Ok… so… ya. We haven’t made a blog post in MONTHS. That is ridiculous and inexcusable. We have been VERY VERY busy.

For now we have finished work on our feature-length script Lost Case.We have entered it into the BlueCat Screenplay competition, received some good feedback on it and have decided to put it on the back-burner for now.

We are now working on a project we have been tinkering with for years. It is a TV Comedy series that we may possibly produce ourselves for the web.

We will be attending the 2010 Banff World Television Festival in June, but we aren’t going to be pushing the project so hard on people. We will take a more laid-back approach and just network, learn, relax and possibly try and find some production partners. This year Banff is combined with the annual NextMedia festival, which is somewhat exciting. The world of “pictures” is moving to the Internet, it seems. A lot of the big players are moving into the web world right now. We’ll hopefully also get to meet some celebrities who will be there such as Ricky Gervais and none other than William Shatner himself! We’re very excited.

So there may be a lot of mystery surrounding our new project, but we will make an announcement shortly about the details of the project.

Sorry again for the lack of posts. Things should be picking-up again in the Broken Forty world.

Happy New Year everybody!

I found a really cool video today. It is a song and music video constructed entirely by splicing together sounds from the movie Terminator 2. For those who don’t know, T2 is probably my favourite movie of all time.

…is not a problem!

Thanks to technology, the screenwriter no longer has to worry about writing scenes that would be prohibitively expensive to film. Well, they do still have to worry about the cost, but locations themselves can be created out of thin air thanks to amazing advances in computer composite-imaging technology. Here is an example of such scenes that were built almost entirely digitally. The video is from Stargate Studios (LA, Vancouver).

This technique is called a “Virtual Backlot.”

I found a new website today called movieclips.com. This could be good.

As I read in this quotd article, a website was able to acquire the licenses for 12,000 movie clips to be streamed and shared in high-quality over the internet. These are all sorts of movies from all sorts of studios in one spot.

Now… I know this isn’t the newest idea around. Plenty of sites like YouTube, Vimeo and others have these movie clips on them. Movieclips.com offers them legally.

There are lots of other good clips on the site too. Check it out! Even though there are “only” 12,000 right now, they are all free to watch and share. This is only a ‘beta’ site. So expect more clips soon if this project takes off.

…after making a killing with Paranormal Activity.

Well, well, well. Finally some good news from one of the big studios.

Thanks to the amazing $100 Million domestic box-office success of Paranormal Activity, which was originally made for $15,000 US, Paramount has unleashed a plan to produce between 10-20 sub-$100,000 films a year with possibility of theatrical release for some of them.

This opens up an outlet for new-comers to the industry to break-in and actually get their film made. In a world where a $1 Million production is considered low-budget, it is often impoissible for an aspiring writer to convince a studio that there is financial benefit in producing their script. With this new relevation from Paramount, aimed at producing films from both established and newbie writers, I think we might see a new era of cinema coming where STORY actually matters more than ‘mass-marketability.’

There is hope!

Source: Variety