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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MEDIAWEEK
Users of the popular young adult-centric virtual world There.com will soon be able to quote from there favorite movies–using actual clips from those movies.
There.com, which is owned by Makena Technologies, has embarked on an innovative partnership with Paramount Digital Entertainment to license short clips from thousands of movies and TV shows. Via the social networking [...]

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The Taste of Others - Film in Focus
If pressed, Joe Konstan will admit that he watches “fewer than two movies a year.” Yet Konstan has spent more than a decade creating software that attempts to figure out your taste in movies and suggest what you might want to watch next.
Konstan, a professor at the University [...]

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Short shrift no longer: Brief films are popular again, especially when the Oscar-nominated ones screen together
LA Times
THANKS to a new generation of viewers more conversant with YouTube than with appointment television, the short subject seems to be making a comeback. “Hotel Chevalier,” Wes Anderson’s 13-minute prequel to “The Darjeeling Limited,” was added to the feature’s [...]

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Print tramps to new home - The Hollywood Reporter
A print of “The Great Dictator” that Hitler himself might have watched is among the thousands of historic films that the Library of Congress is moving halfway across the country.
The print of the Charlie Chaplin classic skewering the Nazi leader is among the 120,000 reels of nitrate [...]

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Associated Press

LOS ANGELES - Talk of the writers strike buzzed around a Four Seasons ballroom Friday as George Clooney, Javier Bardem and other stars gathered for a no-pressure awards lunch hosted by the American Film Institute.
The AFI Awards honored 10 films and 10 television programs of 2007, as selected by juries that include critics, academics [...]

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Bit Player/LA Times Blog
Here’s an unusual first. Paramount Pictures announced a deal Wednesday to let MusicGiants, an online music store that caters to audiophiles, sell collections of movies loaded onto hard drives. Buyers will be able to transfer the contents of those drives onto personal computers or, more likely, home media servers. The deal [...]

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His magic has not extended to visual entertainment. Hollywood and cable companies aim to keep it that way — Business Week

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Times of London
Thirty years ago, it was a byword for gore, suspense and over-acting. Now the Hammer House of Horror is open for business again, exclusively online, writes Hannah Strange.
Beyond the Rave, the first horror movie made by Hammer Films since 1976, will be released not in cinemas but through MySpace, the world’s biggest social [...]

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Technology has use in live action, animation — Variety
You don’t hear live-action performers fretting about being replaced by animated CG creations (at least, not yet), but the prospect of actors having a hand in animation seems to have the toon community in a tizzy.
The Annies snubbed the performance-capture “Beowulf” in every category except production design, [...]

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