked other inmates to help her find it. Along the way the actors/patients find love, friendship and other lost items.

There are often arguments about the theme of the film and how it should be presented. The members of the group all express their views, sometimes in very strong terms. In the end, however, they have to reach a decision, and this process is already an example of how the project is empowering. “Very few matters in an institution for chronic patients are left to their decision,” says Miri. Here they have the opportunity to determine something substantial and important.

Next Miri or another member of the staff (usually another O.T. or a social worker) writes the story as a play. She presents the finished product and again after much discussion a final version is reached by common consent. “The second step involves auditions for the various parts,” says the organizer. Once again it is the elderly who decide who gets which part. Once again there is potential for being hurt or resentful, but in the final analysis the group decides.

Rehearsals can take many weeks. Sometimes an “actor” gets sick or even dies and has to be replaced. That is always a difficult moment. The staff have to cooperate, and sometimes are even “roped in” to take a part. “Actually, the whole Home was involved in the excitement,” says Ronit, a worker at Ganei Ye-elim in Beer Sheva. There the patients in the chronic ward produced a film called “Chag Sameach” and it involved the question of where it’s better spend the holidays—at the children’s home or in the Home. They weighed the fact that at their offspring’s home there’s often a lot of noise and they feel that they’re intruding; but in the ward the atmosphere isn’t holiday-like. “We don’t push a particular view,” says Ronit. “We let the story unfold and everyone can learn from the film what they think suits them. It shows them that they have choices.”

Once rehearsals have gotten the performance down pat, the big day (or days) of actual filming arrives. A professional photographer is on hand from 9:00 A.M. in the morning until 7:00 P.M. at night. The filming is done as a marathon for three or four consecutive days. Yet Miri points out the frail elderly are often up to the challenge and long hours more than the overworked staff who have to adjust to three days of tumult and upset schedules. “It’s like a happening; it’s exciting; everyone feels the electricity in the air,” says Ronit. Editing is also performed by a professional, and then the finished product is shown, first to the participants, and then to the staff, friends and relatives of the whole institution.

“This is always a very big event,” says Miri. The elderly performers’ self image is magnified, their families look at them in a new light, and the medical staff claim that the experience has real therapeutic value. “I didn’t believe that I could do it,” said one matron of 80 whom despite the fact that she is wheelchair bound, was one of the main actresses in a play about loneliness.

“The movie fights our battle,” said another participant who took part in a rather controversial film on the “Bad Caretaker”. “We didn’t mean a “metapel” who hits people or is cruel to them; but we showed up those who take a long time in answering our call or who act callously to our needs.” Miri thought it was very brave of them to choose this subject. Individually they would have been afraid to bring it up, but they found that “in numbers there is strength”, and they backed each other up on what is a very pertinent subject to patients in a nursing home.

With the help of ESHEL, the branch of the Joint Distribution Committee which deals with services for the elderly, the movie making project has spread throughout the land. Miri is kept busy running from project to project in Dimona, Tel Aviv, Beer Sheva and elsewhere. The idea has been taken up by Sheltered Housing Homes and Day Care Centers where the elderly are more independent. The subjects they have chosen for their movies indicate the different stage of their lives: Coping with Widowhood, Intergenerational Relationships; Romance in Old Age, etc. In one lovely story a man who always dreamt of being a writer but never revealed his talents to anyone, takes over the program at a senior citizen club when the leader is sick. He tells a story that he himself wrote. More and more people wander into the room to listen and stay fascinated. In the end he becomes a professional story teller and the group members encourage him to develop his skill.

A number of the movies that have been produced are now used as educational tools in community centers, staff training workshops, support groups for family members and even in schools. The patients in Beit Shirley in Dimona produced a film on “Will He Visit Today or Won’t He.” It shows a lobby full of old people, many in wheelchairs, sitting around, waiting to see who will visit their aged parents during visiting hours. One old man’s son never comes but the father still sits waiting. One of the old guys asks, “Why don’t you call him and tell him to come?” Miri thought that was a legitimate question, but as in so many instances, she learned much more than she taught. In the discussion leading up to this scene, one of the women insisted, “No, don’t you understand; it’s not the same if he comes because his father asks him. He has to want to come on his own accord.” The others accepted her view, and this exchange is in the film.

“The hardest thing in a nursing home is fighting apathy,” says Miri Boker. When we include someone who’s not involved, who claims she or he doesn’t have any talent, or worse still, doesn’t have the motivation to join in making a film, and then over time get them to join, and they develop, and gradually show an interest, and also begin to open up like a flower in the spring sunshine,-- that’s the best part of this job”. The film maker/ therapist continues, “It’s wonderful to see the interaction, the friendships that are formed, the creativity that comes to the fore at the age of 85 or 90 and the way they learn to express what they really feel.” Both producers and participants share in a comment heard in Neve Horim, “This is one of the best periods in my life.”

