All posts by Mark

About Mark

Mark Poole is a writer and director of both drama and documentary. His most recent film Fearless about 92 year old playwright Julia Britton recently screened on ABC1. His career began when the feature film he wrote, A Single Life, won an AFI Award in 1987. Since then he has written more than 20 hours of broadcast television drama, won a directing award for the short film Basically Speaking at the St Kilda Film Festival, and was honoured with a major AWGIE, the Richard Lane Award in 2008.

Screen business online

Appropriately enough I saw this session advertised on twitter, as for some reason I missed it in the Film Victoria ebulletins.

Film Victoria’s Brad Giblin opened this information session at ACMI today by explaining that it was a follow up to a similar one held around a year ago. The Screen Business Online program is an attempt by Film Victoria to encourage and assist people to build their ongoing viability by ramping up their online presence, and engage with their audiences online. Up to $10,000  is available as a grant, and two of the three speakers in this session were past recipients.

So what did they do with their dough?

One key takeaway from the morning was the flood of people migrating onto the WordPress platform as a way of avoiding all that mind-boggling HTML code and enabling the owners of the business to update their content easily and constantly. WordPress is essentially a way of creating a blog, and it can be free, but it’s also a way of creating a web site that will look fine on the major browsers, including the horrible Internet Explorer. So you can slap content into your site without shoving the borders sideways or ending up with a blank screen. You can go a long way with WordPress, assisted if you wish by designers and techheads who know more about CSS than you ever wanted to.

And that was well demonstrated in the presentations by Sue Maslin and Robert Connolly, who both demonstrated gorgeous sites full of content.

Sue Maslin even quoted sales figures that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can make cold, hard moolah from online sales of your back catalogue – surely a thought that will bring smiles to every filmmaker’s screen. And useful wads of cash, not biscuit money.

Continue reading Screen business online

What’s a documentary?

WHAT’S A DOCUMENTARY?

This session at the AIDC 2012 in Adelaide has arisen via a ‘stoush’ between Chris Hilton and Screen Australia over their production Lush House. Chris applied for a producer offset for the program, but it was rejected. However Chris appealed to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, who overturned the decision. Then Screen Australia appealed, and this was heard on 13 February. To date the outcome is still pending.

The session was the liveliest of the conference, with robust discussion as could be expected – and then some! Chris Hilton put forward a passionate argument in favour of Lush House being awarded the offset, and Screen Australia’s Chief Operating Officer Fiona Cameron rebutted his arguments.

Simon Nasht countered with an offer of a bet that Screen Australia would lose its appeal, as in his eyes their case is weak. If he is right, this will create the very uncertainty that Fiona said they were seeking to avoid over what sort of documentary is eligible for an offset.

Bob Connolly unleashed an astounding diatribe against the current state of the documentary industry in Australia. It was so astounding that we have reported it as a transcript of his comments, to the best of our ability in transcribing it. Our apologies for any errors.

Finally Jennifer Peedom put forward a perspective of someone with fewer kilometers on the odometer, but some equally penetrating insights into the dilemmas facing writer-directors or producer-directors who were not part of a large production company, and who wanted to continue to make films, and also pay the mortgage.

Continue reading What’s a documentary?

Joost den Hartog mourns Film Australia

To herald the 2012 AIDC documentary conference just completed in Adelaide, Director Joost den Hartog took the industry to task for failing to save Film Australia. He suggests that only Film Australia was capable of looking after the need to make culturally relevant documentaries here.

This is what he said in IF magazine:

In 2006 – the year I migrated to Australia – Film Australia made its submission to the federal government’s film funding review. That year my ignorance prevailed when I was occupied programming my first Australian International Documentary Conference (AIDC) as its new director.

Encouraged by industry anger about the terms of trade, role and direction of Film Australia, I programmed a keynote address that criticised the six-decade-old institution and put some more fuel on the already burning fire. The keynote by Wall to Wall’s chief executive Alex Graham was meant to alter the terms of engagement, but it set the tone for a further attack on Film Australia as a whole. Unfortunately the industry mobilisation happened at a time the federal government was keen to cut some costs and a golden opportunity arose to axe Film Australia with seemingly the full blessing of stakeholders in the documentary community.

Had I paid more attention to Film Australia’s submission, I would have realised the deep cultural importance of the institution as the people’s production house. I believe cost-cutting was the true reason behind the demise of the agency – there is no other logical explanation why a small industry would liquidate such a national public asset. Unfortunately Film Australia only made it to the age of 61. Something Australia has always understood very well is the importance of documenting its history. The national documentary history exists parallel with federated Australia’s narrative of nation building, starting with the first multi-camera documentary The Inauguration of the Commonwealth in 1901, and onwards to the present day.

Continue reading Joost den Hartog mourns Film Australia

ScreenAus’s optimism not shared by ADG

Australian documentary makers are struggling to make a living and are losing the
grip of their rights to their own intellectual property, Kingston Anderson, general
manager of Australian Directors Guild told the Australian International
Documentary Conference in Adelaide yesterday.

