A teenager mimicking Brad Pitt's Fight Club character, who plans attacks on corporate America, was arrested for masterminding a pre-dawn blast outside a Starbucks Coffee shop in New York, police said yesterday. Kyle Shaw, 17, was arrested on charges of arson, criminal possession of a weapon and criminal mischief. The explosion near the Guggenheim museum, on the Upper East Side, in May shattered windows but caused no injuries. Police said Shaw was trying to emulate the character Tyler Durden from the 1999 film about a secret club where men beat each other up to try to feel more alive.Comedian Noel Fielding is to take part in an attempt to break the world record for the largest gathering of zombies. The Mighty Boosh star is to play the role of the Zombie King in the film I Spit On Your Rave, it was announced yesterday. Shooting for a key scene will take place at this year's Big Chill festival at Eastnor Castle deer park in Herefordshire. Organisers have appealed to revellers to turn up "zombiefied" to the festival on 6 August so they can be used as extras. A spokesman for the Big Chill has said the biggest official gathering of this kind was by 1,227 people in Nottingham on Halloween last year.
The scene: a shop selling musical instruments. The characters: An electric guitar called Riff; Vanessa, a classical violin; a drum kit called Sticks and keyboards, Keys. The storyline: Riff falls in love with Vanessa, the "violin of his dreams" in a rock version of Romeo and Juliet.
The basic storyboard of Live Music, a five-minute short animated film, is the kind of fare that might comfortably emerge from the big studios such as Pixar or Dreamworks. But in the manner of its creation the film, which it has just been given the green light for a cinema release in November, is highly unusual.
It represents the most ambitious attempt yet to apply the interactive model of Wikipedia, otherwise known as "crowd-sourcing" to the animated film world.
The film has been created by a team of 51 people from around the world who responded to an invitation through the social networking site Facebook.
They have participated in a group experiment that is being billed as the largest global collaboration in animation.
Live Music was the brainchild of Yair Landau, who as a former head of Sony's digital pictures division steered into being such mainstream films as Surf's Up and Monster House. He wanted to see whether innovations pioneered in the gaming world, such as the ability of players to modify their own games, could be applied to the production of films.
He conceived the Romeo and Juliet-as-musical-instruments storyline, worked it up into a storyboard and enlisted the help of Intel and the online animation group Aniboom to develop software that participants could download and use to create their own 3D computer drawings. The movie was split up into 107 shots which individuals could create themselves, working through Landau's page on Facebook which he calls Mass Animation.
More than 50,000 people signed up to the project from 101 countries. They voted for their favourite drawings, whittling the pool of artists down to the successful 51 who each won $500 (£304).
Landau said the resulting short film is "a clearly less professional product than you would get from animators who have been in the industry for years. But it's a start and an indication of what can be done."
He said the participants had enriched the story. For instance, an animator from the UK added her own touch of having two cymbals kiss each other in mockery of the guitar and violin's love.
The film will be rolled out at the Los Angeles shorts film festival next week and the Siggraph's computer animation festival in New Orleans in August. In November it will appear in cinemas as a preview to Sony's animated feature Planet 51.
Landau said that his company is already working on a storyboard for a full-length feature film created similarly through the Wiki model.
But not everybody is enamoured of the idea. Opponents of the collaborative concept have set up their own Facebook page called Anti Mass Animation in which professional animators denounce Landau's innovation as a disguised sweat shop.
The 21 members of this group say Live Music is a "cheapskate" film produced through a "degrading, exploitative, manipulative and downright insulting new method".
To which Landau replies: "There are a lot of people who have entrenched positions and are threatened by all sorts of technology."
The British film industry has bucked the trend during the economic downturn with a year of steady growth in revenue and attendances at the cinema, figures show.
In 2008 – the year of The Dark Knight, Mamma Mia! and Quantum of Solace – British films accounted for 15% of box office takings worldwide, banking $4.2bn (£2.6bn) – up nearly $1bn on the previous year.
Attendances also rose steadily, adding weight to research by the UK Film Council on past recessions that suggested going to the movies was generally unaffected by the economic climate.
The trend is expected to continue this year with the production of major UK/US productions, such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One. In the first half of 2009, £535m was spent on film production in Britain, compared with £363m over the same period last year.
Nonetheless, only one in 20 purely domestic films made a profit last year, and there were a number of star-studded flops, including Three And Out, starring Mackenzie Crook, which took only £189,454 when it opened in April 2008.
According to David Steele, head of research and statistics at the UK Film Council, said: "The film industry is a hit-dependent industry, and there are very few hits. If you want to score goals you have to make many attempts; and the difference between hits and misses is vast."
