Adobe Helps Sponsor the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge

Image caption: Winners of last year’s Easterseals Disability Film Challenge

Nic Novicki is an actor who happens to have a disability. In 2014 he launched the Disability Film Challenge to address the under-representation of people with disabilities both in front and behind the camera. In 2017, he teamed us with Easterseals Southern California to expand the challenge. Now known as the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge, Easterseals is the leading nonprofit supporting people with disabilities.

This year, Adobe returns as a sponsor of the challenge, which aims at recognizing the creative output of young filmmakers and showcases their films. In this way, the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge hopes to help change the way the world views and defines disability.

Margot Nack, Adobe’s Senior Manager of Strategic Programs for Professional Film & Video, states “One of the reasons why Adobe loves to be a part of this competition is it gives the next generation of filmmakers a platform to tell stories about disabilities that may not otherwise be told.”

Nic Novicki (center with mic) presents an award at 2018’s Disability Film Challenge.

Registration has already opened and runs through April 3rd. The competition itself takes place between April 5th-7th; participants will have 55 hours to write, put together a crew, shoot and edit a three to five minute short film. Each team must include a person with a disability either in front or behind the camera.

Finalists will be announced at the Newport Beach Film Festival on April 27th and will be followed up by a red carpet award ceremony on May 9th at Sony Pictures Studios.

Winners will receive a variety of prizes including a full, one year subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud. Other prizes include a $2000 production grant by Universal Filmed Entertainment, a Sony mirrorless camera, mentor meetings by important people in the industry and subscriptions to trade publications such as Variety and Film Independent.

There are several different categories including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Awareness Campaign.

The winning film will be screened at the HollyShorts Film Festival, an Academy Award-qualifying competition and the Newport Beach Film Festival.

More information about the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge can be found at their website, http://www.disabilityfilmchallenge.com.

About Joe Herman

Joe Herman is a filmmaker, artist and post production specialist and writes often about the industry. You can reach him at joe[at]legendmultimedia[dot]com. Or reach and follow him on Twitter @JoeHermanTweets.

A letter from International Cinematographers Guild President John Lindley and 13 other top cinematographers was sent to Hollywood studios urging them to reduce excessively long workday hours on film sets as they resumed talks with IATSE on Tuesday on a new collective bargaining agreement.

Along with Lindley, the letter was signed by four Oscar-winning cinematographers, including Roger A. Deakins (“1917,” “Blade Runner 2049”), Emmanuel Lubezki (“The Revenant”), Erik Messerschmidt (“Mank”), and John Toll (“Braveheart”).

Read the full article on TheWrap by clicking here.

PITTSFIELD — Get Diane Pearlman talking about visual effects and she will provide several stories about cutting-edge techniques that were created in the Berkshires for many well-known movies.

For six years in the 1990s, Pearlman served as executive producer and general manager of Mass.Illusion, a visual effects movie studio that had an office in Lenox. Two movies that Mass.Illusion worked on in the Berkshires, “What Dreams May Come” and “The Matrix,” received Academy Awards for visual effects in 1999 and 2000, respectively.

Mass.Illusions no longer exists, but Pearlman remained in the Berkshires after the company was sold. She now serves as executive director of the Berkshire Film and Media Collaborative, an organization that promotes and facilitates film and media production in the Berkshires.

To read the full story on The Berkshire Eagle, click here.

Last month, Ben Gottlieb, a 27-year-old set lighting technician, wanted to show his support for his union’s campaign to improve working conditions on film sets so he wrote an Instagram post calling for an end to 12- to 14-hour shifts.

As with many of his colleagues, the Brooklynite felt burned out after working grueling hours without substantial breaks for much of the last year. Some nights, he was so tired driving home that he felt inebriated. He even thought about quitting — only two years after joining his union, IATSE Local 52.

The post struck a chord, drawing more than 21,000 likes. Gottlieb was soon inundated with messages from industry colleagues sharing their own stories, which prompted him to create a dedicated page called IATSE Stories. In just a few weeks, more than 500 posts have drawn nearly 17,000 followers to the page.

To read the entire story on the Los Angeles Times’ site, click here.

IATSE leaders say they remain “very far apart” on a wide range of issues in their negotiations with management’s AMPTP for a new film and TV contract.

“After more than six weeks of negotiation over a period of four months, it remains clear that the employers are unwilling to resolve our priority issues – living wages, reasonable rest, meal breaks, sustainable benefits and streaming – aka ‘not so new media,’” IATSE president Matthew Loeb and leaders of the union’s 13 West Coast studio locals said today in a message to their members.

To read the full article on Deadline.com, click here.

IATSE is gearing up for a possible strike against the film and television industry, which would be the first industry-wide strike in the union’s history. The union and management’s AMPTP will return to the bargaining table on Thursday in an effort to reach an agreement on a new film and TV contract in advance of Friday’s expiration of their current deal.

A strike, if it comes to that, would still be several weeks away, however, as IATSE continues to lay the groundwork for a possible walkout, which includes a text-messaging campaign to educate members about the negotiations and what’s at stake.

To read the full article on Deadline, click here.