Source: http://www.ou.org/index.php/shabbat_shalom/article/34838/

2008-04-06T07:34:00.000-07:00

Bollywood extra large

Kaveree Bamzai
April 4, 2008

There’s a lot of action in Bollywood this season and not all of it onscreen. Actor Akshay Kumar is celebrating his Rs 20-crore price tag by buying a three-acre Portuguese heritage bungalow on Goa’s Anjuna beach. Kareena Kapoor has just bought herself an apartment in Bandra but is too busy to move. Apoorva Lakhia, a director, who is still owed Rs 11 lakh by his last producer, has just ordered a BMW on the basis of the signing amount for his next movie. And actor-director Rajat Kapoor, who spent seven years struggling to raise Rs 30 lakh for his second film, now has a blank cheque to make five films for Pritish Nandy Communications (PNC). He’s marking the occasion by working out for a towel scene written into the Rs 5-crore movie his friend is directing. From corporates in Hugo Boss suits to independent producers in Gucci T-shirts, there’s a new buzz in town. It’s the new economy of Bollywood and it’s extra large. Everyone’s speaking a new language. Stars are called talent, movies are projects, selling films is de-risking and buying them is building intellectual property rights. Over the next 15 months, even the sceptics will start using the jargon as listed companies and private producers proceed to spend Rs 3,000 crore on making movies. Reliance alone has an intended fund of $1 billion (Rs 4,000 crore), of which it has committed Rs 500 crore. Between them, Eros, United Television (UTV) and Indian Films, an affiliate of TV18, have raised $45 million, $70 million and $110 million, respectively, from the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) in London, which will soon find their way to starry back pockets and busy studio floors. Then there are companies that have gone public, 12 since 2000, which have raised another Rs 1,000-odd crore through their IPOs. The number of releases has gone up—the average number of what are known as high grade Hindi film releases has risen from 1.15 per week in 2001 to 1.71 in 2004—as has the number of prints. Everyone’s earning more. Aamir Khan has just been paid Rs 20 crore plus a share of the overseas profits for the remake of the Tamil hit, Ghajini. Anees Bazmee, who charged Boney Kapoor Rs 1.5 crore just three years ago for writing and directing No Entry, is now asking for Rs 10 crore a film. Katrina Kaif who thought she got lucky when Vipul Shah paid her under Rs 1 crore for Namastey London has just signed a Rs 6-crore two-film deal with Indian Films. Priyanka Chopra has a two-film deal with UTV for Rs 4 crore. The scale has magnified. Last year, when Eros bought the world rights of Om Shanti Om from Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chillies Entertainment for Rs 73 crore, it looked like the final frontier had been crossed. This year just the domestic theatrical rights of Ghajini have been sold for Rs 53 crore—all the rights put together add up to Rs 93 crore, with the highest bid for worldwide satellite rights at Rs 21 crore. Last fortnight when Race released worldwide with 1,600 prints, the industry rejoiced at its new proportions. But already Ghajini, for which shooting will go on till May, and Singh is Kinng, which has days in Egypt left, are planning to release across 2,000 screens worldwide. It’s a function of growth in attendance, rise in the number of exhibition centres and simply, much better marketing. Take an example. Last year, Saawariya and Om Shanti Om released on the same day, each threatening to undercut the other’s business. It didn’t happen. While the Rs 36-crore Saawariya made Rs 57 crore, the Rs 25-crore Om Shanti Om made Rs 110 crore. It is no surprise. Multiplexes, with their higher priced tickets, are booming—while 33 were added in 2006, 41 were built in 2007. It’s a great time to be the “talent”. Neil Nitin Mukesh, star of Johnny Gaddar, a Rs 10-crore film that few managed to watch, is demanding Rs 1.5 crore. Sagar Bellary, who made his first film, Bheja Fry, for Rs 60 lakh, which went on to make Rs 12 crore at the boxoffice is making his next film, Kachcha Limboo, with Sahara at a budget of Rs 5 crore. Madhur Bhandarkar who thought he had arrived when he could make both Corporate and Traffic Signal for Rs 3.5 crore each is now helming the Rs 18-crore Fashion for UTV. Even directors who’ve had mixed box-office results have their hands full. Sujoy Ghosh whose second film Home Delivery was a spectacular failure, is now directing Alladin with a budget of Rs 60 crore for Eros, while Vivek Agnihotri, the director of the middling Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal and Chocolate, has a Rs 3.5 crore contract from Reliance. Even the suits have benefited. Two years ago Sandeep Bhargava had quit advertising and was just one man working from his Pali Hill home on a Dell laptop. Today, as Indian Films CEO, he sits in a 5,000-sq ft office overlooking the Mahalaxmi Race Course. Five years ago, Ronnie Screwvala would wait outside the Doordarshan director-general’s office for an appointment. Today, as the UTV Group CEO he can greenlight a 16th century romance between Akbar and a creatively imagined princess for Rs 33 crore and come out smelling of roses with the box-office delivering Rs 120 crore in 51 days. Two years ago, Ritesh Sidhwani was just a smart young man who made one film in two years with his Maneckji Cooper school friend Farhan Akhtar. Now their Excel Entertainment has a five-film Rs 250-crore deal with Reliance, which has enabled him to make three films a year. Simply put, Bollywood has grown because more people are watching its films. If admissions in 2001 were 2.8 billion, in 2006, the figure went up to over 3.9 billion (compared to just 1.7 billion for the US). Similarly ticket sales too have grown, from $593 million in 2001 to $1.4 billion (Rs 5,600 crore) in 2006, pygmy like when compared to the 2007 US box-office revenue of $26.7 billion but, still significant. And the audience has grown because avenues have. Take a look. The domestic theatrical division which was just 12,000 single screens earlier, now encompasses multiplexes (660 screens, set to grow to 1,800 by 2012-13). There is an Adlabs in Pathankot and a PVR in Latur. The number may be tiny compared to even other Asian nations—in 2004, multiplex penetration in India was just 1.6 per cent, compared to 62.5 per cent in Japan and 70 per cent in Thailand—but even the format has expanded, from print to include digital cinemas as well. Similarly overseas. Not only have the number of prints expanded but also the format, with digital screens in 50 territories now. Home video now includes VCDSand DVDs. Music now includes the physical as well as the digital format with songs being downloaded on the mobile and Internet. Television rights include satellite rights to multiple broadcasters with a cap on airings, DTH, and inflight rights. Now, movies can be extended with infilm placements and merchandising. Also there is a reduction of the time window for each format—even a successful movie such as Jab We Met was out on home video in less than three months. The market has expanded geographically as well. Sidhwani for instance has just sold Don for 150,000 (Rs 93 lakh) to a distributor in Germany, where Shah Rukh mania is at its peak. Pakistan is slowly showing signs of releasing Indian films legitimately. UTV’s Goal has already made $500,000 (Rs 2 crore). Race had a 15-print release across nine Pakistani cities, while Taare Zameen Par will also have a 15 print release there. Even in traditional markets such as the UK, the scale has gone up. In 1989, Kishore Lulla of Eros released Sanam Bewafa in one theatre in London. Last year, he had a grand premiere of Om Shanti Om at West End’s Empire cinema, apart from releasing it in 51 theatres in England. With corporates insisting on electronic ticketing in even territories such as north Bihar now, greater transparency is showing real returns, which stars now have access to. Which is why all stars are either turning to co-productions or demanding a fee plus a share of the revenues. Take the example of Rajkumar Hirani’s film, tentatively titled Idiots, which he wanted to do with Shah Rukh. The mere suggestion from the actor that he could co-produce the film led to an exchange of letters between him and Hirani’s long-time producer Vidhu Vinod Chopra. For many, becoming an actor is a smart career move. Take Akhtar. Instead of sitting around twiddling his thumbs for his sequel to Don to materialise with Shah Rukh—now slated for April next year—he has turned actor for his production company. The first of the movies, Rock On, directed by Abhishek Kapoor, about a band is almost complete while he is getting ready to start shooting for sister Zoya Akhtar’s long-pending project, Luck By Chance, and then begins directing Voice from the Sky in September. Luck By Chance perhaps typifies the importance of stars more than anything else. Its script has been ready for four years now, but has hung fire because of casting problems—at one time it was supposed to star Vivek Oberoi and Tabu. Not surprisingly, several deals are being re-negotiated. When Soundarya Rajnikant and Pooja Shetty first agreed to co-produce the multi-lingual animated feature Sultan The Warrior, starring Rajnikant, the budget was agreed at Rs 8 crore. By the time they signed on the dotted line, Soundarya as head of Ochre Productions and Shetty as director of Adlabs, the budget moved up to Rs 22 crore. Within a year, by which time Shetty had exited from Adlabs, Soundarya has not only managed to escalate the budget of the digital film to Rs 60 crore but has also wrested total creative control. She’s all of 23 and calculates that her earnings from the film will vary between Rs 225 and Rs 275 crore. Take the buffoonery over Welcome, which almost matched its onscreen goings-on. Having made Welcome for Rs 25 crore, Firoz Nadiadwala may have thought himself lucky when Indian Films and UTV, fresh from having raised new money in London, chased him for the two-years-in-themaking comedy’s worldwide rights. He asked Indian Films for Rs 47 crore, which UTV upped to Rs 50 crore. Having bought it, UTV then re-sold it to Indian Films for Rs 55 crore, happy with a profit of Rs 5 crore. But it’s Indian Films that’s now sitting pretty, with Welcome making Rs 110 crore in revenue. But is it Bollywood shining or Bollywood shamming? Several independent producers, who relied on the old system of advances from individual exhibitors are now idling their time. Studio floors in Mumbai are booked— as a result, a city like Bangkok currently has five Hindi films being shot almost simultaneously. Everyone is signed on in “non-exclusive contracts”. So while Anurag Basu directs Hrithik Roshan in Kites, to be co-produced with Eros and Carving Dreams, UTV has already announced a three-film deal with him. While Imtiaz Ali gets ready to direct a film for Saif Ali Khan’s Illuminati Films, Sajid Nadiadwala and Shree Ashtavinayak have also declared he is directing their next films. There is a certain amount of desperation in the air, with companies signing on whoever they can find. Almost anyone will do. UTV has announced a two-film deal with Shahid Kapur, a two-film deal with John Abraham and even Kangana Ranuat (who is barely four films old). And to think that just two years ago, when Adlabs offered Akshay a Rs 14.5 crore deal for four films and Hrithik Rs 35 crore for three films, it seemed as if the Rubicon had been crossed. As strategic consultant Prabhat Choudhary puts it, “Bollywood launches a new consumer product every Friday with one-tenth of FMCG budgets.” And every Friday, the product gets bigger. The advent of the film school generation (from FTII products, directors such as Rajat Kapoor and Sriram Raghavan, to foreign trained Shimit Amin and Manish Acharya) and advertising gurus (R. Balki and writer Jaideep Sahni) has lent a new substance to the old fashioned style of storytelling. It has coaxed Saaed Akhtar Mirza out of retirement in Goa to make Ek Toh Chance for PNC and caused Sudhir Mishra, who couldn’t make a film for seven years, between 1996 and 2003, to coast from one studio floor to another. It’s the nature of the money. It demands—and gets—more movies. And a more adventurous spirit. Source: http://indiatoday.digitaltoday.in/content_mail.php?option=com_content&name=print&id=6615

2008-02-26T22:08:00.000-08:00

Through the lens, digitally

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Markers for the seriesThe Indian film industry is expected to be worth $5.1 billion in 2011, a three-fold increase in five years.The coming of corporate giants has made deals cleaner. Mafia money does not rule. Payments are mostly done by cheque.There are 500 multiplexes now, expected to increase to 3,000 in a few years. Viewers are back at the theatres.Actors and directors are signing multiple film deals — but there is a severe shortage of scripts and stars. Coming up: movies on mobiles and IPTV and games based on movies.

