In a bid to become more than just a sharing platform for online videos, TwitVid has launched a full subscriber system enabling users to keep track of their favourite channels and web video makers.

The channels and video feeds are based on topics, brands and people and will be sourced from YouTube, Vimeo and TwitVid itself initially, with others to follow. Channels can be private or public and shared between a myriad of other social media channels.

The notion of further emphasizing the use of channels on web video sites is certainly looking like a trend for the future. Particularly when it comes to YouTube’s latest design incarnation. In theory making your web video sites act more like television channels you will increase your viewership and the length of time viewers spend on your site.

TwitVid has a pretty strong 12 million unique visitors per month and these innovations are set to continue the starup’s growth into the new year as online video becomes more and more popular and people keep on sharing and watching.

If you want to get your video production shared across the web, why not get in touch.

 

Filmmaking icon and relic of cinema’s good old days, Clint Eastwood, is set to appear in a reality TV show that will explore what it is like to live in a family of “Hollywood royalty”.

The show, which is being developed by the producers of reality shows about the Kardashian sisters and MTV's The Real World, will air on the E! Entertainment channel in the US.

The show will focus on the domestic life of the 81 year old actor and director’s wife Dina Eastwood, a former news anchor and actor, their 15-year-old daughter Morgan, and Francesca Fisher-Eastwood, the 18-year-old daughter Eastwood had with former partner Frances Fisher.

Clint, who has starred in a number of classic film productions such as A Fistful of Dollars, Play Misty for Me and Dirty Harry, as well as directing films such as Unforgiven, Mystic River and Gran Torino, will make fleeting guest appearances in the show, which is scheduled to air in 2012 and is still waiting to be given the obligatory cutsie title – Dirty Dina, Mystic Gold-Digger or Million Dollar Daughters anyone?

The Eastwoods shall join the annals of celebrity families who have thrown the last remaining shards of their private lives into the public domain. But something tells me this television production won’t have quite the scale of censored dialogue we’ve come to expect from low-brow garbage - The Osbournes.

Shooting your own video production? Check out our website to see how our services can help.

 

Today, we have lost one of the most prolific, inexorable and lionhearted wordsmiths of our times. Christopher Hitchens – writer, polemicist, journalist, philosopher and intellectual warlock - has died of oesophageal cancer, age 62.

How do I write a deserving obituary for such a formidable writer, when he is the reason I have the courage to call myself one in the first place? The many details of the great man’s life are far too multifarious to confine within a simple blog, so I should begin by saying that these details should be sought in his own writing. So, let us begin with some classic Hitchens…

Though British-born and Oxford educated, Hitch’s ambitions inevitably took him to America. Flourishing in a place with enlightenment-values and a soft-spot for English intellectuals, he quickly bulldozed his way through the annals of American journalism to establish himself as a political correspondent that could not be pigeon-holed, labelled or marginalised no matter how hard the right, left and just about everyone in-between tried. He wrote fearlessly for, rather than about, the oppressed, and when he wasn’t visiting upon this oppression first-hand (North Korea included), he mercilessly attacked the many faces of tyranny. Tyranny which is invariably skewed into triviality by the fatuous forces of pop culture.

When the planes silhouetted through the Manhattan sky-line on September 11^th, Hitch, like many of us, was left forever changed, and turned his ferocious command of words toward a new kind of tyranny. The result was ‘God is Not Great’, still available at fine book-stores everywhere. His most famous and accomplished best-seller, this book transformed Hitch from Washington’s hottest political correspondent into the defiant face of new-atheism we recognise today. 

It is this part of Hitch’s work which he will be remembered for the most. For helping us pluck the flowers from the chain, not in order that we shall wear the chain without consolation, but so that we can break the chain and cull the living flower, to quote a favourite of Hitch’s Marx pericopes.

Though this literary output is extraordinary in scope and flair, his true legacy perhaps lies on YouTube, where millions of neophytes have turned onto his rhetoric, sweetened with all the elegant turn of phrase, lightning-fast quips and (to put it as Hitch would) “sexual charisma” that only the audio-visual form can encapsulate.

