Archive for the 'Video' Category

• e  19 Upon further reflection, it’s a bit overused

  Another montage of movie tropes, this one involving medicine cabinet mirrors and their kin.

• e  34 Why the Netflix/WB deal isn’t a bad thing

  Netflix announced that it wouldn’t be shipping new releases from Warner Bros. until 28 days after street date.

• e  59 When characters say the name of the movie

  This handy montage might make you think twice about letting one of your characters use the title of the movie in dialogue.

• e  9 Finding movies online, legally

  SpeedCine indexes movies available through iTunes, Crackle, Hulu and Amazon VOD, letting you know where you can find any given title

• e  56 “No signal” is the new air duct

  This compilation clip demonstrates what a hoary cliché it has become to explain why movie characters can’t use their cell phones.

• e  78 Habits, heavy lifting, and the possibility of suck

  MakingOf has part two of my interview up on the site, in which I talk about work habits, writer’s block and 20-minute timers.

• e  10 On adaptations and picking projects

  MakingOf has an interview up with me in which I talk a bit about my writing process, the challenge of adaptations, and why one’s career is often as much about the scripts you didn’t write.

• e  20 Leftover questions

  Some readers had questions they didn’t get to ask on the call-in show last night, so I answered them this morning.

• e  12 Video from Rancho Mirage Q&A

  Synthian Sharp taped my Q&A in Rancho Mirage, and has it available on Vimeo.

• e  46 Inspiration, creativity and showing up

  Writer Elizabeth Gilbert discussing healthier ways to look at the creative process.

• e  50 Writing better action

  A new screencast (scriptcast?) on writing action beats.

• e  20 Not great news at Blockbuster

  They filed with SEC, noting “substantial doubt” about their ability to continue.

• e  15 Gender-specific douchery

  We rarely refer to women as assholes.

• e  114 Writing better scene description

  A YouTube lesson on making more-readable scene description.

• e  30 Redbox, video and economics

  An article about Redbox, whose kiosks rent DVDs for a dollar a day, isn’t quite the beacon of doom it’s made out to be.

• e  18 Let the right subtitles in

  Changing the subtitles for Let The Right One pissed off a lot of fans.

• e  16 Cams, rips and release dates

  I’ve been asking around to find more information about studios’ anti-piracy efforts.

• e  8 10 Sundance shorts on iTunes

  Ten of the 80 short films featured this week at the Sundance Film Festival are available free on iTunes until January 25th. It’s a great way to see some work you’d almost certainly never catch.

  Visit itunes.com/Sundance to check out trailers and download. (Link opens in iTunes store.)

  I’m happy to see shorts featured this way, and [...]

• e  36 The Visitor

  On Wednesday morning, we came into the kitchen to find an orange slice on the stove and a tomato that seemed to have exploded. This was obviously troubling.

  My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to [...]

• e  125 The Remnants, in full

  I showed a snippet back in October, but here is the full web pilot I shot during the strike. If you click through to Vimeo, you can see it in full-screen HD.1

  For the past few months, the pilot has been shopped around to advertisers and other possible sponsors, but given the economy and my schedule, [...]

• e  36 iMovie 09: Almost certainly maddening

  Among the products Apple announced today is iMovie 09, an update to their entry-level video editor that I currently find completely unusable. They have demo videos up showing some of the new features, which range from very helpful (stabilization) to fairly gimmicky (the animated maps).

  What’s most clear, however, is that they’re sticking with the bizarre [...]

• e  4 The Nines on Netflix

  Several readers wrote in this morning to point out that The Nines is suddenly now available on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” feature. If you have a Netflix account, that means free streaming in roughly two clicks.

  I’m not sure how the Netflix streaming gets accounted for in terms of residuals, but I’m glad to see another legal [...]

• e  37 Charlie Brown, advertising, and whatever comes after postmodernism

  What a mash-up indicates about genres and modern storytelling.

• e  43 VHS, RIP

  Thanks and good riddance.

• e  29 Go on Hulu

  Online video service Hulu is now featuring my first movie, Go. If you haven’t seen it — and you live in U.S., and you’re over 17 — it’s worth a look.

• e  9 Insomnia 2008

  I’m going to be one of the judges for the 2008 Insomnia Film Festival, an Apple-sponsored competition for U.S. high school and college students. Entrants get 24 hours to write, produce, edit, score and deliver a three-minute short film incorporating specific elements they only announce on the day.

  The competition begins at 9:00 a.m. on [...]

