Flashforward2008 is going to be in San Francisco this August. This annual conference is directed at Flash designers and developers and those who aspire to be called a designer or developer. Every year Flashforward features a Film Festival with open nominations of the best Flash content out there. In 2008 the categories have changed to the following:

1. Application
2. Cartoon/Story/Narrative
3. Code
4. Experimental/Art
5. Game
6. Motion Graphics
7. Navigation/Experience
8. Sound
9. Typography
10. Video

Anyone can submit links to Flash based works in all categories that are 'innovative and compelling.' Previous winners include Paper Vision 3d, the MoMA Contemporary Voice exhibition, and the amazing Tokyo Plastic. If you do submit a nomination to Flashforward2008 via the official film festival page, please let us know in the comments below with a link. The deadline for nominations is Father's Day, June 15, 2008.

If you have always wanted to be a film titan and you love team work, (that ole collaborator in you), Your Broadcaster puts you in the director chair. Your Broadcaster is a Web 2.0 project where everyone (like you) contributes material for 5 full length feature films in these genres: Bollywood, Thriller, Comedy, Drama, Horror.

Members' participation is primarily through the upload of scripts, auditions, characters, cartoons and stunts among others, which are voted on by other members. Uploads of the most successful member will be used as the basis for the final film.

If you don't want to collaborate on the film project, but still want to show your stuff, you can join Your Broadcaster for free and upload your content such as videos, photographs, audio or video mash-up. Currently, the upload limit is 2 MB per individual data, e.g., video, photo, etc. You still get to vote and you can create your own web page, blog to share, view or post information.

If you do want to collaborate on one or all of the films, the fee is $10 for each, or $35 for however many you want. If you so desire, there is a $10 copyright fee to protect your work.

It's interesting to see how the crowd sourcing trend is impacting our world. Who would have thought Joe Public might get a shot at Oscar night? We're not saying Your Broadcaster will garner that type of success. It could very well share the same fate as the Million Penguins wiki novel, an experiment to publish a crowd sourced novel.

How do you herd edit a million voices, plots, characters, sub-plots, in a novel? The same question might be asked of creating a film with a million directors. Whatever the outcome, you can be sure it will be um, extremely unique, possibly establishing a new film genre altogether.

[via TechCrunch]

Public domain is a beautiful thing. The king of all things public domain, Archive.org is a great resource for downloading copyright-free music, video, texts, etc., but actually searching for specifics can be a chore. For all movie fans and filmmakers alike, OpenFlix presents a very useful solution to hunting down and classifying public domain films. The website is a directory containing all types of information regarding a vast history of movies that have entered the public domain. Although they do not host any of the movies themselves, there are links to purchase the films and a decent chunk of background info. and credits for each entry is available. So, if you were itching to start that Americana mashup epic but needed a place to start collecting possible sources for footage, OpenFlix might be one solution to discovering those hidden gems. Other than that, the website is pretty interesting to simply browse through to see what kind of quirkiness is lurking.

I am a closet indie film fan, in fact, I have always wished I could visit some sort of film festival, but never had the chance thus far. Now, the film festival comes to me (and you) via iTunes. The Sundance Film Festival, probably one of the most widely-known, is going to be selling some of its films on iTunes. Indie filmmakers will get the bulk of the $1.99 price for their films, with the rest of the money going to the festival, the Sundance channel and of course iTunes. The films are expected to be available for at least three years. If you happen to be an amateur filmmaker, you will still be free to "make deals" with other channels or networks, so good for you. Sundance films will be available on iTunes starting on January 22nd.

Got your soda? Maybe some popcorn? Enjoyed the intermission, did you? I can tell, so welcome to the second half of our fine how-to on making your own semi-professional videos. If you missed the first part of this two-parter, you can find it here.

Task Four: Editing and effects
To edit my movie I used Windows XP's built-in Windows Movie Maker (you may need to download the newer version of it included with Windows XP SP2). Sure it has its glitches and problems, but it is A) free, B) available, and C) quick and dirty. If you don't have the latest version, it can be downloaded from Microsoft's website. The current version is 2.1. The interface is fairly simple and intuitive. You import or capture video from your hard drive or video camera, and edit away. Windows Movie Maker will walk you through adding effects, time lines, adding custom audio, transitions, credits, titles, annotations, etc. Since the specifics of using Windows Movie Maker are a bit nitty-gritty to detail in this post, here are some great tips and tricks to help you hot-rod the best performance out of WMM you can get.

