ZagZ.com Deep end of the alphabet

Beijing Punk by Shaun Jefford – Poster

Truly insightful analysis of the movie matched with deep knowledge of history & currency of punk. This guy gets it.

‘Beijing Punk’ is fast-paced and fun, with a fantastic selection of music from the cream of the Chinese punk scene being heard the majority of the time, and an engaging visual style that maintains a steady focus on the subjects at hand at all times.

The Impaler Speaks is a local music blog supporting indie music, indie film and indie life. Local is wherever you are. In their words

Good Review for Beijing Punk by The Impaler Speaks

Tags: Beijing Punk, Chinese government, Culture, Punk subculture, Underground culture

I’m enjoying the spoken word piece I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate by Suli Breaks. It’s a great track with an amazing video.

Follow him on twitter at https://twitter.com/sulibreaks

I’m a father and have raised my kids (I hope) to value self reliance and life long learning. I have never been asked for a copy of my high school results. Until one job about 5 years ago, I have never been asked for a copy of my university transcript or testamur. With hindsight I should have run away from that job as soon as they asked for a copy of my degree, as they were more interested in proving they covered their arses than turning the business around.

I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate||Spoken Word

Tags: art, music video, poetry, spoken word, video

Gesture 2 by Sanja Gjenero, Zagreb, Croatia

Should you use a free website from Tumblr or WordPress or Wix for the early days of  your indie film? You should register on those free services to grab your brand name. But I wouldn’t go live with that for anything other than a teaser or short.

What about getting your own hosting account and running something like WordPress self-hosting? Things have changed, don’t host your own software or blog.

If your film is a short you can select the free hosting from Tumblr, WordPress, Wix or any of those free top level domains. However if you are going to make more than one short film or a bigger project, you should get a top level domain at least in your production company name. So if your making “My Edgy Short” for the ProdCo Philberts Phantastic Philms you should register a domain name PhilbertsPhantasticPhilms (.com or whatever).

Tags: Blog hosting services, Blog software, Free web hosting service, Web hosting

The Eiffel Tower, Paris, France, as seen from the Allee Leon Bourgeois

One of the films I’ve worked on did “French Hours” for one day of the shoot. Chances are unless you’re a film production geek you don’t know about it. Worse still you’ve come here to find out just what French Hours are all about. Hopefully you read this before you vote on the request to work French Hours.

French Hours while most certainly not French, are when a film crew is asked to give up their meal break in return for grabbing something to eat from the craft services table or catering area on the run-in between doing other things. There is no lunch break and lunch is handed around while the crew works continuously.

Tags: Entertainment, Film, French Hours, Working Conditions

I was trying to find which movies I hadn’t rated yet on my IMDB list of movies I’ve seen - at least the movies I remember seeing there are lots of Westerns and SF movies whose titles I have no idea about.

Anyway the trick is to add the following characters to the end of the list’s URL

/?my_ratings=exclude

That will leave all movies that you’ve rated out of the list. If you want to see my Seen It list and exclude the movies you’ve rated go to http://www.imdb.com/list/DzIaduhe9sU/?my_ratings=exclude

I think you have to be logged into imdb for it to work.

Tags: Entertainment, Internet Movie Database

Image courtesy of imagerymajestic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

All filmmakers want to get their shows seen, right?

Uploading additional, extra and behind the scenes footage of your movie is a good opportunity to promote your project, aggregate an audience and create a moment of connection with fans and followers.

However many filmmakers make these beginner mistakes

Newbie Mistake #1: Upload to proprietary, obscure, restricted or unreliable video hosting services

New audience may checkout your video once. Don’t make them register, signup, click-thru or share your video before they see your clip. Don’t use a service that crashes regularly.

Tags: Digital media, Entertainment/Culture, Video hosting, Vimeo, YouTube

The Device is a well executed, beautifully shot, science fiction short film with masterful special effects.

I’ll be showcasing great SF and fantastical shorts as I find them.

The quality of the lighting and camera work make this one special, Claude Lee Sadik and his team have produced something very special. I’m not sure what their plans to distribute this are, but I’ll give it a hand along. Watch it.

Short Sci-Fi Film: The Device

Tags: Entertainment/Culture, Sci-Fi, SF, Short film

I store all phone numbers and email addresses in the Address Book or Contacts app of the devices I use.

• On Apple Mac OS X it’s the Address Book app
• On IOS it’s the Contacts app
• On Android it’s Contacts
• On my webmail it’s Google’s Contacts

I also add spouse and child names where I know them. For members of my extended family, I have cards for the spouses, parents, and children. That way I get birthday reminders automatically in my calendar.

None of these apps have the smarts to make it easy to link a spouse card with a contact without a lot of repeat data entry. Well, the IOS app lets me select another card, but that’s it.

Tags: Android, Cross-platform software, Gmail, Google Contacts, IOS, Web 2.0, Webmail

My main workhorse is an eMachines eM250 10.1″ netbook. All my email, calendar and important software works via the cloud so I can use any machine with a web-browser. I learned that lesson in the Great London Laptop Crash of 2008.

However there are some items I use local storage for:

• genealogy research
• music, video, podcasts and other media
• ebooks, PDF’s, and reference material
• film and TV project producer files (budgets, head shots, contracts)
• software development and scripting (especially for iPad apps)
• GPG signing and encryption keys

Maybe the NBN will give me the speed to store all that stuff on the cloud, but for now it is a lot of data that represents a significant part of my work and home life.

Tags: Apple, Netbook, Technology/Internet

Unsupported Apple ID: iCloud requires an Apple ID that is an email address (including @me.com addresses)

I have had an Apple ID that predated iTunes. It wasn’t in the form of an email address, it was just “funpaul”.

Now that I have an iPhone 4S and am developing apps for  iOS I thought I should start using iCloud. But I was getting this error

Unsupported Apple ID:
iCloud requires an Apple ID that is an email address (including @me.com addresses).

Unfortunately the Learn More button is worse than useless

Tags: App Store, Apple I, IPhone, itunes, MobileMe