MLCM helped the three teams develop their films, filming sequences and editing the final footage.

“It was a privilege to be asked to lend our expertise,” said MLCM’s James Harrison.

“It proved without question the power of film and video, especially when people with ideas are paired with those who who have the creative experience to turn them into powerful messages”

The Gazette & Herald reported on the Council’s recent Communities Day, at which the staff’s films were showcased.

In response to the claims made by BBC Home Editor, Mark Easton that parish and town councils have a “Vicar of Dibley” image, Easton told the Gazette he was impressed by the three films:

“I think they are really brilliant. I sat in my office and shoved them into my computer and my producer and I watched them all the way through.

“And we thought they were really well put together, beautifully edited and a fantastic example of what a town which has a powerful sense of its own identity can do.

“Clearly the town council of Calne is a million miles away from anything as awful as the parish council in the Vicar of Dibley.”

The Council’s films will eventually appear on its website.

In the meantime, if you’d like to discuss how MLCM can help your organisation communicate its ideas through film, do drop us a line.

20 October – 12 November 2011

Jonathan Cooper, Park Walk Gallery, 20 Park Walk, London, SW10 0AQ

‘The Inhabited Landscape,’ is a new exhibition of twelve egg tempera landscapes and animal paintings by James Lynch – his first solo exhibition since 2006.

Five years ago, MLCM met up with James Lynch at his Somerset studio to hear about his work, his use of egg tempera, and how the surrounding countryside fires his imagination.

The feature we produced was broadcast by Irish radio (and via the now defunct Farm Radio website), and we’ve have resurrected it here:

• James Lynch 2006

In addition, the Park Walk Gallery has included a film by Jess Phillimore showing James at work in his studio, as well as indulging his passion for hang gliding.

See more details about the artist and his exhibition at The Park Walk Gallery website.

Jonathan Cooper Park Walk Gallery is pleased to announce ‘The Inhabited Landscape,’ a new exhibition of twelve egg tempera landscapes and animal paintings by James Lynch, in his first solo exhibition since 2006.

James Lynch is known for his paintings that capture the atmosopheric weather over the English landscape, in the Romantic tradition.

In this new collection, Lynch has depicted the Somerset and Wiltshire countryside from a distinct aerial perspective, inspired by years of soaring the skies with his paraglider.

Many of the paintings are pure dramatic panoramas drenched in light, whilst other aerial views provide the backdrop for his birds and animals, which fill the foreground and bring a playful naivety and narrative to the landscapes.

‘‘I’ve always been interested in the skies and weather, ever since I was a child. Now I often find myself souring with the swallows and birds, which fly alongside me, chasing the insects swept up in the thermals. ”

There are impressive works on a grand scale in which the viewer is up in the air with kites and swallows, painted larger-than-life, looking down with a bird’s eye view on fields of crops and far beyond to a distant skyline.

Other major works include statuesque boxing hares on a hilltop and a monumental cuckoo.

There are also paintings of landscapes and weather not inhabited by animals, but where signs of human habitation are evident in small houses, winding lanes or a small tractor ploughing.

‘It’s not just the huge panoramas I’m interested in, it’s the scale of things – those small signs of human activity in the larger picture – telegraph poles, houses, churches, the furrows and marks of the farmer.”

In the renaissance tradition, James Lynch cooks up his white gesso and makes his own egg tempera paint, combining raw pigment with egg yolks from chickens he keeps near his garden studio.

‘I love the way the paint surface reflects light through its egg shell sheen.

There’s also something satisfying about working with these ancient raw ingredients.”

The translucency of the egg tempera allows the bright gesso ground to reflect ambient light through the pigments, and gives the paintings an other- worldly luminosity.

They glow with the vagaries of the English weather and the light that drifts across the chalk downs, granite hills and soft green meadows.

This interest in the elements and the landscape sets James Lynch firmly in the English Romantic tradition and links him with artists such as Samuel Palmer, Ravilious and Minton.

Press Information: For more information please contact Alice Phillimore at alicephillimore@jonathancooper.co.uk or on 020 7351 0410.

Audiences want an easy and fun way to share and buy films online. Most of them don’t want to steal. They want it to be simple to find and buy the films they’re interested in, and they want to share those films with everyone they know.  (Quoted from the website Distrify)

It seems there are two issues here.

The first is the way media has been traditionally delivered (built schedules, commissioned programmes etc) and the second is how that traditional means of media distribution is being rightfully challenged and tested by services such as Vimeo and YouTube, Flickr and Picasa.

There is a generation of young adults who have grown up with the notion that everything on the web or available via a download should be free.

There is no sense that the person producing all this free media has to eat and live with a roof over their heads and that therefore they should be paid for their labours.

So sites like Distrify serve two purposes: they make people think about the value of the product they’re interested in and they present a new model for the way we consume media, a model which we think will become the norm in years to come.

