Aquarium by Jewelia is the soundtrack for 13 Shades of Romanian.
13 Shades of Romanian is a documentary that questions the popular misconceptions of Romanians living in Britain, as seen through the eyes of thirteen Romanians.
13 Shades of Romanian is funded through crowdfunding, the target was met last week.
They may have been wiser to have chosen StartJoin or FairCoin, as both support community and art projects.
The funding raised so far, will cover filming.
There are still post-production costs to be covered.
Sita Sings the Blues is based on the Hindu epic The Ramayana. Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama.
The Ramayana is attributed Valmiki, who was drawing upon an earlier oral tradition. According to Valmiki, Rama dictated to him the story, he was merely the scribe who wrote it in Sanskrit.
The tradition then, is we draw upon what went before. That is until we enclosed the intellectual commons, and intellectual property rights reared its ugly head, having looted the commons, we then sell it back, packaged as entertainment.
To resolve all the copyright issues associated with Sita Sings the Blues, Nina went $70,000 into debt. It is important to emphasise, this was just to clear restrictive copyright issues, it was not the budget for making the film. The copyright issues took a year to resolve.
In Dark Mountain Vol 5, Strange Children written by Akshay Ahuja tells one of the stories from the other great India epic Mahabharata.
I listened lunchtime on BBC Radio 4 You and Yours a pathetic attempt by video industry to justify copy protection. It was a mix of myth, lies and half truths.
Long overdue, a change in the law to make it legal to copy for own personal use. But does not go far enough, we need a removal of copy protection and digital rights management from DVDs and e-books.
The person from the video industry was floundering. It was as though did not believe the garbage that was being spouted.
You can download a copy on-line.
Why should you? And it is not free if you have to pay for the data, and somewhere someone is paying for the data.
People do not choose to watch films on computers.
Really? I watch on my laptop, others watch on phones, tablets.
DRM gives the consumer choice.
Er no. DRM restricts what the consumer can do, where can watch, on what can read.
We also have the old chestnuts of pirates running off millions of illegal copies and selling them.
The reality is a greedy dinosaur industry that for years has been ripping people off, and its only answer is to criminalise potential customers.
All DRM and copy protection does, is cause major headache to users.
Want to break regional coding and copy protection, try
Mission Impossible, a tacky Hollywood film, bums-on-seats, aimed at American teenagers with the attention span of a gnat.
I groaned when I saw this was ThePianoGuys latest, but I have to admit I enjoyed.
ThePianoGuys featuring Lindsey Stirling.
The Story:
It was May of 2011… a few days after Lindsey Stirling and ThePianoGuys had each filmed their first official YouTube videos (“Spontaneous Me” and “Michael Meets Mozart”). Lindsey and Steven Sharp Nelson (cello guy) shared the stage at a concert. After the show they talked enthusiastically about a YouTube collaboration down the road. A year and a half and a million fan requests later and it’s finally here! We love Lindsey Stirling! It feels like we’re family — we started on YouTube around the same time, we “grew up” in the same place, we all LOVE what we do and we’re all REALLY good dancers…except for ThePianoGuys. =)
We chose the theme from “Mission: Impossible” because we thought it would be a great music video to “be ourselves” in — to play off each other, throw in some special effects, a couple “stunts,” and some slapstick! The concept for the song and video began with spy gadgets — we wanted all of them to be string instrument parts! Then how would we pair up graceful, pro-dancer Lindsey and not-so-graceful Steve? =) It was simple. Steve had to carry around his own chair! Then the graceful/not-so-graceful thing contrasted beautifully! When Jon Schmidt (Piano Guy) was cast as the “villain” and donned an eye patch we knew we were on to something…
We composed this arrangement with the story of the video in mind — a tense beginning building up the intrigue, a back-and-forth theme traded between violin and cello implying the partner-agent roles, lasers, the “reveal” moment of Jon, rappelling, and the hectic, scrambled ending. We wanted a little more thematic material to work with, so in addition to some original material, we merged Mission: Impossible with the first movement of Mozart’s “Piano Sonata in C” (here’s a recording of the original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcUh-ggBfzI). But, of course, we sped it up, transposed it into A minor and changed the time signature to 5/4! It became Jon’s “villain theme.” And yes, Jon is really playing THAT fast. At the end in order to create a musical feeling of “pandemonium” we wrote the piano part, reversed it and randomized the notes, tweaking them until they clicked. And for you rhythm enthusiasts, at times you’ll hear a 4/4 time signature in the percussion imposed on the 5/4 timing to add to the intrigue and mayhem!
