digital cinema

Like their past events, South by Southwest will be featuring a conference alongside its film and music festival programming.  This year, however, they’ve added a fascinating new wrinkle into the selection process, inviting anyone who is interested to vote for whatever panels and presentations they’d like to see included at the event.  I’ve applied, and my proposal has made it past the initial stage, receiving approval from the programming staff at SXSW.  Now, I need your votes to help ensure my panel is selected for the conference, so plea ... read more »

Digging through the film blogosphere one last time before my obligations for fall semester begin next week: ... read more »

More film and media news that has caught my attention over the last couple of days: ... read more »

It’s astounding to realize that MoveOn.org has now been a part of our political landscape for several years now, but as the seventh anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War approaches, it’s well worth thinking about the role of MoveOn in reshaping grassroots politics.  While a number of organizations have used digital media to create networks of activists, MoveOn has tremendous symbolic value, both because of the sheer size of their mailing list and because they served as a loaded shorthand for a number of practices and beliefs (often pejoratively as Bush’s references ... read more »

One of the more memorable documentaries of the 2009 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival was 45365, Bill and Turner Ross’s lyrical, impressionistic portrait of small-town Midwestern life.  Now, thanks to a one-week special screening on SnagFilms, I’ve had a chance to take a second look, and after seeing the film again, I was more prepared to embrace its impressionistic, observational approach to depicting Sydney, Ohio, a small town not far from Dayton. ... read more »

More podcasting fun, this time with Craig “Uncle Crizzle” Lindsey for his Critical Condition podcast series on his Raleigh News-Observer blog.  Enjoy.

Tama has a link to a recent Reuters article on the supposed “Twitter effect,” the idea that some summer movies have seen their box office deflated or inflated by the immediate word-of-mouth responses of moviegoers posted to Facebook or Twitter.  These real-time posting can very quickly shape audience consensus, and in the case of Bruno, may have led to a dramatic one-day decline in box office.  ... read more »

Or, yikes, it’s almost August!  Fall semester is on the horizon, which will give me yet another ball to juggle, but here are some new film and media links: ... read more »

Working through some thoughts on Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which will hopefully be posted in the next day or so, but the short version is that you should consider me as part of the “underwhelmed” camp.  In essence, I’m not sure that Anderson is really saying anything particularly new.  There is a relatively long history of giving some content or service away for “free” in order to sell something else (TV and radio are or wer ... read more »

Now that Reinventing Cinema is officially out, I’ve been enjoying some of the early conversations about it.  I’m particularly excited that I had a chance to talk with Scott Kirsner, author of Fans, Friends, and Followers and Inventing t ... read more »