All About Digital & Social Media » movies

Cryengine 3 Showcase

skribe — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 04:13:10 +0000

Wow! Just…wow. Machinima: the future of film-making

YouTube Feature Movies

skribe — Mon, 03 May 2010 04:59:06 +0000

In case you didn’t know, YouTube has a small selection of feature-length movies that appear not to be geographically limited like some of those that are available only in the US. They include movies starring Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Abbott and Costello. Sure, they’re mostly B films but there are a few gems like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Not all of them are embeddable (hence the choice above) though.

How to Fix the Australian Film Industry

skribe — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:50:19 +0000

This is a great clip featuring George Miller talking about the forthcoming Mad Max 4. He also talks about the state of the Australian film industry which is in a pretty shocking state at the moment.

George is spot on about what the industry needs. What he doesn’t say, however, is where the money is going to come from.

The experiment of having a pool of government money that is assigned by bureaucrats has produced a plethora of features that even Australian audiences don’t want to watch. The government simply can’t afford to spend the money needed to kickstart the industry and keep it going. Only private capital can do that. Ultimately only a tax concession will rejuvenate Australian film like it did in the late 70s and early 80s when a 150% concession was on offer to investors. It’s not a coincidence that our most successful and most iconic films were created during this era.

Machine Cinema

skribe — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 14:31:31 +0000

I’m a big fan of using machinima to tell stories. Some of the best are the trailers for the Call of Duty games. Lots of action, mixed with a sprinkling of narrative and character. Just like most movie trailers. Here’s the latest:

Corporate Piggybacking Ideas for Film-makers

skribe — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:45:19 +0000

Telstra have hit upon a brilliant marketing strategy for expanding upon their current Bigpond ‘Rabbit’ campaign. You know the one, where the kid asks about the Great Wall of China and his dad tells him that it’s to keep the rabbits out. Well, word has leaked that Telstra are considering making a film featuring those characters. The basic plot is that the kid searches the Internet – Bigpond, no doubt – for a wife for his dad. It’s corny. It’s cliched. It may just work. And even if it doesn’t then Telstra may not be too much out of pocket if they get the Australian federal and state government film funding bodies to pay for it.

Of course if it happens that way there’s likely to be a very loud cry complaining about how wrong it is for a corporation earning billions of dollars in net profit each year to dip its hand into the government coffers to make, what essentially is, an advertisement. But is what Telstra is doing any different from major foreign studios having their productions subsidised? What counts is that a film gets made, film-makers get employed and the movie actually gets seen. That last part is often missing from many of the films usually paid for by the funding bodies.

Given that there’s likely to be a major slowdown in film production due to the current economic downturn – money is about to become very scarce all round – maybe there’s an opportunity for innovative film-makers to develop an alternate market. I’m thinking along the lines of approaching corporations to use their current or abandoned marketing characters to create new dramas. They could be serious or spoofs. Either way the corporations could benefit by increasing their exposure, especially if the movies were aimed at the podcasting market. In fact the podcasting offers them not only a very subtle viral marketing campaign, but are likely to be lower in cost too.