The comments came after Ruth Harley, Screen Australia CEO on Tuesday told the
conference as a keynote speaker, the value of documentary production was the
highest on record to date and driven by more hours of high production value series.

In Tuesday’s address, Harley said: “It’s been a great year for documentaries with 430
hours of Australian documentary projects made in 2010/11 and a total of $133
million spent on documentary production. This is above the $118 million five-year
average for documentary production.”

Anderson’s point was backed by an ADG survey which showed that the income levels
of documentary makers have declined further in the last 12 months, from 55.5% of
2011 respondents earning less than $45,000 compared to 58.6% of respondents in
2010 earning less than $60,000 per annum. This is below the average Australian
wage for August 2011 of $68,700.

Continue reading ScreenAus’s optimism not shared by ADG

At least on YouTube it’s not all black and white

Online star … video blogger Natalie Tran says that while ethnicity is irrelevant to
YouTube success it would be preferable to see a greater spread of racial backgrounds
on television.

MAJOR TV networks stand accused of creating too few roles for people from
Australia’s ethnic mix. Firass Dirani, who portrayed John Ibrahim in Channel
Nine’s Underbelly: The Golden Mile and New Zealand actor Jay Laga’aia, recently
cut from Home and Away, have slammed racial tokenism on television.

But viewers of the democratised online platform YouTube see a different
representation of Australia.

More of them log on to Natalie Tran’s channel on YouTube than any other. Ms Tran,
25, who lives in Sydney and has a Vietnamese background, is at the top of the list of
the most subscribed to channels in Australia. Her witty and instructive video blogs
have earned her hundreds of millions of viewers globally – and a large salary.

Continue reading At least on YouTube it’s not all black and white

Feature projects to receive development from SA

Screen Australia today announced over $350,000 to support 13 filmmaking teams
develop their feature film projects, taking them to the next level on the path towards
production readiness. Five new projects have been added to the development slate
while eight teams will receive continued support to develop their projects. Genres
include horror, comedy, romantic comedy, drama, adventure and children’s
animation.

Among the new projects to receive support for development is The Tunnel: Dead
End, the sequel to the successful crowd-funded online horror feature film The Tunnel
from producer/writers Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvey and director Carlo
Ledesma.

Continue reading Feature projects to receive development from SA

Katrina Sedgwick swaps jobs with Amanda Duthie to take Head of Arts

The former director and CEO of the Adelaide Film Festival, Katrina Sedgwick, has
been appointed the new ABC TV Head of Arts in a seeming swap. She replaces, in
part, former ABC content head of arts and entertainment, Amanda Duthie, who was
appointed director and CEO of the Adelaide Film Festival in December.

The move comes after criticism of the ABC’s perceived diminution of arts
programming after the axing of production staff in Melbourne and the weekly arts
program Art Nation.

In a statement announcing Sedgwick’s appointment, director of ABC TV Kim Dalton
said, “This new stand alone position reporting directly to me will provide stronger
focus on our arts programming. As a result of changes to our arts production and
line up last year we have increased the resources committed to prime-time arts
programming to be commissioned from the independent production sector,” he said.

Sedgwick will begin the newly-created role, based in Sydney, on 11April.

From The Australian. Michael Bodey. ABC TV names new Head of Arts
February 24, 2012 1:26PM

More Here:
Google: ABC TV names new Head of Arts

ABC TV’s plans for social media

The NICTA technology can overlay the Twitter discussion on top of any show on any
channel.

Your TV experience is about to get a whole lot more social, with government
researchers partnering with the ABC to bring Twitter and Facebook integration to
virtually any show on any channel.

The technology, developed by the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation,
displays tweets about a show overlaid on top of the TV image and is also able to
recommend shows based on previous behaviour and on what the viewer’s Facebook
friends are watching.

“It’s about allowing people to engage a little more than they have been able to in the
past with what they’re watching,” said ABC’s manager of new media services, Chris
Winter, in a phone interview.

Continue reading ABC TV’s plans for social media

Britain enters a golden era of the short film

According to Sarah Morrison of The Independent, Britain is entering a golden era of the short film. Apparently the medium has moved out of art houses and into the mainstream as its popularity soars.

Charlie Chaplin built a career on them, and brands are now using them to sell their
latest products. The short film, once a slightly marginal staple of art houses and film
buffs, is experiencing a golden era in Britain and is reportedly reaching wider
audiences than ever before.

Advances in film-making technology and the growth of the internet are behind the
rise, experts say, but their popularity is down to more than digital progress. The
short film, with its capacity to convey ideas concisely, is capturing the mood of an
increasingly time-pressed, information-hungry generation.

Briony Hanson, director of film at the British Council, said we are at a “watershed
moment” when it comes to the proliferation of “perfect little vessels that tell a story
in their own right”. “We are looking at a golden era in Britain,” she said. “Just over
20 per cent of shorts in the total Sundance [Film Festival] selection were UK-made in
2012, while last year, the figure was 6 per cent.”

Continue reading Britain enters a golden era of the short film