Metro Magazine articles from June 2004

Metro Magazine archives from June 2004

New Funding Guidelines for Film and TV Production
June 22, 2004... Six months of extensive industry consultation have culminated in the announcement of dramatic changes to the funding structures for Australia's major film and television production investment body, Film Finance Corporation Australia. The new...

Film and TV Associations Still Hoping for FTA Reprieve
June 22, 2004... Since the Prime Minister and the US President signed the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the USA in May, the text of the treaty cannot be changed. However, a number of legislative and regulatory amendments are required for the FTA to...

Office of the United States Trade Representative, 8 February 2004
June 22, 2004... The Australian film and television industry organizations worked very hard to limit what the Australian government gave away in the FTA, but they now believe that the levels of Australian content in emerging media systems will be much lower than...

Welcome Workshop on Archive Debate
June 22, 2004... The Friends of the National Film and Sound Archive are planning a workshop/ conference in July, to bring together people and groups who are interested in and affected by the incorporation of the National Film and Sound Archive (ScreenSound...

Homeless, Aimless: Alkinos Tsilimidos' Tom White
June 22, 2004... Tom White is the sort of film that's like brussels sprouts: you don't really enjoy it, but you know it's sup posed to be good for you. We've all sat through films like these, vaguely hoping that our attendance will be enough to help someone else...

Saskia & Hutch: Doggy-Style: The Year Was 1986 and Writer/director Richard Lowenstein's Second Feature, 'Dogs in Space' Was Going to Be Huge
June 22, 2004... He'd won critical acclaim for his student documentary Evictions, had been to Cannes with his first feature, Strikebound, and now Dogs was testing well where the money was, in the youth market. And so, in a unprecedented move the Hoyts cinema...

'Strange Bedfellows': Straight Eye for the Queer Guys
June 22, 2004... Of all the moments that linger after watching Strange Bedfellows, the most memorable is that of Paul Hogan watching wistfully from the window of a projectionist's booth as a film unfurls in his cinema. It's probably not supposed to be as...

A Conversation with Dean Murphy: No Pretension Whatsoever
June 22, 2004... Dean Murphy is a positive guy, but he certainly doesn't have his head in the clouds. As the director of the latest vehicle to star Paul Hogan, he's well aware of the probable reception that awaits his film Strange Bedfellows, but he's also smart...

Sam Neill: Serves Up Dry Wit and Chilling Ghost Stories
June 22, 2004... When female directors are fishing around for names to play the man who their female heroine is itching to give the flick, Sam Neill's face comes to mind. A curious state of affairs you might think. Handsome, intelligent, debonair, sophisticated:...

Elizabeth's Costumes: The Power of Spectacle or Spectacle of Power?
June 22, 2004... When it was released in Australia, the film Elizabeth (Shekhar Kapur, 1998) provoked, comment about its 'post-colonial nature. Ruth Hessey, for example, in her Sydney Morning Herald piece, wrote of the 'exquisitely subversive approach' of the...

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
June 22, 2004... Like great artists or thinkers, great historians are biological freaks: they father the time that has fathered them. SIEGFRIED. KRACAUER (1) We make a little history, baby, every time you come around. NICK CAVE (2) Errol Morris's...

Soundhouse[TM]: Music & Multimedia Technology Studios Professional Development & Workshops 2004
June 22, 2004... Sound House at the PowerHouse Museum, Sydney Full Day Workshops--Digital Video Editing 21 October or 3 November, Reading Movies-Creating and Interpreting Film as Text 11 August Half Day Workshops--Film as Text 4 June, Intro to Computer...

Bollywood Re-Invented? Kissing, Zombies and Aliens
June 22, 2004... Hrithic 'Bollywood Boy' Roshan, leather-clad and hair slicked, swaggers through London accompanied by an iconic bombardment of the colonial and trans-national. The arches of Westminster, Big Ben and London Bridge are merged with the equally...