US/UK productions have a far higher profit rate of 27%, based on their box-office takings over the first two years of release. "Studio films have much larger budgets; and the hit rate goes up as the budget goes up when you can employ stars and tap into global marketing and distribution," said Steele, who today launched the 2009 UK Film Council Statistical Yearbook..
The British film industry has in recent years been propped up considerably by franchises such as Harry Potter, and by blockbusters such as Mamma Mia!. The latter has become the biggest-selling DVD of all time.
The effect on the British film industry when the Harry Potter films come to an end is uncertain.
"I don't think we can assume that others won't come up with great ideas in the future," said Steele. "The talent base in Britain is so rich and deep."
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The scene: a shop selling musical instruments. The characters: An electric guitar called Riff; Vanessa, a classical violin; a drum kit called Sticks and keyboards, Keys. The storyline: Riff falls in love with Vanessa, the "violin of his dreams" in a rock version of Romeo and Juliet.
The basic storyboard of Live Music, a five-minute short animated film, is the kind of fare that might comfortably emerge from the big studios such as Pixar or Dreamworks. But in the manner of its creation the film, which it has just been given the green light for a cinema release in November, is highly unusual.
It represents the most ambitious attempt yet to apply the interactive model of Wikipedia, otherwise known as "crowd-sourcing" to the animated film world.
The film has been created by a team of 51 people from around the world who responded to an invitation through the social networking site Facebook.
They have participated in a group experiment that is being billed as the largest global collaboration in animation.
Live Music was the brainchild of Yair Landau, who as a former head of Sony's digital pictures division steered into being such mainstream films as Surf's Up and Monster House. He wanted to see whether innovations pioneered in the gaming world, such as the ability of players to modify their own games, could be applied to the production of films.
He conceived the Romeo and Juliet-as-musical-instruments storyline, worked it up into a storyboard and enlisted the help of Intel and the online animation group Aniboom to develop software that participants could download and use to create their own 3D computer drawings. The movie was split up into 107 shots which individuals could create themselves, working through Landau's page on Facebook which he calls Mass Animation.
More than 50,000 people signed up to the project from 101 countries. They voted for their favourite drawings, whittling the pool of artists down to the successful 51 who each won $500 (£304).
Landau said the resulting short film is "a clearly less professional product than you would get from animators who have been in the industry for years. But it's a start and an indication of what can be done."
He said the participants had enriched the story. For instance, an animator from the UK added her own touch of having two cymbals kiss each other in mockery of the guitar and violin's love.
The film will be rolled out at the Los Angeles shorts film festival next week and the Siggraph's computer animation festival in New Orleans in August. In November it will appear in cinemas as a preview to Sony's animated feature Planet 51.
Landau said that his company is already working on a storyboard for a full-length feature film created similarly through the Wiki model.
But not everybody is enamoured of the idea. Opponents of the collaborative concept have set up their own Facebook page called Anti Mass Animation in which professional animators denounce Landau's innovation as a disguised sweat shop.
The 21 members of this group say Live Music is a "cheapskate" film produced through a "degrading, exploitative, manipulative and downright insulting new method".
To which Landau replies: "There are a lot of people who have entrenched positions and are threatened by all sorts of technology."
The British film industry has bucked the trend during the economic downturn with a year of steady growth in revenue and attendances at the cinema, figures show.
In 2008 – the year of The Dark Knight, Mamma Mia! and Quantum of Solace – British films accounted for 15% of box office takings worldwide, banking $4.2bn (£2.6bn) – up nearly $1bn on the previous year.
Attendances also rose steadily, adding weight to research by the UK Film Council on past recessions that suggested going to the movies was generally unaffected by the economic climate.
The trend is expected to continue this year with the production of major UK/US productions, such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One. In the first half of 2009, £535m was spent on film production in Britain, compared with £363m over the same period last year.
Nonetheless, only one in 20 purely domestic films made a profit last year, and there were a number of star-studded flops, including Three And Out, starring Mackenzie Crook, which took only £189,454 when it opened in April 2008.
According to David Steele, head of research and statistics at the UK Film Council, said: "The film industry is a hit-dependent industry, and there are very few hits. If you want to score goals you have to make many attempts; and the difference between hits and misses is vast."
US/UK productions have a far higher profit rate of 27%, based on their box-office takings over the first two years of release. "Studio films have much larger budgets; and the hit rate goes up as the budget goes up when you can employ stars and tap into global marketing and distribution," said Steele, who today launched the 2009 UK Film Council Statistical Yearbook..
The British film industry has in recent years been propped up considerably by franchises such as Harry Potter, and by blockbusters such as Mamma Mia!. The latter has become the biggest-selling DVD of all time.
The effect on the British film industry when the Harry Potter films come to an end is uncertain.
"I don't think we can assume that others won't come up with great ideas in the future," said Steele. "The talent base in Britain is so rich and deep."
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Your IP address will be logged
ShareClose
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