Plain Face DVD!

 SEAT  Comments Off on Plain Face DVD!
Jun 052011
 

The DVD of Tess Martin’s Plain Face is now officially on sale at Indieflix.com! Check it out! It comes with two additional short films (A Moment’s Reverie and Gaijin/The Foreigner) as well as a ten minute Behind the Scenes featurette, and animation extras which include a timelapse, instructions on how to joint a back-lit puppet, and how to create a tissue paper mountain range. It is $19.99.
Thank you to Michael Wallenfels for designing the DVD cover!

How is VOD replacing DVDs?

 SEAT  Comments Off on How is VOD replacing DVDs?
Mar 182011
 

Check out this great NYT article about the history of formats for watching movies – from 35mm, through VHS and laserdiscs to DVDs. The future: Blu-Rays or Netflix streaming? As an independent filmmaker its nice to think that streaming sites will become the norm – it’s already easier to get your film on Netflix rather than in the theatres, but will people actually watch it? How does that work? Either way, these sites still have a ways to go:

“If you are interested, say, in exploring the work of John Ford, you can currently find only about a dozen of his more than 50 surviving features on Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Instant Video combined, all of them titles widely available since the VHS days.”

I also really like this article originally published in the Los Angeles Times: “Animated films still face barrier at Oscars”. It really explains well the history of the ‘Best Animated Feature’ category at the Oscars, and how computer animation has dominated the category since it was first created in 2001. The author points out that in the ten years that the category has existed only one traditionally animated film (meaning drawn-animation film) has won – Spirited Away in 2002. Additionally, Wallace and Gromit’s claymation ‘The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ also won in 2005. But perhaps things are starting to change: “Animation has reached a new maturity. The fundamental barrier to making CG animation look good has been lowered, so it comes back to story and character.” – Bob Last, producer of The Illusionist, nominated for this year’s Best Animated Feature, but lost to Toy Story 3.