The showcase last night was a great success! Thanks all of you for coming, and congratulations to all the participants in the competition (even if you did not get to submit a final film), as well as the winners of prizes. And thank you all for participating and keeping the idea alive!

More later…

-cvj

Happy New Year Everyone!

On Friday afternoon, I sent the detailed information about how to submit your films to all the team contacts. You should all have that by now. Looking forward to getting your films!

-cvj

I sent this to all teams back on November 27th, but after a question today, I’m concerned that not all have seen it, so I’ve emailed it out again, and am also posting it here:

From: Clifford Johnson
Date: Tuesday, November 27, 2012 8:03 am
Subject: Submission Deadline Change!

Dear Teams,

(Team contact: – Please pass this message on to all your team
members.)
Several of you pointed out that the deadline (10th Jan ’13) falling
in the week before the semester begins makes things a bit
difficult. This was an oversight on my part not to realize this and
so I want to change it to help you out. So I will make the official
deadline for uploading your film to be the end of **Monday 14th
January 2013** instead. This will be a hard deadline, since I must
have all the films in hand so that I can have the judges begin
looking at all of them so that we can select prizes, etc, before
the showcase…

Please let me know you got this.

[...]

-cvj

Happy Holidays and best wishes for any filmmaking you will be doing during the break!

-cvj

Hi All,

Those of you who are registered for the competition should have received email notification about this some days ago from your team contacts. Tomorrow (Thursday 29th Nov.) from 5:15pm to 6:15pm in SLH 200, there’ll be three filmmakers talking about putting science into film, in documentary, narrative, and everything in between. Many of you expressed interest in having such an event back at the last event, and so I’ve made it happen, so do come along to it. I’ve you’ve not heard about it from your team contact, get in touch with them to get the details and come along! If your class overlaps with it, that’s ok… come late or leave early if you wish.

See you there?

-cvj

Hi Everyone,

I’ve had a huge number of project ideas registered for the competition, with almost 100 students ready to make films! This is a great response! The variety of ideas is really wonderful, and so it will be a great competition, and I hope everyone perseveres and submits completed films in January.

Just in case you are still looking to be on a team so that you can participate, I know of three teams who registered who don’t meet the eligibility requirements because in some cases they don’t have someone from sciences (in Dornsife, Viterbi, or Keck) or in other cases they don’t have someone from Cinematic Arts or Communications/Journalism. If you’re from those areas and want to be connected with existing teams who want to be in the competition, please let me know by email. I’ll help you get in touch with each other. I’m allowing a couple more days for those teams to sort themselves out, so you can maybe join them to participate!

The rest of you, who are on teams and have had their registrations confirmed, your team contact person should have received information about the event on Thursday by now. Ask them if you have not been forwarded it.

Best,

-cvj

Dear All,

You’re probably wondering what’s going on, given that you sent in registration packages. Well, since I’m a one-person operation, it is taking a little while to process all the registrations and so forth… I’ve been working to get some help on this to speed things up.

I hope to send out an email to all (using your primary team contact email) by the end of the day.

Start looking out for the next thing, which is a get-together to have some food and drink and meet each other and get an important presentation about production issues from Joe Wallenstein, head of production at SCA. I’m trying to fix a date for an evening late next week. Stay tuned for more!

Thanks!

-cvj

This just in:-

I heard this from Tom Cwik at JPL, mentioned in an earlier post:

…one specific possibility is to be part of the Invention Challenge that happens at JPL each year. A number of teams, mainly from high schools and colleges, come onto lab and interact with JPL’ers in the contest (see below). It’s a high energy event with a range of folks both at JPL and outside and lots of ingenuity. And its fun.

The logistics of getting on Lab formally with your film equipment etc are then taken care of since it’s an open event. Your student film makers can have access if it makes sense for them.

December 7, 2012 – Annual Invention Challenge “Streaming Tissue Toss Contest”.
For more information, visit http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/events/inventionchallenge/index.cfm

Maybe of interest?

-cvj

Hi All,

These are the last days before the registration deadline. I hope you’ve heeded my advice to not sit around waiting to be contacted by someone to make a team to put together project ideas for the registration. I’m getting a lot of hints from many sources that there will be some interesting and fun projects coming in, and I hope you will be putting one in on time.

Don’t forget to contact me if you’re having issues that might mean you want to participate but can’t, so far. I might be able to help, although it is late, so there is a limit to what I might be able to do.

By the way, I spotted this post on reddit this morning. Seems there is a student in film who is looking for someone in engineering or science (maybe beyond?) to make a comedy for the competition. Might be worth pinging them if that is something you might want to pursue…

Best,

-cvj

Hi folks, I just wanted to introduce myself formally and say hello. You can read a bit more about me in my bio, but please feel free to reach out to me if interested so that we can continue a discussion–hopefully leading to a collaboration!

Cheers,
-Jonathan

Remember that you must use permissioned music for the films (and prove that it is), otherwise they are not eligible. This is not as hard as it seems, since there are numerous libraries of free (or easily licensable) music that you can access online. Ask around. Ask me.

However, some people last year made their own music for their films. In at least one case a team member was a major in film scoring, working in SCA and Thornton. I’ve contacted the head of Scoring in the SCA and he’s let the students on the scoring program know about the competition, so you might find that there are willing collaborators from there (and of course possibly wider afield) to make new music for your film… Music could well be one of the special category prizes, if we decide to award a prize for that at the judging period (I’m not promising that… just saying) so don’t neglect this opportunity. Note that you can also work with someone who is not at USC for music production…. just make sure that this is indicated in your entry and that you have their permission… they can be a contractor or consultant for your project, in that case…

Questions? Get in touch.

-cvj