Like the early days of TV, when after the thing had been invented, people at the BBC for example, scratched their heads and asked, ok, how dow we actually make this thing work?

In effect they had to set their own rules; they were true pioneers of the new technology.

Similarly, we think that’s where we are now with the web.

In the early days of radio, set manufacturers had to invent programming so that people could see the value of their products as an information/entertainment medium and in many ways there is a parallel here with the web.

YouTube and similar sites have proven the technology and while such sites are great for sharing a video made on your iPhone, we don’t believe they are serious contenders for the distribution of better made, bespoke film and video.

And whilst not all the best books are kept to the shelves of expensive bookshops (libraries still provide the same books effectively for free), the desire to own a book keeps Amazon and the High Street a viable proposition for writers and authors.

And we believe the same can be true for film, TV, video and even photography.

People will once again see the difference between amateur and professional for what it really is – not whether one is paid for it or not, but whether it’s well-conceived and beautifully crafted.

Sites like Distrify should help discerning consumers see the difference.

The brainchild of Graham Harvey, script writer for The Archers, Pasture Promise TV is a European funded project which aims to investigate the benefits of returning to a more natural way of farming – a way which harkens back to more traditional values and places the emphasis back on the biological nature of agriculture.

MLCM has been asked to not only produce three of six main features for Pasture Promise TV but is also involved in making numerous news features which will reflect the opinions of those producers already involved in a pasture-led approach to farming.

The films will appear alongside those being produced by other filmmakers based in the West Country and already MLCM has spent two days filming in Lincolnshire with beef farmers Dave Stanley and John Turner who form part of the growing band of producers who believe pasture fed cattle are better for us today and into the future.

See Pasture Promise TV’s website here.

MLCM always aims to work smart, and although we produce our films to broadcast standards – both technically and in terms of journalism and story-telling – we still like the idea of finding a smarter way to create special effects a fraction of the price.

All we would add is that filmmaking is never as easy as it looks – you might have all the gadgets and gizmos in the world, but they count for nothing unless you have the creative ability and experience to turn ideas into stories.

The Frugal Filmmaker: Make a PVC Table Dolly for Under $20.

Build a 35mm Depth of Field Adapter for Your Video Camera on the Cheap

We have always been very proud to be centred in Devizes and with digital communications so reliable, we’ve never seen the need to be city-based.

We have bus stops and taxi ranks outside our building, a free car park opposite and a pay-per-hour car park behind us!

The town boasts at least 9 coffee houses, a host of independent shops – the envy of many neighbouring towns – and wide open spaces nearby to inspire the most needy of creative people.

We certainly don’t waste your money on leather sofas, edit suite fridges stocked with Stella Artois or staff trying to find something to do.

Your money is spent on production. Nothing more, nothing less.

MLCM works smart so you can do so too.

MLCM can help people design their PowerPoint presentations based on the rules of filmmaking, where narrative and imagery are key components.

Contact us if you’re interested in learning more.

Lucy Kellaway | Financial Times

Switzerland’s newest political movement, the Anti Powerpoint Party (APPP), wants to free the world from the ubiquitous presentation software – and not before time, says Lucy Kellaway.

The main trouble with Powerpoint isn’t that it’s so boring, or even that it encourages dull people to make presentations when they would otherwise keep schtum.

No, it is that Powerpoint manages (miraculously) to make things “simultaneously too simple and too complicated.

It reduces subtle ideas” to bullet points, and encourages users to “pad out a presentation with irrelevant data because cutting and pasting is far too easy”.

The resulting presentations are “the least enjoyable way of wasting time there is”, and the flawed decision-making they encourage wreaks untold damage.

What is to be done? In the absence of an outright ban, terrorist tactics might help: an armed wing of the party dedicated to cutting the wires between laptop and projector.

Let the fight start here! Anti-PowerPoint workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the “bonecrushing tedium” of yet another incomprehensible slideshow.

It was recently brought to the attention of MLCM that a commercial organisation playing a corporate film in their reception area had been approached by PPL and asked to produce evidence of a Public Performance Licence.

In this particular case, despite asking for clarification in writing and time to determine the details of the music used in the film, PPL went ahead and established an account for the company and promptly demanded their licence fee.

As an organisation who has enormous respect for the music industry – and especially those  individuals at the the start of the chain: the musicians and composers – MLCM is dismayed to learn about the stance taken by PPL in their collection of fees, and in particular, regarding charities and their use of music in public places.

For more information: PPL FAQS

 

 

 

Community sector campaigners furious as PPL kills off music licence negotiations

Community sector leaders have written to PPL UK to denounce its decision to ignore the plight of over 30,000 community groups who say they cannot afford the introduction of new music licence fees.

