I first met Larry Giesbrecht, director of “Children who work“, at the 2006 Banff World TV Festival and Larry mentioned that he was planning a documentary to be shot in Egypt about the sensitive and challenging topic of child labour. And then last October he mentioned that he was flying off to Egypt to start shooting in Nov. We exchanged Christmas greetings but I haven’t heard much from Larry afterwards.
So it came as an unplanned and really pleasant surprise that I, based on the movie synopsis alone and without looking at who directed the film, ran into Larry last night and watched his well-made and very insightful documentary about child labour.
Here is a synopsis of “Children who work“,
Many of us would say that it is inappropriate to expect a child to work and contribute to a family. In our society, childhood is a time to learn and play. In some societies a child working is the accepted norm. Despite international pressure to ban child labour, Egyptian children are expected to work, but new initiatives are being put in place to protect them.
It was interesting and eye-opening to see microloans being used as means to improve the overall welfare of children who work. Life is tough for the nine-year old motorcycle mechanic but he was amazing on screen and it was wonderful to see that the microloan conditions are helping him. (See also my earlier posts about one of the many organizations offering microloans, and the insightful Charlie Rose interview of Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and founder of Grameen Bank.)
P.S. David has no idea how happy I am in spreading the good news and progress made by young producers/contend creators that I met at Banff World TV Festival.
My friend David Cormican from Year of the Skunk productions (we first met at 2007 Banff) just emailed and told me some great news. He has been selected to be one of ten finalists to pitch his series Crazy People in the Just for Pitching Event as part of the 2007 Just for Laughs Festival (this is big league stuff in comedy) in Montreal at the Hyatt Regency on July 19th, 2007! If you are in Montreal and love comedy, check him out.
David, my best wishes to you. Remember to sign me lots of autographed photos so I can eBay them when you go big. (smile) Seriously, good luck and I am keeping my fingers crossed for you.
I’ve been writing a monthly Chinese column about “user generated media” (自製傳媒) for a local Calgary newspaper since December 2006. For the July 2007 issue, I talked about my experiences as a blogger/reporter reporting on CBC Dragons’ Den (under the blog Dragonfly on the wall) and also nextMEDIA and Banff World TV Festival. The article is written for a general audience. If you can read Chinese, I hope you will enjoy it.
Forgive me for my shameless self promotion here. But it is kind words like these that made the extra hours (with 4-5 hours sleep every night) spending in blogging/reporting about nextMEDIA and Banff World TV Festival sweet.
And words coming from Keith who has attended nextMEDIA and Banff for years mean a lot to me. With Keith’s permission, here is what he said.
And thank you providing me with the information of your blog on NextMedia and Banff. Very interesting and very well done. I learned a lot more than what I learned on site.
Keep up the good work and thanks again.
Keith Chang Director General / Directeur général Trade and Investment Branch / Direction général du commerce et de l’investissement Canadian Heritage / Patrimoine Canadien
And seeing emails and comments from readers and viewers telling me that they enjoyed and learned from my interviews, reports, and video clips also make me a happy blogger & reporter.
Thanks go to everyone who took a minute to write to send in your kind words of appreciation and encouragement, your words are deeply felt and very much appreciated. Thanks.
Antony Thomas‘ master class at Banff World TV Festival 2007 still resonate with me today. Here is a clip from “The Tank Man” as Antony watches it with the audiences. (note: Full program of “The Tank Man” is now available online at the PBS site. Big thanks to them.)
By the way, I’ve posted six Banff World TV Festival clips of Antony on Google Video and two new ones are included below. Enjoy.
Here Antony talks about how his visual style evolves over the years, the use of the camera as an emotional tool, opening sequence, his approach to an interview.
One thing I enjoyed a lot at nextMEDIA and Banff World TV Festival was all the interviews that I was able to conduct with the world leaders of new media and TV industry to pick their brains. I would like to thank them again for sharing a few minutes of their time with me.
