Report

Stephen Talbot tunes in to world music

Should Stephen Talbot be worried? He left PBS’s Frontline World, where he was a series editor and senior producer, to form Talbot Players and create and develop original media properties, including a new globe-trotting television series about world music dubbed Sound Tracks: Music Without Borders. For Talbot, it’s the kind of fantasy project he has been wanting to do for a long time. When we sat down in North Beach’s Cafe Zoetrope recently to discuss the project, Talbot had a pilot just about wrapped up and was getting ready to submit it to the heads at PBS.

topics: bay area, documentary, music, public television, tv, world cinema

Report

Thoughts on the aughts: best/worst trends of the year and decade

A decade as odd as this one, with George Bush and Barack Obama as its bookends, deserves to be examined. While the U.S. moved from rebuilding decimated skyscrapers to the rebuilding of an entire economy, film moved from the multiplex to the mailbox to the cell phone. But did the pictures really get small? We tried to find out by surveying Bay Area film-industry professionals as well as everyday fans on the trends that moved them. We found love for animation and hate for the ascendancy of the first-person narrator-star in documentary films. We saw pleas for more collaboration and less ego. We encountered disdain for CGI and hope for independent exhibitors and filmmakers. The comments below were selected from many we received; needless to say, we couldn’t publish everything. If you feel we missed anything in particular, we encourage you to issue a few opinions of your own in the "comments" box at story’s end.

topics: activism, actors, animation, bay area, cinephiles, critics, critics year end polls, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary film, drama, environmental films, gay lesbian cinema, genre films, tv, world cinema, youth

The 6th Screen

Coming around to "convergence"

There is something in the very thought of AV cables that fills most people with dread, and a small few others with child-like joy. A few beers into Thanksgiving I looked over to see my cousin Tom pointing excitedly around his home entertainment system, and when he stepped aside I saw a Dell computer shoved in there on its side. Tom does not work in technology—he’s a specialized registered nurse. And he’s not alone, as more and more people make the connection that TVs and projectors are, in their most basic form, just really big computer monitors. While set top box, Bluray and TV manufacturers are now offering a closed set of web enabled applications in an attempt to make themselves the gateway drug to getting internet on your TV, many others out there are doing it Tom’s way. That is, by just buying a couple of cables. The industry calls it convergence . But why do so many people have trouble with it?

topics: bay area, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, diy, internet, tv

Experience

After Sept. 11, 2001, a decade found its way

On September 13, 2001, I stood in a small park in downtown Toronto, shocked but confident, and spoke to Canadian television: From now on, movies would not be the same, Hollywood and indie films would change completely. Everything would be different. It had to be, didn’t it?

Well, no, as it turned out.

I was wrong.

[Editor’s note: SF360.org is devoting this and the following week to coverage of the year and decade in film.]

topics: activism, argentine cinema, audiences, authors, bay area, critics, critics year end polls, curators, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, directors, distributors, diy, documentary, drama, dramatic films, dvd, exhibitio, tv, web, women, women filmmakers, world cinema, youth

The 6th Screen

Coming around to "convergence"

There is something in the very thought of AV cables that fills most people with dread, and a small few others with child-like joy. A few beers into Thanksgiving I looked over to see my cousin Tom pointing excitedly around his home entertainment system, and when he stepped aside I saw a Dell computer shoved in there on its side. Tom does not work in technology—he’s a specialized registered nurse. And he’s not alone, as more and more people make the connection that TVs and projectors are, in their most basic form, just really big computer monitors. While set top box, Bluray and TV manufacturers are now offering a closed set of web enabled applications in an attempt to make themselves the gateway drug to getting internet on your TV, many others out there are doing it Tom’s way. That is, by just buying a couple of cables. The industry calls it convergence . But why do so many people have trouble with it?

topics: bay area, digital distribution, digital filmmaking, diy, internet, tv

The 6th Screen

Greenscreen envy

For anyone working in the Internet video industry, walking into the Revision 3 studio is a little like stumbling into Xanadu (Khubla Khan’s, not Robert Greenwald’s). Live switching in a control room that sports a massive mounted flatscreen HD monitor alongside a row of compositing systems, multicam teleprompter-assisted shoots in a spacious greenscreen studio, and a fridge full of beer?

Senior Director of Marketing and Product Management and iFanboy producer and co-host Ron Richards tries to tell me that it’s all on the cheap—the monitor replaces the traditional window into the studio and was a sweet deal, small prosumer HD cameras are mounted on low-tech wheelie dollies. But coming in from a traditional production environment where we’re still shooting on BetaSP and trying to dress an old studio, this looks like paradise. And these guys aren’t even going out to traditional TV broadcast. Instead they’re part of a new generation of pioneering Internet broadcasters.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, technology, the web, tv

The 6th Screen

Greenscreen envy

For anyone working in the Internet video industry, walking into the Revision 3 studio is a little like stumbling into Xanadu (Khubla Khan’s, not Robert Greenwald’s). Live switching in a control room that sports a massive mounted flatscreen HD monitor alongside a row of compositing systems, multicam teleprompter-assisted shoots in a spacious greenscreen studio, and a fridge full of beer?

Senior Director of Marketing and Product Management and iFanboy producer and co-host Ron Richards tries to tell me that it’s all on the cheap—the monitor replaces the traditional window into the studio and was a sweet deal, small prosumer HD cameras are mounted on low-tech wheelie dollies. But coming in from a traditional production environment where we’re still shooting on BetaSP and trying to dress an old studio, this looks like paradise. And these guys aren’t even going out to traditional TV broadcast. Instead they’re part of a new generation of pioneering Internet broadcasters.

topics: bay area, digital filmmaking, technology, the web, tv