Obsession wins Liberty award

A new documentary from the makers of Relentless has just been named Best Feature at the Liberty Film Festival. The new film is called Obsession. Using the same "in their own words" approach as Relentless, but applying it to the global terrorist phenomenon, it uses footage from Arab television - footage rarely seen in the West, and ignored by the mainstream media - to illustrate how terrorism is systematically advocated, propagandised, and glorified, by the radical minority that is trying to hijack Islam and use it against the West. I'm sure that the BBC, in the interests of balancing The Power of Nightmares, is in the queue to obtain the rights. I mean, that's what balance means, doesn't it?

Digital v film on Corpse Bride

A little while ago Pootergeek had a brief rant at the expense of digital cameras. Now I love my Nikon FTn, but it doesn't take better pictures than my Nikon D70, just because it uses film: digital SLRs are very comparable to film SLRs. Despite my strenuous efforts to make him see reason, he remained stubbornly of the opinion that film would forever remain superior to digital imaging.

I thought of him when I read this. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Tim Burton's new movie Corpse Bride, which has notched up a number of firsts:

It’s the first feature-length, stop-motion film edited using Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), it’s the first feature shot using commercial digital SLR still photography cameras and, perhaps most significantly, it’s the first movie to choose digital cameras over film cameras based on the criterion of image quality.

Ahem.

Allow me to quote another interesting snippet. This is a description of the testing they did to determine whether digital SLR cameras were good enough to replace the film cameras that had, for example, been used to make Aardman's Chicken Run. The result:

“Basically, everything looked great until the film-originated version came up, then everyone yelled at the projectionist, ‘Focus!’” The images from digital cameras looked so stunning when projected. The tests convinced Burton... and executives at Warners.

I rest my case.