Author Archives: niamhcarr

How older viewers are rescuing cinema (article)

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A quiet revolution is afoot: older people are flocking to cinemas. But they don’t care for special effects. They want big characters, grown-up dramas and tales of late-blooming love. And so Hollywood’s changing its game …

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/mar/08/older-viewers-rescuing-cinema

Warner Bros and 20thC Fox – Cross Media Convergence

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“Historically, communications companies have formed newspaper chains and networks of radio and TV stations to realize many of these same advantages, and convergence can be seen as the expansion and intensification of this same logic. Time Warner in the United States is seen as a model for media convergence. Time Inc and Warner Brothers first merged in 1989, creating the world’s largest media and entertainment company with its complementary properties in magazine publishing, music recording, film production and distribution. AOL subsequently bought Time Warner in January 2001 in an attempt to expand the Time Warner synergies to the global computer network called the Internet.”

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/articles/media-convergence

AVATAR – 2009

This 20th Century Fox film was helped by cross media convergence as the film studios is owned by New Corp, a huge international conglomerate which would’ve helped publicity, advertising and marketing.

http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2010/02/how-digital-marketing-helped-avatar-break-the-box-office039.html

How are new technologies changing the film industry?

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“In 2011, the first feature film shot entirely on a Smartphone was screened at a West Hills cinema in Los Angeles. Olive, by director Hooman Khalili, was filmed solely on a Nokia N8 and thanks to its cinema run, qualifies for Academy Award consideration. Olive is a reminder that the traditional days of filmmaking are now behind us. The film industry today is in a constant state of change, with a wealth of new opportunities available for those with their finger on the pulse. Thanks to rapidly evolving digital technology, film making and distribution is undergoing a major revolution. Avenues such as YouTube, web series and smart phone applications are all viable- and often lucrative- methods of getting work into the public eye.”  –  http://trueherostudio.com/producer-blog/how-new-technology-is-changing-the-film-industry

This is an example of how new technologies are changing the face of the film industry, and in this case the way they are filmed. Hooman Khalili, filmed a whole movie on his smart phone called Olive; a film about a mysterious child with magical powers and a great secret, invades the lives of three lonely people who learn to embrace life once again. Films are usually made with multiple extremely expensive and very large camera’s that capture all the scenes. However in this case, the extent of the development of smart phones such as the Nokia N8 has allowed the director Khalili, to film a whole film on his smart phone and utilise the high-tech functions of a phone to act as a camera in filming, producing and editing a blockbuster style film.

“The Nokia N8 shoots in high-resolution, but before Khalili and his crew could start filming, they had to hack the phone to turn off the auto focus and the auto zoom.”The camera thinks it knows what you want to focus on, but it doesn’t know,” he said.They tried to pay professional camera makers to build a 35-millimeter camera that would work with the phone, but they were turned down everywhere. Eventually Khalili and his team built what they needed from scratch, dismantling a 1940s-era movie camera to figure out how it should be done. And when it came time to attach the camera to the phone, the best they could come up with was double-sided tape.” – http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/12/olive-smartphone-movie.html