Category: cinema

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Stop Online Spying!

Stop Online Spying | OpenMedia.caStop Online Spying | OpenMedia.ca.

Please circulate and sign this petition.

The government is about to push through a set of electronic surveillance laws that will invade your privacy and cost you money. The plan is to force every phone and Internet provider to allow “authorities” to collect the private information of any Canadian, at any time, without a warrant.

This bizarre legislation will create Internet surveillance that is:

  • Warrantless: A range of “authorities” will have the ability to access the private information of law-abiding Canadians and our families using wired Internet and mobile devices, without justification.
  • Invasive: The laws leave our personal and financial information less secure and more susceptible to cybercrime.
  • Costly: Internet services providers may be forced to install millions of dollars worth of spying technology and the cost will be passed down to YOU.
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Hébert: Radio-Canada’s days as talent incubator may be over

“…While talent is an undeniable part of the mix, nurturing has a lot to do with the result. And the Quebec film industry’s success is due in no small part to Radio-Canada’s role as an incubator.”

Hébert is one of Canada’s most astute political writers.  Today she does a really good analysis of how arts funding, including public broadcast funding, lead indirectly to impact around the world and commercial box-office success. Continue reading “Hébert: Radio-Canada’s days as talent incubator may be over”

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Signal Out: Remote Artist Talk from Newfoundland!

So without much more than a crashed Macbook to slow us down, Something Collective‘s first presentation of “Signal Out” went off great.   Liz Solo and the Black Bag Media Collective presented Flick Harrison‘s films in St John’s, Newfoundland while we showed Liz’s music-video and machinima work here at our studio at Moberly Cultural Centre.

After the screenings, we did live Skype chats so the audience could Q & A.  I spoke a lot about Final Cut Pro vs Adobe software and the future of independent video editing. Liz, for her part, talked about Second Life and the combination of joy and horror she feels in that phantasmagoric shopping mall.

Liz got to bed VERY late – the time difference is 4.5 hours – and a good time was had by all, at both ends of this giant country.

 

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UBC and SFU welcome $1.7M Videomatica film collection « UBC Public Affairs

 

UBC and SFU welcome .7M Videomatica film collection « UBC Public Affairs

UBC and SFU welcome $1.7M Videomatica film collection « UBC Public Affairs.

An exceptional film collection valued at $1.7 million will be housed and preserved by the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University.

Videomatica – a long-loved video rental store that opened in 1983 and specialized in rare and esoteric titles – is donating the bulk of 28,000 DVDs, 4,000 VHS titles and 900 Blu-rays to UBC. The collection will be housed at UBC Library with more than 5,000 duplicates available at UBC’s Dept. of Theatre and Film. SFU receives about 2,800 documentaries from the collection.

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War Torn Man – new video with Rodney DeCroo

This is my new music video for Rodney Decroo!

A good review in the Georgia Straight:

“Let’s hope this collaboration between acclaimed (but not acclaimed enough) singer-songwriter Rodney DeCroo and filmmaker Flick Harrison isn’t the last. ”

When I first heard this song, I thought it was a fictional story about Iraq. But it’s actually the true story of Rodney’s dad after the Vietnam war.

I used the Collateral Murder video as my model for this, and I suppose I was thinking of the video for Brothers In Arms by the Dire Straits as well.

 

    War Torn Man – YouTube.

 

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Come to our Open Studio on Nov 20 at Moberly!

(The open studio will also be accessible on the avatar chat network Blue Mars Lite in the room called Something Collective. Download and prepare yourself ahead of time! Thanks to Jeremy Turner for turning me on to it…)


You’re invited to Something Collective’s Nov. 20th Open Studio, from 4-7 pm, at Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre.

Something Collective Open Studio
Nov. 20th, 4-7 pm PST
Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre
7646 Prince Albert St.
Vancouver, BC

As friends, neighbours and colleagues of Something Collective, we are inviting you to the celebration of our new Incubator Residency at Moberly Arts and Cultural Centre.  Our like-minded group of activists and artists includes Maggie Winston (puppetry, theatre), Juliana Bedoya (sculpture, performance installation), Laura Barron (flutist, yogi, writer), Flick Harrison (media arts), and Natalie Gan (dance).  We are excited to serve the Sunset community over these next three years, by bringing our versatile expertise to a vibrant array of community-engaged art projects.  In order to maintain an active presence in the community, we are hosting three annual open studios, at our new collective space, on 7646 Prince Albert St. (one east of Fraser, at 59th).  The first of these takes place on Sunday, November 20th, from 4-7 pm.  There will be refreshments for all, as each of us shares work from our individual art practices.  We also look forward to discussing some of our plans for future community art projects, and we invite you to share ideas about this community’s passions and interests so that we can better meet the needs of the Sunset neighbourhood.

We hope to see you there!
Maggie, Juliana, Laura, Flick, & Natalie

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Software of the Spectacle

Final Cut Pro X means Apple has abandoned professional artists

by Flick Harrison

Guy Debord said that the main function of our society is now the production of spectacle. The spectacle alienates us from life and each other. Facebook, for instance, transforms our relationships into images of those relationships, mediated by Facebook’s own hidden desires.

Fifteen years of engagement with the Final-Cut-Pro-using professional class is, at best, a good self-funding, street-cred foundation for the new consumer version of FCP, called FCP-X.  It could be compared to the free itunes app of yesteryear which slowly led us to the Itunes Store and thence to the app store, iphone and ipad.

Continue reading “Software of the Spectacle”