AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

LA Times “Web Scout” blog
Enter a cineplex this summer and you’re basically wandering into a giant circus. Each tent pole — the biz term for a colossally expensive movie — is sure to include at least one outlandish, or even freakish, main character. Step right up. On your left, watch an old man — incredibly! [...]

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The Hollywood Reporter
Partnering with City Lights TV on the documentary series
Barbara Kopple is partnering with City Lights Television on a documentary series titled “3 Americas,” which will explore how class affects the day-to-day lives and behavior of three American families of varying socioeconomic status.
City Lights TV president Dave Noll said the plan is to shoot [...]

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CinemaTech
Every summer, the Bay Area Video Coalition runs the Producers Institute for New Media Technologies, which has quickly become one the world’s foremost petri dishes for experimentation at the intersection of film, games, social networks, and virtual worlds.
If that’s an intersection that interests you, the list of projects just accepted into this summer’s workshop is [...]

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peabody.uga.edu
Athens, Ga. – Thirty-five recipients of the 67th Annual Peabody Awards were announced today by the University of Georgia`s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The winners, chosen by the Peabody board as the best in electronic media for 2007, were named in a ceremony in the Peabody Gallery on the UGA campus.
The latest [...]

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CPB Announces Ten-Year Funding Commitment to Filmmaker Ken Burns - Press Release
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) today announced that it has entered into a long-term agreement with renowned filmmaker Ken Burns and his company Florentine Films to develop and produce programming for public broadcasting.
“For over 20 years, Ken Burns has educated, entertained and enlightened [...]

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HBO breaks with tradition - Variety
Great packaging still secures filmmaker deals
If HBO is known as the belle of the docu ball, prexy Sheila Nevins is the undisputed queen of the castle, a tastemaker who comes to fests like Sundance not to ogle, not to acquire, but to inspire envy.
“We rarely buy during the festival. [...]

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PBS Idealab blog
MTV, as part of its Emmy-winning “Choose or Lose” campaign (www.ChooseorLose.com), today unveiled “Street Team ‘08″: a specially recruited group of 51 citizen journalists - one from every state and Washington, D.C. - who will cover the 2008 elections from a youth perspective and tailor their reports for mobile devices. The members will [...]

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Sunday NY Times covers Ted, who produced NANKING & keynoted at this year’s SilverDocs, where he talked about the concept of Filmanthropy and changing the business model for documentaries.

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The Hollywood Reporter dissects the Oscar race for Best Documentary in : BRAVER THAN FICTION, while Variety reports that a who’s who of contemporary documentarians have been recruited to create a doc version of the best-seller FREAKONOMICS, HERE.
Says the Reporter:
In documentary boxoffice annals, 2007 won’t be noted as a year of barrier-busting business. For all [...]

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Source: Current.org
37.8 million people tuned in to watch all or part of Ken Burns’ series The War, announced PBS in a press release yesterday. The series won a 4.7 national average household rating, and on average, 7 million people were watching the saga at any given time.

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