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To meet the new Bollywood, you need to get out of Mumbai. We found it 125 km down the highway from Mumbai, next to a bicycle repair shop and a tea seller, in a large village called Neral.
The only theatre here, the single-screen Mahesh Talkies, was on the brink of being shut down before being reincarnated last year. It now downloads films on a satellite link, using a technology that few have begun to use across the globe.
From themes to work ethics to the way films are written, sold and distributed, the world’s most watched movie industry is going through its biggest transformation ever. In ways visible and invisible, this change will touch the lives of millions of people across the globe — including those who watch it and those who live off it.
All that, however, would have could come to nothing if theatre owners like Srinivas Dasrath Dhule in Neral did not ride the new wave. People like him will begin to decide the destiny of flop films which could break even or make profits through digital theatres. In the process, they will also avoid the death that threatens thousands of humble single-screen theatres across India.
And how. From Aurora Cinema in Doomdooma (Assam) to Shyam Chhavi Grah in Churu (Rajasthan), and Zeenath Theatre in Alwaye (Kerala) to Amar Mahal in Katra (Jammu and Kashmir), hundreds of small-town theatres are screening films digitally, in languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Bhojpuri, Tamil and Kannada. Of India’s 13,000 film theatres, at least 1,500 are already using digital technology.
In Neral, a village surrounded by craggy hills and shrubby plateaus, the leap of imagination by the owners of the 310-seat Mahesh Talkies is showing results. The theatre is winning back viewers by screening films the same day they are released — not a month later, as it used to do earlier. It does not pay Rs 60,000 to buy a print and then transport it in heavy metal boxes on bumpy journeys from Mumbai.
Instead, it pays just Rs 4,000 upfront and an average of Rs 200 a show to screen the film. It is winning the battle against piracy. The films have great sound and picture quality. There are big savings on electricity and equipment. And it is making good money — despite raising the prices of tickets, 70 per cent of the seats are sold out, up from 40 per cent earlier.
Shiny new seats have been placed. And Mahesh Talkies now has a Dolby sound system. “We were deep in debt. We could only show scratched prints of old films. By the time we got prints in Neral, everyone had seen pirated copies,” says 40-year-old owner Srikant Dasrath Dhule, sitting in a room full of the strong fragrance of sandalwood incense. “Now, things have transformed.”
It is a fitting statement on how the village has aligned itself with the world: the film being shown at Mahesh is a new Hindi dubbing of the Thai film Chai Lai’s Angels — a takeoff on the Hollywood hit Charlie’s Angels. Hours later, an even more popular offering will play — Rambo 4.
Outside the theatre, a few lanes away, the swiftly globalising India was making a footprint in the village — a leading international motorcycle maker had brought a road show, showing off gleaming new models from a truck amid loud music.
In the earlier format — still alive in most theatres across India — two attendants braved thick carbon fumes and placed huge spools of film every half hour in the projectors, and had to connect negative and positive carbon rods to produce the flash that illuminated the screen. Now there is a small glass cabin built on the side and a split air-conditioner keeps the satellite-connected computer cool. The two attendants lost their Rs 5,000-a-month jobs, but it saved dozens of others from getting fired.
Last Friday, Mahesh Talkies witnessed something unimaginable even a year ago. Villagers who often travel two hours by the train to watch films here saw this season’s big-ticket offering, Jodha Akbar, the same day as the rest of the world.
An idea born of desperation
Dhule grew up in nearby Badlapur, enjoying action movies and comedies like most other friends. Then he made movies his profession. But the world of cinema viewing was swiftly changing. Hundreds of thousands of jobs around the country were at risk as theatres began shutting down to make way for shopping malls and office complexes.
Soon, the monster was on Dhule’s doorstep. One day, a theatre closed down in Karjat, an hour away. “The day that cinema closed down in Karjat, I realised I had to do something... I had to change while there was still time,” he says. He did a quick survey — there was no other theatre nearby, and he could potentially draw thousands of viewers from 56 villages. All he needed was the right idea.
With over 1,500 screens on digital projection, India has emerged as one of the largest theatres for the new technology.Armed with information from some other theatre owners, Dhule travelled to Mumbai, where a handful of companies such as UFO Moviez, Real Image, Pyramid Saimira and Adlabs are providing the software and the hardware needed for digital projection.
Before films are released, they are brought to such a company. Any leakage could mean huge losses to piracy. Expectedly, it thrives on a detective agency-like secrecy. One owner of such a company was once barred by guards from entering the area where the prints were kept because he did not have the authorisation.
At UFO Moviez, a security guard travels in the van that carries the print from the producer to the lab where huge spools are converted to digital D5 files, which look like big VCR tapes. It is then brought to the UFO ‘Capture Centre’ under tight security, with the van driver’s time of departure and arrival monitored to ensure the film has not been illegally copied on the way. Only the fingerprints of a few people can help open the door at the capture centre, physically linked by a 2,300-km optic fibre to a New Delhi satellite hub, which downloads a digital version of the film to the member theatres.
Dhule soon had all he needed: a digital projector, a server called Cineblaster attached to a satellite link, an uninterrupted power supply set, and a high-speed phone connection for data transfer. Better still, the company gave it all for free.
Using all that could sound like rocket science, but if the company’s cooks could use it, surely could Dhule. “When we started out, we first called our cook and asked him to download a movie, reading from a pictorial chart we give to all our customers,” says Sanjay Chavan, the UFO Moviez chief technology officer, who was earlier with the Indian Air Force. “Until all the five cooks in our office could download films without our help, we kept refining the chart.”
Now, every Thursday, UFO engineers download the upcoming film to the computer at Mahesh Talkies and 1,000 other theatres across India. Every film, about 2,500 gigabytes in size (on an average, the storage capacity of 125 home computers), is compressed to an encrypted 10-gigabyte version. The download takes real time — a two-hour movie is saved on the theatre’s computer in two hours.
However, someone like Dhule cannot screen the film until the scheduled time on Friday morning. And when he does, he uses a pre-paid card or a numeric key that has to be used to show a film.
For now, all seem to be gaining from digitisation.
“On an average, there will be an increase of 15 per cent to 20 per cent in tickets sold per movie — that is, if the shift from traditional screens to digital screens happens,” notes a Confederation of Indian Industry study.
“For a hit movie from a mid-sized production house, the average domestic gross box office collections will increase by about 40 per cent (from Rs 20-25 crore to
Rs 30-35 crore), while for a flop movie the gross box office collections will increase by about 15 per cent (from Rs 5-5.5 crore to Rs 6-6.5 crore). This will help some of the flop movies to break even or even make money,” the study predicts.
And as theatre owners such as Dhule dream big, companies such as UFO are dreaming bigger. They want to now reach out to the US, where the penetration of digital films is only 2 per cent. Hollywood mostly delivers its films physically to theatres, on hard disks.
Attempts to digitise films in the US began in the 1990s, but did not take off because the technology available there is extremely expensive, says UFO’s Chavan.
“We will now take Hindi content to the US theatres — we can even beam Hollywood content to American theatres if they are willing to share,” he says.
But back home, the new Bollywood is still dealing with the glitches of the India out there, which is often not a Bollywood fairytale.
“There are huge power outages in small towns. The UPS runs for only 15 minutes — we have had several burnt projectors,” says Chavan. “And there are satellite link breakdowns at the local level. Sometimes the cable is loose, at other times the rat has eaten the cable."

2008-02-26T22:06:00.000-08:00

The changing face of movie-making business
They are all over Bollywood – in their dark glasses and business casuals, making offers you cannot refuse.
Not the new mafia, they are Bollywood’s new corporate honchos, the new age producers transforming the movie industry. And from two opposite ends of the city, two men are watching.
Over three decades, Mahesh Bhatt, Bollywood’s master of reinvention has set benchmarks for Hindi movies. But to stay ahead in the new Bollywood, Bhatt’s company, Vishesh Films, is about to begin a new journey of its own. It has tied up with a major international company and will make something it has long scoffed at — big budget films.
“The dream is the same, the dreamers have changed,” Bhatt said.
A two-hour drive away in the seaside money district of Nariman Point, editor-turned-producer Pritish Nandy meets visitors in a conference room lined with nattily designed posters of his films. Nandy knows a thing or two about this new Bollywood. After all, he helped invent it.
And somewhere midway on this long drive, in the neighbourhood called Mahalaxmi, is the swank office of Sandeep Bhargava, now betting on a new breed of cinema.
Bhargava is the chief executive officer of Studio18, one of the leading corporate players in the film business. With deep pockets, legal money and a new way of working, corporate houses like UTV, Studio 18, Reliance ADAG, Mahindras, Adlabs and Eros are changing the face of the business. Hollywood majors — like Warner, Sony Pictures and Disney — are jumping in too.
But moviemaking was a messy game years ago when Bhargava was pursuing his management degree in the American state of Ohio. Movies wasn’t where MBAs went to work those days. “The culture was dominated by the underworld and petty shopkeepers. Some were a pretty sick lot,” said director Sudhir Mishra. “Now, the nature of financing has changed.”
Much else was changing all around. Even after the Vajpayee government gave Bollywood the status of an industry in 2000, corporate majors watched from the sidelines, just releasing Hollywood films in India. Nandy, bored with his work in television software, decided to move in that year to his new home: the movies.
“There was a belief that only ‘mainstream’ movies — the formula movies — worked. And I did not believe that,” he said. “We wanted to do mainstream films — not what was called parallel cinema — and try and transform it inside out.”
The year 2003 brought two landmark films for both Bhatt and Nandy. Jism, written by Bhatt and produced by his daughter Pooja, introduced John Abraham and made him and Bipasha Basu stars. It became one of the biggest hits of the year with an audacious edginess and a pushing-the-envelope sexuality.
Later that year, came two small films produced by Nandy, Chameli and Sujoy Ghosh’s Jhankar Beats.
By the end of that year, the word “corporatisation” was doing the rounds of Bollywood. Then headed by Bhargava, Sahara Motion Pictures led the way, putting on the floor about 40 films. “In the early days, the cost of production was not very high. Artistes were not charging a lot, and not a lot of corporates had come in with deep pockets… (but) transparency was a big concern,” Bhargava said. “But by 2006, just about everybody was entering here.”
India had swiftly changed too. Malls and multiplexes were coming up, incomes were rising, and ticket sales were soaring. Viewers were returning to theatres, experiencing the joy and comfort of film viewing with the family.
Bhatt realised it was time again for the only constant of his life: change.
“At Vishesh, we have survived for three decades, but with the corporatisation of the media, we are finding it difficult to stay afloat,” Bhatt said. “We have tied up with Sony-BMG. Budgets will be much more scaled up. We will cater to the indigenous audience but hope it will stand shoulder to shoulder with world cinema.”
In another part of the city, meanwhile, Nandy was winning his own small and big battles. “The mainstream industry tried its best to ignore us… till it could no longer do so,” Nandy said. “People were watching these movies, people were waiting to see more of this stuff.”
The corporates made lives easier for a lot of people. Payments were clean. Financing was assured. Once it was in the works, there was certainty that a film would be made. Films began to be sold well, and new income avenues emerged — including mobile phones, the Internet, cable television.
“Theatre revenues are going up by more than 17 per cent every year, but less than 50 per cent of revenues are now coming from theatres,” said Bhargava. “To an extent the conventional wisdom that all films lose money is being turned on its head.”
Every time that happens, Nandy says, “It not only reaffirms my faith in the Indian audiences’ quest for good cinema, but also redefines Bollywood.”
http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=82cf1757-9d5f-42e7-a568-2ee0f650d41d

