Month: August 2015

John Ostrander’s Summertime Blues?

guardians-of-the-galaxy-movie-imagesby John Ostrander

About a million years ago when I was a kid, summer time was the entertainment doldrums. All the TV shows were in reruns (and we only had a few channels back then) and the new season wouldn’t begin until September, right around the time school began, limiting the shows we could see. Big new movies usually didn’t come out during the summer; the prevailing theory was people didn’t want to sit in a darkened theater (even if it was air conditioned) during the summer. They’d rather be outside. Drive-ins did good business because they combined both. My mother usually didn’t let us go to one because they were reputed to be make-out dens for teen-agers… and they probably were. Mother didn’t approve. Again, the fall started up the movie season.

We didn’t have VHS tapes when I was a kid, let alone DVD or Blu-Ray. No channels on TV devoted exclusively to movies or old movies or cartoons. Even our music wasn’t portable; vinyl records had to be played on large machines. Transistor radios were small enough to take with you and that gave you some music but it was always what the guy on the radio chose for you to listen.

I know. The Dark Ages, huh? Somehow we managed to survive. read article

Enter the SPLOID Short Film Festival

You’ve put in more time and work than you ever thought possible to develop your video crafting techniques and have the samples to prove it. And you went through all this hell, why? Because you were driven by creative demons? Because you really, really, really wanna go pro? Because you have a need to entertain? Maybe even a need to be – gulp – famous?

If that’s you, bunky, then here’s the next step:

sploidby Casey Chan

Welcome to the first edition of the Sploid Short Film Festival, a celebration of great storytelling and awesome eye candy. We will select the best short films of 2015 in the next five months leading to a November award ceremony at Gawker Media’s theater on Fifth Avenue in New York. read article

Indie Film & Video: TIMELIKE

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What we used to call “peer production,” the creation of online video by non-pros and fans, just keeps getting better and better. This particular “found footage” artistry is going to be very hard to beat:

read article

How to Control Your Creative Process

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by Diana Black

That blank page stares back at us…if we’ve had the good fortune to land an assignment and there’s a serious deadline involved, Holy Crap! Okay, we take a breath; confident in our knowledge and understanding of what the hell we’re doing and we’ve got a kit-bag of kick-ass skills at our side. Like our hero/heroine, we will prevail.

As artists, we are at some fundamental level, observers and explorers of the human condition. Our job/compunction is to observe and interpret human behavior. We perceive ‘a moment’ in time, intimately associated with either our own human experience or someone else’s – real or imagined. It fascinated/horrified us. We then lift that compelling ‘moment’ out of the day-to-day and embed it within a dramatic narrative in all its ugliness, beauty, terror, gut-wrenching sorrow or triumphant joy. When we’re ‘done’, we reflect it back to the society from whence it came – “See, this is who you really are and this is what drives you.”

While we’ve learned and mastered the mechanical skills necessary to construct a teleplay that should stand up under the subjective scrutiny of the gatekeeper – at least structurally, does that mean we have the insight to recognize the salient ‘moments’ let alone the creative ability to weave them into a compelling narrative? Let’s assume that we do or at least, the potential. read article

Indie Film & Video: The Incredible Hulk vs The Ever Lovin’ Blue Eyed Thing

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Long before the travesty of pop culture that is Fox’s most recent version of THE FANTASTIC FOUR to cause the eyes, ears, and brains of move-goers to bleed–

Long before technology made it possible for comic book superheroes to become mainstream cinema icons– read article