The making of a Santa

Santa Claus, is a mythical figure with legendary, historical and folkloric origins who, in many Western cultures, is said to bring gifts to the homes of the good children on 24 December, the night before Christmas Day.
The modern figure of Santa Claus is derived from the Dutch figure of Sinterklaas, whose name is a dialectal pronunciation of Saint Nicholas, the historical Greek bishop and gift-giver of Myra. During the Christianization of Germanic Europe, this figure may have absorbed elements of the god Odin, who was associated with the Germanic pagan midwinter event of Yule and led the Wild Hunt, a ghostly procession through the sky.

Santa Claus is generally depicted as a portly, joyous, white-bearded man—sometimes with spectacles—wearing a red coat with white collar and cuffs, white-cuffed red trousers, and black leather belt and boots and who carries a bag full of gifts for children.

Since the 20th century, in an idea popularized by the 1934 song "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", Santa Claus has been believed to make a list of children throughout the world, categorizing them according to their behavior ("naughty" or "nice") and to deliver presents, including toys, and candy to all of the well-behaved children in the world, and sometimes coal to the naughty children, on the single night of Christmas Eve. He accomplishes this feat with the aid of the elves who make the toys in the workshop and the flying reindeer who pull his sleigh. He is commonly portrayed as living at the North Pole and saying "ho ho ho" often.

Hadrians wall

Hadrian's Wall (Latin: Vallum Aelium) was a defensive fortification in Roman Britain, begun in AD 122 during the rule of emperor Hadrian. In addition to its military role, gates through the wall served as customs posts.

A significant portion of the wall still exists and can be followed on foot along the Hadrian's Wall Path. It is the most popular tourist attraction in Northern England and was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

Arcachon, end of summer

A film release is the authorization by the owner of a completed film to a public exhibition of the film. The exhibition may be in theatres or for home viewing. A film's release date and the method of release is part of the marketing of the film. It may be a wide or limited release.

The process may involve finding a film distributor. A film's marketing may involve the film being shown at a film festival or trade show to attract distributor attention and, if successful, may then be released through a chosen distributor.

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Highest dune of Europa

"Screen direction" is a term used in motion picture editing and refers to an underlying concept of cinematic grammar which involves the direction that actors or objects appear to be moving on the screen from the point of view of the camera or audience. A rule of film editing is that movement from one edited shot to another must maintain the consistency of screen direction in order to avoid audience confusion."Camera left" or "frame left" indicates movement towards the left side of the screen, while "camera right" or "frame right" refers to movement towards the right side of the screen. "Foreground" refers to the apparent space close to the camera (and thus to the audience), while "background" refers to the apparent space in the distance away from the camera and the audience.It is the responsibility of the director, cameraman, and script supervisor on the set to maintain consistency of screen direction so that later during editing the myriad short pieces of film can be properly assembled by the editor into a coherent film that tells the story intended.Avant-garde, experimental, and some independent film and video productions often deliberately violate screen direction rules in order to create audience disorientation or ambiguity. However, unless done very skillfully, violation of screen direction can appear to the audience to be the result of filmmaker ineptitude rather than experimentation.

The new Carcasonne

Visual effects (commonly shortened to Visual F/X or VFX) are the various processes by which imagery is created and/or manipulated outside the context of a live action shoot. Visual effects involve the integration of live-action footage and generated imagery to create environments which look realistic, but would be dangerous, costly, or simply impossible to capture on film. Visual effects using computer generated imagery has recently become accessible to the Independent filmmaker with the introduction of affordable animation and compositing software.

Winter in the eighties

Blackhawk Films, from the 1950s through the early 1980s, marketed motion pictures on 16mm, 8mm and Super 8 film. Most were vintage one- or two-reel short subjects, usually comedies starring Laurel and Hardy, Our Gang, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and other famous comedy series of the past. Blackhawk also offered newsreels, documentaries, and silent feature films. With the rise of the video market in the early 1980s, Blackhawk began producing video versions of many of their titles in 1981 and within a few years no longer manufactured film copies

Nature of Norway

A natural history film or wildlife film is a documentary film about animals, plants, or other non-human living creatures, usually concentrating on film taken in their natural habitat. Such programs are most frequently made for television, particularly for public broadcasting channels, but some are also made for the cinema, medium, in fact, where this genre started almost simultaneously alongside television series.
Robert J. Flaherty's 1922 film Nanook of the North is typically cited as the first feature-length documentary. The Living Desert written and directed by James Alger is often considered as one of the first full-length cinematic nature-documentaries. Produced by the Walt Disney Company, it was first released in 1953.

Suspension Railway: Die alte Dame

Modern storytelling has a broad purview. In addition to its traditional forms (fairytales, folktales, mythology, legends, fables etc.), it has extended itself to representing history, personal narrative, political commentary, and evolving cultural norms. Contemporary storytelling is also widely used to address educational objectives. New forms of media are creating new ways for people to record, express, and consume stories. Tools for asynchronous group communication can provide an environment for individuals to reframe or recast individual stories into group stories. Games and other digital platforms, such as those used in interactive fiction or interactive storytelling, may be used to position the user as a character within a bigger world. Documentaries, including interactive web documentaries, employ storytelling narrative techniques to communicate information about their topic.

 

Sur Loire

“I noticed so often that when people take their camera, they simply hold it at eye level, shoulder level or whatever is comfortable and that determines the height their camera is going to be and how they are going to film something. And that’s a monumental mistake. So often, just by lowering down your camera a little bit, you can get an amazing shot.”

Visingso

Visingsö is an island in the southern half of the lake Vättern in Sweden.
Visingsö lies 30 km north of the city Jönköping and 6 km west of Gränna from which two car ferries connects the island. The island is 14 km long and 3 km wide, with a total area of 24 km².
According to legend, a giant named Vist created Visingsö by throwing a lump of soil into the lake so that his wife could use it to step over the lake.
In the 12th and 13th century, Näs Castle on the southern end of Visingsö was the residence for the fragile Swedish monarchy.