deadCENTER Film

deadCENTER is now exactly like Dick Tracy. Sort of.

In the run up to this year’s festival, we’ve had some great press around the country from all sorts of cool publications and sources. But one of the most fun things we’ve been featured in are the comic-strip style ads for BodyTrends, “The Housewives of the 405.” Created by friend of the festival Brian Winkeler, the story has been following one of the Housewives, Rebecca, as she prepares for her film’s debut at deadCENTER. Despite being a completely fictional film, we really want to see “Fatal Femme.”

The exciting conclusion ran today in the Oklahoma Gazette, and is set at what’s sure to be the best place to be tonight. Check out the first part below and then head over to The Housewives’ homepage to see the exciting conclusion.

Google Wave is Dead. Long Live Google Wave.

Over at The Candler Blog, friend of the festival Jonathan Poritsky is lamenting the recent demise of Google Wave, which is something a lot of people have been doing. What he’s thinking about, though, is the impact on filmmakers – what does this mean for the future of filmmaker collaboration on the web? Why did no one use Google Wave to actually make a movie?

The whole article is worth your time, but the way he ends it is especially poignant:

“For now, creators will keep on creating. Like anything else, these are just tools. Google Wave was a bold move in the right direction towards central collaboration. There is no way to look at this as a failure for Google, or for any of us. The conversation has shifted. Now we need to take the momentum that Google Wave kicked off and the tools it will leave behind to keep the conversation up so that when the technology falls in line, we will be there to adopt filmmaking methodologies that move us forward.”

The future of filmmaking on the web is definitely an exciting one, and I hope Jonathan is correct in thinking we’re closer than anyone thinks to being able to create films solely online.

For now, though, hop over to his post and join the discussion.

The Referral: The Filmcake finishes a film, has regrets, starts a discussion

Our good friend Dwight over at The Filmcake published a really interesting blog post we think deserves your attention. Having just finished his first short film, he has begun to reflect on the reviews he’s written from the perspective of a new filmmaker.

Along the way, he touches on several things many of us involved with independent film at any level struggle with – how important are access and funding? To what extent, if any, should those circumstances affect or make themselves known to the viewer? And finally, how should critics approach low or no-budget films?

Read the whole thing here. And when you’re done, we’d love to hear what you think about the subject in our comments section below.

The Referral – Film Threat Wants to Help Fund Your Film Project

If you attended our excellent panels series this year at deadCENTER, you know something we talked about a lot is the effect the Internet has had on the entire filmmaking experience, not to mention the film viewing experience. During these discussions, one issue kept popping up: the lowering of barriers is great, but it also means there’s just a lot more competition.

One of the best examples of this is the huge number of film projects vying for funding on the Internet. On that front, Film Threat is trying to help by giving a few worthy projects a leg up. Every week, they will be featuring one noteworthy project posted on crowd-sourced funding sites like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo on their site. Which means more eyes on your fund-raising efforts. Which could mean more cash. From the posting:

“That’s right, every Monday, starting July 25, 2010, we’re going to feature one film or film-related project in progress that we feel is worth your and our time. From there, it’s up to our passionate, film-hungry and film-savvy readers to decide whether they want to take that extra step to help make these projects in progress a reality. It’s then up to you, the filmmaker, to live up to the faith we’re putting in you and your efforts by giving you such lofty praise as featuring you and your project as a top story on our site (seriously, you want this; studio films and indies alike routinely angle for space and feature stories on our site).”

For the full post and submission form, click through to the Film Threat post. And if you’re an Okie filmmaker who is going to submit, let us know in the comments, and we’ll keep an eye on Film Threat to see if you’ve been spotlighted.

The Referral – Candler Blog has SXSW details

Friend of deadCENTER and all-around cool guy Jonathan Poritsky has a blog he calls the Candler. We’ll probably be linking to his posts fairly often. Now you know.

He has the goods on the latest announcements from SXSW – clicky click.