48 Hour Film Project

Last weekend, Las Vegas not only hosted the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention, it also was this year's kick off point for the ninth annual 48 Hour Film Project.

From the website:
"The 48 Hour Film Project is a wild and sleepless weekend in which you and a team make a movie—write, shoot, edit and score it—in just 48 hours.

On Friday night, you get a character, a prop, a line of dialogue and a genre, all to include in your movie. 48 hours later, the movie must be complete. Then it will show at a local theater, usually in the next week.

In 2008, some 30,000 filmmakers made films in 70 cities. This year, we're even bigger, with filmmakers around the world taking the challenge to make a film in just 48 hours."

48 Hour Film Project hits Salt Lake City May 15th to the 17th and screenings of the films will be the following weekend. Teams are forming, get yours together now! Registration is $155 for teams of any size. Finished films are four to seven minutes in length.

Article VI

This is a clip from a Utah-produced documentary that showed at the D.C. Independent Film Festival in March. It has screened in major cities across the entire U.S. and has received overwhelmingly positive responses from audiences. Having viewed the entire 90+ minutes of it myself, I can see why. This is one of the most facinating documentaries I've seen. It focuses on two of the hottest topics around: religion and politics. It handles these issues with finesse and respect.

Article VI of the United State's Constitution states: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." And yet, a huge amount of the questions in the debates for the 2008 Presidential Candidacy were extremely personal and dealt directly with candidates' spirituality and religion.

Filmmakers, Bryan Hall and Jack Donaldson (both LDS Democrats), of Living Biography Media created an incredibly captivating and powerful documentary. When I interviewed Hall he talked about how he likes documentaries that show both sides of a story while still revealing their own bias. His film clearly met up with his own criterion. Somerset Films' Dean Hale is working on finding distributors. I eagerly await directing my friends and family (and all of you) on where and when or how they can view the film.

Props to New Zion

Salt Lake City graphic designer, Joshua Humphreys, was recently contacted by a filmmaker to make signs for a video production. Josh then realized he knew a lot of people who would be useful in the physical aspect of making a set. First to mind was Paul, an incredibly talented metal-worker, who can also get his hands on cars from any era. But Josh also knew people in plastics, aviation, sound, and various other craftsmen who could build, customize, or aquire just about anything you can imagine.
Josh decided to fill a niche in the Utah film market and create New Zion Film Properties, a conglomerate of several companies fullfilling the needs of visionary film makers. If you need a prop or scenery, they will quickly find or make it for you. Hopefully this new venture will knock down another barrier keeping film makers out of Utah.

Got Stock Footage?

Orem's Creative Media Group has birthed a new venture, StockShotsNow.com. This is good news for videographers, editors, camera men/women, and producers. They have enabled you to put your stock clips up on their site, which is also searchable by five other companies. If they sell your clip, you receive a 40-50% commission on the sale. This is using footage you've already shot!
You also have the option of becoming one of their Stock Footage Artists, where you are put on an email list where they forward you their clients footage requests. They are currently receiving approximately three to five requests a week. Maybe you have the footage they need right in your archives.
When I spoke with C.M.G.'s John Farr a couple weeks ago about Stock Shots Now, he had just returned from shooting in the Great Britain with one of their coveted Red cameras, which produces video at four times the quality of a Hi Def camera. If he's really lucky instead of selling that footage for the usual one or two hundred dollars per clip, he'll sell it to a major motion picture company for thousands like he did recently with his shots of Paris. He sold a few clips to Sony Pictures which were used in their film, The Pink Panther 2.

The Hollywood of the Rocky Mountains

Yesterday Governor Huntsman signed Senate Bill 14. This should start attracting more film makers to Utah.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=5946914

Also, a major motion picture and television studio is slated to begin construction in Park City as early as late summer. It will take approximately 18 months to complete and will include eight to 10 large soundstages, a back lot and a post production facility.

Hopefully, the thousands of jobs created in our industry by these two occurrences will go to locals and not just attract a bunch more people to crowd into the state.

The Actors Workshop

Michael Flynn's the Actors Workshop

Tuesdays beginning March 24th for 6 weeks
East Bay Studios 85 East Bay Blvd., Provo
$295

Small class sizes.
Work on auditioning, improv, scene work, and monologues. The goal is to help you become a better actor and get work. Period.

www.theactorsworkshop.biz
801.362.9811

PK Takes Vegas

Perhaps, like me, you were completely riveted by the opening action sequence in Casino Royale where Bond chases a man through the streets, onto construction sites and into a building. The speed, agility, and moves of this unknown actor were incredible, reminiscent of Jackie Chan, only with more lateral movement. The man's name is Sebastien Foucan and he is not an actor, but more of an athlete, the co-founder of a discipline called Parkour (French for The Art of Movement).
Parkour is often miscategorized as an extreme sport, but to traceurs and traceuses, its practitioners, it is something closer to a martial art. The activity's aim is to move from one place to another as quickly and efficiently as possible. When Parkour becomes more artsy it is called free running, but for most people the two terms are interchangeable. One could say that if martial arts focus on the fight of "fight or flight", Parkour is the flight aspect. Escaping over, under, or through whatever obstacle may come into your path, Parkour is what allows Foucan to lead Daniel Craig on such a spectacular chase and leaves the audience nearly out of breath.
PK Takes Vegas is a documentary following seven traceurs through Las Vegas on location at exciting destinations around Vegas, such as; Hoover Dam and Red Rock Canyon. I sat down with the directors and producers of PK Takes Vegas last week to talk to them about this Utah production.
Director/Producer Eric Bennett of The Barefoot Group, couldn't contain his enthusiasm about the project. Almost immediately he told me they would "likely be doing a sequel." He said he could hardly call himself a director on this shoot because essentially he was more there to observe. Fortunately, some great hi-def footage and skillful editing lets us observe as well.
Producer Gilbert Howe of First Vision Entertainment bragged that one of the traceurs, Devon Bardole, a local, is "probably the best in the U.S." The other six athletes come from various cities around the country. Their skills are impressive and Vegas makes for quite the backdrop to their stunts.
The documentary is currently showing on Video on Demand on a number of international airlines. It will soon be airing on both broadcast and cable networks. For many viewers, the highlight of the show will be seeing former traceurs-turned-artists performing sequences in Cirque du Soliel's Ka production.
The traceurs practice their philosophy of connecting to one's environment in a number of eye-catching locales, including a local park and the campus of University of Northern Las Vegas. Learning to train with athlete's they'd only just met, makes for a highly interesting dynamic in the film. For such young, sport's-minded guys, the philosophizing on free running and their observations on everything involved in it are surprisingly deep and well-spoken.
So if you've watched every Jackie Chan dvd available on Netflix, or you loved the early scenes in Casino Royale, this documentary may be just your cup of tea (if you kids even know what that phrase means). For those interested in extreme sports, martial arts, or documentaries in general, this is certain to be of interest. Get your own copy here. DVD copies contain nine extra minutes of footage along with special features containing some of the best footage of the entire shoot.