• e  48 The triumph of product integration

  The brand to content relationship has come full circle.

• e  31 Strike, day 25

  I nearly went over to Burbank to join colleagues at the Gay Gate (NBC), but decided to stay local at Paramount. Irene, a fixture on the 5:30 a.m. shift, pointed out that the key to passing three hours is to have at least two in-depth conversations. As a group, we never reached consensus on [...]

• e  7 Not The Daily Show

  But really, quite a bit like it.

• e  11 The Office is closed

  Video courtesy of THE OFFICE writers.

• e  14 Script Cops

  Video link.

• e  14 The Kingdom opening titles

  The opening title sequence for The Kingdom is spectacular, presenting a heroic amount of backstory.

• e  26 2007 Insomnia Film Festival

  Advice for hasty filmmakers.

• e  29 Trailer Competition: The Winners

  We had 57 official entries. That’s a lot, and it’s about the most I could handle without my eyeballs exploding.1 I’m happy to report that many of the entries were quite good, and it was genuinely a pleasure to watch them. Most of them.

  I feel like I should pad this opening bit with [...]

• e  8 Trailer competition judging in progress

  Wow, that’s a lot of entries. I’ll be announcing the winners tomorrow morning.

  Erik Beeson, who so generously helped with the hosting and torrenting, sent along stats:

  total torrent file downloads for both torrents combined: 808 (includes search engine crawlers) dv torrent: 162 completed downloads mpeg4 torrent: 79 completed downloads mpeg4.zip: 242 (the direct download) total completed (torrents+direct): 483

  Thanks [...]

• e  21 Trailer competition FAQ

  What should the tone of the trailer be?

  Whatever you prefer. It can be funny, scary, dramatic or simply weird.

  How long should the trailer be?

  Most trailers are between one and three minutes, but if you feel like cutting a 30-second spot, or a half hour masterpiece, go for it. I reserve the right to [...]

• e  22 Trailer competition details

  Call in sick, ignore your loved ones, and put on a pot of coffee: the trailer competition for The Nines begins today.

  The delay in staging the competition has probably led to some over-thinking: What about people who haven’t seen the movie? What about film school students? What about people who are [...]

• e  13 Trailer competition, teaser

  Tomorrow, full details of the long-gestating trailer competition will be announced here (and at the lookforthenines site). You’ll have two versions of footage to choose from: DV and MPEG-4. The DV is big and beautiful. The MPEG-4 is small and nimble — and not as bad as you’d think.

  To get ready, Erik Beeson [...]

• e  20 The Nines trailer, HD

  The super-deluxe HD version of the trailer is now up at Apple. Me like.

  Check it out.

  It’s not showing up on AppleTV yet, for whatever reason. I don’t know what subset makes it through, but I presume it’s coming at some point.

• e  12 Trailer competition, second update

  Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.)

  We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re [...]

• e  62 The trailer for The Nines

  It’s up. IGN has an exclusive first look. Stop reading and…

  Click Here

  Then come back and tell us what you thought. Or better yet, check out the Forum at lookforthenines.com.

  Update

  There’s a YouTube version as well. Not as big or sharp, but handier.

• e  11 Location scouting vs. reality

  Looking through my YouTube account, I realized that I’d actually posted (and blogged about) our location scouting footage more than a year ago, shortly after we’d wrapped shooting.

  I thought I’d go back and grab screencaps from the movie to show you what some of these places looked like as shot. (The following are in [...]

• e  11 Three from The Nines

  In preparation for the trailer competition, I wanted to see how footage from the movie would hold up when subjected to the Flash compression of YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. So I uploaded three clips in various formats to experiment.

  The results? Two clips look surprisingly great. The third looks like ass.

  The difference [...]

• e  1 The virtues of technology failure

  I brought my videocamera with me to Malawi, only to discover upon unpacking it that the main sensor was shot: it could record sound, but not video. In retrospect, this was a fortuitous failure.

  Looking at things through a lens–or on a tiny flip-out monitor–creates a layer of distance, of safety. On a subconscious level, it [...]

• e  7 I talk with my hands

  Video links explaining how film and television writers should approach promoting themselves and their work through the media.

• e  31 Hello, Residuals

  How I earned $86.50 a second.

• e  14 A Thousand Roads lead to this

  About a year ago, I took a Final Cut Pro class at UCLA Extension. It was a mixed success. I already knew too much for a beginner class, but wasn’t proficient enough for a more advanced session. So I ended up having a lot of extra time to fiddle around with the [...]