On the riverside of Amsterdam

“We get our ideas from what I’m going to call for a moment our unconscious — the part of our mind that goes on working, for example, when we’re asleep. So what I’m saying is that if you get into the right mood, then your mode of thinking will become much more creative. But if you’re racing around all day, ticking things off a list, looking at your watch, making phone calls and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.” ~ John Cleese

Poterie du Gard

Pottery is the material from which the potteryware is made, of which major types include earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. The place where such wares are made is also called a pottery (plural "potteries"). Pottery also refers to the art or craft of the potter or the manufacture of pottery.

The definition of pottery used by ASTM is "all fired ceramic wares that contain clay when formed, except technical, structural, and refractory products." Some archaeologists use a different understanding by excluding ceramic objects such as figurines which are made by similar processes, materials and the same people but are not vessels.

Making of Titanic-film

There have been several proposals and studies for a project to build a replica ship based on the Titanic. A project by South African businessman Sarel Gaus was abandoned in 2006, and a project by Australian businessman Clive Palmer was announced in 2012, known as the Titanic II. In late 2014 it was announced that the project has been abandoned due to low funding.

A Chinese firm named "Seven Star" commenced a project in January 2014 to build a replica of the Titanic for use as part of a water-front theme park. The ship will take on passengers and then, without actually leaving port, it will simulate being struck by an iceberg and sinking. The project has been criticised as being in "poor taste".

Streetcar Nostalgia

The term nostalgia describes a sentimental longing for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning "pain, ache". It was described as a medical condition, a form of melancholy, in the Early Modern period, and became an important trope in Romanticism.
Nostalgia, in its most common form, was responsible for the old front desk of The Beverly Hills Hotel (from 1942 to 1979) being made into a bar.

In common, less clinical usage, nostalgia sometimes includes a general interest in past eras and their personalities and events, especially the "good old days," such as a sudden image, or remembrance of something from one's childhood.

The scientific literature on nostalgia is quite thin, but there are a few studies that have attempted to pin down the essence of nostalgia, and the reasons that we feel that warm glow when recalling the past. Smell and touch are also strong evokers of nostalgia and memories in general due to the processing of these stimuli first passing through the amygdala, the emotional seat of the brain. These recollections of our past are usually important events, people we care about, and places where we have spent time. Music can also be a strong trigger of nostalgia.

 

Colliage du Sud

In colorfilm, light-sensitive chemicals or electronic sensors record color information at the time of exposure. This is usually done by analyzing the spectrum of colors into three channels of information, one dominated by red, another by green and the third by blue, in imitation of the way the normal human eye senses color. The recorded information is then used to reproduce the original colors by mixing together various proportions of red, green and blue light (RGB color, used by video displays, digital projectors and some historical photographic processes), or by using dyes or pigments to remove various proportions of the red, green and blue which are present in white light (CMY color, used for prints on paper and transparencies on film).

Mosel Treffpunkt

16:9 (1.77:1) (generally named as "Sixteen-Nine", "Sixteen-by-Nine" and "Sixteen-to-Nine") is the international standard format of HDTV, non-HD digital television and analog widescreen television PALplus. Japan's Hi-Vision originally started with a 5:3 ratio but converted when the international standards group introduced a wider ratio of 5⅓ to 3 (=16:9). Many digital video cameras have the capability to record in 16:9, and 16:9 is the only widescreen aspect ratio natively supported by the DVD standard.

Traject en Ardeche

Filming- TIPS:

- Check your camera battery on a regular basis

- Check diskspace on your memory card
- Clean your lens with a soft cloth when you're not filming
- Set your camera in manual mode for more control
- Don't talk during filming...so stupid

- Shut down your computer and start filming!

 

Once upon a time: Trams

A tram (also known. as a tramcar, streetcar, trolley car) is a passenger rail vehicle which runs on tracks along public urban streets and also sometimes on separate rights of way. It may also run between cities and/or towns. Trams very occasionally also carry freight. Trams are usually lighter and shorter than conventional trains and rapid transit trains.

Most trams today use electrical power, usually fed by a pantograph; in some cases by a sliding shoe on a third rail or trolley pole. If necessary, they may have several power systems. Certain types of cable car are also known as trams. Another power source is diesel; a few trams use electricity in the streets and diesel in more rural environments. Also steam and petrol (gasoline) have been used. Horse and mule driven trams do still occur.

