Paper Giants: That 70′s Show
Recreating popular culture can be challenging; especially when you’re trying to achieve it on a budget and within limited time. Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo production designer Jon Rohde writes about the importance of design on period productions, and how the design sector is working to obtain the recognition it deserves.
The Southern Star Entertainment telemovie (2x2hr), produced by John Edwards and Karen Radzyner, is set in 1972. It follows two ambitious young upstarts, Ita Buttrose (Asher Keddie) and Sir Frank Packer’s unregarded second son, Kerry (Rob Carlton), creating their own legends in the Whitlam era.
VFX: Sucker Punch
Miguel Gonzalez spoke with US director Zack Snyder about Sucker Punch, the first film he’s conceived from beginning to end. It’s also another step in his successful relationship with Australia’s Animal Logic.
Sucker Punch is Zack Snyder’s fifth film, but only the first one not to be adapted from existing material. It’s an original script co-written with Steve Shibuya; it tells the story of Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a teenager locked up by her stepfather in a psychiatric hospital. With the help of her inmate friends (including Abbie Cornish) she’ll have to enter and conquer a series of fantasy worlds in order to escape her real life prison before being lobotomised by her captors. Read more »
East West 101: Ending with a bang
One of the most acclaimed TV series of recent years, East West 101, is trying to expand its audience and become a mainstream hit with its third and final season.
The jewel in the SBS drama crown is a series about a major crime squad investigating crime in multicultural Sydney. “When we first started East West 101 we were living in a post 9/11 world, so it was very much about fear of Islam. The second season was about boat people and attitudes towards illegal immigration and what lengths governments and people would go to deal with that. Season three is about how the war goes on in Afghanistan and the effects of combat on service men and civilians and how that is reflected in Australia,” explained producer Kris Wyld. Read more »
Bob Ellis’ Rough Cut
Bob Ellis on the Oscar-winning The King’s Speech (available on DVD this month), Biutiful, The Company Men and the passing of Sidney Lumet. Read more »
Archive digitisation: Move it or lose it
Organisations with large audiovisual archives are facing the challenge or digitising their libraries, or risk missing out on business opportunities or even losing their collections forever. In this article, DAMsmart! Business manager Adam Hodgkinson analyses the challenges facing large audiovisual collections.
Digital television, smart phones, laptops, netbooks, web radio – there are now so many ways in which people access audiovisual material that in recent years the demand for content has grown exponentially. While those organisations that have large audiovisual collections containing videotape, film and audiotape, should be well placed to capitalise on the seemingly insatiable demand for content, many such organisation have been hamstrung by having large sections, if not the entirety, of their archives confined in ageing and deteriorating content carriers. Read more »
Profile: Rachel Perkins, right place, right time
Encore spoke with the prolific Rachel Perkins about a career that started by chance and evolved into an everlasting passion.
Rachel Perkins is part of the Arrernte people from central Australia, east of Alice Springs. The daughter of Indigenous activist Charlie Perkins, she grew up in Canberra but didn’t necessarily dream of becoming a filmmaker. She just happened to be in the right place at the right time, when there was a lot enthusiasm for Indigenous people to be made a part of the screen industry. Read more »
Subscription Television: TV worth paying for
Australian subscription television (STV) has experienced considerable growth in terms of penetration and impact on the content production industry. Aravind Balasubramaniam spoke with pay TV executives about the future of their sector in the face of increased competition.
With an increased economic pressure on families and a wider range in free entertainment and information options available to most Australians, the subscription television sector faces an enormous challenge: anticipating future trends and offering new services that people perceive as being worth their hard earned money, and make them feel in control of their experience. Read more »
Women in the Screen Industry: A woman’s work is never done
The Australian screen industry is full of talented and successful women, but this doesn’t mean gender imbalance is a thing of the past. Georgina Pearson writes.
Gender equality is an age-old debate; one that’s been analysed and pulled apart countless times before. Yet as women in the Australian screen industry continue to deliver on a global stage we must dispute its relevance – is there a significant gender imbalance within the industry, or has this argument become a moot point, questioned merely as a matter of principle? Read more »
Griff the Invisible: an Australian superhero
Writer/director Leon Ford, producer Nicole O’Donohue, and actors Ryan Kwanten and Maeve Dermody – the team behind Griff the Invisible - reveal how a project with a modest budget and a lot of heart and imagination became Australia’s first superhero movie.
“It’s the first, but people are not thinking ‘We’ll go see that American movie, or that Australian film’. It will sit amongst all the films in release,” Ford told Encore. Read more »
The Reef: Between distributor flags
Andrew Traucki brought a touch of realism to the shark film sub-genre with The Reef, and found himself in uncharted distribution waters.
His first film Black Water starred a dangerous (and very real) crocodile, and his follow up The Reef sees a group of tourists trying to survive the attack of a white shark, but writer/director/producer Andrew Traucki is not afraid to be known as ‘the one who makes movies about lethal animals’. Read more »