Middle East Spices Up MIFF
June 22, 2004... THIS YEAR'S MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL IS ENTHUSIASTICALLY EMBRACING MIDDLE EASTERN FILMS. CYNTHIA KARENA TALK TO JAMES HEWISON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE FESTIVAL. Banish thoughts of a dry festival purely for cinephiles--this...

Australian International Documentary Conference 2004
June 22, 2004... Hundreds of directors, producers, distributors, commissioners and others from all corners of the documentary industry, from all corners of the world, descended on Fremantle, Western Australia for this year's Australian International Documentary...

State of Bliss: Australian Actor Ian Bliss Has a Distinctive Face That Has Been Seen in Homegrown Film Productions Such as Siam Sunset (John Poison, 1999) and the Bank (Robert Connolly, 2001)
June 22, 2004... But Bliss really made a name for himself walking in another man's shoes, when he took on the challenge of playing Bane, a man possessed by Hugo Weaving's infamous Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded (Andy Wachowski, Larry Wachowski, 2003) and The...

A Short History of the World: (As It Applies to Video Editing)
June 22, 2004... After recent discussions with a few other old timers I decided to write this highly biased potted history of the mechanics of video editing as I have experienced it in my career. No responsibility is accepted for any errors of fact, since we are...

Editing
June 22, 2004... This special feature section examines the contribution of editing to the process of filmmaking. From the earliest editing innovations--Georges Melies' turn of the century illusionist effects and Edwin. S. Porter's crosscutting in The Great Train...

Technological Change in the Postproduction Film Industry: A Victorian Case Study
June 22, 2004... The first and last stages el filmmaking--production and projection--remain relatively unchanged, but computerization (through digitalization) has radically transformed film and sound editing. The aim here is to examine some of the effects of...

Everything Is Editing: Bill Russo on Blue Murder, Intuition, and That Small Dark Room
June 22, 2004... At the beginning of his short course, 'The Art of Editing', Bill Russo asks the class a deceptively simple question: 'Who does the editor work for?' 'The director?' one student calls out 'The audience!' volunteers another, 'The executive...

Brutality and Beauty
June 22, 2004... Ken Sallows has edited many of Australia's most renowned films, including Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000), Crackerjack (Paul Maloney, 2002), and Gettin' Square (Jonathan Teplitzky, 2003). His latest work is Tom White from director Alkinos...

Trust Me-I'm an Editor!
June 22, 2004... TRUST: To have faith or confidence: to place reliance; to confide Oxford English Dictionary ... so I guess in that process as an editor, she trusted me to know what was needed and how to do it, (1) The key ingredient in the relationship...

The Rhythm of Thinking: Speculations on How an Editor Shapes the Rhythms of a Film
June 22, 2004... Making time, sculpting in time (1), creating, orchestrating or conducting rhythm. How does an editor make decisions about where and when to cut in order to make a film 'feel' right? When asked, most editors will answer: 'by intuition' or 'you...

Wrap up.(St Kilda Film Festival 2004)(Brief Article)
June 22, 2004... Usually the crowds are there, for Opening Night only; however, this audiences in most sessions seemed to be bigger. Interestingly, before the success of the documentary Super Size Me, and Michael Moore's recent Cannes win with Fahrenheit...

Creative Energy: The Vibrancy of the St Kilda Film Festival
June 22, 2004... Cynthia Karena talks to Festival Director Paul Harris and judge, Glendyn Ivan for an insider's look at one of Australia's great film festivals. I always wonder why the St Kilda Film Festival is so popular, given that there are so many other...

Going It Alone: Making Low Budget Feature Films without Pre-Sales
June 22, 2004... You've made a few shorts and feel it's time to move on to a feature film After a year or two of hard work, you save what you believe is a brilliant screenplay The next step is to make it and get it on the screen. You have two basic...

