Sunday, July 12, 2009
Update: Sunday, July 12th, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Convergence Saturday

Friday, July 10, 2009
Mind-Blowing New Media Business Models and Practices
Circulation of the country's weekly comic magazines, the essential entry point for any manga series, has fallen by about half over the last decade. Young people are turning their attention away from the printed page and toward the tiny screens on their mobile phones.
Fans and critics complain that manga — which emerged in the years after World War II as an edgy, uniquely Japanese art form — has become as homogenized and risk-averse as the limpest Hollywood blockbuster. Pervading the nation's $4.2 billion-a-year industry is a sense that its best days have passed.
Which ought to make what's happening here at Comic Ichi — a manga market the size of several airplane hangars that will attract some 25,000 buyers — so heartening. The place is pulsing with possibility, full of inspired creators, ravenous fans, and wads of yen changing hands. It represents a dynamic force that could reverse the industry's decline.
There's just one hitch, one teensy roadblock on the manga industry's highway to rejuvenation: Nearly everybody here is breaking the law.
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Wednesday Means Comics!

Some people believe I don't like print. What with all my digital prosthelytizing on the old pulp soapbox here I can see where someone might get that opinion. As a clarification on the matter let me just say this:
I'm for whatever puts the most content into the most people's hands (and hearts). I'm also for experimentation and creating something inexpensive that draws attention to itself by design.I'm for cool.
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The best contributions may be the ones that deliberately harks back to the comic strips of yore. Dave Gibbons and Ryan Sook come at Kamandi by way of Hal Foster, providing a Prince Valiant-like take on the character that perhaps suggests Kirby’s ties to his comic-strip forebears may be stronger than surface glances would suggest. Joe and Adam Kubert pull a brutal nine-panel sequence that nevertheless evokes Roy Crane and Milton Caniff. Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher’s Flash strip attempts the clever hat trick of offering two strips — one a straight-up adventure, the other a Juliet Jones-style soap via Iris West. And, of course, there’s Paul Pope, whose pulpish Adam Strange delivers Alex Raymond-like thrills while still being delightfully weird.
WWIII Propaganda Posters

Tuesday, July 07, 2009
G-8 and Other Pulp Heroes by Steranko

G8 and His Battle Aces was a series of pulps that were reissued in the 70's with new covers by Jim Steranko.
This I Like
From the reprinting of the newly revised Detective Comics featuring Batwoman and The Question. MEGACONDA - BEHIND THE SCENES (AND CAMERA)
In May of 2009, we began shooting Megaconda, another giant monster movie aimed squarely at the straight-to-DVD and television market.
My oldest son, Chris, would again direct, this time from a screenplay by SciFi Channel veteran Steve Latshaw (Stan Lee's Lightspeed, Curse of the Komodo). Under the SAG low-budget agreement we added TV’s Greg Evigan (BJ And the Bear, My Two Dads) and Stella Stevens (The Nutty Professor, The Poseidan Adventure) to the cast for star power.
We decided to shoot the entire feature in HD and felt that we needed a better camera that went beyond the limitations of an HDV camcorder like the HVR-V1U, but something a lot less pricey than hiring the Sony F900 Cine Alta we were normally using for our television work.
While the show was to be a very low-budget affair I wanted a better image quality than we had had on Reptisaurus and it still had to be affordable.
We also wanted to buy instead of rent.

From left, director Christopher Douglas-Olen Ray and DoP Matt Freund with their EX1 rig while shooting Megaconda, featuring an onboard Ikan monitor, Cavision matte box and Hoodman viewfinder shade.
Enter the Sony XDCAM PMW-EX1.
SyFy New Website = Epic Fail
Monday, July 06, 2009
Knightmarish Reviews:
Fortunately, this is exactly the place to play that sort of show.