This video was in over its head before we even started filming. We planned a base-jumping scene for the beginning that didn’t end up working out. The restaurant was a last-minute idea that we threw together as an intro. We were concerned that the laser and rapelling scenes would also die from over-complicatedness, but thanks to the genius and hard work of Paul Anderson and Tel Stewart we pulled them off!
Filming locations:
THANK YOU to Stephen Wade Auto for serving as our last minute filming location when all others fell through! They were so nice to us and let us film in their place all through the night and they saved us on the reppelling scene!
Check out their website here: http://www.stephenwade.com/
Facbook here: http://www.facebook.com/StephenWadeAutoCenter
Thank you also to Benja’s Thai food restaurant http://benjathai.com/ for staying open late so we could get the beginning shots for the video! (Best Thai Food in Southern Utah!)
Last but not least, thank you to Stan Plew at Dixie College for letting us film late at The Jeffrey R. Holland building.
If you’ve read this far this description will self-destruct in 5…4…3…2…
The purpose of life is the expansion of happiness. It is the goal of every other goal. Ben Henretig has embarked on an ambitious project to document a country and culture that has embraced Happiness as a part of its national policy. — Deepak Chopra
It has been known for at least twenty years that once people reach a certain level of material well being their quality of life does not improve, it deteriorates.
Once this level of material wealth is reached, growing GDP becomes meaningless, we do so counter to our quality of life, counter to environmental degradation, growing gaps between rich and poor, increase in crime and mental and family and societal breakdown.
We hear a lot about wealth creation, that we must not tax the rich else they will go elsewhere. What we do not hear is creating no place for them to hide.
We do not have wealth creation, we have wealth accumulation and vulture capitalism.
Up until the 1950s, we had industrialists who created wealth, they built the railways, made cars, produced jeans. Now they create complex financial instruments that rob Peter to pay Paul, they avoid tax, they fire not hire people.
We see our towns and cities destroyed, the same High Street names in every town, soulless Clone Towns. Rapacious corporations like Costa Coffee.
A nuclear meltdown as we saw in Japan, increases GDP due to the cost of the clean up.
Four travellers travelled across the mountain Kingdom of Bhutan. They found a people, a country, that valued their culture, valued their environment, that had a high happiness Index.
They filmed what they saw. They are now wanting to turn what they saw into a documentary, The Happiest Place. They are using crowd sourcing to raise the money via Kickstarter.
I was hoping to find the film Blade Runner, instead found music by Vangelis with clips from the film Blade Runner.
I remember a friend inviting me round to watch this film some time in the 1980s. Directed by Ridley Scott, based on Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick, a very chilling and disturbing portrayal of the future into which we are sleepwalking.
I first saw Cows with Guns at the BeyondTV International Film Festival in Swansea. I never did discover why I got an invite, I actually got three, but I went and thoroughly enjoyed myself. It was well worth going to. Not quite Cannes, but then Cannes is not about films.
I became a regularly and it was something I looked forward to. 2008 I did not go as I did not like the programme. 2009 I did not go as I was broke.
It was held around this time of year (usually end of November, early December), so I thought I would go this year. It looks like it no longer takes place, 2008 was the last one, which explains why I got no invite for 2009.
It is easy to see why it is no more. Although the last couple I attended had full feature length films and trailers for others, this was never what it was about. It was short documentaries, often of only a few minutes long, or animations like Cows with guns. The point was that you do not have to rely on the mainstream media, you too can be the media, all you need is the internet and a decent video camera and editing facilities.
Look at the success of Story of Stuff and the follow ons.
In many ways if BeyondTV has died, it is because of the success of its own message. People are making their own videos. One only has to look at the success of YouTube. If I want to see a video, I can do so with my laptop connected to the internet. Many of these short videos you can find on this blog, and once you have found one, you will find there are many similar videos closely linked. Sometimes I go looking for them, but mainly I do not have to, I receive them through twitter and facebook, and those I think worth watching I re-tweet, share on facebook and the very best get a mention here.
Synchronicity: It is strange, I was thinking of Cows with guns and was going to look for it. I did not have to. Checking out BeyondTV on the Undercurrents website (who were the organisers of BeyondTV) I stumbled upon Cows with guns.
I did though, and I do not know where, come across something that looked remarkably similar to BeyondTV down in Brighton in February. When I saw saw it I thought at the time it looked similar to BeyondTV. But I do not know where I saw it. If anyone has any details, please let me know and/or write the details in comments below.
If same weekend as Seedy Sunday Brighton maybe worth making a weekend of it! Though sadly the last time I went it had gone downhill.
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