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.

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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.

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!

Animal Planet has announced that it will showcase an eight-part reality series Unearthed: Film School Wild later this year. For this purpose, it has called for entries globally.

Unearthed will follow four contestants on an intensive training course as they learn the essential skills and realities of creating a natural history documentary.

Industry experts and wildlife filmmakers Lyndal Davies and Andrew Barron will guide the contestants though their tasks on the course. The tutors will provide inside knowledge to help the students shoot and edit their own short wildlife film.

The budding filmmakers and animal enthusiasts will carry out their challenges at the Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa in July 2008, competing to ultimately have their film chosen the winner. An international panel of experts will judge the final documentaries at a gala dinner in South Africa, and the winner will have his or her film broadcast on Animal Planet in 160 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Entries will be accepted from 14 April to 19 May. All applicants will be required to shoot a three-minute personal profile. This must be produced, shot and edited by the applicant with no outside assistance. The film should then be delivered in a DVD format with the application form to the application address.

The competition is open to those over the age of 18.

Full details here ~~ Download contest application form here

Send in your entries!

The Raindance Film Festival is perhaps the most well-known and well-received independent film festival in the UK. London’s annual festival sthe best of new independent work. Raindance showcases features and shorts made by independent filmmakers from all around the world to an audience of film fans, journalists, acquisition executives, actors, producers and directors. The 2008 edition promises to be an exciting event.

Though held in London, Raindance welcomes and encourages international submissions. If you’re not already aware, the 16th Raindance Film Festival opened for submissions on 1st January. The laste date for sunmitting your shorts if 6th June’08. Do read the submission guidelines beforehand. It also includes information on prizes and categories.

Raindance has hosted such guests and filmmakers as Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins), Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England), Ken Loach (Kes, Ae Fond Kiss), Marky Ramone (The Ramones), Iggy Pop, Andrea Arnold (Red Road), Quentin Tarantino, and Lou Reed.

If you didnt know, the Dungog Film Festival is back again from the 29 May – 1 June, and not only that, their 2007 Trailer directed by award winning filmmaker Stavros Kazantzidis has just won GOLD at the Australian Cinematographer Society Awards and you can view it HERE

What is it?:In addition to discovering filmmaking’s newest talent through the
Festival’s program of documentary, dramatic, and short film, Festival attendees experience live music shows, panel discussions with leading filmmakers and industry figures, parties celebrating the Festival community, and more.

The Dungog Film Festival was founded in 2007 to celebrate Australian cinema in a non-competitive environment, to strengthen the bonds within the film community, to create a context for contemporary Australian films by screening heritage films, and to enhance awareness, accessibility and appreciation of Australian film among a broad and diverse film going audience.

I have written a comprehensive review of the Bollywood movie Jodha Akbar on my website lughole.net. It was one film that I really enjoyed watching, even though it stretched approximately 4 hours, and so I took my time writing it. Read the Jodha Akbar Review

I also post short films from youtube on that website. Notable ones among them are Black Button and The Window – incidentally, both have been produced by a company called Dark Heart Productions.

10 Basic Tips and tricks for Avid

1. If you can’t play a sequence in Avid, it’s often because of corrupt media, so use the binary chop to find where that niggly piece of media is hiding. Mark an in/out on half of your sequence. Press play in-out (usually 6 on most keyboards). If that half plays, then the corrupt media is on the other half. Keep chopping the other half into halves, and you’ll very quickly narrow down where the corrupt media is.

2. If you work on a weekly show, where each show is a project, don’t use the same bin names in each project, because you’ll often want to open bins from one project in another, and Avid won’t allow two bins of the same name in each project.

3. If you want to guarantee that bins will follow a particular order in your project window use a number system before the bin name i.e.

4. Chaning Font Size and Type: Straining to read the text in your bin? Would you like to be able to see the timecode above your Source and Record Monitors better? Hate Geneva (the font, not the city)? It’s easy to change the font and/or point size of items in the following places:
- Bins – works one bin at a time unfortunately.
- Composer window
- Timeline
- Project window – version 11.x and later only.

Here’s how: just make one of the previously mentioned windows active, then go to the EDIT MENU.
Scroll down the menu to SET FONT and play away.

5. Super Spacer Bar / Trimming Trick: Test out mapping the SOLID PLAY button from the Command Palette (in earlier versions of MC you have to move the play that is on the “5″ key) to your space bar. Now the bar becomes not just stop, but play as well while in Composer mode. Even cooler, and more useful: now when you are in Trim Mode and have finished a trim, just hit the space bar and it will loop play.

6. People sometimes get a sync drift (a common problem with Avid and Digibeta) all the time. To easily correct your drift, duplicate your sequence just before you re-conform your video and give it a name like Offline Backup. Hi-res your sequence, and then load your Hi-Res sequence in the record monitor and your lo-res sequence in the source monitor. Click the gang button in either monitor. You can now move through your sequence, checking the shots in your record monitor to see if they line up with the source. If they don’t, use the slip & slide buttons (usually m,./) to correct it.

