No British Films at Venice Festival This Year

ROME (Reuters) -  This year’s Venice Film Festival starts on 27th August, but won’t be helping the British Film Industry.  The competition lineup will highlight independent US cinema, Italian productions and Japanese animation.

Last year, US and British films dominated the lineup, with nearly half of the films in the main competition.

This year, only five English language movies – all listed as US productions – will vie for the top prize at the world’s oldest film festival.

Full Story on Reuters.com

Tracey – OwnAFilmCompany.com

Good News For The British Film Industry

LONDON, July 21 (Reuters) – Cinema admissions hit 162 million in 2007, up four percent on 2006 and reversing a two-year decline, the UK Film Council said on Monday.

Box office receipts were also up, rising eight percent to 821 million pounds versus 762 million in 2006.

According to the council, British films accounted for 29 percent of the total UK box office, up from 19 percent in 2006, and were led by “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”, the biggest film of the year earning over 49 million pounds.

Full article at http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL2181926620080721

Tracey – OwnAFilmCompany.com

Another External Meeting

On Thursday we had another external meeting. This time it was with a mobile phone network. We’re still discussing details, but will hopefully be partnering with them for our upcoming short film competition. More details to follow, so watch this space and start getting your short films ready…

Tracey – OwnAFilmCompany.com

Should We Have a Panel to Shortlist the Best Scripts?

This week, we had our first external meeting since we started this blog. I met Robert Lewis, a Director, at Minibar on Friday 27th June, where Channel 4 presented 4IP, their “new investment fund for innovation.” He said he was interested in meeting up and getting to know more about OwnAFilmCompany.com and we eventually managed to find time to meet on Thursday.

It was an interesting meeting and he had some good suggestions, most of which I can’t blog about. Well we can’t post too much of our business and marketing plans, but I am going to mention two of his suggestions. The first that we post about external meetings in our blog, so I’m taking his advice and doing that right now.

The other was that we have a panal to judge the scripts. Our original plan was to check that the scripts could be made with £2.5m, but not do any quality control. In the interests of democracy, we were going to put all scripts up for the members vote.

Robert pointed out that we could end up with 100s of scripts come in and members won’t have time to read through all the entries, so they either won’t vote at all, or they will only read the first few and just vote on those, making it an unfair vote. He suggest we put together a panel of judges, to shortlist the best few scripts, then just put those up for the members vote.

What do you think? To launch this blog, we’re opening the script judging panel idea up for discussion.

Please add comments letting us know if you think we should have a panel of judges create a short list, or put all scripts up to the members vote. If you like the panel idea, who would you like to see on it?

Tracey – OwnAFilmCompany.com