2008-02-25T11:19:00.000-08:00

Bold & brainy: Bollywood’s new thought leaders

Twenty years after class got over, the three men met and hugged each other outside a movie theatre, telling each other the story they had never told anyone: all they had touched since had turned gold.
That, of course, would have been the Bollywood version of the story of director buddies Raju Hirani, Sriram Raghavan and Rajat Kapoor. Hirani created Bollywood history with the “Munnabhai” films, Raghavan just joined the A-list with the cracker Johny Gaddaar, and Kapoor proved his point on his kind of film-making yet again with the just-released witty thriller Mithya.
But for almost 20 years after they studied at the Film and Television institute of India (FTII) in Pune, the reality was more like a 1970s arthouse movie. Armed with just their ambition and talent, they wrote scripts and planned movies and patiently heard producers say “No”.
Until now — until they ran into the new Bollywood. The three friends are now among a small group of Bollywood’s new thought leaders — audacious directors helping define the new Hindi cinema. They are being wooed to make the kind of films no one would touch a few years ago.
“This is the best time for filmmakers like us,” said Raghavan, now working on his next film with John Abraham and Aishwarya Rai. After that, he directs Saif Ali Khan. “We did not give up — but we did not know it would take this long.”
We are standing outside the box office at Fame Adlabs, one of Mumbai’s earliest multiplexes, on a noisy February evening. Director Sudhir Mishra (Hazaron Khwahishen Aisi, Khoya Khoya Chand) joins in. A small crowd gathers as the HT photographer takes pictures, and a teenage autorickshaw driver walks up to the reporter to show off his knowledge: he knows all the four directors and their films.
That is the new Bollywood — where good, intelligent cinema is also the cinema of the masses, and not labelled condescendingly as "parallel" cinema.
“After the release of the first Munnabhai, a director — I won't name him — said in criticism: ‘you broke every rule — you took an action hero and made a comedy, you shot indoors, there are no outdoors’ … but now, people have stopped believing in all these pre-conceived rules that they thought worked,” Hirani said.
Not too far away, at a small coffee shop where the movie types hang around, director Sourabh Narang takes another sip of his coffee and lists what else he sees changing around him.
“Just look at the kind of people coming in from non-traditional pools — there are doctors, lawyers, former bankers. They want to be assistant directors,” said Narang, who directed Vastushastra, is now doing a film for UTV.
“When I came to Bombay eight years ago, the profile of the assistant director was different. There was a big city focus. Now we have people from Kanpur and Meerut — and they wear it proudly as a badge,” Narang said.
But in this melee, some see the spectacle of the proverbial fools rushing in.
“It is a very slippery street. Opportunities are many. There is a temptation to rush in without proper experience or qualification,” said Milan Luthria, director of films like Hattrick, Taxi No. 9211, and Deewar. “If at all we see a dip, it will be because of this.”

Young men and women, some in their twenties and thirties, are being signed up as directors. Many directors have multiple film deals from corporate filmmakers.
“There seems to be too much money around, people signing three-film and five-film deals with actors and directors. There is a level playing field to some degree,” said Raghavan, his bag slung over his shoulder. “But I hope to guard myself against getting trapped in the ‘big film’.”
Hirani is buzzing with optimism: “This a great time to make a different kind of cinema.”
Hirani grew up in Nagpur, where he did theatre and grew up on the work of Hrishikesh Mukherjee and other favourites, and finally, after film school, came to the city where all dreamer and filmmakers finally aspire to come. He worked on several advertising films, began working with Vidhu Vinod Chopra, for whom Hirani made the genre-setting Munnabhai MBBS.
“Raju Hirani Munnabhai!” someone mumbles in the small crowd around the autorickshaws.
A huge poster of Mithya looms behind the three FTII buddies. One of the evening shows is on now. A young woman walks up for autographs of the directors.
That image is a long journey from many images of the past two decades, when they made documentaries — and lived through frustrating times when even if a good film was made, it had no hope of being screened.
“We all ended up doing nothing for a long time. I used to make a documentary and it used to sustain us for three months,” said Raghavan. He often watched films at the Topiwala film theatre near his home in Goregaon. Films aimed at the single-screen theatre, films that could please all, were the films being made back then. “Earlier, films were being made only for the front-benchers. Now the films are made only for the balcony viewers, as it were. Now there is no front bench,” Raghavan said. He assisted filmmaker Mukul Anand and briefly worked for the Stardust film magazine as a trainee reporter but would go and watch shoots, come back and write nothing.
“I was thrown out in four months,” he said.
Some other small film jobs and the film school diploma later, Raghavan made a short film on the serial killer Raman Raghav in 1993. It got him attention and a toe in the door, but it wasn’t until 2004, when he made Ek Haseena Thi, that he would be pampered by attention from producers.
Meanwhile, the movie-watching world had started transforming. A new kid arrived in the city. It was called the multiplex, the saviour of filmmakers like Kapoor.
At 21, after breaking up with his girlfriend, Kapoor had taken to theatre in New Delhi to fill the void. He would get before the arclights once again, years later, when he began to get work as a model during the excruciating wait for someone to help him become director.
“For about 10 years I made no money at all,” Kapoor said. “For eight years I took Mithya to every possible producer — between 1998 and 2006. They said ‘mindblowing! but can't produce it’ — and it is understandable."
Kapoor and some others like him are shooting entire films in as little as nine days, turning the entire production model on its head — in a good way. The hugely successful Bheja Fry, in which Kapoor acted, was shot over 12 nights at just 16 locations. When he directed Raghu Romeo and was short of Rs 25 lakh, he began sending out e-mails to friends, urging them to donate Rs 10,000 each, which he would return later.
“My friends got it, then their friends, and before I knew it, I was getting mails from complete strangers, from all over the world. Many gave money as well — and I had what I needed,” Kapoor said.
“After the success of Bheja Fry, I was getting a call from a producer every second day. Me — who has been going around with a script, begging people — ‘please make my film!’” he said. “Now they have woken up to the fact that you can make a film in Rs 60 lakh and still make pots of money.” And even the single-screen Topiwala theatre, near Raghavan’s former home, is turning into a multiplex.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=ab7cdc1d-8192-4aee-8314-2819ac9cea9f

2007-10-28T01:29:00.000-07:00

Apple trying to beef up film content
By David M. Halbfinger
Tuesday, October 23, 2007

LOS ANGELES: When Edward Burns's latest romantic comedy, "Purple Violets," had its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in April, it drew positive reviews, but only lukewarm offers from movie distributors.

Burns, the director of indie favorites like "The Brothers McMullen" and "She's the One," but whose latest movies have not done as well, knew from experience how that story would end.
"Not enough money to market the film, not a wide-enough release to even make a dent in the movie-going public's consciousness," he said.

So he and his partners, who spent $4 million making "Purple Violets," instead are gambling any chance of recouping their investment on a distribution deal that involves not a single theater. On Nov. 20, the film will go up for sale exclusively on iTunes.
It is the first time a feature film will make its commercial debut on Apple's digital download service, but only the latest deal aimed at winning attention for the iTunes movie category.

