George Clooney honoured at Palm Springs Film Festival

George Clooney will receive the Chairman's Award for his acting work in The Descendants and his directing of The Ides of March at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The award will be presented on January 7 at PSIFF's annual Awards Gala, a black-tie event that always hands out an array of awards to luminaries who figure to be in the Oscar race.

Like the awards given at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in late January, the Palm Springs event has become a valuable stop on the Oscar campaign trail. Previous recipients of the Chairman's Award include Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman and Ben Affleck.

Oscar-nominated actress Michelle Williams will also be rewarded for her portrayal of Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn,” which is already generating Oscar buzz.

Williams, 31, will receive the Desert Palm Achievement Actress Award at the Palm Springs International Film Festival awards gala at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Previous recipients include Academy Award winners Natalie Portman, Marion Cotillard, Charlize Theron and Kate Winslet.

“My Week With Marilyn,” which opens Wednesday in limited distribution, premiered Oct. 9 at the New York International Film Festival. Directed by Simon Curtis, the film was presented Nov. 6 as part of the AFI Fest at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, where Monroe put her hand and footprints in cement in 1952.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival runs Jan. 5-16 2012 at various venues in Palm Springs

Sources: mydesert.com & Reuters

Technorati Tags: film festivals,filmmaking

How to sell your film online

Selling your film online has now became easy, although it wasn't always like this till even a couple of years back. You had websites like Revver and Turnhere, which later became redundant.

However, there is something even better now, and its completely free. The best part is that its promoted by Amazon.com, which with its vast resources has helped many self publishers of ebooks to become millionaires.

I am talking about CreateSpace.

CreateSpace provides free tools to help you self-publish and distribute your books, DVDs, CDs, video downloads and MP3s on-demand. So whether you're a filmmaker, a musician or an author, createspace is one service you should definitely try to sell your films, music and books.

Let us talk about filmmaking here. What does Createspace offer for filmmakers? Quite a bit if you ask me. For starters, here's what their DVD publishing section says:

Bring your film to market with retail-ready DVDs. We faithfully reproduce your artwork in full-color and package your discs in Amaray-style cases.
Setting up your title with us ensures your DVD remains in stock, made on-demand when customers order.

Here's some more benefits they claim:

• Your movie becomes eligible for listing on IMDb
• Printed with full-color, full-bleed, customizable disc and cover artwork
• Create custom DVD menu artwork
• Free UPC is assigned if you do not already own one

The best part is that you can sell your DVD on Amazon.com and have your eStore on it. Set the list price and start earning royalties. You can also choose Amazon Video On Demand™ as a sales channel when setting up your title to turn your film into a download. Definitely worth a try for short film makers who find it difficult to find a distribution channel.

Click here to setup a free Createspace account and start selling your film

Final Cut Pro X released

Apple has released Final Cut Pro X, the latest version of its professional video-editing software and one of the most popular programs for digital filmmaking.
Its actually been two days since FCP X was launched, and of course there’s been a strong buzz about it in the market. Video professionals were not only impressed with the new features, but with the new price too. Final Cut Pro X is available in the Mac App Store for $299.99. Compare that to 2009, when the fully loaded Final Cut Studio retailed for $999.99.

Final Cut Pro X is a big update for the powerful editing suite, in no small part because it is now (finally) built with 64-bit support. That means that the app will be able to take advantage of the additional memory space in Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming Mac OS X Lion.

Installing Final Cut Pro X
Since the only way to get Final Cut Pro X is through the Mac App Store, installation is easy: You just click "Buy" in the store, and the app's icon appears in your Finder, ready to run. You'll be able to install it on five Macs, and you receive updates automatically. The program requires at least a Core 2 Duo-based Mac running Snow Leopard, a decent video processor, 2.4GB of disk space, and 2GB RAM (4GB recommended).

The big new feature is called the Magnetic Timeline, which takes a trackless approach to editing. Like Adobe, Apple has also put a lot of effort into what it calls Content Auto-Analysis, which is another way of saying that the software uses meta-tags to better organize and import content, based on shot type, media format and other information.

Check out this video Apple released to show off the new features in Final Cut Pro X: