Category: media

“Hollywood will be destroyed and no one will notice,” Wales said. But it won’t be Wikipedia (or Encarta) that kills the moviemaking industry: “Collaborative storytelling and filmmaking will do to Hollywood what Wikipedia did to Encyclopedia Britannica,” he said.

“Frame rates are the number of images displayed by a projector within one second. Twenty-four frames per second (fps) has long been the standard in cinema, but industry leaders James Cameron and Peter Jackson are among those who propose high frame rates such as 48 or 60, reducing or eliminating jutter and other motion artifacts.”

“Some low-budget film makers say crowdfunding has now become an essential lifeline for the creation of their work.”

“Steve McQueen has stopped his controversial film on sex addiction Shame being shown in Singapore after a row over censorship.”

“Poe’s work, full of murder, madness, ghosts and febrile passion, is irresistible to filmmakers because of its bold imagery and powerful emotional impact. But despite these sensational qualities Poe is not nearly as movie ready as his writing seems. The big problem is that he wrote almost exclusively in short forms, and his stories’ effects are highly concentrated, like shots of neat whiskey.”

“Movies end, even obliquely, while television shows are specifically designed to go on and on, giving movies a satisfying narrative compactness and resolution that television can rarely match. The emotional gut-punch of a film such as the recent British thriller Kill List gains its power in part because when it’s over, that’s it, audiences are left reeling to grasp for themselves the death blow of the film’s moral sinkhole and sort through their own feelings without the cushion of more to come.”

“Bollywood actress Meenakshi Thapar, who appeared in the Indian horror film 404, was kidnapped by two actors who later killed her on the set of her latest movie.”

What the 1980s’ “Just Say No” campaigns spawned: A sea change. “The increasingly normalized depiction of marijuana use on television, taken in conjunction with the increase in American marijuana users, raises a chicken-or-the-egg question: Was TV making Americans more tolerant of marijuana use? Or was the increase in American marijuana users encouraging TV to depict the drug less negatively?”

“After decades of functioning as something like a planetarium – an attraction designed to spice up museums by showing documentaries aimed at families and nature enthusiasts – IMAX is suddenly in the spotlight,” with movies like The Avengers, The Amazing Spider-Man, Men in Black 3 and The Hunger Games being shown on the supersize screens.

The commissioning editor for music and events said there are 350 hours of arts programming on the BBC each year, but audiences “don’t know it’s there” because the Corporation does “not spend a lot of money on marketing”.