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What’s the Legality of Writing A Script Based on a News Story?

We’ve all seen a sensationalist news story and thought – that would make a great movie. What are the legalities? Entertainment lawyer Christopher Schiller discusses some of the basic legalities of “based on a true story” but as always with legal advice found online – to be sure, CONSULT AN ATTORNEY.

First let’s start with the basics. Usually, if we’re lucky, news stories are based upon facts. Facts are NOT copyrightable – opinion and expression are. Contrary to popular opinion, newspapers don’t own the news. (Unless they make it up, their published fiction is theirs to license, but, that’s another article.) They just own their particular take on the reporting of it. (We’ll get back to this.)

Take this sample, short news story from a police incident blotter:

“Citizen Jim Brown was struck by a car today at 10:30am while jaywalking across Morgan Street. He is reported in stable condition at Our Lady of Hope Hospital.”

If all of these pieces of information are truthful facts, then there is not much expression in the story that can be protected by copyright. Can a writer take these facts and put them in a script? As far as the facts go, yes, though it wouldn’t be a very interesting movie. Suppose, though, the writer decided it was a great starting point for a story, say where the movie version of Jim Brown learns from this incident that he has superhuman healing ability and becomes a superhero? Can that story be told, maybe even stating that it is “based on true events” without legal issues? Again, it depends.

Script Mag | Read the Full Article

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15 Tips for Producers from the Cannes Film Festival

 writes about 15 tips picked up from discussions with producers at this  year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Aint them bodies saints

Learning from your producer colleagues — that’s one of the benefits of attending the Cannes Film Festival and Market. Whether you are premiering a film, hustling a film, or just watching movies, the experience of encountering at multiple parties fellow filmmakers makes Cannes a great place to learn from the business practices of your colleagues.

In addition to watching movies, this year at Cannes I moderated morning meetings at the Producers Network, of which IFP is a sponsoring partner. I also moderated the “American Producers in Cannes” panel at the American Pavilion and spoke with financiers, distributors and sales agents at parties or just on the lawn of the Grand. And, of course, I’d page through the trades each morning, like everyone else. Here, then, are 15 tips, cautions and commentaries on producing films circa 2013 I gleaned from my time at Cannes.

Learn how to collaborate. The five panelists at my American Pavilion panel, all of whom had films at the festival, were generous with their advice to young filmmakers. When I asked what advice they’d impart to those starting out, Parts and Labor’s Jay Van Hoy, a producer on the Critic’s Week selection Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, said, “Learn how to collaborate.” Pointing out that most of the company’s films have multiple partners — and that on Saints he and P&L’s Lars Knudsen teamed with several others, including director David Lowery’s team of James Johnston and Toby Halbrooks — he evoked a less hierarchical producing model by asserting effective collaboration as skill today’s producers must learn. Elaborating, Van Hoy said that he considered a large part of his job managing the flow of information between producers, financiers and the film’s other key figures.

Form an international collective. Expanding on the above point, it’s interesting to note that two of the five producers on my panel have created structures to facilitate international collaboration. Van Joy and Knudsen have formed Creative Alliance, a collective with six Scandinavian directors (Lone Scherfig, Per Fly, Ole Christian Madsen, Dagur Kari, Thomas Vinterberg and Janus Metz) and Danish producers Nikolaj Vibe Michelsen and Jacob Jørgensen. With its development financing in place, the Creative Alliance is designed to access the filmmakers’ local funding organizations to make films in the U.S. for international audiences. And producer Andrew Corkin (We Are Who We Are) announced at Cannes Start to Finnish, a collaboration between his Uncorked Productions and the Helsinki-based Bronson Club. Similar to Creative Alliance, Start to Finnish looks to develop English-language projects by six international directors — Finns AJ Annila, Zaida Bergroth, Antti J. Jokinen, Dome Karukoski, Aku Louhimies and Samuli Valkama.

Filmmaker | Read the Full Article

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Interview with “Dexter” Composer Rolf Kent

Composer of Dexter as well as Election, About Schmidt, Thank You For Smoking, Up In The Air and Sideways, Rolf Kent talks about how his methodology of composing music for film.