Last month, for example, iTunes began distributing a 13-minute short film, "Hotel Chevalier," a prequel of sorts to Wes Anderson's "Darjeeling Limited," as a publicity vehicle for that Fox Searchlight feature. The short, offered free, has since been downloaded more than 400,000 times and has helped drive the early box office performance of "Darjeeling," the studio says.

That will no doubt gladden the hearts of Apple executives. A year after Walt Disney became the first major studio to offer its movies on iTunes, Apple admits that iTunes is struggling to achieve the critical mass in film content that it has long held in music, and is facing stepped-up online competition from rivals like Amazon Unbox, Netflix Watch Now, Jaman and GreenCine.

Though Disney has embraced iTunes, most of the other major studios have balked at Apple's refusal to work with them on flexible pricing or to accede to their demands for piracy countermeasures. Most notably, NBC Universal recently decided not to renew its contract to sell its TV shows there. NBC Universal and the News Corp. have also announced plans for a video portal called Hulu.com.

James McQuivey, a media analyst at Forrester Research, said iTunes was primarily a vehicle for selling Apple's media-playing devices like iPods, and noted that its Apple TV box, which transfers video downloads to television, has failed to gain popularity.
Apple "is in a little bit of a crisis now," he said, adding, "If they can't get the content soon, which may be why they're doing all sorts of attention-getting content deals now - they need to show they have some traction in the video space - they stand to lose whatever momentum they've gained."

Besides Disney, Lionsgate, MGM and Paramount now offer a limited number of film titles on iTunes. But the offerings seem mainly to point up what is missing. The iTunes "staff favorites" Sunday night included Paramount's 1962 John Wayne romp, "Hatari." And the top-selling iTunes film for several consecutive weeks in September and October was MGM's 1987 comic classic, "The Princess Bride."

The picture isn't much rosier in independent film: That iTunes subcategory turned up only 28 titles as of Sunday.
"We're really at the beginning stage in the movie space," said Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president for iTunes, adding that iTunes had sold more than four million movie downloads - including shorts - but still had fewer than 1,000 titles for sale.

The littlest guys - makers of short films - are singing the praises of iTunes. Apple began selling shorts nominated for the Academy Awards last year, and it distributed about half of the Sundance Film Festival shorts this year, all at $1.99, the same price as a television episode. Features sell for $9.99 to $14.99.
A result has been a shift in what it means to be a maker of short films, several directors said.
"It was so cool to actually get people to see something I directed," said Rob Pearlstein, director of the Oscar-nominated short "Our Time Is Up," who said he had previously gotten only as far as development hell. Among the people paying attention are scouts from Hollywood and the Web, said Ari Sandel, whose musical comedy "West Bank Story" won the Oscar for live-action short this year. "Now that there's a place to see a short," he said, "it makes more sense to make a short."

For filmmakers, Apple offers a cookie-cutter deal that is generous on paper, compared with Hollywood norms: It charges just 30 cents on the dollar, while, with independent films, another 10 or 15 cents typically goes to an aggregator, or middleman, who converts a film into Apple's format and accounts for the proceeds to the filmmaker.

But Apple provides financial reports only every six months, aggregators note, and it is safe to say no one has gotten rich on an iTunes short film yet.
Releasing a feature on iTunes carries its own risks. Burns's producing partner, Aaron Lubin, said video distributors had offered lower-than-expected advance payments for the film's DVD rights out of fear that its availability on iTunes would cannibalize home-video sales.
But he and Burns said they hoped that the novelty of being the first movie to go out on iTunes would generate more publicity for "Purple Violets" than if it had opened on a few screens in New York and Los Angeles.

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8020195

2007-10-20T14:34:00.000-07:00

The next Kubrick? Sony aims to find him
By Saul Hansell
Sunday, July 15, 2007

NEW YORK: Sony is trying to edge into Internet videos with a new Web site to be introduced Monday called Crackle that will feature short segments by aspiring filmmakers, many of which Sony will pay to produce.

Crackle is the latest incarnation of Grouper, a Web site that began as a way for people to share music, photos and videos with friends. It transformed itself into a YouTube clone and was bought last August by Sony Pictures Entertainment for $65 million. At the time Sony said Grouper would mainly be focused on user-created video, which it hoped would spur use of its home video equipment.

But this approach had little traction in the market. There was a lot of competition, especially from Google's YouTube, which has become the center of user-created videos. Moreover, Sony found that advertisers didn't find user video very appealing.

So Sony decided that higher quality videos would both let it stand out in the market and attract advertisers as well. The company has been moving toward higher quality content, said Josh Feltzer, the founder of Grouper who is now the co-president of Crackle, "by rewarding the aspiring producer versus the person who wants to share a video of a wedding or of someone jumping off a roof."

Other sites have tried this approach.

Revver , for example, promised to share advertising revenue with video producers, but foundered. Sony, instead, will offer up-front cash payments to some producers. These will range from a few thousand dollars to well over $10,000 per segment, Feltzer said.
That is somewhat more than some other sites, like Heavy.com, that have been paying for video segments.

Sony has created "Crackle Studios," with 15 employees, to produce its own segments for the site. One example is Judgment Day, a reality show in which a person judges other people, then interviews them to find out if first impressions were correct.

Crackle will also invite submissions from users, and all of them will be posted unless they violate the site's terms of service. But since the user videos are meant to be added to Crackle's existing channels, Feltzer said he hoped they would be in the spirit of the site.

People who submit unsolicited videos won't earn any money, but they can try to submit ideas to get funding from Crackle for future projects.

Sony plans to make Crackle the center of a budding generation of young filmmakers by holding out the hope of possible stardom in productions emanating from Sony's movie and television studios. The makers of the best videos in each of several categories each quarter will win trips to Los Angeles where they can pitch their ideas to Sony executives. "The reason people work with us is we provide a pathway to Hollywood," said Feltzer.

Sony hopes that people will come to its site to view the Crackle videos, but it has also arranged for them to be distributed on AOL, MySpace, Facebook, and several other social networks.
Taking advantage of the company's electronics business, it will promote them as well for download to Sony's PlayStation 3game consoles, Vaio computers, and new Bravia televisions with Internet connections.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/07/15/business/sony16.php

2007-10-12T14:53:00.000-07:00

Blinkx heats up online video battle with Google

By Victoria Shannon International Herald Tribune

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Blinkx, an Internet video search company based in London, will start letting consumers make money from the videos they show on their own blogs, social network sites or home pages if they agree to include advertising in the videos.By combining two hot Internet trends - social networking and online video - with a money-making opportunity, Blinkx hopes to better compete with YouTube, the market-leading service for video-sharing owned by Google, said the founder and chief executive of Blinkx, Suranga Chandratillake.

Blinkx's move heats up the competition in online video, which has sparked multibillion-dollar acquisitions, attracted countless amateur and professional video makers, and roused the interest of marketing executives worldwide who see a new audience for their advertisements.The growing reach of broadband Internet access has in the past two years made video appealing to large numbers of Web surfers.Google on Tuesday said it would allow Web sites in its advertising network to use some YouTube content. Two other companies, Babelgum and Joost, hope to use the Internet to become alternative television providers.Blinkx, however, has until now concentrated on its role as a video search engine. The company, which was spun off from the British software firm Autonomy in May, uses speech-to-text transcription and visual recognition technology to sift through Internet videos.

On Monday, Blinkx started offering search capabilities in French, German and Spanish. It is indexing content from 200 European sources and sites with more than one million hours of foreign language video content, including Eurosport, Euronews, TF1, El Mundo, Le Monde and Spiegel TV.Under Blinkx's new program, to be formally introduced in London on Wednesday, Internet video fans can take a film clip, post it to their site and submit it to Blinkx to be indexed and categorized.Each time the video gets watched, the Blinkx system will choose a relevant ad from its inventory and place it in one of two places - either in a small transparent window in the bottom of the video screen, or in a box outside the top of the frame.Every time an ad is clicked, the Web site on which the video is hosted will receive a portion of the payment for the ad placement. The rate varies based on the ad, but it is generally a few pennies per click."This way, the people who are powering the video revolution are the ones who get the rewards," Chandratillake said.

Chandratillake said the choice of ad display was up to the host of the Web site, adding that they were no more distracting than the banner ads now common on Internet pages.Many Web sites - especially social networks like MySpace and Facebook - allow users to borrow and "embed" video on their personalized pages. Others, usually professional media companies like the BBC, do not.Chandratillake cautioned that any income derived by bloggers and others agreeing to take the ads would not be much, "maybe enough to pay your Internet bill at best."

Under the new YouTube program, the videos would be provided by about 100 content partners, including TV Guide Broadband, Expert Village, Mondo Media, Extreme Elements and Ford Models. The ads would come from Google's vast inventory, which dwarfs the amount that Blinkx has to offer.Last week, Blinkx, which trades on the London alternative market, said first-half results would be at the top end of analysts' expectations. Piper Jaffray had forecast interim revenue of $2.4 million.The British company created its own video-ad network, called AdHoc, earlier this year.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/09/business/video.php

2007-10-02T13:30:00.000-07:00

I couldnt be happier to see a film like Loins of Punjab (LOP).