I hope you will enjoy the following interviews as much as I in conducting them,
P.S. I worked real hard to get every one of these interviews. And I promise to work even harder to get you more interviews next year. Of course, once I am more established as a blogger/reporter, I hope the interviewees will be more willing in granting me interview time slots. This year I ended up just waiting patiently after their speeches and hope I could get an interview. This year, after lots of wait and determination, I was “lucky” 50% of the time. (big smile)
I was so lucky to attend this Banff World TV Festival Master Class with Antony Thomas. So that I can share some of my experiences with others, here are more video clips of Antony Thomas talking about different topics in his wonderful master class. The text are just highlights as the clips sometimes contain a lot more insightful comments. Here are the clips.
As I wrote in a previous post, I met the Hong Kong entrepreneur Paul Lam (no relation to me) from zooin.net at nextMEDIA and Banff World TV Festival. What interests me the most in this case is that his company’s technologies are sitting at the intersection of both sides of my interests — TV and patent protected technologies.
A quick Google found that the Korean entrepreneur Park Hyun-je is both the CEO of zooin.net and also co-inventor of some of its patent applied technologies. For the patent geeks (like me) out there, here are two of zooin’s patent applications (see submitted patents) for your reading pleasure,
“[0002] The present invention relates to a multicasting technological field of an internet broadcasting system, and more particularly to a multicasting relaying method to achieve a multicasting under a modem environment utilizing a digital subscriber line (xDSL) and a public switch telephone network (PSTN) and a recording mechanism that can read a program to achieve the aforementioned method with a computer.”
“[0001] The present invention relates to a multicasting technology in an Internet broadcasting system; and, more particularly, to a virtual multicast networking method for establishing a multicast network without changing existing routers or switches on the Internet, and a system thereof.”
My regular readers may remember that I mentioned in a previous blog entry when reviewing a TV show that,
And thanks to “2165 The Best Mode Requirement” of the MPEP, the patent is required to disclose the “best mode” to make this device thus making the patent an interesting read. (smile)
Have fun as I am sure I will when I get around to read up on them a little.
I am happy for Jessica and Catherine’s FemTV in winning the C$10,000 prize. Now, to encourage other content providers to try and be brave. Here are videos of Jessica and Catherine’s FemTV.ca’s winning pitches. And I will include a link to their bio and my comments after the videos.
When I met Catherine and Jessica, they were always in character. So I would love to meet them or talk to them “out of character” and see how insightful they are in terms of character designs and production related questions. I may pick up a phone and call either Jessica or Catherine to follow up and interview them for the record.
Even the comedy styling of Borat is quite different from FemTV stuff, I will not be totally surprised, given Jessica and Catherine’s resume, to see that they are really smart girls that play dumb.
Greg Goodfried (co-creator and executive producer of LG15) gave a presentation at nextMEDIA and Banff World TV Festival about some history and thinking behind Lonelygirl15.
Congrats to the two Scott for winning the “Pitch it! The Comedy Network Comedy Pitch“. It was my pleasure to meet Scott Feschuk at 2006 & 2007 Banff World TV Festival as I saw Scott’s masterly interviewing titans in the Film and TV making business (Paul Haggis last year and Carol Mendelsohn this year). And after watching Scott pitch, and comparing to the other pitches, I was near certain that Scott won but I have to wait for a confirmation. Now I have Scott’s winning confirmation and I am happy to share with you my excitement. OK, I am biased as I really like Scott’s interview. But if you have seen him pitch, you would love him too. And with my video, now you can. (smile)
To inspire the next generation of comedy writers to enter the challenging field of making us laugh, here is the video of Scott’s winning pitch. In fact, I think drama writers can learn from Scott too (pay attention to details and have well developed characters). I hope you will enjoy the video as much as I watch Scott did his magic performed live in front of the judges.
The following are some video clips of Banff World TV Festival 2007 Master class with Chuck Lorre, Creator, “Two and a Half Men” as interviewed by Scott Feschuk, Journalist. The discussions are very frank and very insightful. I had a great enjoyable experience and I’ve learned a lot.
