Jugglezine

Jugglezine may help you organize your life and work. Striking a balance between what you do for work and your personal life can be a challenge. Jugglezine has tips to help you rebalance your life.

Interface Laundry (Signal vs. Noise)

Interface Laundry (Signal vs. Noise) is a blog entry by Matthew Linderman about designing interfaces. It's applicable to writing and editing as well. He points to the redesign of Blogger and the approach that Douglas Bowman outlined. The process is to take everything away and then figure out what to add back in as opposed to figuring out what to eliminate. This may work if you are having trouble rewriting or editing something down... just get rid of everything and then start only adding the things that you need back in.

Cinema Scope Magazine

Cinema Scope Magazine Online is the site for the magazine Cinema Scope. The Fall 2004 issue is up and there is a great selection of articles and interviews on international cinema with a bit of a Canadian perspective.

ChangeThis - The Talent Myth

The Talent Myth is a manifesto on ChangeThis by Malcolm Gladwell about how talent may not be the greatest asset of an organization.

Directors NoteBook Software

Directors NoteBook Software helps you get organized for a production. It's built around a database with various versions that provide storyboards and other organizational tools for productions. There is a free downloadable version as well.

Magnatune

Magnatune is a record label with the slogan, "We are not evil". They have an innovative model where artists get half of every purchase. That's revolutionary for the music business. As a listener you can listen to everything before you buy it.

ChangeThis - How To Be Creative

Hugh MacLeod's How To Be Creative is now available in a downloadable PDF beautifully designed by ChangeThis, who publish manifestos. Hugh's is my favourite though, as my constant raving about it confirms.

O'Reilly Digital Audio

O'Reilly (publishers of fine computer books) have launched the Digital Audio section of their Digital Media site... it's a place where there will be articles and information about digital audio. The Photography section is great and I'm sure that this section will quickly fill up with solid news and information.

drew's blog-o-rama

drew's blog-o-rama is the blog of drew, who also does the great drew's script-o-rama where you can find a wide array of film scripts. A great resource!

freeculture.org

Ready to change the world? Check out freeculture.org which is a student organization that is dedicated to increasing student participation in culture around issues that spring out of the recent copyright challenges. They are also sponsoring a contest to remix zombie movies since Night of the Living Dead is in the public domain. Go to UndeadArt.org to find out more.

The WIRED CD

The current issue of Wired magazine has The WIRED CD which has 16 tracks that are available for sampling and incorporation into your own works. You can sample the songs and create your own original works. After November 9th you can download the songs from the Creative Commons site.

screenonline: Black Pioneers

The British Film Institute's Screen Online has a new feature on Black Pioneers in British filmmaking.

Audacity

Audacity is a free, multi-platform, multi-track sound editor. It's a powerful and exciting program that you can use on pretty much any computer or operating system. It comes with a number of filters and effects and also supports the VST audio plugin format.

Visual Cognition Lab Demos

The University of Illinois Visual Cognition has a page of demos that show how individual perception can make us not notice things that may be changing in front of us or in a visual image. It helps to understand how edits can work and how you can get away with sometimes having things that don't match.

DigiDocs: Rebuilding The Documentary: The DigiDoc ImaginNation

DigiDocs: Rebuilding The Documentary: The DigiDoc ImaginNation is a somewhat breathless essay by Peter Wintonick about the possibilities that the new digital technologies give the documentary. It was published in 2001, but it's even more relevant now.

Bell Fund - Publications

The Bell Fund - Publications features several great documents to help you with grant applications. While tailored towards those who are applying for the Bell Fund, there is some great advice for producers there.

Why Aren't You Blogging?

You really should start blogging if you aren't now. Reading blogs is a start, but you have to switch from receiving all the time to transmitting. Share your thoughts and become part of the conversation. A great place to figure out how to get going is The Kitchen: How to Cook a Weblog which is starting off thanks to Shelley Powers. There is also a wikipedia for weblogging as well. Go and read and then start to change the world.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a great project that seeks to bring back the spirit of the Commons and the original intent behind copyright, which was to protect the creators of work in a reasonable way. Find out more on their recently redesigned site and think about publishing your own work under a license that will allow others to use it or find works that people will allow you to ru-use for some uses without having to pay or ask permission. There is also a Canadian version of the license that fits within the laws here in Canada.

NSI ZeD Drama Prize

The National Screen Institute organizes the NSI ZeD Drama Prize every year to allow up five teams to make a short film that airs on CBC ZeD TV. They receive cash and services as well as professional support and contacts. Unfortunately you have to have graduated from any training program that you were in at least a year before the November 4th deadline though.

