Director Steven Soderbergh: The State of Cinema
“When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience was like, trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a thrown baseball but with another thrown baseball.
That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing—I can tell: it’s not going to happen, I’m not going to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream: “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?”
But I didn’t do that. [laughter] I just sat there, and I smiled.”
Get the full transcript here:
http://blog.sffs.org/home/2013/4/steven-soderbergh-the-state-of-cinema-video-transcripthtml
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Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genres best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.
Will Smith, actor (and sometimes singer), has a profoundly simple formula for his personal success. Mr. Smith on his approach:
“My experiences with violence in schools still echo throughout my life but standing to face the problem has helped me in immeasurable ways… Schools and families are in desperate need of proper tools to confront this problem. We can give them a starting point… A message that will have a far reaching and long lasting effect in confronting bullying.” For more on 
I ran aground watching this little nugget of 
For the most part, you’ll be able to tell just by feel as to what compliments a particular voice-over – if it doesn’t sound quite right, or obscures the narration, adjust the levels first of all to rule out any volume issues. If that fails, swap out the music for something radically different and see if you can identify the exact reason as to why the first selection didn’t work. Chances are it’s either an issue with the key or tone of the song, or the EQs clash.
… Particularly on YouTube. One thing we’ve noticed over the past couple of years is the powers that be have gotten very hot on copyright protection, so much so there are many complaints about false positive flagging and blocking of videos which demonstrably don’t have any copyright issues.
“The effect is accomplished by cutting out parts of the image, stacking in layers and then using a software such as Adobe After Effects to animate. Sounds simple, but for those that have done it you realize the amount of time and work that goes into creating these videos and will be able to appreciate this one even more. Animator Joe Fellows used the puppet-warp tool in combination with the parallax effect to create a faux slow-motion effect all done with still image photographs.”