For one, it was genuinely funny.

Second, it marked a departure from bigger-budget-slapstick-mindless-wanna-be comedies like XXXXX - i won't name any here because there seems to be some disagreement in my taste of the current offerings with my peers. However, LOP was liked by crtics and audiences like, so I'm allowing myself to go on about how much I liked it and the reasons for it.

The direction stood out not only because all the actors did a fine job, but also because of the finesse with which each of the characters was etched out. In 90 minutes, it may sound simple, but with a multi-actor cast, it is defintely challenging.

The pace of the film was brisk, the theme very-today and the best part was that the film had an unpredictable ending. To cut a long story short, it is definetely worth a watch

I, however, liked it for another reason altogether. Films like LOP herald a new age for Indian cinema: Low-cost quality films with tight scripts and superb performances. This means that the market (read multiplex audiences) is now driving the supply of such films. The english speaking Indians in India and elsewhere are now a seperate target audience and films made seperately for them are a need-of-the-hour product.

More importantly (and this is where my adrenalin levels shoot up), it also means that anyone with a passion for film-making can actually collect the resources and make a film. Bheja Fry was made in less than Rs. 60 lakhs and grossed over Rs. 16 crores. I can also say this confidently, because a friend of mine is making a film on a shoe-string budget, but with a quality script and truck loads of energy!

It also means that you, I and the boy or girl next door can be part of the creations of the talkies - exciting innit?!

2006-06-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

HAIL THE IITians

Lets go with IIT Madras this time

Hero of the story : Rabi Kisku (2005 BT ME)

Vaibhav: Give us a sneek peek into 'Silicon Jungle'?
Rabi: Silicon Jungle shows various shades of IIT life through the eyes of four students - the main character - Frooti (Kashyap Arora) and 3 of his IITian friends - Bulby (Nitish 'Fubar' Joshi), Shocker (Abhijit Mohanty) and Stud (Mihir Mysore) coming from different backgrounds. The story is one that many IITians can relate to. Frooti has come to IIT just to app, Stud is a creative guy who is disappointed at IIT due to the grade-centered approach, Bulby is highly interested in Physics but there is pressure from home to get a job and settle down in life, and Shocker is a typical guy from Hyd who considers that getting into IIT is enough and that he can now rest. The story takes you through the four years that these guys spend at IIT. It shows you that IIT is not all about studying and then going to the US. It shows the emotional side of IITians.

Vaibhav: What was the inspiration behind the movie?
Rabi: When I first came to IIT, I found that the life here was pretty different than what I had imagined it to be. This is completely a different world. The way most of us live, the emotions that we go through are what I wanted to portray to the outside world - especially to those tens of thousands of students who write the JEE every year.
Vaibhav: When did you decide to make this movie?
Rabi: I was interested in movies from my second year onwards. I initially wanted to make a documentary movie, but that didn't get much support. I also thought that it might not be that interesting. Then I thought of making a short movie. When I approached alumni and the corporates for funds, I was advised to make it on a larger canvas with a better story line - and it was then that I decided on making this movie.

Vaibhav: Did anyone sponsor the movie?
Rabi: Apart from friends, there are corporate sponsors including Airtel, Honeywell, and AMD. This movie is made on a shoestring budget.
Vaibhav: Tell us something more about the movie?
Rabi: The movie was shot in a digital format. It was mostly shot on IIT campus. The other locations include the Besant Nagar beach and a couple of eateries in Chennai. The music is by Vaibhava, for whom this is the second movie. At present, the movie is with the censor board and we plan to release it in Bangalore, Kota, Hyderabad, Delhi, and Chennai and are on the lookout for distributors in the US.
Vaibhav: Personally, when did you start planning to enter movies?
Rabi: Movies have fascinated me from childhood. I have always had an interest in photography. After seeing movies like Roja, Titanic, and Braveheart, I knew that I had immense interest in this field.
After my second year, I realized that I was not cut out to be an engineer and I wanted to do something that I was really interested in. I initially wanted to do an MS in the US in the field of movie making. But my grades were not good, and I had some personal problems. So I started learning from the net and from books.

Vaibhav: Did the IIT system help?
Rabi: The IIT culture surely helped me. Working as the movie coordinator during Saarang, playing for the institute Cricket team and participating in other cultural activities helped a great deal in my personality development and inculcated in me the spirit to achieve. I received help from most of my hostel mates (Narmada). The Dean - Prof. Idichandy, the Registrar - Dr. Usha Titus, and Prof. KN Satyanarayan helped a lot to make this dream come true.
Vaibhav: Are you planning to have a special screening of this movie at all the IITs?
Rabi: There will be a special screening of the movie at IIT Madras for the professors at the CLT. As of now, we are planning to screen this movie in places from where a high number of IITians come from - like Kota, Delhi, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Chennai. We are also planning to screen this movie in all the other IITs.
Vaibhav: A movie on 'Five point someone' (the novel by Chetan Bhagat) is in the pipeline. Will it clash with 'Silicon Jungle'?
Rabi: FPS is a ficitional story - sort of a masala movie. Silicon Jungle is quite realistic. I have tried to keep masala away from the movie. Also FPS is releasing in May, and Silicon Jungle in Feb.

Vaibhav: What are your future-plans?
Rabi: After the release of Silicon Jungle, I plan to work for some time as an assistant director. My next movie will be on a larger scale. This will give me exposure into film-making and would also help me establish contacts.

2006-05-21T03:58:00.000-07:00

San Fransico School of Digital FilmMaking (http://www.sfdigifilm.com/faq.html)

Q: Do I need a background in film or photography to attend your school?
No you don't. You need a passion for filmmaking and a willingness to put in a maximum effort to achieve your goals. We are looking for committed people who care.

Q: I already have movie experience, can I just take the advanced class?
Yes! Qualified applicants can bypass the Essentials class and join one of our Advanced Digital Filmmaking class. Our advanced class is tough and requires a thorough knowledge of moviemaking. Qualified students must demonstrate proficiency in the craft of moviemaking and receive permission from the Director of Education.

Q: What are my chances of getting into SFSDF?
Your chances are excellent to get into SFSDF. Your enthusiasm is your best bet for enrollment.

Q: Will I make my own movie or be part of a group project?
You will be writing, directing and editing your own movies. In addition, you will gain valuable experience and credits crewing on other student pictures.

Q: Will projects be shot on film or video?
Your projects will be shot on High Definition digital video, using the latest cameras.

Q: Will I really work on a feature film?
Yes you will. SFSDF's core curriculum is based on advanced students working with professionals on our school produced and co-produced feature films. SFSDF will do its utmost to promote and distribute completed movies.

Q: How hands-on are the classes?
From the very first day of class you will be getting your hands on the equipment. This is our guiding principal.

Q: What kind of cameras and editing system does the school use?
SFSDF will be using Sony's latest HDV-Z1U High Def cameras, and Apple HD Final Cut Pro on Mac G5 dual processing computers with 23-inch Cinema Display monitors.

Q: How much access will I have to the equipment?
We realize that the greatest frustration a student faces is waiting for equipment. Because of the structure of our curriculum and the small size of our classes, students have greater access to all equipment.

Q: Can I work and still attend classes?
We have designed our curriculum to accommodate working students. Students can choose either a daytime or evening course schedule for our Essentials of Digital Filmmaking class. Because Students apprentice on a feature length digital motion picture as part of their studies, the Advanced Digital Filmmaking class is only offered during the day.

Q: What other expenses are there on top of tuition?
Additional fees and expenses (application, registration and materials) run around $500.00. There is also a $150.00 refundable building access key.

Q: What else will I get besides a Certificate at the end of the program?
We know that the three most important things an aspiring filmmaker needs to be competitive in the job market are; a reel of your work, a credit on a film and contacts within the industry. This is our commitment to each and every student graduating from SFSDF.

Q: Can I get financial aid or a scholarship?
Yes! SFSDF and SLM Financial (a Sallie Mae Company) are partnered in order to help students receive financial assistance for their education. Eligible students may also receive living expenses, up to $6,000, as part of their loan. For more information please contact our admissions department. 415-824-7000

Q: What is the policy for foreign students?
San Francisco prides itself as one of the greatest cities of diversity in the world. We welcome all foreign students into our family at SFSDF. The free exchange of ideas and sharing of cultures creates a climate of tremendous creativity. Students with English as a second language will be required to submit a passing score on the Test on English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) from a qualified testing center. Our staff is happy to assist you in making these arrangements.

Q: If I come for a tour, may I sit in on a class?
We welcome all visitors and would love for you to sit in on any of our classes. Our school is open Monday through Saturday 9:00 am to 4:00 pm. Call admissions to make arrangements.