 

Rhone valley

Before railroads and highways were developed, the Rhone was an important inland trade and transportation route, connecting the cities of Arles, Avignon, Valence, Vienne and Lyon to the Mediterranean ports of Fos, Marseille and Sète. Travelling down the Rhone by barge would take three weeks. By motorized vessel, the trip now takes only three days. The Rhône is classified as a class V waterway from the mouth of the Saône river to the sea.
In French, the adjective derived from the river is rhodanien, which is the name of the long, straight Saône and Rhone river valleys, a deep cleft running due south to the Mediterranean and separating the Alps from the Massif Central.

Tulips from Amsterdam

The International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) is the world's largest documentary film festival held annually since 1988 in Amsterdam.

The festival was initially held at the Leidseplein area in the centre of Amsterdam. The festival has since spread to a number of other locations.

The objective of the IDFA is to promote creative documentaries and to present them to as wide an audience as possible. It started as a small festival and has grown to an eleven-day festival, screening more than 200 documentaries and attracting nearly 120,000 visitors.

Apart from its international film program, the variety of genres and the many European and world premieres featured each year, the festival also hosts debates, forums and workshops

Hawai dreams

Islands : Oahu / Maui / Kauai / Big Island
Country : Hawaii (USA)
When : January 2012


Time-lapse photography is a technique whereby the frequency at which film frames are captured (the frame rate) is much lower than that used to view the sequence. When played at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. For example, an image of a scene may be captured once every second, then played back at 30 frames per second. The result is an apparent 30-times speed increase. Time-lapse photography can be considered the opposite of high speed photography or slow motion.

Processes that would normally appear subtle to the human eye, e.g. the motion of the sun and stars in the sky, become very pronounced. Time-lapse is the extreme version of the cinematography technique of undercranking, and can be confused with stop motion animation.

dance

 

Leader

A film leader is a length of film attached to the head or tail of a film to assist in threading a projector or telecine. Leader attached to the beginning of a reel is sometimes known as a head leader, or simply head, and leader attached to the end of a reel known as a tail leader or foot leader, or simply tail or foot.
A universal film leader is a head leader designed for both television and theatrical motion picture exhibition applications. This not only includes the countdown, but technical information about the film, including, but not limited to title, studio, production number, aspect ratio, sound level and mix, reel number and color.
Head leaders are marked with visual and audio information that may be used to ensure that the correct amount of time is allowed for the machine to run up to speed and arrive at the beginning of the program or movie. They generally feature a countdown.

Chalons Champions

Flashback is an interjected scene that takes the narrative back in time from the current point the story has reached. Flashbacks are often used to recount events that happened before the story’s primary sequence of events or to fill in crucial backstory. A character origin flashback shows key events early in a character's development. In the opposite direction, a flashforward reveals events that will occur in the future. The technique is used to create suspense in a story, or develop a character.
In movies and television, several camera techniques and special effects have evolved to alert the viewer that the action shown is from the past; for example, the edges of the picture may be deliberately blurred, photography may be jarring or choppy, or unusual coloration or sepia tone, or monochrome when most of the story is in full color, may be used.

West Bank

January 2012

In 2011, volunteers in B'Tselem's camera project filmed over 500 hours of footage in the West Bank. Here are two minutes we collected from it, to sum up the last year.

Music: Einav Jackson Cohen
Additional editing: Noa Barak

Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information.
The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.

Citizen journalism is a specific form of citizen media as well as user generated content.
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.

the Street

There’s no great mystery to scouting good locations for a film. There’s no template that tells you exactly how to do it, either. Many of the requirements for a location will be in the script. Finding them is down to marshalling your resources. If you know the area where you are looking, you are well on your way, If you don’t, a good starting point is people who do know it well.

Vues de Chalons/Saone

The First Photograph
On a summer day in 1827, Joseph Nicephore Niepce made the first photographic image with a camera obscura. Prior to Niepce people just used the camera obscura for viewing or drawing purposes not for making photographs. Joseph Nicephore Niepce's heliographs or sun prints as they were called were the prototype for the modern photograph, by letting light draw the picture.

Niepce placed an engraving onto a metal plate coated in bitumen, and then exposed it to light. The shadowy areas of the engraving blocked light, but the whiter areas permitted light to react with the chemicals on the plate. When Niepce placed the metal plate in a solvent, gradually an image, until then invisible, appeared. However, Niepce's photograph required eight hours of light exposure to create and after appearing would soon fade away.

