Is it over for HDDVD?
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DVD?
My friend Harriet Earle has uploaded an excerpt from her short film “Ready for Sex.” She wants to see if posting a clip will encourage people to buy the full-length film on DVD via eBay. It shows what goes on behind the scenes when a woman hears that her boyfriend is returning from a trip one day early.
If you know anyone who is attending a hen (bachelorette) party any time soon why not splash out on a DVD gift to take along for the blushing bride?
Stop
In an article at The Hollywood Reporter, five screenwriters talk about the strike, adaptation and tips on how to organise your day:
When I was writing novels, I knew Graham Greene, and he gave me the best piece of advice ever given to any writer. He said, “Always stop when it’s going well.” […] because you know what to return to. So you don’t have those sleepless nights.
LDTV
I may have a camera that can shoot HD, software and a computer that can edit HD, but my SD TV and LD iPod and iTunes is good enough for me.
In an article over at Roughly Drafted, Daniel Eran Dilger argues that Low Definition content will be wildly more popular than HD. LD is what people watch on iPods, what they convert their DVDs to, what whiles away their time on YouTube (and YouPorn).
HD appeals to less people here in the UK. In the US, SD is associated with broadcast TV at a ratio of 4:3. In the UK over 90% of SD broadcast is at 16:9 – widescreen. That means that the vast majority of TVs in the UK are widescreen TVs. The PAL TV standard also has a higher visual resolution (with a lower temporal resolution to make up the difference) than NTSC. It follows that most consumers will not see much difference between a vertical resolution of 525 lines (the 51 remaining lines are used for other stuff) and 720.
Of course as people replace their TVs, they’ll get TVs with chips that can interpret any HD signal. They’ll be scaled onto LCDs and Plasmas of many different resolutions. 95% of the audience won’t see the difference. They certainly won’t see the need to pay extra for HD content when SD is good enough.
720 by 405 24 times a second is enough for almost everyone. The rest aren’t enough to support one HD on shiny discs.
Control
You can find ideas that could be explored in screenplays in odd places.
The following quote comes from an article on the search for a new manager for England’s football team:
One can only truly love someone if they exist to some degree outside the sphere of your control; if in a relationship you can dominate someone completely how can they offer salvation? How can they place their self between you and death?
To see the rest of the article (with no further thematic material) visit The Guardian’s website – you may need to register for free to read more. Alternatively, you can read the Google cached version while it lasts.
Position
Position determines what you see. What is real in the picture above? Click it to get some idea.
Speak
Ben Affleck. Pretty-boy actor with a mildly interesting love life, right? I recently listened to a podcast that reminded me that he is also an Oscar-winning screenwriter.
In ths podcast from Creative Screenwriting Magazine (iTunes, mp3) he is promoting the film he co-wrote and directed Gone Baby Gone. He covers many screenwriting subjects very quickly including how to adapt the fourth in a series of books as if it were the first, and the many advantages of speaking your dialogue to see if actors can say it:
15:50 – “Writers think about dialogue as ‘getting from A to B’ or having some thematic connection to something. None of that means anything if it can’t be delivered in a way that works. […Sometimes] it doesn’t sound like a human being talking”
If you haven’t seen the film, make sure you stop the podcast at 21:05 as there are huge spoilers for the end of the film.
Undownloadable
A few days ago a client asked me to put up an edit on my site so that any visitors could not download it for later review. She wanted people to look at the edit in situ. That meant creating a Flash version of the QuickTime movie and uploading it instead.
My friend Matt Davis told me how. I have software for creating Flash versions of movies, but not the player to embed on a web page. People are used to pausing, rewinding and replaying videos. They also want control over the volume. Luckily there is a player available for free on the internet.
Here’s how to make a web page to play Flash FLV files.
- Download the JW FLV player.
- Export your movie as a Flash 8 FLV file.
- Name your video video.flv
- Create a preview .jpg called preview.jpg
- Upload the flash video, the preview picture, the flvplayer.swf file, the swfobject.js javascript file and an html file to your website.
Here’s a version of the html file I used:
<html>
<head><script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js">
</script>
</head>
<body>
<p id="player1">
<a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Get the Flash Player</a> to see the video.</p>
<script type="text/javascript">
var s1 = new SWFObject("flvplayer.swf","single","1024","596","7");
s1.addParam("allowfullscreen","true");
s1.addVariable("file","video.flv");
s1.addVariable("image","preview.jpg");
s1.addVariable("width","1024");
s1.addVariable("height","596");
s1.write("player1");
</script>
</body>
</html>
My source movie had a resolution of 1024 by 576. In the html, you can see the dimensions used are 1024 and 596. I added 20 pixels to the height for the controls of the player.
Mr. Wijering also has a setup wizard that can generate the html for you, based on settings you provide. For more support, go to the Support section of the JW FLV Player page.
Romero: I watch movies on the small screen…
…because they are made on a small screen! He also credits ‘I am Legend’ as the source for Night of the Living Dead, although he had to change the vampires to zombies because vampires had been done before. He’s in town to promote The Zombie Diaries at the London Film Festival.
Until November 5th, listen to an interview with him starting one hour into this two hour BBC local radio broadcast.
Say kid, can you go on stage right now?
Fairytale story: Student Nick Haley creates his own advert for Apple’s new iPod Touch. He uses Final Cut Pro to edit material he finds on http://www.apple.com:
Apple gets in touch. Instead of the usual takedown notice, they ask him if he wants to visit Silicon Valley to collaborate with them to create a broadcast version of his advert:
(from applegazette)
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