Q: Can I contact a former student?
We have many former students who would love to share with you their experiences. Contact our admissions office by phone, fax or e-mail.

2006-05-21T03:40:00.000-07:00

Digital Filmmaking Tips for Beginnersby Roger Richards (http://digitalfilmmaker.net/DVtips/DVtips.html)

The following are some basic tips for those of you who are beginning to learn how to use the new generation of digital camcorders to tell stories.1. Select the right camera for your goal and your budget. A 3-CCD DV camcorder, such as the Canon XL-1s or Sony VX-2100, is best for optimum color and sharpness but the new 1-CCD models, such as the Canon Elura or Optura, offer wonderful image quality at a price that won't break the bank. If your production is intended for television, a 3-CCD camera is highly recommended. However, if you are aiming for the Web, a 1-CCD will do nicely. The camera you select should offer manual focus and exposure control, in addition to manual white balance for tricky lighting situations.

2. In addition to your camcorder, a few other accessories are invaluable. First would be a decent tripod, preferably one with a fluid head that allows smooth panning. Manfrotto-Bogen, in my opinion, make some of the best low-budget units that offer sturdy support and decent performance. Next would be an external microphone, such as a short shotgun and/or wireless lavalier. These will allow you to get better sound than the built-in microphone that came with your camcorder. A lavalier microphone, preferably a UHF model to limit signal interference, is useful for interviews and for allowing you to capture sound when your subject is a distance away from your camera. The shotgun microphone will allow you to do the same but can be more tricky to master. Good models are made by Sennehiser, Audio-Technica, Sony and Samson. A wide-angle accesory lens is useful for when you have to work in tight confines, and an on-camera video light for low-light filming situations. Finally, always carry extra batteries for everything and plenty of videotapes.

3. Some of you will already be familiar with using a still camera. Using a video camera is somewhat similar, except that your subject moves within the frame. One of the hardest things for a newcomer to digital filmmaking to do is getting used to the new camera, and what it can do. My foremost tip is once you get the camera in your hands, before you start filming you should go over the unit carefully and figure out exactly where and what the function of each button is. Read the manual from cover to cover. Most of the people I know don't like to do this but it makes no sense not to. Learn about your camera thoroughly. Only then can you begin to work with it instinctively. There is no time when you are filming something important to start figuring out what to do next because of unfamiliarity with your equipment.

4. OK, so now that you know how to make your camera function, the next step is actually filming. Firstly, until you are more experienced, leave your camera in all the automatic modes, like exposure, focus and white balance. Later on you will probably desire to control all these functions manually but for now go ahead and depend on your camera's auto systems. The most important thing you will learn is to hold your picture steady. Most people, when they get a video camera in their hands, end up recording a picture that when you play it back almost makes you dizzy. Forget about zooming and panning. Compose a picture in the viewfinder carefully, then hold the shot for a minimum of 10 seconds. Let the action happen inside the frame. While filming you should already be thinking about your next shot. Next, pause the camera and reframe. Stay away from the zoom button if you need a close-up. Leave your lens at its widest setting. Instead, walk over to your subject and compose your shot. When your lens is at wide-angle your focus is not as critical as when you zoom in tight on telephoto. Your shot also will be much steadier. Nothing is worse than jiggly video, unless done on purpose for aesthetic reasons, but usually only by people who know what they are doing (remember the TV show Homicide?).

5. Shoot wide, medium and tight. A variety of shots at different focal lengths are necessary to make an interesting production and for editing. Your first shot should be a wide view of the scene, then most of the rest should be of medium and close-up range. Vary your position and angle.

6. If you are trying to capture sound with your camera's built-in microphone, remember to stay close to the person who is speaking and not to move the camera until they are finished talking to avoid sound drop-outs and inconsistency.

7. Once you are finished filming your project, the next step is editing it into a finished production. In the past, the ability to do this was limited to only those who could afford to spend the thousands of dollars necessary to build an editing station. Thanks to computer makers like Apple and their revolutionary products like the G5 and the iMac, editing your DV project is now affordable and easier than ever. If you are just starting out, my recommendation would be to buy an iMac computer, which comes bundled with iMovie editing software. Editing your movies is as simple as connecting your Firewire-equipped DV camcorder to the iMac and transferring the footage to the computer's hard drive. The tape can be logged and edited into a simple production with only a few hours practice. Once you have learned how to edit and have some experience under your belt, it is then possible to move up to Apple's more advanced, professional level computer and software, the G5 and Final Cut Pro.I hope the above information will be helpful to some of you. This is just a taste of what you need to learn in order to be able to produce high-quality digital video productions.

For those of you who wish to take your skills further, more extensive training is available by attending the Platypus Workshop. Please contact me if there are any questions.

2006-05-14T01:42:00.000-07:00

To start with, I'm putting some interesting articles that I came across. Take a look -

Three-Minute Moguls (from December 2005, Businessweek)

Can a converted barbershop off a main drag in Santa Monica, Calif., really be the new epicenter of entertainment? Evan Spiridellis, 31, a director, takes his spot in front of a computer on this December afternoon as his team of twentysomething computer animators puts the finishing touches on his latest creation, 2-0-5. The two-minute film is a none-too-subtle lampoon of President George W. Bush's 2005 lowlights. Set to a banjo rendition of Auld Lang Syne, the short features a marionette-like Dubya bouncing from one calamity to another singing "there's a special investigator after my friend Karl." Along with his 34-year-old brother, Gregg, Spiridellis runs JibJab Media Inc., a onetime commercial animation house that first became an Internet hitmaker with the 2004 election spoof This Land. Now, feverishly working his computer's mouse as the President tiptoes sheepishly through Iraq, Evan is rushing to make a deadline: Jay Leno wants to see a finished version for The Tonight Show.

By the time 2-0-5 aired on NBC on Dec. 15, the film was already on its way to becoming an Internet smash. "We were seeing a huge spike in traffic," says Rob Bennett, product manager for video, TV, and movies at MSN, which licensed JibJab's short to be shown on the online service. Within two weeks, about 2 million additional folks watched it directly on JibJab's Web site, says Gregg Spiridellis.

Those may not be the blockbuster numbers of, say, a Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings, but six years after the Internet bust dashed hopes that original movies and shows would fly in cyberspace, online production is back. And it's not being fueled by Hollywood suits and high-priced directors like Ron Howard and Tim Burton who crowded the Net in 1999. Today a small army of computer jockeys from Santa Monica to Brooklyn is quietly creating a New Hollywood by conjuring up hundreds of short bursts of animated or live-action entertainment from their second bedrooms or kitchen tables.

AD MAGNETS

Even though the online flicks can be crass, irreverent, even downright gross, companies such as Ford (), Miller Brewing (), and AT&T () are taking notice, placing products in the films themselves or running ads next to the videos. Going a step further, companies eager to connect with a younger audience are hiring these new filmmakers to create commercials. "It is becoming a business instead of a pastime," says Frank Dellario, a co-founder of Brooklyn's ILL Clan Productions, which has created shorts for MTV2 and other channels and commercials for Audi.Improved broadband speeds and penetration, as well as growing demand for content for wireless devices and game consoles, are giving the genre a boost. Soon, plans for Internet protocol TV (IPTV) by giants like Google () and Yahoo! (), which lets viewers see shows on both TV and computers, could create an even bigger opening. In fact, edgy fare is precisely what's connecting with teenagers, college kids, and, increasingly, older folks getting hip to the Net's vast offerings. "There's a wealth of cool content out there that plays well with our demos," says David Cohn, general manager of MTV2, which airs the shorts on its show Video Mods.

As with any kind of fringe media, these new filmmakers pride themselves on producing their work on the cheap. Three-minute shorts can cost as little as $1,000 and rarely more than $50,000 to produce. They often star girlfriends or feature the voices of out-of-work comedians. And because it costs so little to get started -- a computer, some software, and a digital camcorder -- there's no shortage of counterculture Spielbergs flooding the Net. Atom Entertainment, founded in 1998 and today the reigning site of this category, has 6 million monthly visitors to its various Web sites that act as a distributor for the films, much like a cable channel. Atom pays as little as $500 per short, say online producers. But the site also gives content creators a small cut of the ads preceding their flicks. That can mean popular shorts can make more than $200,000, says Atom Entertainment Chief Executive Officer Mika Salmi.

BOTTOM DOLLAR

Still, it's a tough way to make a living. The hippest Web sites of the moment, like MySpace.com, purchased by News Corp. () ()last summer, build communities of young videophiles by offering viewers a chance to show their work. That free content drives the price down for even the hottest pros cranking out films for the Web. "It has become like independent filmmaking," says Internet investment banker Michael Montgomery. "The good ones will get attention and money. Lots of others get nothing." It has also created a rarity among the online crowd: bidding wars. Last year, JibJab left AtomFilms to jump to MSN after the site agreed to host JibJab's advertising on its servers.