You can check out clip two, three, four, and five for some more great insights from Chuck.
Smita, Scott, and Paul attended this year’s Banff World TV Festival and I know them previously so I will start with them. (smile)
Smita Acharyya – CTV Fellow 2007 – introduces herself and her project. (note: I have known Smita for a few years now as she is a wonderful documentary filmmaker in Calgary. She was quite helpful to me earlier on, and I returned a favour by shedding light on the CTV Fellowship application process for Smita. It is a small world and I try to help my friends.)
Scott Feschuk introduces himself and the comedy he is pitching at BWTVF. (note: I knew Scott from the wonderful master class interviews that he did for Banff in 2006. I particular enjoyed his chat with Paul Haggis. Love to know Scott more.)
Paul Lam (no relation to me) is CEO and Co-founder of Zooinnet, and Paul comes all the way from Hong Kong to pitch his product and create contacts.
(Geek alert: By the way Paul, as far as I know, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a “worldwide patent“. True, you can establish a priority date through internationally agreed treaty. But you still have to go to, e.g. the Japanese government, to apply for a patent to protect the IP in Japan.)
Now here are some other pitchers that I came across.
I met David Cormican at a dinner thing. I shared with him some of my business advices and he gave me a demo DVD which I enjoy a good portion of it. Here is one he has put up on YouTube – THIERRY – HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
I met Siobhan McCarthy (Blyssful) while waiting to attend a session. Siobhan is pitching her comedy project at BWTVF – (see video).
I met Dennis Allen – Mackenzie Delta Films (Inuvik) in a party and here Dennis introduces himself & his project (see video).
Jane Mote, Director of Life Style, UKTV, shared some good insights in Banff World TV Festival 2007 to show us how a major broadcaster has involved the audiences in an open manner with great success. Here are two clips of Jane’s presentation followed by my interview with Jane.
Here is my interview with Jane to try to pick her brain and learn from UKTV’s experiences,
Every year that I have attended Banff (OK, just two, last year and this year), I made a point to visit the Video Library at the Banff World TV Festival to check out some great programs from around the world. Sorry to be picky, but unfortunately the TVs in the temporary video library are still stocked with mono-TV (as oppose to Stereo). I hope we will go stereo next year.
Due to very limited time and too many things to do, the way I watched the programs can be better described as scanning. With practice, I believe I can tell quickly if a program is any good or at least if it is something that I may enjoy.
So without further delay, here are some of my favourite titles in this year’s library. If you get a chance to watch them, I highly recommend them. And please let me know if you enjoy them or not.
I truly enjoyed this master class at Banff World TV Festival 2007 with Carol Mendelsohn (as interviewed by the wonderful Scott Feschuk) since Carol was extremely candid and insightful.
Here is Carol’s bio [K: emphasis mine],
Carol Mendelsohn is Executive Producer and Showrunner of “CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION”, the most watched scripted show on network television, as well as Co-Creator and Executive Producer of its spin-offs, “CSI: MIAMI” and “CSI: NEW YORK”. Her job has her managing every aspect of the series, making her one of the most powerful women in Hollywood.
Mendelsohn started out as a lawyer practicing in Washington, D.C. but she loved writing and pursued it on the side until the early 1980s. It was then she took the leap, quit her job and moved to LA. A spec script for “Remington Steele” (in which an elephant is framed for murder) caught a Studio Executive’s eye and led to jobs writing for TV shows like “Fame,” and “Wiseguy”. She wrote, produced and eventually became the Co-Showrunner on “Melrose Place”. And it was she who later assembled the CSI writing team, which has now produced 165 episodes.
Here is the first of three video clips of Carol sharing her insight. I hope you will enjoy and learn from Carol as much as I did. I am sure I can watch them over and over again and learn something new every time.
I blog about Business, Sci. & Tech., Law, innovation, Film & TV, Medical Science, Politics and whatever interests me. Just so you know, I aspire to make mistakes faster.
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