Cinemateque d'youf

Hmm. Matthew Clayfield has posted a quote from a guy called Craig Keller about the need for a 'Cinema of Youth'. I've decided to blog my own response here:

Hmm. I would say that of the four scripts I'm developing concurrently (two of which are short features), all of them are partly about being 'young'. The only one which is borderline is a very cynical treatise on the nature of corruption, violence and politics... and the 'hero' is a young idealist. Heh. Only thinking about it now has made me realise it is subconsciously about the fear that maturity = pragmatism = acceptance of the banality of evil.

... and its not like I'm special in that regard. A lot of my friends have written and/or are developing scripts about youth. I mean, what other world are young people going to write about?

The problem isn't a lack of ideas amongst young filmmakers.. its a lack of an ability to get stuff *made*. There comes a point with most early-mid twenty filmmakers where we can no longer pour thousands of dollars into making short films and yet we're tired of making zero-budget crap. Our only alternative is the scehmes like YFF (which considers a young filmmaker to be under 35) or the AFC.... and the latter is open to everyone.

If I were a film funding body, and we all wish I was, I'd be considering funding MORE scripts with less money. Rather than 4 scripts at $30,000 twice a year (as is with YFF). I'd make a 'low budget' category of 12 films at $10,000... or 24 films at $5,000... and then have the 'mid budget' at $30,000 once a year.

Most of the YFF films I've seen could have easily been made for $10,000 by a bunch of dedicated filmmakers who know how to push every dollar on screen.

That said, a new funding scheme isn't going to change the systematic problems of an opaque script approval process. Just because you fund more films, doesn't mean you're going to fund BETTER films.

All that said, I think a lot of interesting young filmmakers are working in music videos, mograph and short films... but stuff just isn't getting seen.

Of course, what is "intellectually curious youth cinema?"... sounds dangerously like self-important filmschool wank.

Eyes on the Costs: Documentary Film Making and the escalating costs of copyright clearances

Eyes on the Costs: Documentary Film Making and the escalating costs of copyright clearances:

Eyes on the Costs: Documentary Film Making and the escalating costs of copyright clearances

Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide have published the final report from their year-long study, Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of the Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers.

Jaszi and Aufderheide have found in their study that:

* Rights clearance costs are high, and have escalated dramatically in the last two decades

* Gatekeepers, such as distributors and insurers, enforce rigid and high-bar rights clearance expectations

* The rights clearance process is arduous and frustrating, especially around movies and music

* Rights clearance problems force filmmakers to make changes that adversely affect—and limit the public’s access to--their work, and the result is significant change in documentary practice

* Filmmakers, while sometimes seeing themselves as hostages of the “clearance culture,” also are creators of it

* Filmmakers nonetheless exercise fair use, and imagine a more rational rights environment

--Via Weatherall's Law: An Intellectual Property Blog from Oz.

Why is it that Screen Director's are always pointing? Near a camera?

-- Photo from the shoot of CK a few weeks back. Taken by Antigone. Me in f/g, Robbie in b/g. Yes, he's wearing a Ford Ute T-Shirt. Yes, we're posing.

Hmm. Shoot photos.

Looks like me is moving to Erskinville, home of all the yuppies who are too cool to live in Newtown. I'm gonna fit in perfectly.

Stupid people are too stupid to know that they're stupid. Fact.

A Cornell University study showed that people who bombed tests of logic, grammar and humor "grossly overestimated" how well they did on the tests.  "Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions," said the authors, "but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

-- Via John Robb's Weblog. The link on the site requires registration.

Comment: In other words, if you think you're stupid then you probably aren't all that stupid - more a mild stupid... a vegetable korma kind of stupid.

War is business and business is war.

War is often viewed as an affair of men fighting for the political causes of their nations. History, however, is filled with examples of combatants who were instead motivated solely by economic profit. And as jarring as it sounds to us today, the conduct of violence used to be just another capitalist enterprise.

-- P.W. Singer, 'The Ultimate Military Entrepreneur' in Military History Quarterly, Spring 2003, 6-15. Or you could just grab the PDF here.

Comment: Why does Singer think it sounds jarring to us today? All this article proves to me that nothing changes.

File this under research for Praetorian the comic which I am (slowly) beginning to pull together mentally.