7. Adding Comments to Avid Clips in the Timeline: Did you know it’s possible to add clip comments directly to clips within the Avid Timeline? This is important for a few reasons.

#1 The comments will stay embedded within the clip, so if you move the clip, the comments will stay with it.

#2 If you edit a title directly from the timeline, the clip name doesn’t change. You can add a clip comment to reflect the real-name of the title template, instead of having to deal with a generic name.

To add comments to clips within Avid Xpress or Avid Media Composer follow these steps:

Highlight one or more of your clips within the Avid timeline using segment mode. In this case, red segment arrow has been turned on to select a clip.

Next, navivate to the pull-down menu in the upper right corner of the Composer Window. Choose add clip comments. A clip comment dialog box will appear. Go ahead and type your comment.

To get the comments to appear in the actual Avid timeline, you need to turn them on using the timeline-fast menu which is located in the bottom left corner of the timeline window.

Non-narrative movies demand a very different approach to narrative. They require that you embed continuity as a part of the whole structure of the film, not as an afterthought during filming.

Non-narrative movies such as music videos, abstract movies and multimedia projections used in live concerts are particularly susceptible to looking fragmented. At their most out of control, they look like you are channel surfing, looking at a number of clips of movies by different people. Of the following ideas, the more effective ones are those that are part of the planning and shooting stages rather than those placed over the film in post-production.

Methods of ensuring continuity in non-narrative film
Single filter effect (edit software filters, not camera filters)
If your editing software has special effects that you can use to alter the look of clips – for instance, to make them change colour, stretch or change contrast and tone – you could apply one of these to the whole film, or at regular points. Restrict yourself to one filter only.

Tracking
A tracking shot – where the camera moves while it shoots, tracking the action – can make a good way of connecting shots. Decide on a constant speed of tracking and stick with it throughout the film. To enhance the effect, keep to one direction in the screen – for example, left to right. For example, you could show a slow, left-to-right movement of the camera along a beach, cutting then to a similar constant shot along a busy street.

360-degree movement
This device is particularly effective in linking shots. Decide on the height of the camera and the speed of the camera as it moves, then shoot everything while moving 360 degrees around the subject, at every location, throughout the film.

Common space
This involves including an object or space in the background that is present in each shot, and could be as simple as a fireside with picture frame. This is commonly used in scenes with dialogue where it is useful to be able to locate two actors within the same space by showing some common space or object in each actor’s frame. In a non-narrative film you could choose a single prop that is present throughout.

Transitions
At the editing stage, you will need to decide how you cut between scenes. The most common – the straight cut and the cross dissolve – could be developed by trying something a little more noticeable. An example could be to fade fast to white as the picture cuts, suggesting flash photography.

The length of the shot
A style of editing that uses short cuts, with a high turnover of clips, will encourage the viewer to see these clips as linked in some way, even if the subject matter is not. Therefore, we tend to see a montage sequence consisting of a lot of quick images because the diversity of images needs to be balanced by speed of perception. But what is a ‘long cut’ or a ‘short cut’? In this case you could think of a quick cut as half a second or less and a slow cut as anything from three to five seconds, but your subject matter will dictate how fast your cuts will be.

Motif
In non-narrative films, a motif can be used with some thought to what kinds of objects or colours add to the overall theme of the movie. For example, in an interpretation of the word ‘anger’, we could justifiably use the colour red as a motif in the film. To stand as a motif you would have to see the object or colour recur often enough to be noticed. Alternatively, you could use images of a clenched fist or a brick hurtling towards a window, letting us see more and more of it as the film proceeds.

Linked imagery
For this idea we could take a look at Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). After a lengthy start where we see ancient pre-human apes, Kubrick needed a way of jumping tens of thousands of years into the future without disrupting the flow of the movie. If ever there was a time to use a continuity device, this was it. His response was to have the camera follow a bone thrown high into the air, and immediately cut to a similar-shaped, bone-like spacecraft, occupying the same space in the frame. This is a daring way of connecting two shots that could not be more dissimilar, visually. While shooting, you could look for parts of the scene that visually resemble a part of another, with the aim of linking the two later.

Sound
This is a last resort method of connecting shots and is not the most effective way. A single piece of music is dubbed over the whole film as with a music video. If you want to use sound in this way, try to use a particularly noticeable home-made soundtrack of sounds, rather than music, and one where you have altered the sounds or looped them, producing a repetitive, rhythmic effect.

The Crunch
In narrative, continuity is crucial
In non-narrative, broken continuity can be a useful tool
Get to know the rules of keeping continuity and break them wisely
Continuity is developed both in the script stage and also while shooting
In non-narrative movies, beware that the movie doesn’t look fragmented – use continuity devices in editing or shooting.
Get to know the action line and the 30-degree rule
Use good quality sound and take care of ambient sound.

Recommended Reading – Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction (links below)
US and North America
UK and Europe