Filmarchives

filmarchives online provides easy and free access to catalogue information of film archives from all over Europe. Via the multi-lingual web portal film works can be searched for by content, filmographic data and physical characteristics. Search results provide information about existence and location of the materials as well as contact details to facilitate the access. The focus of the database is on non-fiction material; i.e. documentary and educational films, newsreels, travelogue, advertising, scientific, industrial, experimental, sports films, as well as animation films.

Along the Moselle

Filmmaking is the process of making a film. The nature of the film determines the size and type of crew required during filmmaking. Many Hollywood adventure films employ a cast and crew of thousands and have complicated computer generated imagery (CGI), while a low-budget, independent film may be made with a skeleton crew, often paid very little. Filmmaking takes place all over the world using different technologies and techniques, and is produced in a variety of economic contexts that range from state-sponsored documentary in China to profit-oriented movie making within the American studio system

2000 years old

Unlike sound for television dramas, a motion picture normally records only the dialog (the spoken words) during production. All the other sounds are created in post production. This gives greater freedom when editing the dialog. Therefore, the natural sounds of the environment need to be added. This is especially true if the scene was recorded on a sound stage at the motion picture studio where the background sounds are never natural or realistic. The sound of the environment is the ambience and must be recorded in a real location. Even though ambience is very soft in the background, a scene will feel flat without it.

Ambience is also sometimes referred to as "room tone."

 

Pictures of Ghent

Both film and digital have their respective advantages and disadvantages. Digital photography provides instant results, and combining this with a notebook computer means the results can be viewed instantly by the photographer, crew and cast. The choice often comes down to personal preference, but is sometimes dictated by the stills photographer's brief. Medium and large format cameras are often used for a higher quality image although 35mm is usually sufficient, and is often used for speed and ease of use. Large format cameras - considered superior in terms of image quality - is a slower medium, and often hard to use on a busy set. Generally the equipment will suit the type of shots required. If the shots are "reportage" style, then 35mm is advantageous. High-quality cast / set shots can be taken on medium/large especially for very large poster/billboard reproductions.

Donnerwetter

Narrative Music
Narrative music is completely different. Narrative music is music which tells a story and acts like one of the actors in the scene. Narrative music can have themes which are very short melodies which are associated with an actor or an action.
Narrative music can only go in gaps between the dialog of the actors because it is too strong to be placed on top of dialog. That is why, if you want to add narrative music, you must go back to the rough edit and add the correct gaps between the dialog of the actors.

How long should the gap be? How long should the narrative music be? You must make the music, and then create the gap to fit the music. The only way that you will know the correct length of the gap is if you work closely with the composer during the editing of the scene... or if you are the composer!!!! This is why the best film editors also are great film composers (or at least understand film score composing). It is really not that hard so try! (It takes a lot of time though. But it will make your edits better.

Saint-Jean-du-Gard

In filmmaking, the 180° rule is a basic guideline regarding the on-screen spatial relationship between a character and another character or object within a scene. An imaginary line called the axis connects the characters and by keeping the camera on one side of this axis for every shot in the scene, the first character will always be frame right of the second character, who is then always frame left of the first. If the camera passes over the axis, it is called crossing the line or jumping the line.

Arena of Nimes

The Arena of Nîmes is a Roman amphitheater found in the French city of Nîmes. Built around 70 AD, it was remodeled in 1863 to serve as a bullring. The building encloses an elliptical central space 133 m long by 101 m wide. It is ringed by 34 rows of seats supported by a vaulted construction. It has a capacity of 16,300 spectators.

As the Empire fell, the amphitheater was fortified by the Visigoths and surrounded by a wall. During the turbulent years that followed the collapse of Visigoth power in Hispania and Septimania, not to mention the Muslim invasion and subsequent conquest by the French kings in the mid eighth century, the viscounts of Nîmes constructed a fortified palace within the amphitheater. Seven hundred people lived within the amphitheater during the apex of its service as an enclosed community. The buildings remained in the amphitheatre until the eighteenth century, when the decision was made to convert the amphitheatre into its present form.

