dogme 95
I watched an amazing film last night called ‘Open Hearts’. If you haven’t seen this film yet, then I highly recommend you watch it…soon!
It abides to the Dogma 95 Vow of Chastity, which is a set of rules made up by a bunch of film makers (including Lars von Trier) who believed that ‘The movie had been cosmeticised to death’. my friend emma first told me about this movement, in relation to stray cinema.
There is one paragraph in the Dogma 95 manifesto which I just love:
“Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratisation of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the media becomes, the more important the avant-garde, It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer ... we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition!”
That’s pretty cool, especially since this manifesto was written in the 60’s (*correction - as per comments on this blog - this manifesto was not actually written in the 60's - duh). I’m all for the democratization of film, and I think this political idea applied to modern films involves the internet, and the accessibility of digital media – whether it be hand held camera’s or your mobile phones etc. Film is cheaper now and easier than ever to make, putting filmmaking into new hands, and giving a different type of person (like me - and now you) the opportunity to tell their story using this all powerful medium.
I think filmmaking has a history of elitism. Whether it be the super expensive study of film, ‘who you know’ in the industry or how much backing you have from a producer (often back to who you know). Who is to say that these select, privileged few have the most original, interesting or even important stories to tell?
Anything’s possible in the world of amBX?
By michelle, 5 years ago - No Comments
Getting there anyway...amBX is Philips Electronics’ latest gaming technology:
"With amBX, filmmakers can embed ‘ambient experiences’ into their films: to influence lighting, sound and atmospherics in the world beyond the screen.
They can bring gentle shifts in light and colour around a viewer, to underscore changes in tone or scene: light-to-dark, reflecting onscreen weather, or providing metaphors for a character’s emotions.
It can also set pulses racing during effects-heavy action sequences: neon lights flash by during a car chase, or feeling the rumble of battle and seeing explosions flash in your peripheral vision. Or amBX can alter light and sound in more subversive ways to build tension, or help induce skin-crawling fear."
Snapvine is the new myspace?
By michelle, 5 years ago - 2 comments
sorry, it may seem i chop and change subjects/ interests randomly when i write this blog, but there are alot of different components to stray cinema. so while I am interested in film/ open source initiatives, there are also other things of interest to me...for example social networking.
we all know myspace is one of the biggest brands online, here is another site snapvine, that seems to be on the rise in usa. it's like myspace...but with voicemail instead of comments. We just want to get closer and closer to our cyber counterparts don't we?
Thome Yorke - The Eraser
By michelle, 5 years ago - No Comments
Hey, just as a sneaky side note, I was listening to Thom Yorke’s The Eraser’ as I wrote that last blog, and it is an amazing EP. Have a free listen here. You may have to register, but it only takes a minute & is well worth it.
Stray Cinema footage resolution
By michelle, 5 years ago - No Comments
I wanted to write about the resolution of the Stray Cinema raw footage.
There was an article written about open source filmmaking on the Indieworks blog, where Valentin (writer) talks about our project. He makes the following point:
“Unfortunately it looks like they plan to provide the source footage in a low-resolution (only a selected few will be able to finish their work with the high quality source footage). This seems a bit unattractive to me if you are serious about editing/film making.
And it raises another question:
At what resolution do you have to provide your source footage for a movie to be open-source?”
You can read the full article and my response here.
I think he raises a good question actually, and one I have been pondering ever since. Because we provide over an hours worth of raw footage for people to remix, it is for practical reasons that we decided to make it available for download at low resolution. However, I have recently had quite a few requests from people around the world, asking for the high resolution footage to use for their own creative purposes. I have posted this to them. You see I have no problem with people using the high resolution footage, so long as they respect the creative commons license we have placed on it.
So anyway next year I would like to give you the choice as to what footage you would like to download. You can download the low resolution footage for the competition as a direct download (like this year), or the high resolution footage for your own purposes. We will probably distribute the later using BitTorrent, or some type of P2P file sharing client.
By michelle, 5 years ago - 2 comments