Filmmaking Competetion Cum Reality Show

Animal Planet has announced that it will showcase an eight-part reality series Unearthed: Film School Wild later this year. For this purpose, it has called for entries globally.

Unearthed will follow four contestants on an intensive training course as they learn the essential skills and realities of creating a natural history documentary.

Industry experts and wildlife filmmakers Lyndal Davies and Andrew Barron will guide the contestants though their tasks on the course. The tutors will provide inside knowledge to help the students shoot and edit their own short wildlife film.

The budding filmmakers and animal enthusiasts will carry out their challenges at the Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa in July 2008, competing to ultimately have their film chosen the winner. An international panel of experts will judge the final documentaries at a gala dinner in South Africa, and the winner will have his or her film broadcast on Animal Planet in 160 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Entries will be accepted from 14 April to 19 May. All applicants will be required to shoot a three-minute personal profile. This must be produced, shot and edited by the applicant with no outside assistance. The film should then be delivered in a DVD format with the application form to the application address.

The competition is open to those over the age of 18.

Full details here ~~ Download contest application form here

Raindance Film Festival 2008 approaches

Send in your entries!

The Raindance Film Festival is perhaps the most well-known and well-received independent film festival in the UK. London’s annual festival sthe best of new independent work. Raindance showcases features and shorts made by independent filmmakers from all around the world to an audience of film fans, journalists, acquisition executives, actors, producers and directors. The 2008 edition promises to be an exciting event.

Though held in London, Raindance welcomes and encourages international submissions. If you're not already aware, the 16th Raindance Film Festival opened for submissions on 1st January. The laste date for sunmitting your shorts if 6th June'08. Do read the submission guidelines beforehand. It also includes information on prizes and categories.

Raindance has hosted such guests and filmmakers as Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins), Shane Meadows (Dead Man’s Shoes, This Is England), Ken Loach (Kes, Ae Fond Kiss), Marky Ramone (The Ramones), Iggy Pop, Andrea Arnold (Red Road), Quentin Tarantino, and Lou Reed.

Dungog Film Festival from May 29

If you didnt know, the Dungog Film Festival is back again from the 29 May - 1 June, and not only that, their 2007 Trailer directed by award winning filmmaker Stavros Kazantzidis has just won GOLD at the Australian Cinematographer Society Awards and you can view it HERE

What is it?:In addition to discovering filmmaking’s newest talent through the
Festival’s program of documentary, dramatic, and short film, Festival attendees experience live music shows, panel discussions with leading filmmakers and industry figures, parties celebrating the Festival community, and more.

The Dungog Film Festival was founded in 2007 to celebrate Australian cinema in a non-competitive environment, to strengthen the bonds within the film community, to create a context for contemporary Australian films by screening heritage films, and to enhance awareness, accessibility and appreciation of Australian film among a broad and diverse film going audience.

Jodhak Akbar Movie Review

I have written a comprehensive review of the Bollywood movie Jodha Akbar on my website lughole.net. It was one film that I really enjoyed watching, even though it stretched approximately 4 hours, and so I took my time writing it. Read the Jodha Akbar Review

I also post short films from youtube on that website. Notable ones among them are Black Button and The Window - incidentally, both have been produced by a company called Dark Heart Productions.

10 Basic Avid Tips and tricks

10 Basic Tips and tricks for Avid


1. If you can't play a sequence in Avid, it's often because of corrupt media, so use the binary chop to find where that niggly piece of media is hiding. Mark an in/out on half of your sequence. Press play in-out (usually 6 on most keyboards). If that half plays, then the corrupt media is on the other half. Keep chopping the other half into halves, and you'll very quickly narrow down where the corrupt media is.

2. If you work on a weekly show, where each show is a project, don't use the same bin names in each project, because you'll often want to open bins from one project in another, and Avid won't allow two bins of the same name in each project.

3. If you want to guarantee that bins will follow a particular order in your project window use a number system before the bin name i.e.

4. Chaning Font Size and Type: Straining to read the text in your bin? Would you like to be able to see the timecode above your Source and Record Monitors better? Hate Geneva (the font, not the city)? It's easy to change the font and/or point size of items in the following places:
- Bins – works one bin at a time unfortunately.
- Composer window
- Timeline
- Project window – version 11.x and later only.

Here's how: just make one of the previously mentioned windows active, then go to the EDIT MENU.
Scroll down the menu to SET FONT and play away.

5. Super Spacer Bar / Trimming Trick: Test out mapping the SOLID PLAY button from the Command Palette (in earlier versions of MC you have to move the play that is on the "5" key) to your space bar. Now the bar becomes not just stop, but play as well while in Composer mode. Even cooler, and more useful: now when you are in Trim Mode and have finished a trim, just hit the space bar and it will loop play.

6. People sometimes get a sync drift (a common problem with Avid and Digibeta) all the time. To easily correct your drift, duplicate your sequence just before you re-conform your video and give it a name like Offline Backup. Hi-res your sequence, and then load your Hi-Res sequence in the record monitor and your lo-res sequence in the source monitor. Click the gang button in either monitor. You can now move through your sequence, checking the shots in your record monitor to see if they line up with the source. If they don't, use the slip & slide buttons (usually m,./) to correct it.

7. Adding Comments to Avid Clips in the Timeline: Did you know it's possible to add clip comments directly to clips within the Avid Timeline? This is important for a few reasons.

#1 The comments will stay embedded within the clip, so if you move the clip, the comments will stay with it.

#2 If you edit a title directly from the timeline, the clip name doesn't change. You can add a clip comment to reflect the real-name of the title template, instead of having to deal with a generic name.

To add comments to clips within Avid Xpress or Avid Media Composer follow these steps:

Highlight one or more of your clips within the Avid timeline using segment mode. In this case, red segment arrow has been turned on to select a clip.









Next, navivate to the pull-down menu in the upper right corner of the Composer Window. Choose add clip comments. A clip comment dialog box will appear. Go ahead and type your comment.












To get the comments to appear in the actual Avid timeline, you need to turn them on using the timeline-fast menu which is located in the bottom left corner of the timeline window.