Internet filmmaking also serves as a showcase for directors eager to hit the big screen. Jason Reitman, the 28-year-old son of Ghostbusters director Ivan Reitman, says he was able to raise money for his upcoming independent film, Thank You for Smoking, in part because of the attention he got from three live-action films he made for AtomFilms. Icebox Inc. is producing one of its shorts, Queer Duck, into a full-length movie for Paramount Pictures Corp. () More telling, Creative Artists Agency Inc., which represents such directors as Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis, now represents the JibJab brothers.

Some of these newbies, however, say it's best to keep some distance between the old and new cultures. By steering clear of large studios, John Evershed, CEO of Mondo Media, says he has gotten better deals from smaller middlemen to distribute DVDs and merchandise based on Mondo characters. Its hit short, Happy Tree Friends, in which cute critters are often torn to pieces, has sold more than 500,000 DVDs through stores like Blockbuster and Best Buy. And its stickers, key chains, and plush toys are big sellers in retail chains like teen-centric Hot Topic. "Large media companies have their own way of doing things," says Evershed, "and it's not always the right way for us." Now there's a creed for the alternative Hollywood.
By Ronald Grover

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France: Thousands of Young Spielbergs (Machinima -- making movies using video game software -- starts to explode )

Alex Chan simply wanted to make a political statement, countering what he deemed inaccurate coverage of the riots in French suburbs. Instead, the industrial designer created an emblem for a hot new form of entertainment. Working on his laptop with software from a $70 video game -- a technique called machinima -- Chan made a rudimentary but powerful 12-minute animated film about racism, The French Democracy, that is winning applause worldwide. "What I love is how neatly it blends the culture of games with the aesthetics of film," says Clive Thompson, a journalist in New York who has written about machinima and runs a well-known blog on technology and culture.

Since it emerged in the late 1990s, machinima has been the playground of mainly hard-core gamers who cobble together characters and sequences from favorite games, adding voice-overs laced with references that only fellow gamers can grasp. But with more user-friendly software tools on the market, novices can create their own narratives. That will democratize the movie business, machinima enthusiasts say. Anyone with a computer and off-the-shelf game software can now make and distribute animated movies over the Internet. "This is to the movies what blogs are to the written media," says Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences, a New York nonprofit.

Many entertainment executives see machinima as an opportunity rather than a threat. One is Evan Shapiro, general manager of Independent Film Channel, a unit of Cablevision Systems Corp. () that reaches 36 million U.S. homes. IFC has sponsored a machinima film festival and commissioned six films from animation companies such as the ILL Clan and RoosterTeeth Productions. The films are cheap and appeal to IFC's tech-savvy viewers, Shapiro says. "This is grassroots moviemaking at its best."

1 MILLION HITS
Chan produced his film using a video game called The Movies, in which players make their own films. He then posted the film on a site hosted by the game's developer, Lionhead Studios Ltd. of Surrey, England. The site is hot: Within three weeks of the game's November release, users posted more than 15,000 films. New ones are being added at a rate of one per minute. The French Democracy helped the site hit 1 million unique viewers in the past month.

No one is more astonished than Chan. The 27-year-old from the Paris suburb of La Courneuve was upset by news reports suggesting the violence was linked to Islamic fundamentalism. The film weaves together the experiences of three dark-skinned characters, all French citizens, to back Chan's contention that racism was a key reason for the riots. "I wanted to get people to understand why this happened," he says. It's not a polished work of art: The street scenery provided by The Movies is in Manhattan, so Chan's French characters act against a backdrop that includes the Empire State Building. Still, the film packs an emotional wallop.

The buzz over the film could help Hollywood and machinima move closer together. Directors George Lucas and Peter Jackson already have tried the technique for special effects. Who knows: The maker of the next blockbuster may be hunched over a computer right now, ignoring Mom's calls to dinner.
By Carol Matlack, with Ronald Grover in Los Angeles

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Views on the Digital Age ( I think this is from Business week too :-))

“PAIN is temporary, film is forever.” That hopeful thought, which found its way into the original script of Peter Jackson's recent re-make of “King Kong”, might be seized upon by today's beleaguered entertainment industry. Media companies are suffering intense pain—and it is starting to seem worryingly permanent. In America shares of “old” media firms such as News Corporation, Comcast and other giants of television, film, radio and print, have fallen 25% behind the S&P 500 in the past two years, despite some heroic financial results. Meanwhile, the market value of Google, which made its debut on the stockmarket in 2004, is now equal to the combined worth of Walt Disney, News Corporation and Viacom, three beasts of the old media jungle. One investor, who recently moved two-thirds of his $1 billion fund out of American media and into emerging-market companies, moans that “the market thinks something's going to get them, whether it's piracy, personal video recorders, or Google.”

Desperate to rescue its share price, Viacom broke itself in two on January 3rd. Time Warner, the biggest media group of all, is under attack from Carl Icahn, a corporate predator perfectly adapted to sniff out the weak and vulnerable. The big groups have seen their newspapers and magazines lose readers and advertising to the internet; their music businesses suffer piracy and falling sales; and someone else's video games captivate new generations of consumers. Now come fears about film and TV, the bedrock of their business.

Hollywood took 7% less at the box office in 2005 than in 2004 and growth in sales of DVDs has slowed. Internet video threatens the satellite and cable systems of companies such as News Corporation and Time Warner. Dozens of advertisers are shifting budgets from television to such places as the internet and billboards. Brand-owners hate it that people are using digital video recorders to avoid their pitches. And if media firms move on to the internet themselves, they risk losing their films and television programmes to pirates.

Moguls still
No wonder that on media island they are downcast. Yet, if Hollywood teaches one thing, it is that stories can be re-made and dreams can come true. Rather as big retailers, including Wal-Mart and Tesco, have discovered advantages online, so too will big media companies.
True, the internet and digital devices will eventually break those companies' grip on distribution. But they gain something else: a digital world in which what you supply matters far more than how you supply it. In satellite radio, for example, Sirius has crept up on XM Satellite Radio thanks chiefly to its content, in the controversial form of Howard Stern. And this world holds another promise, too: an abundance of virtually costless ways to supply consumers with what they want to watch, whenever they want it—things established media are ideally placed to provide.

The internet is still in the digital equivalent of the silent-film era. It has been formidable for text, still images and music, but is only now, with broadband access, entering an age of high-quality video. As it does so, Time Warner, News Corporation, Disney and other media companies will be able to cash in on their film and television archives. Selling video direct to consumers, without distribution getting in the way, lets media firms, and viewers, mine their vaults for old episodes of “The Outer Limits”, Johnny Carson, or whatever: minority tastes, to be sure, but taken together, a vast new market.

Moreover, old media will command audiences for many years yet. New media understand this: Google has just bought dMarc, which sells old-fashioned radio advertising. Websites, such as BabyCenter.com and AlwaysOn, have recently launched print-magazine versions of themselves, to capture advertising that was out of their reach online. As the best remaining source of a mass audience, TV and film are the best places to create and promote the next “Simpsons” or “Narnia”.

Some people worry that new media companies may over time shunt old ones aside as producers of content. Certainly, digital media will create new stars and new businesses, but making high-quality video content will always be a daunting and expensive task. Music or a blog can be composed from a bedroom, but not an episode of “Friends”. Just last month DreamWorks, Hollywood's youngest studio, sold itself to Viacom, despite its strong financial backing and the talent of Hollywood luminaries. It made some money, but could not afford a billion-dollar investment in films year-in, year-out. Yahoo! has a media unit, but so far it hasn't had any hits. Responding to the news this week that Yahoo! intends to spend up to $10m on a reality-TV concept called “The Runner”, analysts complained that the investment would damage its margins.

By contrast with Yahoo!'s dabbling, old media is now investing in digital media in earnest. It all went terribly wrong before 2000 when bewitched executives squandered money on the internet and Time Warner sold itself to AOL in one of history's worst-ever deals. But now they are back. Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation, made a series of acquisitions in 2005 (see article). Disney is supplying two hits, “Desperate Housewives” and “Lost”, using Apple's iTunes download service. Last summer Viacom bought Neopets.com, a virtual-pets site. Old media is well placed to steer its huge offline audiences to its websites.
Helpfully on cue, piracy now seems less of a threat. The music industry now has a healthy business in legal downloads. Operators of peer-to-peer networks, such as eDonkey, are going straight. And Hollywood is realising that it has no equivalent to a big musical weakness—that many albums consist of a few decent tracks padded by dross.

Any media business has two products to sell: its content (to readers and viewers); and its audience (to advertisers). The task for old media is first to protect its advertising revenues by amassing audiences online and, second, to offset their viewers' intolerance of mass-advertising by making them pay more for content—which they are increasingly willing to do. It will not be easy, but then saving the heroine never was