The best part of digital filmmaking is that it can be highly innovative, and of course, such innovation lies in the imagination of the beholder! Leapfrogging technologies and the ever expanding internet with its plethora of options has been instrumental in bringing about a seachange in the way films are made.

Today, I am talking about a do-it-yourself collaborative filmmaking website called RootClip.com, where the creative team make a short video clip or “Rootclip” to start the story. Amateur filmmakers watch their video, then shoot their own rendition of what should happen next in less than 2 minutes. The result is an entire short film made by amateur filmmakers.

I think it’s pretty exciting. Their last film actually debuted at the Travese City Film Festival. ust say this has got a lot of potential.

CHIEF – a short film written and directed by Brett Wagner and produced by Dana Satler Hankins, has won “Best Dramatic Short” at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival on August 22nd.

Jurors included actress Sandra Oh, HBO Executive Producer Andrew Reimer, and L.A. Weekly film critic Ernest Hardy. L.A. Shortsfest is an Academy Award accredited film festival whose winners are eligible to be nominated for an Oscar in the short film categories. CHIEF was among thousands of shorts submitted to the fest for consideration.

CHIEF’s winning run started in January, when it became the first Hawaiian short film ever to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. IndieWIRE declared it “one of the 10 must-see shorts of the festival.”

The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Certificate of Excellence and won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Short at the Maui Film Festival. CHIEF has been recently screened at the Festival of Pacific Arts in American Samoa.

Thanks to a sponsorship from Hawaiian Airlines, Wagner and lead actor Chief Sielu Avea were able to travel to Pago Pago and present the film to enthusiastic audiences at the quadrennial event. CHIEF’s Honolulu premiere will take place in October at the Hawaii International Film Festival.

More about the movie – including styills and info available at http://www.chief-movie.com/

Yours truly was just looking through interesting filmmaking jobs at mandy.com when one particularly interesting one caught the eye.

The New York Film Academy (NYFA) seems on the lookout for a new film editing instructor. The invite for applications looks something like this:

Vacancy: Editing Instructor
Employer: New York Film Academy
Location: Universal City
Duration: part time, starts ASAP

Los Angeles area film school seeks instructor of Editing. Topics include: basic and advanced editing, color correction, sound editing, compositing, titles and the fundamentals of VFX. All classes are taught on Final Cut Pro. MFA or
equivalent industry experience required. Position is part time and starts immediately.

Web: http://nyfa.edu/

Apply to: Kristen Abitabile, 100 Universal City Plaza Drive, Building 9128, Suite 179, Universal City, CA 91608

Interested parties should apply directly using the online form at mandy.com via this link.

Once an expensive, difficult and inaccessible profession to break into, filmmaking has now opened up to the masses. With the digital revolution, anyone with a digital video camera and access to basic editing software can make a film.

Along with this accessibility has come a new wave of collaborative, open source filmmaking, where writers, videographers, musicians and producers share their work on a film project — often entirely in the virtual realm. Sometimes these collaborators know each other, and sometimes they don’t.

Solomon Rothman, 27, who runs Solomon Rothman Films, is one of those on the cutting edge of this trend. In 2006, he released a film called “The Boy Who Never Slept,” and at the same time he released all of the footage as open source material, so people could tweak, remix and reshape it however they liked. It was used by teachers in video editing classes, made into a music video in Romania and put on Finnish television.

“I still receive e-mails every week [about that film]. People are still playing
with it.”

Rothman’s latest project, “Jathia’s Wager,” is an even more thoroughly collaborative project than his first. It began with him posting a seven-page script on his Web site in 2007, calling for people to send in different versions. He now has five versions he’s received back that are ready to be shot, and he’s hoping to have online, open source casting for the different versions of the films, with people voting on who will play what role. Ultimately, he wants to produce all the versions, using the skills and perspectives of the people who are gathering around the project.

“The entire process is being built by the community. With the digital
revolution, it’s all accessible. Filmmaking used to be really expensive and
inaccessible. Now anyone can make a film if they want. Technology has broken
down that wall.”

