Tag Archives: short

Take the Sundance & Gates Foundation short film challenge?

Sundance and the Gates foundation welcome (and fund sinner) films about solutions to poverty, cinematic celebrations of innovation and problem-solving for common global problems.

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find all the info here

Also check out the Nuffglobal.net doc film contest about Climate Change, from way back in 2007.

“APPLAUD or DIE!!” Must see Award-Winning Short (10 min)

Contemporary film studies commonly use the feature film as the basic, common dramatic space and format. The three acts, the familiar setups and characters populate what film students examine the most. If you are learning how to write screenplays, you probably have read and reread “Chinatown” and “Ordinary People” and “Tootsie” ay nd “Casablanca” and other classics. These films of course are awesome and history and deserve attention, respect, awe. But they are not the only source out there and, in my POV, they can frankly be too much. If you are learning to swim, laps are more manageable than crossing the Channel. If you are a beginner at Chess, you can learn how to “castle” from a friend, without having to study a whole Fischer-Spassky match.

This new category in the “Movies Without Cameras” Blog suggests different award-winning short films to watch and perhaps explore. Shorts can have alternative structures, fewer characters and streamlined scenes. What better gym for short-film makers to flex their imaginary muscles in?

The first short I offer for thought is called “Applaud or Die” by and with Benson Simmonds as a desperate man in an alley playing for his life. Not recent, but a timeless CLASSIC.

This is not an Ad – It’s film funding.

Crowdsourcing is the thing now.  When you want to make a film  you take it first to  family, friends, supporters and potential audiences. By the process itself of revealing your intentions in public, you transform an abstract idea (a dream?) into a plan. By asking for contributions in exchange for (clever, fun) rewards, your film becomes a project, one that you are responsible for. Just by posting on Kickstarter or Indiegogo (among others) you become a storytelling entrepreneur, a making-of artist  in the web-circus.

What are you selling when you crowdsource? Your ideas, your talent, your role as an innovator in an innovator world

Your video. good=funds, bad=redo, rethink, remake.