20 AFV Winter 2013.pub - Federation of Australian Movie Makers

The 17th Combined Clubs’ Meeting &The 11th Southern NSW Division of FAMM MeetingSource Wollongong Movie Makers NewsletterOn Saturday the 6th of April twenty six members of the four clubs that make up the Southern NSW Divisionof FAMM met at the Weston Creek Community Centre for the 17th Combined Clubs meeting. Asthese meetings are biannual, this event is in its 9th year and far from growing stale by its age it is growingfrom strength to strength as evident by the very high calibre of the members’ videos shown. Many commentedafterwards that this was the finest collection of videos so far shown at such a meeting.The meeting followed the now well accepted agenda of two guest speakers, a show & tell segment, aFAMM business meeting and the showing of members’ videos made to a previously set theme or subject.How to Win a Film FestivalThe first presentation was by Christian Dorin on the topic, ‘How to Win a FilmFestival.’ With a background in Screen ACT and having won best director andbest editor in a film festival, Christian was very capable to tackle the topic. Hespoke of his experiences in the making of his video, “On Air” which told thestory of how a young man goes for an interview for a job at a TV station andinadvertently gets ‘hired’ and then ‘thrown in’ the deep end of the making of anews programme. He covered everything from script preparation to final edit;of how he had to compress an 18 page script to 12 pages even then finding thattoo long for a seven minute video and how he had a team of four computerscompiling his competition entry (edit, grading, special effects and sound).He demonstrated his RED scarlet video camera which shoots in 4K resolutionin RED RAW format. This equipment he uses to shoot advertisements and forother corporate work as well as preparing show reels and dance DVDs. Hisbusiness is called SOLAR PICTURES. http://www.solarpictures.com.au/Christian Dorin demonstratinghis RED Scarlet cameraHow to Get Your Videos SeenThe second speaker was Andrew Pike who has been a film distributor since1974. Andrew trained as an historian with an MA in Australian Cinema. Heinitially made documentaries but couldn’t get them shown and so he became adistributor and created his firm, Electric Shadow Cinema.http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/2445/electric-shadows-story-ofcinema.htmlHis life as a distributor began by distributing documentaries and then hemoved into feature films. “Dances with Wolves” was offered to him by Hoytsas they thought it un-screenable because it was three and a half hours long andcontaining some subtitles. Andrew also started importing films from Europeand Asia and finally started showing Australian films.Andrew then discussed a part of the distribution business, the distribution ofdocumentaries. The market for this genre is the education market which encompassescommunity groups, institutions, government agencies, universitiesand secondary schools. This is a small market and 85% of the market involves Andrew Pikethe distribution of the material on DVDs, the remaining 15% is streamed toUniversities. As Andrew pointed out most librarians want a physical item to catalogue, hence the interest inobtaining a DVD and not live streaming. The expectations of this market Andrew explained were:1) a duration of 25 minutes or more is expected and longer videos are not a problem,2) not concerned about the date of production (the current commercial market is not interested in productionsfrom 2010 or older and even those made in 2011 are often not accepted),3) technology tolerant as it is interested more in content than in video techniques.4) content is primary – Subject matter not Story.Page 36 AUSTRALIAN FILM & VIDEO—VOL 20 WINTER 2013