Rothman said he sees open source filmmaking as an extension of the open source software model, which gives people a chance to collaborate in order to improve the creative product.

“People are really creative, when they work together, they can do so much more than they can alone. It’s done wonderful things with software, making it more efficient, and of better quality. It’s time for that now to go into films.”

Rothman thinks of what he’s doing with “Jathia’s Wager” as being more crowdsourcing than open sourcing, since it’s not just releasing footage to be remixed, but harnessing the power of people.

Dominick Del Bosque, owner of the Open Source Film Project in San Francisco, has a similar perspective.

“We don’t view the source as the tangible parts, we see the ’source’ as the people in a project.”

Launched in 2005, the Open Source Film Project’s vision is to bring together writers, directors, producers, musicians and financiers for the creation of independent films.

Read the full article at Linux Insider

In Final Cut Pro, an alternate way to sync clips of a multi-camera production is to use timecode as a reference. When clips share the same timecode, you don’t have to set an In point to sync them together. A timecode number in one clip should identify the same action in an event as that same timecode number in a different clip. The method of switching and cutting angles in the multiclip is the same, no matter how the clips are synchronized.

1. In the Browser, Ctrl-click the Sequences bin and choose New Sequence from the shortcut menu. Name this sequence Timecode, and open it in the Timeline.
Each new sequence you create contains the same PAL settings you chose from the Easy Setup window earlier in this lesson.

2. Hide the contents of the Audio Pops bin, and display the contents of the Timecode bin.

3. Double-click the Gilly_cu clip, and play from the beginning of the clip. When Gilly steps up to the mic to start singing, stop the clip and look at the timecode number in the Current Timecode field in the Viewer.

4. Open a few other clips from the Timecode bin and compare the timecode numbers at the location where Gilly starts to sing.

The same timecode number in all of these clips identifies the same event or clip location. For this group of clips, you can synchronize by timecode, even though they don’t all start or stop on the same frame.

5. To make a multiclip of all the clips in the Timecode bin, Ctrl-click the bin and choose Make Multiclip from the shortcut menu.

6. In the Make Multiclip window, click the Synchronize Using pop-up and choose Timecode as the sync option.

The blue bars of each angle reposition to align the clips by timecode. Notice how the blue bars seem to cover the same relative area. They were taken from the same portion of the song but are not exactly the same length.

7. Click OK. In the Timecode bin, rename the new multiclip Timecode, and double-click to open it in the Viewer.

8. In the Viewer button bar, click the Show Multiclip Overlays button to toggle off the overlays in this multiclip.

9. In the Viewer, click the View pop-up and choose Multiclip 9-Up from the pop-up menu to see all the multiclip angles. Play this portion of the music video.

10. To edit this multiclip, use the same process you used with the Audio Pops multiclip. Start by changing the sync to Video+Audio and selecting the CD Track – Timecode clip. Then change the sync to Video and select the first video angle. Set an In point and an Out point where the angles are all in view, and edit the multiclip to the Timeline.

11. To see the clips play in the Viewer as you play the sequence, click the Playhead Sync pop-up, and choose Open from the menu, or press Shift-Ctrl-O. This will allow you to see the angles as you play and cut in real-time.

At this point, you can edit these clips as you did in previous exercises: either by moving the playhead to an exact edit location and cutting to a new angle, or by cutting live.

NOTE
If you are using a laptop or slower computer, this nine-clip multiclip may play slowly.
Digital Filmmaking is the way to go…

Some film-making competitions that are on and looking for participants these days:

• Boom filmmaking competition: Run by MTV, the Boom Filmmaking Contest is open to filmmakers in UK aged between 16-25-years. It involves a nationwide series of free filmmaking workshops in which young people will learn something on how to make films, video diaries, news bulletins, reports and mini-documentaries. Boom! requires filmmakers to use Apple hardware and iLife software, including iMovie and GarageBand. Finished films are to be uploaded to MTV’s website, where it will be voted on by website visitors, the most popular clips may be screened on MTV, and there’s a series of awards for the very best candidates.

