Shooting People: Film Of The Month Competition

With all the advances in online distribution for short-filmmakers there seem to be more short-films out there than ever before. But this does create a problem; as good as YouTube and Vimeo are at hosting films, they’re not that great at filtering the gold from the mud. Any ‘best short-film’ index on these sites is going to be pretty static, with older posted films holding the top spots for a long time making it hard for good new shorts to get any recognition. What’s more, many of those responsible for determining what’s the best may not have much of an appreciation for the short-film format, and seeing as short-films so often take risks and dare to experiment, many good, but obtuse, films will get overlooked. Shooting People’s re-launched Film of the Month competition aims to address this.

The idea is fairly simple; members of the Shooting People network post their films on www.shootingpeople.org to watch, other members vote on them (non-members are free to watch the films but can’t vote), this creates a short-list of 5 member-voted films, to which 5 more “wildcard” films are added by Shooting People staff and friends of the site. This short-list of 10 then goes before a guest judge who picks a top 3 and an eventual winner. The advantage of this system is that the voters, being members of the site, know about and understand short-film (well, in theory anyway), and the monthly format of the top 10 means new films can get exposure.

This month’s judge (who joins a very illustrious list of past Film of the Month judges, which includes, Matt Groening, Nick Cave, Danny Boyle, John Waters and Miranda July)  is Mark Cousins, the man responsible for the recent, brilliant, The Story of Film: An Odyssey. So to see what Mr Cousins will have to choose from, and make up your own mind about this month’s “10 best”, check out the Shooting People site.

Some more about the films on the leaderboard, and a run down of the new, improved competition:

http://shootingpeople.org/blog/2012/02/film-of-the-month-final-round-take-1/

This was written by David Price. You can watch some of his films made with CarsonCoePrice Films here:
http://dccpfilm.tumblr.com/tagged/dccpshorts

Coming Soon: Issue 4!

The underlings have been hard at work at Gorilla Film Magazine, not only performing at the Student Film Festival but also keeping the website full of short film reviews and interesting articles. So far It’s been a very busy 2012, but there’s no time to take a break!

Get back to work, scum!

The time has finally come to start work on Issue 4, also known as “the one you’re going to pay for”. Why? Because we gotta eat too, y’know! We can’t afford to keep printing Gorilla Film Magazine without a little help from the consumers, so we’re working on getting our publication in shops. The truth is, either we can scrape enough money together to go to print, or Gorilla Film Magazine falls apart like a wet cake.

All of our work is designed by one man, a guy called Lee Yan Chak (Jack the Rabbit) who gets three meals of oats and water every day, so really has no right to complain. Last time we checked to see how he’s getting on designing the cover for issue 4, he sent us this…

You don’t think we’re working him too hard do you?

Food for Thought and Some Optimistic Conjecture

Recently I was struck by the sheer number of ‘good’/'artsy’/'pretentious’/'indie’ films playing at the cinemas around London. The listings were made up of smaller budget non-blockbuster releases; We Need to Talk About Kevin, Drive, Melancholia, Tyrannosaur and trailers for the now released The Artist. As a PPE graduate with too much time on his hands this got me to thinking about a number of things that I have been aware of and considering for some time. Tentatively, and with more than a pinch of optimism, it strikes me that there are a number of good reasons why we should think that this is a sign of things to come.

Hollywood currently generates most of its revenue from its foreign, and not its domestic market. This has led to a decline in the number of relatively cheap romantic comedies, ‘bromances’ and other films of the like being produced. Mostly this is due to them being relatively unpopular, or at least much riskier bets, in places like China, Russia and other big emerging markets. In their place major Hollywood studios have instead focused of producing only one or two $100/200m plus budget releases a year. These action and special effects heavy spectaculars, backed by massive advertising budgets and rapid release of DVD’s, BluRay and other merchandise, translate well across boarders and consistently do well at the box office, turning big profits. The most obvious recent example of this being Avatar and the Harry Potter franchise (‘The Deathly Hallows’ had a budget of $250m for the two parts combined) although the trend is also present in Hollywood’s appetite for more traditional fantasy releases like the Narnia franchise, The Golden Compass (I know it did badly) and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. This is a trend that I don’t see changing any time soon and is also hopefully one that will continue to leave space on mainstream cinema listings for more independent /character driven films.

There is also a second force at play here. Not only is it the case that the listings have more space for films other than blockbusters, but also that consumers are able to satisfy their demand for glitzy action epics by substituting computer games for cinema tickets. It is no secret that Hollywood has been losing ground to the computer game industry.

Computer games kind of have blockbuster escapism covered

Over the last decade it is a market that has grown exponentially with games like Modern Warfare 3 taking $750m in its first five days as compared to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows which took $169m in its first weekend. Games like Modern Warfare 3 or the recently released and heavily hyped Skyrim, provide viable substitutes for people looking to satisfy there desire for fantasy adventures, pornographic violence and battlefield action in a manner that is more cost effective than paying for a cinema ticket to Immortals, Transformers or Thor.

Looking forward into this year and beyond, maybe we can quietly hope that, if current trends continue, those of us of a more sensitive nature and an aversion to the usual ‘play it safe’ clichéd Hollywood fare will have a lot more opportunities to sit down and enjoy the silver screen.

This was written by Alex Megone.