Morbid

An anatomical theatre was usually a room of roughly amphitheatrical shape, in the centre of which would stand the table on which the dissections of human or animal bodies took place. Around this table were several circular, elliptic or octagonal tiers with railings, where students or other observers could stand and get a good view of the dissection almost from above and unencumbered by the spectators in the rows in front.
The first anatomical theatre was built at the University of Padua in 1594 and is still preserved. Other early examples include the Theatrum Anatomicum of Leiden University, built in 1596 and the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio in Bologna The anatomical theatre completed in 1663 by medical professor and amateur architect Olaus Rudbeck for the University of Uppsala is located in the idiosyncratic cupola which Rudbeck placed on top of the Gustavianum building, at the time the main building of the university.

Common wisdom in filmmaking dictates that if we leave terrifying ideas up to the audience’s imagination, they can fill in the gaps and have an even more thrilling experience than if given all pieces of the puzzle at once. This philosophy dictated Hitchcock’s style, and worked to great effect in films like Spielberg’s Jaws where the antagonist is rarely even seen.

Scenic Ghent

Subjective camera: The camera is used in such a way as to suggest the point of view of a particular character.



High- or low-angle shots indicate where she or he is looking from
a panoramic or panning shot suggests she or he is surveying the scene
a tracking shot or a hand-held camera shot signifies the character on motion.

Ghent North northwest

In cinematography, a take refers to each filmed "version" of a particular shot or "setup". Takes of each shot are generally numbered starting with "take one" and the number of each successive take is increased (with the director calling for "take two" or "take eighteen") until the filming of the shot is completed.

A one-take occurs when the entire scene is shot satisfactorily the first time, whether by necessity (as with certain expensive special effects) or by happy accident.

Film takes are often designated with the aid of a clapperboard. It is also referred to as the slate. The number of each take is written or attached to the clapboard, which is filmed briefly prior to or at the beginning of the actual take. Only takes which are vetted by the continuity person and/or script supervisor are printed and are sent to the film editor.

Fly with me

Film-related podcasts for film-makers.

Creative Cow: Useful creative tech news. In depth interviews.

Filmmaking Central: Podcast from an independent filmmaker, good on the filmmaking process itself.

KCRW's The Business: US-centric high-quality podcast about the movie industry.

KCRW's The Treatment: Interesting discussions with screenwriters.

Creative Screenwriting Magazine.

Celluloid Remix

Celluloid Remix This is the second edition of the successful video-remix competition containing historical fragments from EYE's film collection. Professionals and amateurs remix special film material from the Bits & Pieces collection into new short films with an individual soundtrack.
Bits & Pieces are short fragments, snippets from films that are often forgotten or have disappeared. Quite often these ‘remnants’ are discarded from the archives.
For all information and details please visit www.celluloidremix.nl. You can also keep in touch through the Celluloid Remix Facebook page Celluloid Remix Facebook-page.
MAKER OF THE FILM is Arvid van Kasteel, MUSIC Digi G.Alessio

Eyes on Windows-shopping

Any time you have a cut that looks or sounds abrupt, try adding a dissolve to smooth the transition. This effect blends the two video clips together so that audiences barely notice the change.

Fade In & Fade Out: You'll notice that most professional videos begin and end with a black screen. It's easy to give your projects this same professional look by adding a Fade In at the start of the video and a Fade Out at the end.

Superimpose: Superimposing one video image on top of another can be a little bit tricky, but it is a powerful tool if used properly. Be careful where you apply it; if the scenes are too busy it wont work well.

Saint Bavo Ghent

Bavo was born near Liège, Belgium, to a Frankish noble family that gave him the name Allowin. His father was Pippin of Landen, the Mayor of the Palace of Austrasia.

Wild as a youth and selfish, he was known to have sold servants to local nobles as slaves. He contracted a beneficial marriage, and had a daughter through it. He was a soldier; however, he led an undisciplined and disorderly life. Shortly after the death of his wife, Bavo decided to reform himself upon hearing a sermon preached by a monk, Saint Amand. Bavo was struck after the sermon at the emptiness of material objects and donated his wealth to the poor after he converted to Christianity at Amand's convent. Bavo traveled with Amand for some time in his missionary work through France and Flanders.

He built an abbey on his grounds and became a monk. He distributed his belongings to the poor and lived as a recluse, first in a hollow tree, later in a cell in the forest near the Abbey. He died at St. Bavo's Abbey in Ghent, in today's Belgium.