With just 2.5 million viewers during it’s third and final season on the CW Network, VERONICA MARS, a TV series about a young female sleuth and her detective father, was cancelled in 2007.

The audience might have been too small to justify the show’s renewal to Warner Brothers, the rights’ holder, but it’s  passion was anything but. More like a cult following, fans of the series soon began to clamor for VERONICA MARS, the movie.

The studio passed on the idea, but series creator, Rob Thomas, and star, Kristen Bell, with Warner Brother’s permission, decided to launch a VERONICA MARS Kickstarter campaign  to try to raise the necessary production funds themselves. And, the fans responded in spades.

With 210 million unique site visitors reportedly viewing over 1.9 billion videos and 707 million mobile videos in February 2013 alone, Machinima is YouTube’s number one entertainment channel.

Never heard of it?

Not sure what “machinima” means?

The term comes from the fusion of “machine” (+ “animation,” according to some) + “cinema” and, with roots in the video gaming community, has traditionally referred to,

“… original films made within a real time 3D virtual environment, combining film-making, animation and games development.” (Tracy Harwood, “The Machinima Movement,” Fallopian, October, 2009)

 On the other hand, Machinima, Inc., the company, which draws on gamer, fan-produced machinima for content, is,

“… a video entertainment network (online) for video gamers (that provides) gaming-focused editorial and community programming  (featuring) official publisher content, gameplay videos, scripted series, and original content, including weekly and daily shows to 18 to 34 year old male demographic. The company’s properties are available across various distribution platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, iOS, and Android.  Machinima, Inc. was founded in 2000 and is based in Los Angeles, California.”  (Bloomberg Businessweek)

So, you may wonder, why has Ridley Scott (ALIEN, BLADE RUNNER) signed up to work with a gamer-oriented network like Machinima?

Things are changing.

According to Adam Leipzig, film and theatre producer, writer, Cultural Weekly’s Publisher and former executive at Disney and National Geographic, a perfect storm has developed from the collision of new technologies, new business models, and new creative talent and it’s creating a new Golden Age in cinema.

Some thoughts from Rick Pagano

(Writer, Director, Casting Director)

There are volumes on what it means to be creative. Let me add two more metaphors to the canon.

To be an actor means to play in your own sandbox, on cue, under pressure, in front of a bunch of people who need to be reminded of their own, often misplaced sandboxes.

Buried by production, time, and personal pressures, the people sitting in many audition rooms usually look like they’ve just swallowed a half-pound of toxic waste.  The air in the room can be stale with tension.

From the blog of John Bailey,

Cinematographer and

Film Director …

No one is likely to conflate the dangerous, kinetic world of Nigerian Nollywood action movies with the benign fantasies of Lewis Carroll, although each portrays a surreal universe. The Nollywood portraits of South African photographer Pieter Hugo depict the denizens of a dark rabbit hole of third world cinema, one heralded as the world’s third most prolific production center—behind only Hollywood and Bollywood.

Some Thoughts from Rick Pagano, Writer, Director, Casting Director…

I would like to talk about discipline, specifically the discipline of the Olympic athlete and how it compares to the acting profession.

Think of Los Angeles as the Olympics of acting. This is the city where actors come, from all around the world, to compete for the “gold.” Throw a rock in this town, and you’ll hit an actor, writer, director. There are those who hate that notion; personally I find it a tremendous asset/resource/comfort for those of us who have come here to create.

But the proximity of  collaborators comes at a price.  Because they are also your competition.

INDIE GAME: THE MOVIE premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival where it won the award for best editing in the World Documentary Competition.

It’s the story of four struggling independent game designers, Phil Fish, Edmund McMillen, Tommy Refenes, and Johnathan Blow, and the three games, Fez, Super Meat Boy, and Braid, they fought tooth and nail to create.

It’s also the story of two independent filmmakers from Winnipeg,

Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky,

and how they’ve used the internet to bring their feature-length documentary to life in the digital age.

The Tribeca Online Film Festival

is back for its third year.

As the 2012 Sundance Film Festival approaches, filmmakers whose films have been accepted by the Festival this year, or any other year for that matter, have an additional reason to be happy, thanks to an initiative set up by the Sundance Institute last summer to help Sundance alumni get their films streamed online.

Scott Macaulay wrote in Filmmaker Magazine (July 27, 2011) …

Matt D’Elia’s directorial debut film, AMERICAN ANIMAL, which premiered at SBSW in 2011, was picked up by Screen Media today for distribution in the US.

According to Indiewire:

“D’Elia, a graduate of NYU’s film program, also stars in the film which was shot on a microbudget in his downtown Los Angeles apartment.  The supporting cast of AMERICAN ANIMAL features an impressive array of up-and-coming actors including Brendan Fletcher (HBO’s “The Pacific”), Mircea Monroe (Showtime’s “Episodes”) and Angela Sarafyan (THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN Part II”) …