IndieWire has a great summary of the Gotham nominees for “Best Film Not Playing at a Theatre Near You.” It’s a sad commentary that five of the more intriguing films I’ve read about (or, in the case of one of these, seen) are films that have received no distribution beyond film festivals.

The films are:

Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland
Lanre Olabisi’s August the First
John Fiege’s Mississippi Chicken
Jeremy and Randy Stalberg’s Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa
Chris Fuller’s Loren Cass

Unfortunately, the article, which was meant to promote the exhibition of these films at the MoMA, only went out in indieWire’s email service today, after most of the films have already screened. The only remaining screenings are Frownland and Loren Cass. If you live in New York and you don’t want to miss these screenings you get the screening details here.

Over the last month or so I’ve needed to send and receive a lot of large files (Final Cut project files, songs in AIFF format, DVD burn files, and so on). By “large” I mean in the 20mb - 4gb range. These files are usually too large to be sent via email because of file size limits, using an FTP site can be a hassle (as David Pogue has noted), and sending files via DVD-Rom via mail or FedEx is (comparatively) slow and pricey.

For me, the solution has been to share these large files via a few of the several services that exist online. I have used YouSendIt, FileFactory, and Pando. All have worked just fine.

The first two are file-hosting sites; Pando, on the other hand, is a stand-alone application. It requires a (free) download, but it also allows for the sharing of much larger files.

If you find yourself needing to share large files and don’t know where to start, a fairly comprehensive listing of file hosting sites is available on Wikipedia. You can also check out this article, which surveys some of the main services.

When I was looking through the new edition of The Filmmaker’s Handbook, I noticed a lot of little changes and additions. An example: In a list of equipment to bring to the set, in the lighting category I noticed one addition: “dimmer boxes.” I can’t argue with that — dimmer boxes help one light with finesse, and they’re fairly easy to come by.

I went to the trouble of making a couple dimmers (aka “hand squeezers”) myself about a year and a half ago. I made a couple of 600 watt boxes, as well as a 1000 watt box. The supplies I got from the local home improvement store, though I remember that the 1000w dimmer was not widely available. If I remember correctly, I built all three dimmer for about $100 in supplies. They would have been cheaper, but the 1000w dimmer was considerably more expensive than the 600w.

In retrospect, instead of making those boxes, I would have been better off simply purchasing one of the many dimmer boxes or router speed controls (which can be used as a dimmer box) that are commercially available. They’re cheaper, they’re probably more reliable than anything I could build, and the heavy duty router speed controls can handle more power than the ones I built. Plus, the router speed controls have a safety fuse, which my self-built dimmers lack.

Shopping for some last week, I ran across lots of varieties. Here are some:

Dimmer Boxes:

Ikea Dimma - 300 Watts and under - $7.95
Note: Not useful for most motion picture lights, but if you just need something for practicals, these are nice and cheap.

Smith Victor - DC-1 Dimmer Control - 600 Watts and under - $23.95

Router Speed Controls:

Harbor Freight Tools - 15 Amps and lower - $19.99

MLCS Router Speed Control - 15 Amps and lower - $20.95 and $28.95, respectively, for the “home” and “industrial/commercial” use boxes

Grizzly G3555 Router Speed Control - 20 Amps and lower - $31.50

Rockler Router Speed Control - 20 Amps and lower - $39.99

If, however, you wish to build your own, you can find instructions in Blain Brown’s Motion Picture and Video Lighting, 2nd Edition (p. 241) and, of course, there are plans aplenty on the ‘net.

Doing some researching and writing earlier this month, I was trying to decide on an appropriate occupation for a character I was creating. One of the most helpful online resources I found was the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If you visit the site, go to the search box in the upper right hand corner and type an occupation. If your search terms are too specific, just make it more general (e.g., try “dental” instead of “dental technician”, which will give you lots of results). Eventually you should be led to an overview of the profession you’re seeking, including the types of wages that might be expected, the type of education required, and so on. Useful stuff for writers, particularly the stuff about the downsides to each job. Can you say “conflict”?

Of course, besides its usefulness to writers, people that are actually, you know, looking for jobs might appreciate the link, too. Being the lucrative, high-demand profession that independent filmmaking is, though, I doubt many readers of this blog would ever need to use the site in this way.