Cinema Salad on Friday, November 30, 2007

Scorsese Does Hitchcock
[Courtesy HD for Indies] This is very cool, and something I would love to see more of. In this short within a short, director Martin Scorsese claims to have found four pages from a lost Hitchcock project entitled The Key to Reserva. He then decides to film what he has in Hitch's style, and the result is a really fun homage that you should all check out. Watch for the nods to many of the Master's films, and how close it actually looks like one (although Hitchcock's camera moves were never this clean). Don't touch the pages!

More Fake Webbery for Film Promotion
[Courtesy Cinematech] I've seen this before, and I think that creating fake web sites that back fictional aspects of your film is one great idea. I liked the one for Shoot 'Em Up, but this one for Pixar's Wall*E is way more in depth, and must have take quite a bit of effort to assemble (and I would expect nothing less from Pixar). Despite it being a Flash site (which we learned awhile back is a new no-no), it is a nice touch to help the literally virtual film fit into the real world.

Five Improv Techniques That Can Help You Direct
Copyblogger has a guest post from Nathania Johnson, who is the wife of fellow microbudgeter Josh Johnson over at Carolina Flicks. In the post, Nathania outlines several techniques she has learned as an actor that could help you as a blogger. Well...those same methods could help out quite a bit in our favorite pastime--filmmaking! My favorite is probably "Valuing Emotional Integrity over Audience Response". Read them all for a good primer in making your movie better.

Brightcove Cutting off Uploads--Shades of the Future?
[Courtesy Camcorder Info, Online Video Watch] Here's some unhappy news, that could be a signal of high-bandwidth video sharing vanishing in the near future. Come December 18, Brightcove will no longer let the unwashed use their high quality video distribution channel for custom content. They will be using their service for bigwigs only, with the rest of us left out in the cold (though previous uploads will remain). There are other alternatives, but this was a nice service (which powered sites like Web Serials) that will be missed.

Creativity to Spare: Avoiding Bad Audio
Here's a great episode from Chris Bailey about one of my pet peeves concerning crappy sound. There are few things that will cheapen your production faster than awful, hollow sound coming from the built-in mic on your camera. You've heard it before, the bouncy, echoing junk that sounds like your actors (or you) have a bucket over your head. Chris goes into great detail about fixing this problem, along with examples of how the improved audio sounds. It's all common sense, but if you are unaware, please heed these instructions. You will never regret it.