• Creative World Awards: Creative World Awards is an annual international screenwriting competition. Entries are now open and run through late July 2008. The 2008 Creative World Awards have also announced the launch of a new online interactive video series debuting this week entitled, “The Business of Storytelling.” In this special online video showcase, participants can view insider tips from several leading Hollywood executives, writers, directors and producers. These experts offer informative perspectives on the creative process of screenwriting as well as the business side of the filmmaking industry.
• Film Racing: Film Racing is a USA based nationwide competition that challenges filmmakers to create original short films under extreme time constraints. Film Racing visited 13 cities on the 2007 Tour, and will be visiting 17 cities on the 2008 Tour challenging filmmakers to create short films in 24 hours. The films premiere on the big screen in theaters across the country and the top films advance to compete for thousands in cash and prizes. Visit filmracing.com for more details.

Subscribe to the Digital Filmmaking Blog by clicking here for the latest updates on filmmaking and screenwriting contests!

MainConcept AG, a wholly owned subsidiary of DivX Inc. and one of the world’s leading providers of video and audio codecs and software development kits (SDK) to the broadcast, film and consumer markets, have announced the release of the updated MainConcept™ MPEG Pro™ HD 3.2 Plug-In for Adobe Pro CS3, providing enhanced support for the editing of high-definition video.

MainConcept’s renowned MPEG Pro HD 3 Plug-In allows the quick and easy editing of MPEG, H.264/AVC, and even native HDV content in the familiar Adobe Premiere Pro workflow without requiring transcoding. The newest MPEG Pro HD 3.2 Plug-In brings frame-accurate, native MPEG editing with smart rendering to Premiere Pro CS3 versions. It includes full support for Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, Dolby Digital, AVC-HD and a wide variety of camcorders, including Sony’s new XDCAM HD 422 series optical disc and XDCAM series solid state camcorder.

“The release of MainConcept MPEG Pro HD 3.2 Plug-In is a significant technology leap for Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 users that adopt Sony’s highly anticipated XDCAM EX and XDCAM HD 422 camcorder,”

said Muzaffer Beygirci, Managing Director and VP sales of MainConcept AG.

“The new plug-in offers high-end features such as MPEG and Dolby Digital support, and will be a must-have for video professionals to import, edit and produce high-quality work using Adobe Premiere Pro.”

The MainConcept MPEG Pro HD 3 plug-in is available for online purchase and instant downloading at the MainConcept website. A free demo version is available for pre-purchase testing.

Source

The 2008 Big Bang Film Festival promises to be a spectacular affair. Submissions are open for the 5-day event starting October 1.

For those who don’t know, here’s an introduction to the Big Bang Film Festival:

BBFF is a celebration of exciting and inventive films in the Action, Adventure, Suspense and Asian Action Cinema genres. BBFF also welcomes documentary submissions featuring extreme sports and athletic events, activities and competitions which have contributed some of the most entertaining video of death defying speed, skill and daring. Each year Big Bang Film Festival showcases amazing films, some classics, some classics in the making. Every submission is posted on the BBFF Submissions Page so that all of our filmmakers can link to their listing.

Wondering what’s the location for this film festival? Philadelphia it is, and suitably so. In the last 10 years, more than 80 films have been made in Philadelphia including Lady in the Water, Charlotte’s Web and The Woodsman. The BBFF is a perfect fit for this action-packed, filmmaking city.

For more information on the festival, process and special events, zoom onto the Big Bang Film Festival’s official website.

The custom presets in Adobe After Effects are a great way to quickly animate your layers. The latest version of After Effects has many different presets to choose from and you can apply them to text, backgrounds or any other layer. The often misunderstood concept about presets is that once you apply them that is all you get. These presets are only a jumping off point, there are several presets that look great just the way they are but every preset is fully editable. The two Genius DV logos here were created using the exact same preset and I just modified the color and the motion for a completely different look. The only way to get familiar with presets is to practice and do not be afraid to modify them. You will be amazed how well these presets work and how simple it is to get the look you need.

This is a must read article detailing the work of 6 controversial and provocative filmmakers praticing the craft from various parts of the world. You may find some of their work shocking, vulgar and downright disgusting. Some, would find it daring.

Depends on you!