"The House of Seville" and Youtube Age Restriction

"The House of Seville" (18 min) is our animated mock horror ghost story based partly on "Carmen".

Watch "The House of Seville" on Youtube

Posting "The House of Seville" on Youtube for public viewing raised the question of audience rating. Our movie has animated violence with a murder scene based on the "Carmen" story. In our discussions we thought it was a low level issue and we should use the Youtube upload option "not made for kids". However when I did the upload and carefully read the Youtube guide notes I made the call to "play it safe" and go "age restricted".

We work with a storytelling trope that ghosts are obsessed with causing the living to reenact their deaths. Here, the ghost of Carmen takes control of Ray and causes him to kill Daria with a sword. The critical items from the Youtube checklist are (1) the audience can see blood and (2) the editing and animated camera point of view highlight the blood beyond incidental detail. This is balanced by a non-realistic animated depiction.

Blood is a major rating element. I went through an exercise of reviewing Youtube scenes of violence and other content that could be challenging for sensitive viewers. These were mostly trailers for horror movies as well as examples like "1917", "Dunkirk" and "Gladiator". Challenging yes, with many life-at-risk tension moments, but mostly contrived to be bloodless. It was very difficult to find any example clip that showed blood. It appears that a convention has developed that bloodless violence is OK. Reflecting on that I agree that blood is an issue and I should restrict a film that depicts it. However, how OK is it to have wide audiences for otherwise realistic violence without blood? Advances in movie tech are making bloodless violence more intense. We are seeing entertainment violence that is missing violence realities like long term pain and suffering: including a lifetime of guilt and remorse for the perpetrators after a moment of impulse. Blood is a truth of violence. And film-makers should tell the truth. To age-restricted audiences rather than using the bloodless excuse to market violence to a wider audience.

Watch the Murder Scene as discussed here

Compare with the Murder Scene in the Opera "Carmen".

"Ulead MediaStudio" project recovery - the raw file is partly readable.

The Challenge

I am re-editing our animated short "The House of Seville" using Adobe Premiere. It needs an extensive audio re-edit.

It was originally edited in Ulead MediaStudio 8 which is no longer available.

I can use the output video as a guide track for re-editing in Premiere. Reconstructing multitrack audio sequences is the biggest challenge.

 

The Solution

Open the MediaStudio Project file in a simple text editor. I use "WordPad".
The "project file" has an extension "dvp" eg "vedScene06_v12_QS.dvp"
A lot of the data appears as non-printing characters, but names of source files appear in uppercase plain text - like this:

And that gives us answers to IMO the most important recovery questions: which was the selected clip for a particular moment? and where do we find it? The old video then guides us as to where to position and how to cut.

Free for Three - indie e-book publishing promo experiment

A little side adventure happening here, from the Democratisation of Film-making to the Democratisation of Book Publishing. 21st Century enabling tech means that books are becoming a natural extension of our media creativity.

IAFilm is publishing "The Master Weaver: Tales of the fantastic for grownups" by Bronwyn Calder. The promo experiment is to make the e-book version free for 3 days: 18, 19, 20 Aug 2021. Will this giveaway work as promo? Will it result in any positives? We are doing our indie thing which is to run the experiment to find out.

"The Master Weaver" as an Amazon Kindle e-book - free for three days

The Amazon Kindle has developed into a reader that can run on many devices including most phones or tablets. It can also deliver through its web page. 

As an alternative for anyone without an Amazon login, we have a sample story free to read on the IAFilm website:
"Gift of the Sea" - read on IAFilm

"Loki" Review - Kafka meets Climate Change

On 17th April 2020, the BBC website published this article:
"Why does cinema ignore climate change?"
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200416-why-does-cinema-ignore-climate-change

Climate change drama makes a welcome brief appearance in "Loki", a big budget fantasy+scifi TV-web series. The protagonists do time travel visiting apocalypses. One of these is a near future climate-change-induced catastrophic hurricane destroying an entire corporate town owned by the  "Roxxcart" superstore, which looks like a parody of "Walmart". Message: hey corporate America, take responsibility for dealing with Climate Change else this is what will happen to you.

Link  to the "Loki" trailer which includes a very brief clip of the Roxxcart scene:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW948Va-l10

"Loki" is good enough to rate as alternative indie. Is this because the creative principals are women? It has remarkable layers of allegory and satire with the villains being a satirical take on authoritarian regimes. A big influence is "The Trial" by Franz Kafka. We can see that in the beginning of the trailer. The "Time Variance Authority" is a high tech setup with a 1970s retro design look to its layout, equipment and gadgets. And a lot of clumsy bureaucratic paperwork that moves inexorably to doom for its victims as in "The Trial". My following description may or may not be a spoiler - this is my guess as to where this is going after seeing the first 3 episodes. The Authority's mission to bring order to the "Sacred Timeline" threatens to remove free will from the universe. An unlikely flawed antihero, Loki the Norse God of Mischief, Marvel comics version, must step up and save us all.

Congratulations to director Kate Herron, writer Elissa Karasik and their team for going above and beyond the expectations and formulas of this genre. It appears that Marvel Studios is giving its creatives freedom to play variations on their fictional universe in a way that the "Star Wars" franchise is failing to do. "Loki" succeeds where "Rogue One" disappoints.