From The "Pulp for the New Media" Department: Author Michael Stackpole
"Rather than simply changing the method of delivering stories to readers, Stackpole believes digital formats will change the nature of the stories themselves. At the very least, authors should tailor their work to these new mediums. He cited what he referred to as "the commuter market," people who read two chapters per day on their half hour train ride to work. It's an ideal market for fiction broken into 2,500 word chapters, and could presage a resurgence of serial fiction. "It's kind of like a return to the Penny Dreadfuls," he said. "But the readers today are more sophisticated, so we as writers need to put more work into it."It was interesting to hear the formulaic way Stackpole approaches writing. He described how the method of writing old pulp stories could easily be adapted for modern audiences by eliminating certain ubiquitous but unecessary subplots and adding a bit of character development. A serial detective story should be, "70 percent case, 30 percent soap opera," with a little more soap in a later story to satisfy readers interested in a character's developing personal life."
What's The Difference...
Sunday, July 05, 2009
Here's a Headline that You Don't Hear Everyday...
The Internet is a Growth Industry...
The Insight Research Corp. recently released the results of an industry study which states that streaming media will be a major source of revenue through 2014. They classified streaming media as the transmission of digital audio and video files over an IP network or wireless network in real time or on-demand, while prohibiting users from storing the files locally.
For the next 5 years they predict that revenue from streaming media will grow at a rate of 27 percent per year thanks to more and more people turning to online audio and video. That means over 135% growth through 2014.
Robert Rosenberg, Insight Research president said that the growth is coming as traditional television advertising dollars are shunted into online ads.
However, don't go pulling out of traditional media (television) just yet. It's going to take a couple of years to stabilize the industry's metrics so that base ad rates, market penetration and so forth can be determined. If you're working in TV or movies and so on, now is the time to develop that web series, that book for Kindle, or Iphone app - then make the transition.
***Edit to add - and if you're new to the business, now is the time to start making a name for yourself by creating something and getting it out there.
But it's going to happen. Movies and "TV" pumped directly from the web to your home for free... Or a subscription server where you get all sorts of stuff - movies, series, books, webcomics - all built around a single or group of properties or genres. It's not any different than network TV for free or HBO. It's simply going to come to your home computer or set top box and it will be far more interactive than television ever was.
More Lessons from Nollywood...
Acclaimed director, Bond Emerwua, has a nine day schedule and $20,000 to film an action adventure, Check Point. Set in a village outside Lagos, it tells the story of two innocent men robbed and shot by rogue cops who are eventually brought to justice. The film was made against the backdrop of a campaign to clean up the notoriously corrupt Nigerian police force. Emerwua says he makes ‘edutainment’ because it entertains to get an audience and recoup its costs, but at the same time conveys a relevant social message. Nigerian films regularly involve such controversial issues as AIDS, women’s rights, the occult and ethnic differences. Emerwua believes Nollywood films are the most effective way of reaching Nigeria’s vast population of 140,000,000, Africa’s largest.
Shooting conditions, we soon discover, are much more improvised and unpredictable than in the U.S., Hong Kong or Mumbai. Emerwua does not work in a studio but in the streets and countryside, while everyday life flows around him. Sometimes directors simply draft extras out of passing crowds. One day on location, a neighborhood mosque broadcasts non-stop prayers most of the day, bringing the production to a halt. A tropical downpour ruined another day’s shooting. Frequent power outages require that every crew take along a generator. The lead actor, a current Nollywood star, arrived several days late and could devote only four days to the project; apparently, he had accepted roles in three films simultaneously.
The producer and director remain surprisingly calm during all these costly and unforeseen delays explaining that in Nigeria ‘filmmaking is an economic adventure.’ Emerwua reflects that ‘In Nigeria, we do not count walls, we figure out ways to climb over them.’ Among all the chaos, he maintains a professional and cooperative set, managing to shoot a remarkable 13 scenes in one day.
Industry veteran Immanuel France describes how this unique system of producing films grew in response to a crisis in the Nigerian film industry at the beginning of the 1990s. Because of civil unrest people stopped attending public theatres and many closed. Then Nigerian television started importing cheap Latin American telenovelas rather than supporting original local production. Nigerian filmmakers had no choice but to find a way to produce inexpensive films for a new market.
Before the rise of Nollywood, Nigerians saw mostly American Westerns, Hong Kong Kung Fu movies and Bollywood musicals. In contrast, Nollywood appeals to a hunger for indigenous stories with characters and situations audiences can easily relate to. The popularity of these films has spread across English-speaking Africa and their stars have become celebrities from Zambia to Ghana. Nollywood also provides a vital, constantly up-dated link between the vast Nigerian diaspora and their home culture. Thousands of Nigerian films are already available to immigrants to the United States both on DVD and over the internet.
The Nollywood phenomenon is doubtless an expression of the resourcefulness and vigor of Nigerian society. But it also raises questions about the potential social impact of commercial cinema, especially in the developing world. Does Nollywood in fact depict daily Nigerian life any more accurately or incisively than Hollywood portrays American society? Does it dare expose the kleptocracy which for forty years has kept its citizens impoverished by pocketing the nation:s immense oil wealth? As for cultural preservation, Nollywood narratives seem more influenced by international genres like the action thriller and the soap opera than Yoruba drama or Ibo folk tales. Can we reasonably hope that a cinematic Chinua Achebe or Wole Soyinka will emerge out of the frenetic deal-making of Lagos? Superstar Saint Obi optimistically predicts that “I believe very soon we are not only going to have better movies, we’ll have that original Nigerian movie.” For the time being, hard-pressed Nigerians are at least getting their own version of the vicarious excitement and undemanding escapism, which have become the prime commodities of the Information Age. For us, these films may give clearer insights into the apprehensions and aspirations of the average Nigerian than any documentary or political drama.