Visual culture: studies in film & TV, fashion & advertising, new media & cyberculture, art, architecture & video production.(School Of Literary, Visual & Performance Studies)
June 22, 2004... What is Visual Culture? Visual culture is a multi-disciplinary field which incorporates film, television, visual arts, advertising, the built environment, and new digital and electronic forms of representation. Visual culture is associated...

The Art of Walking Backwards: How to Make a Documentary for Nz$12,000; an Account of the Journey of Film Student and First-Time Documentary Maker, Sandor Lau, Who Walked 500km from Auckland to Cape Reinga, New Zealand's Spiritual Tip, to Make His Documentary, Behaviours of the Backpacker
June 22, 2004... A Maori proverb says you spend our life walking backwards because you can see the past but not the future--that's why we trip. The journey to make Behaviours of the Backpacker is full of stumbling blocks--especially on such a small budget. But...

(Pan-)Animal Magics: Ecofeminist Ethics and Aesthetics in the Web
June 22, 2004... The 1990s has often been dubbed 'The Decade of the Environment'. Pollution, deforestation and desertification, ozone destruction, endangerment of species of animals and wildlife, vanishing wildernesses, and energy conservation are some of the...

Gearing Up for Digital Cinema in Australia: Despite Numerous International Developments, There Has Been Little Commentary concerning How the Australian Film Industry Perceives the Future of Digital Cinema in This Country
June 22, 2004... Digital cinema is the replacement of 35mm celluloid film with digital files that are shown on special high-resolution video projectors in cinemas. These files can be sent to theatres in the form of digital tapes or disc, by fibre-optic cable or...

Innovating the Digital: Universities, Industry and Research Come Together for Little Girl Blue
June 22, 2004... A recent research project in Switzerland, investigating the relationship between innovation and film production, demonstrates that government assisted research can catalyse the development of local industries, progress the development of...

Jon Hewitt on 'Bloodlust': 'Fuck Film. Digital Is Where It's At.'
June 22, 2004... Before 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (Robert Rodriguez, 2003), Dogme95 and the Star Wars prequels (George Lucas), before digital and HD became a hip and viable choice for filmmakers, there was an Australian...

True Crime
June 22, 2004... We are not selling hope audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions--bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even--do to individuals. It...

Spy-Fi and Soap Opera
June 22, 2004... You can be sure you're onto a good thing when a show's creator describes it as 'ludicrous', and JJ Abrams' Alias certainly doesn't disappoint. It's unashamedly bubblegum, but like its forerunner Buffy, you can sense the writers realizing what...

Loving the Lie: The West Wing
June 22, 2004... The West Wing is the work of gods. Every week I'm sure that it must stumble and reveal itself as the work of mortals after all, but somehow it never does. The writing is whip-smart, doing all the things that you would have sworn could never be...

Newlyweds: Off-Key and Offbeat
June 22, 2004... You may remember Jessica Simpson as 'the other virgin' who burst onto the pop music scene around the same time as Britney Spears. However, unlike Britney, it seems that Jessica was able to have the white wedding, with ex-98 Degrees member, Nick...

Screentech
June 22, 2004... Every year there comes a time, around April, that my Inbox (both virtual and physical) fills to over flowing, stuffed with news of new technology, new media tools, new cameras, new software. Of course, most of what I'll dig out of my Inbox I...

Streaming Video
June 22, 2004... Hosting your films online is a fantastic way to gain exposure to an international audience. However, we all know how painful it is to download small files on a 56k connection, let alone entire films. By offering a streamed video file you can...

Various
June 22, 2004... Combustion 3.0 Mac and PC. www.discreet.com From Videobytes: www.videobytes.com.au/ (61) 3 9348 9177 241 Peel Street, North Melbourne Victoria, Australia 3051 Price Inc. GST: $1563.00 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS. Apple Macintosh: Power Mac G4,...

Apple Computer Australia
June 22, 2004... Case study From Nashville to Byron Bay, SAE Institute engineers audio magic with Apple creative technologies: Global empire of audio engineering colleges extends its Mac investment as the world's largest recording studio opens its doors to...

Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Cinema.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... WILLIAM VAN DER HEIDE MALAYSIAN CINEMA, ASIAN FILM: BORDER CROSSINGS AND NATIONAL CINEMA University of Amsterdam Press, Amsterdam, 2002. This book provides an important introduction to a little-seen regional cinema. At the same...

The Encyclopedia Of British Film.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... BRIAN MCFARLANE (ED.) THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF BRITISH FILM Methuen and BFI, London, 2003. 'This is a book I've been waiting for all my life', says film critic Philip French in his enthusiastic preface to The Encyclopedia of British...

New German Cinema: Images of a Generation.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... JULIA KNIGHT NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Wallflower, London, 2004. On the back cover of this book, Wallflower Press's 'Short Cuts' series describes itself as: '... specifically designed for building an...

Yash Chopra.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... RACHEL DWYER YASH CHOPRA BFI, London, 2002. It isn't necessary to have read Rachel Dwyer's All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India (Cassell, London 2000) before reading her Yash Chopra, but...

Scorsese's Men: Melancholia And The Mob.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Pluto Press, Melbourne, 2004. When Newland Archer walks away from the little square in Paris without going up to see Ellen Olenska again after many years, in the last sequence of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, he is encapsulating a...

Jean-Pierre Melville: An American In Paris.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... British Film Institute, London, 2003 To a great degree film studies emerged as a legitimate academic field by grappling with the problematic question of the relationship between the productive force of the individual artist and the larger...

Film Editing: The Art Of The Expressive.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Wallflower Press, London, 2003 VALERIE ORPEN FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Wallflower Press, London, 2003. KAREL REISZ & GAVIN MILLAR THE TECHNIQUE OF FILM EDITING 2nd Ed., Focal Press, 2003. KEN...

Script Partners: What Makes Film And TV Writing Teams Work.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... SCRIPT PARTNERS: WHAT MAKES FILM AND TV WRITING TEAMS WORK Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City, 2002 'Collaboration is a merger of the aesthetic of two different people', says Nicholas Kazan, who wrote Matilda with his wife, Robin...

How To Make Great Short Feature Films: The Making Of Ghosthunter.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... HOW TO MAKE GREAT SHROT FEATURE FILMS: THE MAKING OF GHOSTHUNTER Focal Press, Oxford, 2001 This book attempts to fill a niche in an already crowded marketplace of filmmaking manuals--that of the short film. The term, short feature...

Grave Of The Fireflies.(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2004... GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES Isao Takahata (d), Akiyuki Nosaka (w), Jap, 1988, 88 minutes, Rated M15. In English and Japanese (with subtitles). DVD FEATURES INCLUDE: Interviews with director Takahata and author Nosaka, and a 'Historical...

Matrix Revolutions.(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2004... MATRIX REVOLUTIONS Andy and Larry Wachowski (w/d), US/ Aus, 2003, 124 Minutes, Rated M15. ACTORS INCLUDE: Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Ann Moss, Hugo Weaving, Jada Pinkett Smith. DVD FEATURES INCLUDE: Making of Features,...

Lost In Translation.(Video Recording Review)
June 22, 2004... LOST IN TRANSLATION Sofia Coppola (w/d), US, 2003, 97 Minutes, Rated PG. ACTORS INCLUDE: Bill Murray, Scarlet Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Anna Faris. DVD FEATURES INCLUDE: 'A Conversation with Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola', 'Lost On...

Peter Pan
June 22, 2004... PETER PAN P.J. Hogan (d), P.J. Hogan and Michael Goldenberg (w), Aus, 2003, 109 Minutes, Rated PG. ACTORS INCLUDE: Rachel Hurd-Wood, Jeremy Sumpter, Jason Isaacs, Olivia Williams, Lynn Redgrave. DVD FEATURES INCLUDE: Deleted Scene and...