This particular writer will hold a large glass of Johnny Walker Black to the universe tonight, and thank the stardust from which we came that such a great man is immortalised within his gargantuan body of work. I salute you Christopher, a thousand times over. May you Rest in Peace.    

 

2011 has been an incredible year for online video but what are some of the key lessons we have learned with regards to video marketing over the past 12 months? Daisy Whitney from New Media Minute is on hand to give her expert opinion on the three most important lessons learned in 2011.

These are the highlights:

1. Web video series have a future and can garner an audience

2. Paid media is an essential for brands to get that boost and can lead to viral hits

3. Online video is going to be a big part of your living room with TV connectivity on the rise.

If you want to get a great video production together in the New Year, why not get in touch.  

If the absolute loftiest tenets of artistic filmmaking are rarely displayed by those movies nominated for the major English language film awards, then there is still plenty of fun to be gleaned from observing the various contenders trying to time their various Oscar promotional pushes to perfection. The most important precursor to the Academy Awards is probably the Golden Globes, the nominations for which have just been announced.

Pleasingly, the way to the 2012 Globes (due to be dished out on 15 January) is led by Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, a genuinely terrific throwback to the era of silent filmmaking. Backed by the Weinsteins, those awards season campaigners par excellence, The Artist has scored nominations in most of the main categories: Best Picture (Musical/Comedy), Screenplay, Director, Supporting Actress, and Actor (Musical/Comedy) for Jean Dujardin, who also won the acting prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for his turn as fallen screen idol George Valentin.     

There were Best Picture and Best Director nods for another, lesser, silent cinema homage, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, which has already been named Film of the Year by the National Board of Review (before Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 had been released?! Talk about shooting your load too early…).

There was, however, no Best Supporting Nomination for either of Sacha Baron Cohen or Ben Kingsley, who respectively play a conflicted station guard and real-life fantasy filmmaking pioneer Georges Méliès in Scorsese’s movie, and who both also cropped up a few days ago in the disappointing first trailer for the former’s latest exercise in comic bad taste, The Dictator.

Already the hot favourite for the Best Actor Oscar is George Clooney, for his role in Alexander Payne’s The Descendants. Although if he wants to secure the Golden Globe in that category he will have to see off the challenge of Ryan Gosling, nominated for his leading role as a beleaguered media fixer in the glossy-but-enjoyable Clooney-directed Ides of March.

While Gosling was also named in the Best Actor (Comedy/Musical) category for his performance in Crazy, Stupid, Love, there was no love shown for the same actor’s mannered, taciturn showing in stylistic tour de force Drive. Albert Brooks has, however, been justly recognised for his turn as a mobster-cum-film producer in that movie, the veteran writer-director-actor earning himself a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

That category will see Brooks pitted against an even more venerable Hollywood presence, in the shape of Christopher Plummer, nominated for his touching, funny performance in Mike Mills’ Beginners. And in what looks a strong category, Brooks and Plummer face further competition from Kenneth Branagh, by far the best thing in My Week with Marilyn as a by-turns petty and regal Laurence Olivier.

Though this writer was far less impressed with Michelle Williams’ showing in the same film, her Marilyn Monroe is still viewed as a leading Oscar contender, and is definite frontrunner for the Best Actress (Comedy/Musical) Golden Globe – a category in which the ex-Dawson’s Creek star is competing against two actresses from the same movie: Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet, for the Roman Polanski-directed four-hander Carnage.

It seems a tad harsh that Foster and Winslet have been recognised for their roles in the Polanski flick while the obvious scene-stealer in that film, Christoph Waltz, has been overlooked. But there is also perhaps some kind of perverse artistic justice done by the fact that Waltz has been passed over, whereas Viggo Mortensen’s turn as Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method has been nominated for Best Supporting Actor – that being a role that Waltz, in the words of Cronenberg, “copped out” of in order to appear in the Hollywood fromage of Water for Elephants, opposite Chin du Jour Robert Pattinson.   

Have you got a filmmaking extravaganza boiling away, which would be a sure-fire awards season smash, if only you could find somewhere to shoot out it? Then why not check out our studio rates, and see if we could help put you on the path to Hollywood glory?