‘Get Well Soon’ is a short film by BRAG Productions. Its a quiet, visceral horror starring Gresby Nash and Laura Howard. I saw it last year at The Exhibit in Balham and thought the combination of cinematography and sound design were particularly effective.
The film has finished its festival run and will be released online on 13th June. Here’s a short video of the cast and crew, talking about the making of the film.
Director Ian Baigent has also created a lovely montage of all the clapper boards from the film shoot. I think all films should have one of these.
Category: Diary (Page 119 of 301)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Over the weekend I was quoted in Politiken, the Danish broadsheet, discussing the LOCOG attempt to control how staff, athletes and the public tweet during the Olympics. The ‘Games Makers’ have strict tweeting rules, and Twitter have been roped in to police ‘ambush marketing’ attempts by companies who are not an official games sponsor.
Here are the quotes:
Hos den engelske afdeling af PEN, der kæmper for ytringsfrihed over hele verden, siger kampagneleder Robert Sharp, at han finder forbuddet direkte latterligt. “Det er bizart og man kan spekulere over hvilket signal OL sender ud ved netop at lægge så meget vægt på deres sponsorers interesser. Det efterlader en med en dårlig smag i munden og det strider for mig at se imod hele den olympiske ånd, der går ud på åbenhed og at dele”, siger han.
and
Robert Sharp tvivler alvorligt på, at de den Olympiske Komite kan håndhæve nogen form for censur. “Vi har tidligere set i forbindelse med retssager her i Storbritannien, at selv ikke et forbud fra Højesteret har kunnet stillet meget op overfor twitter. Tværtimod tror jeg ethvert forsøg på at stoppe en twitterpost eller et opslag på Facebook vil have den modsatte effekt. Det vil sprede sig på nettet med lynets hast”, mener han.
Previously, I asked How Much Code Should A Citizen Know? This led me (and I’m not sure how, possibly via a twitter tip-off) to this fascinating article by Annie Lowrey in Slate. She decided to learn how to code, and in doing so stumbled accross the story of _why, an avante-guarde Ruby programmer who had a huge cultural impact on the Ruby coding community, before mysteriously deleting all his code vanishing from the discussion forums. Its a good read.
What stood out for me was Lowrey’s respect for _why’s privacy. She does discover who he is and where he works, but chooses not to pester the guy when he makes it clear he wants to be left alone.
I’m sure there are many decent journalists who would have behaved in the same way, but as the #Leveson Inquiry unfolds and puts journalism in its worst light, such acts of respect draw the attention.
I was reminded of the actions of blogger LinkMachineGo, who discovered the identity of blogger Belle De Jour in 2003 and kept it secret:
I waited five years for somebody to hit that page (I’m patient). Two weeks ago I started getting a couple of search requests a day from an IP address at Associated Newspapers (who publish the Daily Mail) searching for “brooke magnanti” and realised that Belle’s pseudonymity might be coming to an end. I contacted Belle via Twitter and let her know what was happening. I didn’t expect to hear anything back.
And then early last weekend I received an email signed by Brooke that confirmed that she was outing herself in the Sunday Times because the Daily Mail had discovered her identity via an ex-boyfriend.
This in turn reminds us of outing of Girl With A One Track Mind in 2006, who was outed by the Sunday Times itself, and Nightjack, the police blogger who was outed by the The Times (illegally, so it turned out) in 2009. When the identities of these writers were revealed, their writing stopped and something important was lost from the writing ecosystem.
In all these cases, the print journalist’s desperation for a scoop (revelations that score quite low on Jay Rosen’s taxonomy of scoops) outweighed concerns about the value of the writing that was being produced by the blogger, a fellow person-of-letters. A writer-on-writer attack.
Its odd that the more mature approach to pseudonomity is being manifested at Slate, an online magazine that is only sixteen years old, and by bloggers who have been writing for only a few years. Meanwhile the harmful short-term thinking is happening at The Times, an institution established for a couple of centuries. It points to an arrogance within the mainstream media, a belief that the masthead confers a priority of one’s writing, opinion, and needs. Bloggers have long understood this culture. I wonder if Lord Leveson will challenge it?
I’ve been laughing at this online web comedy series, asdfmovie by Thomas Ridgewell. Here’s episoide 5, which I sumbled upon because its one on the most top rated YouTube uploads today.
It feels like a distillation of comedy down to its purest elements. The punchline is all, illustrated in 2-dimensional simplicity. Its like tweeting on video. Very much of the internet age.
Hurrah! A Defamation Bill was announced today as part of the Queen’s Speech at the State Opening of Parliament.
The Government will introduce a Bill in the next few days/weeks, not unlike the draft they consulted on last year. This means it still needs work. Specifically: stronger provisions for public interest reporting; a tougher ‘harm’ threshold to weed out the trivial claims and stop wealthy people using the High Court as a branch of their PR teams; protections for ISPs and hosts who currently have to field spurrious takedown notices; and a ban on companies suing for libel.
In March I produced a series of short videos for the Libel Reform Campaign, explaining each of these points.
You should join the Libel Reform Campaign bandwagon here.