• Windows Movie Maker has great clip splitting and joining tools.
• Be sure to have nothing else open when editing video on your PC. Required much memory is, young Skywalker. Sure, you want to have this article open to follow along, so that is okay, but you get the idea.
  
• Windows Movie Maker has an untimely fetish for crashing and making you want to chuck it, so save early, save often, and if it suddenly tanks, don't panic, if you save frequently, you won't have too much trouble. I had this problem with WMM, but I was only running 512MB of RAM at the time, so that could have been the issue. I have now upgraded, shame on me.
  
• When adding titles and other annotations, sometimes the title is too high on the screen, or won't behave and move down where you want it. To fix this little problem, simply hit enter, then space to create an invisible placeholder for the title to shift down. If WMM thinks you have something on each line, though a space doesn't display anything, it will move the text down to accommodate you. Take that you dopey title.
  
• The small preview window does help a lot, but sometimes gives a bad impression that your video isn't looking good, i.e. it will cut out and go black here and there for some reason during playback, but generally this is a glitch in the playback, not actual footage in your project, so don't mind it too much. Just be sure you watch your video before importing it to be sure you have good tape.
  
• As with many other video and audio programs, you can save WMM video project files in mid-edit, so make use of that, however, once you have imported video, you shouldn't move the original clip from its location since WMM will look for it and mess up your editing when it doesn't find that clip in the same spot on its next program startup. File location very important to WhaMMy here.
  
• Despite all the seemingly bad and unusable things I have mentioned about WMM, it really is a decent piece of software as far as features and capabilities go. A slightly better piece of hardware on my part, and better coding on Microsoft's part, and we could have a winner.

Want an easy way to record video from your webcam and post it on your blog or website? Flixn is a simple online solution to achieve this. Simply connect your webcam, press record, grab a snippet of code, and post it anywhere you like.

When you plug your webcam in, Flixn.com will recognize it and instantly let you being recording. The playback mode lets you check out your video, and record again if you are not satisfied. When you are satisfied with your video, you grab your code. Flixn has build special code options for use on MySpace, Blogger, eBay, LiveJournal, TypePad, and Friendster. You can also choose the URL option, which is a direct link to your video on Flixn's servers. You can't get much simpler than that.

Another collaborative ratings site, Filmcrowd (beta), is born. Filmcrowd is, as you might guess from the name, focused on movies. Gibbity, which you can't guess from the title, is more of a games site, but uses the same social aspect. The two sites are from the same folks, in fact. Tags and collaboration are the key here. For instance, you can create a focus group of sorts, with users who find certain movies in common as their likes or dislikes. Keep tabs on the group, and what they're reviewing, and get suggestions. Filmcrowd is young, so there aren't as many reviews as say, Amazon (that's a joke really, Amazon has a wee bit of a head start). My favorite tag has to be crap, which contains such winners as Alone in the Dark and The Postman.

Starting with the story and breaking down the elements, building a schedule and sharing the reports, Celtx is an incredibly thorough tool for TV and video (or film, or theater). It's cross platform and totally free. One of the interesting features involves a built-in web browser, enabling some great collaboration opportunities. For instance, you can update multimedia assets (like photos) in realtime, so everyone has the same pic of the location for tomorrow's shoot. In fact, Celtx is built on Mozilla's Application Framework. I had been stressing templates for Word to do a little proper screenwriting, but Celtx does a great job, reminding me of my long-lost OS 9 copy of Final Draft. But Celtx is like much of the Movie Magic line rolled into one web-aware, cross platform nugget. Did I mention it's open source too?

The LA Times is reporting on an anti-spam company that has used Bayesian filtering to predict, with 81% accuracy, which films at the Sundance Film Festival will financial successes. The company's enginneers realized that "determining whether a movie is good or bad could be similar to determining whether e-mail is spam or not" and used the last 10 years of the festival to determine the predictors of success or failure. Among the predictors are the number of producers (more is better) and the words in the blurbs (good: romance, death, human; bad: Africa, riveting, vision). The project, called Deconstructing Sundance, has its own web site where you can check out their predictions for this year's films.