Rolf Kent

If you start to work with someone for the first time, do you want to see a rough cut first before signing onto the project?

Absolutely. Very often, whatever you started out with in the script has not quite made it onto the screen for various reasons, and the music can help you get back to what you hoped for in the first place. There may not be the chemistry, or the excitement, or the tension that the screenplay seemed to have or certainly seemed to promise. You’ve shot it, you’ve edited it, yet it doesn’t seem to have those qualities. But the music can contribute those qualities. The music is very much there to interact with images, it’s not there to simply go along with the script, and so you really do need the images and a good idea as to how they’re flowing and the kind of story you’re telling before you get too concerned about music.

When you’re working with a director for the first time, do you have a set of guidelines you give him/her?

Absolutely. The guidelines have nothing to do with musical terminology, they’re more about how to think about the music and what it does in the film. There are four basic questions, which are always good questions to come back to whenever one’s in any doubt as to how to talk about music for a certain moment in the film. For every single moment of the film, one should be able to address that moment with these four questions:

1) What is missing if we don’t put music here?
2) What do you want the audience to feel?
3) What is the energy supposed to be?
4) What is the point of view?

1) What is missing if we don’t put music here?
If nothing is missing, then there’s nothing to write. There’s no point in contributing music to a scene that already works. So if the music is completely needless and nothing is missing, then what is it contributing? It’s crucial to be able to have that discussion and know that the music has a very specific job and to know what that job is.

Directors have often watched the film 3,000 times and they’ve lost confidence in the material because they no longer see it as the drama it actually is; they’re just seeing edits and performance pieces, but they’re kind of losing perspective. Sometimes you get asked, “We need your thoughts on music for this scene,” and you look at it and go, “I don’t know why… the scene’s fantastic – why do you need music here?” And the director will say, “Oh… you actually think it works?” And in this case, there really is nothing to do.

Film Independent | Read the Rest of the Interview

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The Basics of Music Licensing

Anna Durisch attempts to clarify some of the issues surrounding licensing of music for your film project.

When do I have to license a song?

Let’s start with a little example: Imagine you’re making a video about your holidays and the only thing missing is a piece of music to complete it. Quickly you add your favorite track and you’re done. So far everything sounds quite easy. But when does music licensing come into play? Depends on how you want to use the video. There are two different types of use:

Which rights are affected?

To publicly use someone else’s work you have to acquire certain rights of use. There are two different kinds of rights involved: The master and the publishing rights.

If you publish your video without acquiring the usage rights, it can, to put it mildly, get quite unpleasant for you. YouTube for example can block your uploaded video or delete your account. If you are really unlucky the rights holder can take legal action against you and demand compensation. The rules apply to all sorts of videos and their public use not just YouTube videos.

Rights Clearing.com | Read the Full Article

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Film vs Digital: Here’s The Reality

Phil Rhodes’ take on the ever persistent hotbed topic: Film vs. Digital:

Film vs Digital

I write hoping that the subject of this article – the move from film to digital, as if that’s a complete description of such a complex situation – is no longer controversial enough to provoke a lot of angry mailbag. Some of what’s to come in this discussion of what’s been lost and gained will be familiar to most people who’ve shot both formats, but I hope to explore one particular point that’s of waning importance now but did a lot to define the debate at the beginning of the changeover, and which has left echoes that are are audible to this day. What I’m talking about here is the difference between shooting film and postproducing that film in a digital environment, and shooting digitally in the first place, a distinction which was and is frequently glossed-over in discussions of the relative merits.

The first thing to be clear about is that, despite the nostalgia, film is far from free of faults. Grain is, despite its intermittent fashionability, noise. Being a fundamentally mechanical animation system, film is subject to to instability and flicker, dirt, scratches, colour variations, and other problems, all of which are inevitably present to at least some tiny degree in all film. I’m going to overlook the corner case in which these faults are artistically sought after, as they’re easy enough to simulate in either medium.

Red Shark News | Read the Full Article

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How To Make a Boring Industrial Interesting

 offers some tips on how to make what can be a dull industrial video into something that would be worth watching.

