Australian Screen Education articles from September 2006

Australian Screen Education archives from September 2006

Events.(Calendar)
September 22, 2006... GENERAL ACTIVITIES ATOM Film, Television and Multimedia Awards The ATOM Film, Television and Multimedia Awards recognize the achievements of Australian and New Zealand professionals, educators and students in thirty-two categories. ...

'Kokoda': lost and found on the trail: to Australians of a certain age, and even to some younger, the 'Kokoda trail' has acquired the sheen of legendary significance.(WAR AND MEMORY)(Critical essay)(Cover story)
September 22, 2006... IT is one of those place names that evokes not just a period--1942 and World War Two--or a location, but resonates also with a sense of threat to Australia's insular safety, and to its plain insularity. The other associated echo is that of 'the...

The Kokoda miracle: an interview with Director Alister Grierson: after years of watching American war films, and some damned good ones too, it's great to see an Australian war story on the big screen.(WAR AND MEMORY)(Interview)
September 22, 2006... KOKODA IS DIRECTOR Alister Grierson's first feature film, released nationwide on Anzac Day 2006. 'It's the seminal Australian story,' he says enthusiastically. 'It's so inspirational. It's such an addictive story--you read the books, get...

'The nightmare of their choice': photographic dispatches from the frontline: understanding the historical development of war photography from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the present-day era is inextricably entwined with mapping out the changes in the character of photographic representations from the front line over a period of 150 years.(WAR AND MEMORY)
September 22, 2006... SOCIAL conventions, cultural standards and ideological norms have played a major part since war photography's early days and the establishment of the new medium. The possibilities afforded by photography as a strategic weapon of war were...

Promoting tolerance and diversity: 'Paper Clips' and the memory of the holocaust: the recent months have witnessed premieres of films commemorating the victims of the holocaust and the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.(WAR AND MEMORY)
September 22, 2006... LAJOS Koltai's film debut, Fateless (2005), based on the autobiographical prose of the Hungarian Nobel Prize laureate, Imre Kertesz, emerged as an inspirational and revealing film, revisiting a tragic past. Kertesz's 1973 novel, Sortalansag,...

'I Know I'm Not Alone': a Middle-Eastern musical odyssey: why must I feel like this today? I'm a soldier but afraid sometimes to face the things that may block the sun from shinin' rays and fill my life with shades of grey but still I long to find a way so today I pray for grace ['Pray for Grace' by Michael Franti].(WAR AND MEMORY)
September 22, 2006... I Know I'm Not Alone (Michael Franti, 2005) is described in the film's publicity leaflet as 'a musician's journey through war in the Middle East'. Filmed in 2004 and directed by well-known musician, poet and human rights activist Michael...

Teaching football narratives: how to survive World Cup madness and keep talking about film.
September 22, 2006... The 2006 World Cup in Germany marks the moment when Australian international football will rejoin the great family of football nations on the international stage, after more than three decades on the outer. Sport and media commentators are...

Big screen, high hopes: bringing Australian film to school kids.(THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE)
September 22, 2006... Big Screen started its life as a Centenary of Federation project in 2001. It was meant to be a one-off regional touring film festival promoting Australian cinema, but was so successful that it has continued and to date we have presented over...

Reinventing the media classroom: arguments from both sides.(THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE)
September 22, 2006... Introduction THIS article is based on the keynote address I presented to the annual ATOM State Conference held in Melbourne in December 2005. The original brief was to expand on some personal thoughts about future possible directions in...

Is that a film in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me? The International Portable Film Festival.(THE MEDIUM AND THE MESSAGE)
September 22, 2006... HAVE portable device, will watch film. For us film addicts, portable film viewing is probably not going to help us. Imagine being able to watch films on the train home, on your lunch-break, wherever. The world's first International Portable...

Stories of Us: made with students, for students: Stories of Us is an unusual series of film resources for primary and secondary students.(A PRIMARY SCHOOL: TEACHER RESOURCE)
September 22, 2006... STUDENTS were involved in every stage of the development and production process. They collaborated with filmmakers in brainstorming the subjects, developing the characters and workshopping the scripts, and performed all key roles in a series of...

The Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: the beginning of this epic film story opens with dark, frightening scenes of London being bombed during World War Two.(A PRIMARY SCHOOL AND MIDDLE YEARS TEACHER RESOURCE)
September 22, 2006... QUICKLY, the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005) creates a sense of urgency in getting the four Pevensie children--Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy--out of London. With their father...

In search of Mozart: a conversation with writer-director Phil Grabsky: Phil Grabsky has been making documentaries for British television and the cinema since the early 1990s.(A MIDDLE YEARS TEACHER RESOURCE)(Interview)
September 22, 2006... HE ALSO DIRECTED the much-acclaimed feature documentaries Muhammad Ali: Through the Eyes of the World (2001) and The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan (2004). Grabsky and his production company, Seventh Art Productions, initiated these...

It's about time, it's about space: Crank TV: we've been waiting for it, and now internet TV has finally come to Australia. America and Europe have had broadband content, on-demand television for years, and now radio broadcaster Austereo bites the bullet and moves its music into the internet space.(A MIDDLE YEARS TEACHER RESOURCE)
September 22, 2006... AUSTRALIA'S first Internet music TV channel, Crank TV, went live in March. A joint venture between Austereo and music entertainment company Sony BMG, Crank TV provides two main content areas: on-demand music video clips, and Lowie's Crank TV--a...

Offerings to the God of Speed: The World's Fastest Indian: this New Zealand film tells the story of real-life Kiwi Burt Munro, and his obsession with entering his souped-up 1920 Indian Twin Scout motorcycle in the speed trials at Utah's Bonneville salt-flats.(A MIDDLE YEARS TEACHER RESOURCE)
September 22, 2006... DIRECTOR Roger Donaldson, who also wrote the screenplay, had already made a documentary, Offerings to the God of Speed, about Munro, and it would be fair to say that he was as obsessed with making a film about his hero as the latter was in...

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer: using a popular culture post-modern text in the classroom.(TEACHING MEDIA)
September 22, 2006... It's the last period on a Friday afternoon. The air is thick and your twenty-six Year 11 students sigh heavily as you explain, yet again, that Lady Macbeth cannot be said to be entirely responsible for the downfall of her husband. MOST...

Tabloid current affairs programs and the production of meaning: the contemporary media landscape is heavily saturated with competing segments of dissonant information.(TEACHING MEDIA)
September 22, 2006... On television, these segments come in an in credibly diverse range of forms, such as programs, advertisements, sound bites, voiceovers, written text and soundtracks. The primary motivating force behind each one of these forms is to capture and...

Harnessing the power of QuickTime: as online publishing systems become increasingly audiovisual (thanks to processor, bandwidth and software improvements), it's worth re-investigating just how well the QuickTime software architecture can be leveraged to enhance and smooth the production, presentation and delivery of online media.(TEACHING MEDIA)(Product/service evaluation)
September 22, 2006... What is QuickTime? AT FIRST GLANCE, QuickTime is a versatile media player, which recently received a decent performance boost and upgrade to Version 7 (as part of Apple's operating system upgrade to Tiger 10.4). he QuickTime player,...

'Look Both Ways': seeing is not necessarily believing.(fto 1931-2006 FILM AS TEXT)
September 22, 2006... YOU MAY LOOK TO THE RIGHT and look to the left but, in spite of what that old song tells us, that is no guarantee that you'll never get run over. There is too much about life that is sheerly arbitrary, too much that we can't be careful about,...

Sometimes you need the help of the universe: 'Run Lola Run'.(fto 1931-2006 FILM AS TEXT: FOCUS ON NARRATIVE)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... THERE IS NO GETTING AWAY from the fact that humans are a meaning-making species. While some insist that German writer-director Tom Tykwer intended the three outcomes of Lola's search for money to be random events illustrating the...

