Film Analysis

Louis Le Prince, who shot the world's first film in Leeds - BBC News Who made the first film? The Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison are usually credited with pioneering the moving image. However a new documentary argues that the first film was actually shot in Leeds in 1888 - but that its maker disappeared before he could claim his place in cinema history. When film producer and distributor David Wilkinson visits Hollywood or New York or Cannes, he tells his movie business contacts that he comes from the city "where film was invented". His puzzled acquaintances figure that he does not have an American accent, so cannot come from the birthplace of Thomas Edison, and is clearly not from France, the land of the Lumieres. He then informs them he is, in fact, from Leeds, England. During his 33 years in the film business, Wilkinson says only a few people have known what he was talking about, and why Leeds can claim to be the birthplace of film. Among the group was Louis Le Prince, who had with him a curious mahogany box. The groundbreaking camera

Guide To Finding Music For Your Videos: 15 Great Music Websites One of the hardest tasks in filmmaking is finding the right music for your project. And while composing is a fantastic idea, most people cannot afford to hire a composer for every project. That brings us to the wonderful world of royalty free music (dripping with sarcasm). Lets be honest, trying to find the right track for your video sucks. Hours and hours can be spent looking and searching Google just to find nothing. I put together this guide for filmmakers in mind. Understanding the Licenses We can’t go and download whatever music we want and use it however we want (Unless you’re a pirate and don’t mind the possibility of getting your arse sued into the next century). Creative Commons Creative Commons has been described as being at the forefront of the copyright movement, which seeks to provide an alternative to the automatic “all rights reserved” copyright, and has been dubbed “some rights reserved.” Royalty Free Music that is not free, but you do not have to attribute. Public Domain 1.

Watching violent films does make people more aggressive, study shows Their brains were scanned as they watched a succession of shootings and street fights on day one, emotional but non-violent scenes such as people interacting during a natural disaster on day two and nothing on day three. While watching violence the aggressive group had less activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, which controls emotion-related decision making and self-control. These subjects said they felt more more inspired and determined and less upset or nervous than their non-aggressive counterparts when watching violent instead of only emotional scenes. Their blood pressure also went down progressively while the calm groups' rose. During the final 'mind wandering' stage - when no films were shown - the aggressive participants had unusually high brain activity in a network of regions known to be active when not doing anything in particular. This suggests they have a different brain function map than their non-aggressive peers, said the researchers.

10 tips for editing video in a thoughtful, compelling way By Kari Mulholland One of TED’s video editors, Kari Mulholland, hard at work. Below, her editing advice. Photo: Biljana Labovic The techniques that video editors use to shape their content reveal a lot about how people create meaning in the world. The TED Talk editing toolkit is small when compared to ones used to cut a narrative feature or documentary. Now, compare that to the same excerpt edited competently. What made the first excerpt so uncomfortable to watch was that the edits were unmotivated; every edit was random. Choose the best camera angles for each moment. Now the “um” is edited out, by cutting between two shots during an action-filled moment. Think about who’s speaking and who’s listening. Now let’s watch the same excerpt edited like a TED Talk. The edits are motivated by the words spoken by both Chris and Bill. All of a sudden, the point of view of the interview shifts. Take some space from your edit. Hope that these tips have been helpful.

Labour in a Single Shot | Films How Can I Make Quality Videos and Short Films on a Budget? Hollywood's Corporate Art Men don’t make movies. Industries don’t make movies. Corporations do. No commentator of the first two decades of the century could mistake the growing economic power of the modern corporation. The Supreme Court had bestowed upon the corporation the legal status of a person; the Hollywood movie made it a natural fact. How did businessmen know what people were like? Niebuhr overlooked the role of Hollywood in generating the cultural intelligence so critical to the survival and prosperity of corporate capitalism, but Fortune magazine did not. MGM is neither one man nor a collection of men. Fortune’s respectful consideration of MGM’s corporate status was unusual. For the central fact about a movie producing company is the legal unreality of its assets. Then as now Hollywood films were as much the calculated revelations of the aims of the studios that made them as they were the product of writers’, directors’, or producers’ genius. The Nuisance makes no brief against the social order.

Journeys of a Hybrid Violent Femme How Scarlett Johansson learned to become aloof from her own seductiveness. Scarlett Johansson as the title character in Luc Besson’s Lucy Within the past twelve months, Scarlett Johansson has been an alluring and rapidly expanding artificial intelligence in Her; a seductively murderous extraterrestrial in Under the Skin; and now, in Lucy, a superintelligent, post-sexual, sometimes deadly freak of evolution. Given the disparities in financing and distribution among the films I’ve just mentioned—which vary from the artisanal to the mega-industrial—as well as the differences among them in style and tone, it would be a mug’s game to rush into defining Johansson’s new screen persona, let alone to speculate about the wishes and anxieties floating about in the culture that might have coalesced to create it. An auteurist would ascribe this most extreme elaboration of her new image not only to Johansson (or her manager) but also in large measure to the writer-director of Lucy, Luc Besson.

Was 12 Years a Slave the best film of the year? I hope not | Michael White 12 Years a Slave is a remarkable film and I share the widespread delight that it won recognition at the Oscars in Hollywood, especially when there was always a risk that an enjoyable bit of immoral trash like The Wolf of Wall Street might have done some business at its high-minded expense. But best film of the year? I hope not. It's a political film with a political message for our times – slavery isn't over when there are an estimated 21 million slaves today, so Steve McQueen reminded his audience on Sunday night. But Casablanca was a very political film too, plenty are, but dialogue, plot, character made them better movies. By the time we first glimpse 33-year-old carpenter, Solomon Northup, author of a moving 1853 memoir and hero (as played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) of the film – it was not the only such memoir as Sarah Churchwell explains here – living an idealised life with his family as free American citizens in Saratoga, New York, the viewer may already feel uneasy.

Did the 'Blue is the Warmest Color' Director Push Too Far? In “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, our brightly burning heroines first meet in a lesbian bar in Lille. Adèle, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, has already spotted Emma, a blue-haired sparkplug, on the street, and pleasured herself to thoughts of her. When the chance at conversation arises, Adèle asks Emma, somewhat mechanically, what she does. This exchange between the two, whose ardors we follow over years, mirrors a debate being hashed out over the film. The 2013 Cannes jury, presided over by Steven Spielberg, awarded the top prize not only to the director, Abdellatif Kechiche, but to the lead actresses, too. In late September, Kechiche told the French magazine Télérama that the outrage had “sullied” the film for future audiences; now the public would wonder whether he’d harassed the exquisite starlets. “The job of an actor,” he went on, “it’s one of a spoiled child. “There is something really weird about Abdellatif,” she went on.