Danny Cohen on Les Mis cinematography (Kodak blog)

Taken from Kodak's About the Storyboard blog, which is obviously a promotional tool + thus pro-analogue film but still a very useful resource for the flipside to the pro-digital arguments, you may find some of this (an interview with Danny Cohen) familiar from Cohen's seminar at the 2012 ASFF...
See http://motion.kodak.com/motion/About/The_Storyboard/4294971312/index.htm.

Sample quote:

The filmmaking team also did quite a bit of testing, comparing different mediums. ... “In the end, for a variety of reasons, we chose 35mm film. What film has over digital is that it’s organic, it’s slightly softer, and there’s grain. There’s a certain sharpness to digital; you can treat it, but if you shoot on 35, what you see is what you get. You get an amazing image without a lot of post production.
“We shot well over a million feet of film ..."

UK Film uses Kickstarter

News of a UK example of film producers seeking finding via Kickstarter rather than through the traditional channels. Warp's Mark Herbert also raised this as something they would be exploring in future too.

UK video games industry movie turns to crowdfunding for a second time

by Ben Parfitt Thursday, February 28th 2013 at 4:05PM GMT

A film that hopes to tell the story of the UK video games industry has arrived on Kickstarter – the second time it has sought funding from crowdsourcing.
From Bedrooms to Billions has already been successfully funded on Indiegogo, but filmmakers Anthony Caulfield & Nicola Caulfield have now turned to Kickstarter for additional funding. £18,000, to be precise.
“In 2012 we successfully ran our first crowdfunding campaign which allowed us to begin the principle photography, so we've been filming almost continuously throughout 2012 and are very close to completing all filming in 2013,” the pitch reads.
“However as is common with many films financed via crowdfunding, money is now needed to complete post-production, to secure archive footage, stills, music usage and clearances. Without these crucial elements the film would simply be two hours of talking heads and not the true and lasting documentary movie experience that the subject matter deserves.”
Quite how the team can describe its Indiegogo campaign as “successful” when it has now turned to Kickstarter for more money is open to question, although they argue that they “always wanted to run separate campaigns for the production and the post-production budget”.
Nonetheless, the aim remains to finish the two-hour film which tells the story of UK gaming from 1979 to the present. It has been in production for ten years and has amassed footage from interviews with the likes of Matthew Smith, David Braben, Gary Penn, Rob Hubbard, Julian Rignall, Martin Galway and Jeff Minter.
“From Bedrooms to Billions has been a very personal project for us since June 2008,” producer Anthony Caulfield stated. “Having completed many documentaries we have always wanted to document the rise of the British video games industry and the incredible story that went with it.”
Fellow producer Nicola Caulfield added: “This film will be a great piece of nostalgic entertainment that documents an important part of UK history. This era is so often overlooked and not known by young British talent looking to enter the games industry, as the vast majority of UK children, school leavers and even students believe that gaming originated mainly from the US and Japan and have little to no knowledge that a British games industry even once existed.”

Digitisation: links + points from past posts TBC

In no particular order for now:

[TOWID: The Only Way is Digital] UK download revenues (includes music, TV and video games) topped £1bn in 2012; will Skyfall's record of topping £100m UK box office ever be beaten ... is cinema facing a decline on the level of the press and music industries?

[Hollywood encourages piracy?] Hollywood's treatment of online renters/streamers is encouraging piracy argues David Pogue in The Scientific American.

[NEW: DPunch dir Olly Blackburn on HD advantages over film] "Of course there’s still a place for film, I love film, just because it looks beautiful. I was trained on film, I edited film with a knife! I love working on film, but I had such a good experience of working on HD here. If a low budget film uses this technology, the [possibilities] are endless. Much of that comes from working in commercials, you find yourself in the cutting room wondering what this button does, or that one. If you have the right people working on a low budget digital film, you can come up with amazing things. I’d recommend it to younger filmmakers."

[NEW: All Tomorrow's Parties] Interesting as an example of digitisation in full effect: ‘All Tomorrow's Parties is a 2009 documentary film directed by All Tomorrow's People and Jonathan Caouette covering the history of the long running All Tomorrow's Parties music festival. Described as a "post-punk DIY bricolage", the film was created using footage generated by the fans and musicians attending the events themselves, on a multitude of formats including Super8, camcorder and mobile phone. All Tomorrow's People is a name representing the contributions of these attendees.’

Furthermore, it inspired 4 short film projects funded through Kickstarter.com in 2011, the online site where you can post a pitch and seek funding: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/613961261/from-atp-four-short-films-by-vincent-moon  [Wiki].