Women beware women: Zhang Yimous: 'Raise the Red Lantern'.(fto 1931-2006 FILM AS TEXT)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... CERTAINLY in the world of this film, women need to beware women, to paraphrase the title of Thomas Middleton's 1657 tragedy, and it is not altogether inapt to reference this Jacobean work in which women behave treacherously towards each other...

'Lantana': the threat and the attraction of the exotic.(fto 1931-2006 FILM AS TEXT)
September 22, 2006... WE CAN LEARN WHAT'S GOOD and what's bad, what's generous and unselfish, what's cruel and mean, from fiction... 'Thou shalt not' might reach the head, but it takes 'Once upon a time' to reach the heart. (Phillip Pullman, writer of children's...

Dancing in the dark: personality and politics in 'Cabaret'.(fto 1931-2006 FILM AS TEXT)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... ABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) there is an abrupt cut from revellers in the restaurant of Berlin's Hotel Kempinski to a corpse lying in a street. Police constables stand around and there are Communist party placards. A KPD flag...

Not at all easy: Granada TV's 'King Lear'.(fto 1931-2006 FILM AS TEXT)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2006... WHEN A LITERARY WORK is transferred to the screen, the most interesting and entertaining result often comes from an artistic concept that sees its primary aesthetic purpose as a response to, rather than a replication of, the original in a new...

Bearing fruit: Apple reinvents itself--again: the beginning of the year is generally a very quiet time for the creative technology sector with little new and exciting to report.(SCREENTECH)
September 22, 2006... THAT is of course except for that Californian fruit company whose annual holy day known as MacWorld is cleverly and strategically held this time of year in San Francisco. An event that attracts sycophantic faithful from all corners of the...

All together now: Adobe make all their children play happily together.(SCREENTECH)
September 22, 2006... IN the past five years we've seen all the major players in the software post-production sector build towards being able to offer creative users a complete and unified bundle of applications for end-to-end production. It's all very much like...

Adobe's Lightroom: no doubt deliberately timing the announcement to coincide with MacWorld, Adobe have announced the beta release of Lightroom, effectively a front-end importer/manager for pro digital photographers.(SCREENTECH)
September 22, 2006... FOR those who have been awake over the past couple of months, it will take less than three seconds to work out that Lightroom is vying for the same niche that Apple set their sights on with the recent release of Aperture. Lightroom (like...

HD in Da House: its hard not to feel a bit like a broken record reporting on new developments in media production technology, as once again I'm forced to put those two little letters that seem to have everyone so excited in front of everything I write: HD.(SCREENTECH)
September 22, 2006... OF course, I say that with the tone of someone who isn't that excited when, if truth be known, I've developed a mantra these days to recite to anyone who will listen: 'Once you go HD you never go back!' So what's new in HD land? Not a...

Non-linear thinking: Premiere gets some more of that ol' BlackMagic.(SCREENTECH)
September 22, 2006... THE media technology sector is a lot like a domino stack: when someone makes an announcement, everyone else moves in turn to follow suit. Sometimes it's to reinforce their own product, other times it's to get on the bandwagon with a popular...

Mergers and buyouts: here we go again ... I'll refrain from using musical puns such as 'another one bytes the dust' but that's certainly how it feels as yet another media creation software developer is swallowed up by a bigger fish in the pond.(SCREENTECH)
September 22, 2006... THE past handful of years have seen a rather extraordinary number of business acquisitions that have seriously reduced the number of developers making digital media tools. Let me count the ways... Avid bought Softimage (XSI), Sony bought Sonic...

Les Gock: So You Wanna Be a Rock Star: Making the Fantasy a Reality.
September 22, 2006... So you want to be a rock star, huh? PERHAPS you're looking for advice on how to wield a microphone stand to gain star status on stage, how to wow a crowd with no more than a skimpy outfit and a well-timed hair flick, or maybe how to get...

Michael Futcher and Helen Howard: The Drowning Bride.
September 22, 2006... The Drowning Bride explores the deep and universal themes of guilt, love, forgiveness and the ability to recover from life's tragedies. IT explores how one can 'move on' and live fully again. The play is firmly set in Australian culture,...