In a letter sent on 2 June 2011 PPL UK, the recorded music licensing collector, said that it was turning its back on two years’ of negotiations with the Community Sector Law Monitoring Group (CSLMG) who represent community groups’ interests. It announced its intention to charge a fee of 1% of community groups’ income in order to have permission to play recorded music in public places unless their income is under £10,000 a year, in which case they will pay a flat rate of £42. Similar charges will be applied by the Performing Rights Society. Sports groups are so far not included in the decision, and they could potentially face even higher charges.

CSLMG today expressed shock as until this letter they believed themselves to still be in a productive negotiation with PPL UK, in tandem with the PRS, over the terms of the introduction of compulsory licences for all community groups. As far as CSLMG and its member organisations were concerned, no deal had yet been struck between PPL and the sector.

In a response to PPL UK’s letter David Tyler, chief executive of Community Matters and chair of CSLMG, wrote, “We all felt that our discussions with PPL were moving forward and that this was encouraged by PPL asking us to provide more information at each meeting. We have all invested considerable time and effort into substantiating our proposals for further improvements to a community buildings tariff and understood that you were considering them very seriously. As your letter makes no reference to our proposals, I now have to wonder whether this was really the case.”

David Tyler later added, “We have not been fighting these charges out of a sense of entitlement but because many of our members simply cannot afford to pay for them. To a group with an income of £50,000 a year, a total of £1,000 on music fees is a great deal of money and often the difference between running a service or not. Furthermore the charges have no relationship to the amount of music a community group is likely to play; it’s just a way of wringing more money out of small charities.”

CSLMG collectively denounce the decision and have vowed to carry on campaigning against the charges, seeking the introduction of an affordable capped or flat rate for all community organisations that want to play live or recorded music.

Last year the Government decided to end voluntary and community groups’ statutory exemption from paying for music licences before a deal on charges had been reached.

The change in licensing will affect thousands of small community charities’ activities such as tea dances for older people, youth clubs, children’s music and movement groups, fundraisers and fetes and festivals. CSLMG has warned that these activities may have to be stopped when PPLK UK begins charging.

The Performance Rights Society has made no new announcement, and the plans for a single licence covering both PRS and PPL UK are believed to still be going ahead.

 

This video includes some great motion controlled time lapse photography, filmed by cinematographer Grant Wakefield in Lasse Hoile’s music video for the band Porcupine Tree.

The use of fast cut, time lapse coupled with the inescapable fact that time does indeed wait for no man (or woman) adds up to a powerful statement – a great example of music+image=meaning.

People have always been storytellers – it’s something that separates us from all other beings perhaps.

But things became screwed when man added special effects to his stories by discovering the latest story-telling phenomenon: Pictures In The Fire™(PITF).

Then, as now, those first story critics suggested the thing was all very clever but “it would never catch on”.

Those first flickering flames were later replaced by celluloid and projector lamps, but at least cinema avoided losing the plot and stuck to the principle of just telling a story.

But as technology moves on we appear to be steadily turning out backs on good story-telling in preference for CGI, special FX, clever soundscapes and motion control.

But, as MLCM predicted when it emerged onto our screens for a second time, the 3D film phenomenon appears to be waning, just as it did in the 1950s (a fact nobody seems to acknowledge).

Why, if it didn’t catch on then would it work today?

Audiences want stories. Special Effects have their place but only in moderation or when it helps to tell the story.

According to The Week magazine (15th July 2011), it seems audiences do indeed know best; hopefully the industry will stop playing with fire and get back to what MLCM had been saying for years:

Stories are King.

From The Week, 15 July 2011:

The 3D revolution is already coming to an end, said Nick Alien in The Daily Telegraph.

When “Avatar” was released in 2009, almost 80% of movie-goers chose to watch it in three dimensions; in 2011, only 38% of audiences watching “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” have bought tickets for 3D cinemas.

So what has ended the 3D honeymoon?

Analysts blame ticket prices, which are almost 50% higher for 3D movies.

But there are also medical reasons: the American Association of Optometrists found that a quarter of people watching 3D films reported “eye strain, dizziness or headaches”.

Salvation may be just around the corner – in the form of 4D, said John Harlow in The Sunday Times.

A South Korean company, CJ 4DPIex, has built cinemas where “the seats rock and viewers are assailed by wind and fog, strobe lights and scents to accompany 3D images on screen”.

The company now plans to build America’s first 4D cinema in New York.

Dewey Hammond, who watched a 4D version of Kung Fu Panda 2 in Korea, was full of praise for the new technology.

“If there is a low angle looking up at a character, your seat tilts backwards at the same time. When arrows start flying, expect bursts of air shooting past your ear.”

But it’s not all good news.

Patrons who saw a 4D version of Transformers: Dark of the Moon reported suffering from “nausea and temporary deafness”.