Pattern Recognition Film?

... I don't regard films of novels as being the ultimate form in which a novel may be lucky enough to manifest. I regard *the novel* as the ultimate form in which the novel manifests. And if I should suspect that you think otherwise, I'm liable to snap at you.

William Gibson is one of my favourite authors and thinkers and one of the best recent novels that I've read is his Pattern Recognition. Gibson has blogged in the past and now he's blogging again due to the political situation that has been unfolding the past few years in the United States. A non-political post today stating that MEDIA DOES MATTER brings word of a possible screen version of his novel being developed by Peter Weir.

(Via Gibson Blog.)

Larry Jordan's Final Cut Pro Articles

Larry Jordan is a producer, director, editor, consultant and trainer who has an excellent collection of Final Cut Pro Articles & Newsletters. It is filled with practical, solid advice for using Final Cut Pro and he also has some goodies such as useful scripts and a great Excel template for logging footage.

Jump the Shark

The Word Spy has a definition of jump the shark, which is when a tv series starts to go downhill. It comes from the series, Happy Days when Fonzie drove his motorcycle over a shark. The site Jump The Shark collects an incredible number of shows and charts when or if they "jumped the shark".

Frederick Wiseman

Zipporah Films is Frederick Wiseman's production company. Wiseman's first documentary was Titicut Follies, which he made in 1967. Wiseman is one of the preeminent Cinema Vérité filmmakers and his most recent film is La Dernière Lettre.

SabuCat Movie Trailers

SabuCat Movie Trailers is a collection that is part of the Internet Archive's Movie Archive and it has over 100 movie files from SabuCat, who have over 60,000 trailers in their collection. Lots of great old trailers to watch!

The Wilhelm Scream

The Wilhelm Scream is a sound effect that you've probably heard. It's been used in countless films, but Steve Lee has tried to catalogue all of the appearances of the sound effect in films.

Nova Scotia Filmmakers Charity Screening

Up and coming Nova Scotian filmmakers Jay Dahl, Evan Kelly, Gillian Matheson, Trevor Sutherland, Ian MacMillan, Paul McCurdy, Mark Almon, Edward Mowbray, Ian Johnston, Kyle Cameron and Tarek Abouamin have been selected to show their award-winning films this coming Wednesday, October 13, at the Oxford Cinema in Halifax at 7pm.

There is no admission though there is a suggested five dollar donation at the door. One hundred percent of the profits go to the Canadian Cancer Society.

Go and see some great films!

Screening Log

Screening Log is a new feature recently added to the excellent site Not Coming to a Theatre Near You. You can find out what the folks of that site have been watching and get a great idea of stuff to check out.

The Living Room Candidate

The Living Room Candidate is a project of the American Museum of the Moving Image that collects together an amazing range of American Presidential campaign ads. You can view the ads and even see the most current ads being run by the candidates in the current election.

Outfoxed: Interview Footage

Robert Greenwald made the documentary Outfoxed and now he's made the Interview Footage available under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. That means you can download and use the footage yourself.

Errol Morris

Errol Morris is one of the top documentary filmmakers in the world. On his recently redone site he has tons of information about his films including transcripts of The Fog of War, Mr. Death, and The Thin Blue Line. Lots of great information and links.

Good Scene / Bad Scene

Good Scene / Bad Scene by John Appel is a brief interview by Jennifer Rodger with documentary director John Appel where he picks a good scene and a bad scene from a documentary. He chooses Grey Gardens from Ellen Hovde and Albert Maysles as the good and Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore as the bad. Interesting takes on both films.

Docúpolis

Docúpolis, Festival Internacional Documental de Barcelona is an international documentary festival underway now in Barcelona. It would be neat to be there... maybe next year...

The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess

The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess is the latest film from Bruce McDonald. It's a radical rethinking of a story that would be a typical reality-based movie of the week. Written by Angus Fraser (who cowrote the script for Kissed) it's a fragmented tale of a real-life woman who became a media sensation after she slept with the accused in a trial where she was a juror. Bold and challenging, the film marks an exciting progression for McDonald from the inspired Hard Core Logo.

Virtual Dictionary

Virtual Dictionary - A guide to the language of reality TV is a neat guide to the dominant form of cheap television by Kevin Arnovitz. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the process behind the creation of "reality" television.

Dziga Vertov

Dziga Vertov was was one of the first and most influential of the earlier documentary filmmakers. With Man With a Movie Camera he created a film that serves as a catalogue of cinematic techniques that all still used today. What is remarkable about the film is that it still has the power to excite and entertain 75 years later.