Boring subjects interesting

If you’re making a film entirely on your own, you’ll have full creative control over the script and story. But not all videomakers have that kind of luxury, as they work on projects from time to time that call on others’ materials, choices, and commands. In these cases, you’ll want to collaborate with the team but still try to find ways to envelop your vision into the product’s creation.

That’s easier said than done some of the time, however. As video has shown up in marketing materials and business presentations, more executives are looking to add some visual accompaniment to maintain audiences’ attention and convey their information. Thanks to this recent proliferation, videomakers will at times be faced with the daunting task of having to work with difficult scripts to “art.” Here’s a look at how visual storytellers can apply stock footage to lighten up difficult topics and make them more accessible:

Science

For many filmmakers, this can be the most dreaded topic of all. Before you turn down an assignment as a result of your intense fear of the subject matter dating back to grade school, you’ll want to at least consider how your artistic qualities can enhance a largely-perceived dull subject. First and foremost, get inside the body or the structure at hand. People love to dissect and investigate what lies beneath, and you can echo that sensibility with something colorful, active, and alive. Look at science differently than you or others may have been willing to before.

Raindance | Read the Full Article

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Everything You Wanted to Know about Camera Mounted Recorders

At AbelCine Expo – Mitch Gross and manufacturers gave a two-and-a-half hour presentation on Camera Mounted recorders which include an in-depth explanation of the technology and application of these camera recorders. Manufacturers that participated in the EXPO included AJA, Atomos, Convergent Design, and Sound Devices. Presentations

 

For a somewhat shorter primer for some of the digital tech, check out the second part of our “Evolution of Modern Digital Editing” Lesson.

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Fujinon’s $90,000 4K lenses – Craft Truck

The Fujinon 4k Premiere Zooms are some serious pieces of glass and steel. There’s a reason why these things go for $90,000 each – ’cause they’re worth it.

Now bear in mind, these aren’t for all situations. You have to be doing essentially studio style shooting, on sticks or dolly and want that flexibility to change focal lengths and not require more light than T2.6-2.8ish. But that being said, if you’re in that situation, some might argue that these lenses are actually sharper than even Master Primes. I’m not joking. Take a look at what Claudio Miranda has to say about them (they had 8 of ‘em living on the set of “Oblivion”) and you’ll know. When it comes to big heavy zooms, these Fujinons are no joke. They’re serious lenses for serious application, and they don’t mess around.

Check out Craft Truck for more DP interviews and tech bites.

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5 Ways the ‘Fast and Furious’ Franchise Got It Right

Variety’s Pat Saperstein hypothesizes some reasons why the “Fast and Furious” franchise continues to draw in the crowds even on its sixth outing.

Fast and Furious

With an estimated $120 million at the domestic box office, “Fast and Furious 6“ had the biggest opening weekend yet for a film in the Universalseries, achieving the rare feat of a franchise that keeps getting more popular as it goes on. And the racing action-fest managed its record-setting Memorial Day weekend despite the opening of “Hangover III,” which targets the same young male audience. Sure, the third installment, “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” stumbled a bit when the filmmakers seemed to drift from the core mission, switching up the original cast, but the films seemed to find their footing after that.

Every studio would like several more franchises with this kind of durability, but what’s the secret to its success? Here’s a few factors, some contributed by Variety readers.

1) Hispanic appeal: “Fast 6?s” boffo Memorial Day B.O. in the U.S. came from audience that was comprised of 32% Hispanics. Hispanics are typically the most enthusiastic moviegoers overall, buying about 25% of all movie tickets compared to representing about 17% of the population, and cast members like Michelle Rodriguez, Gina Carano and John Ortiz help the series look more like the U.S. itself than the typical Hollywood title.

Variety | Read the Full Article

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Making a Movie Without a Hollywood Budget and Big Crew

This B&H seminar provides information on how to take a personal project from concept to reality and maximize its potential in the marketplace. Gail Mooney’s film Opening Our Eyes won Best Documentary at the 2012 Los Angeles Women’s International Film Festival, Best Documentary at the 2012 Orlando Film Festival, Utopian Visionary Award at the 2012 Utopia Film Festival, and Best Humanitarian Documentary at the 2012 Bare Bones International Film Festival. In this seminar she uses the film as an example of how she made her project happen.

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