The Very Short Film competition was launched in partnership with The Guardian in October 2012. The longlisted entries are now available for the public vote which will produce four finalists. After a live final in March, the winner will receive £9000 towards their university education.
By Chloe Foster
After more than three months of students carefully planning and creating their entries, the Very Short Film competition has closed and the longlisted submissions have been announced.
The competition asked entrants to create a short film which would inform and inspire us. Students were free to base their entry on any subject they were passionate about. There was just one rule: films could be no longer than 60 seconds in length.
We certainly had many who managed to do this. The standard of films was impressive. How were we to whittle down the entries and choose just 12 for the longlist?
We received a real range of films from a variety of ages, characters and subjects — everything from scuba diving to the economic state of the housing market. It was great to see a mixture of academic subjects and topics of personal interest.
It must be said that the quality of the filmmaking itself was very high in some entries. However not all of these could be put through to the longlist; although artistic and clever, they didn’t inform us in the way our criteria specified.
When choosing the longlisted entries, judges looked for students who were clearly on top of their subject. We were most impressed by films that conveyed a topic’s key information in a concise way, were delivered with passion and verve, and left us wanting to find out more. By the end of our selection process, we felt that each of the films had taught us something new or made us think about a subject in a way we hadn’t before.
The sheer amount of information filmmakers managed to convey was astounding. As the Very Short Introductions editor Andrea Keegan says: “I thought condensing a large topic into 35,000 words, as we do in the Very Short Introductions books was difficult enough, but I think that this challenge was even harder. I was very impressed with the quality and variety of videos which were submitted.
“Ranging from artistic to zany, I learned a lot, and had lots of fun watching them. The longlist represents both a wide range of subjects — from the history of film to quantum locking — and a huge range in the approaches taken to get the subjects across in just one minute.”
We hope the entrants enjoyed thinking about and creating their films as much as we enjoyed watching them. We asked a few of the longlisted students what they made of the experience. Mahshad Torkan, studying at the London School of Film, tackled the political power of film: “I am very thankful for this amazing opportunity that has allowed me to reflect my values and beliefs and share my dreams with other people. I believe that the future is not something we enter, the future is something we create.”
Maia Krall Fry is reading geology at St Andrews: “It seemed highly important to discuss a topic that has really captured my curiosity and sense of adventure. I strongly believe that knowledge of the history of the earth should be accessible to everyone.”
Matt Burnett, who is studying for an MSc in biological and bioprocess engineering at Sheffield, used his film to explore the challenges of creating cost-effective therapeutic drugs: “I felt that in a minute it would be very hard to explain my research in enough detail just using speech, and it would be difficult to demonstrate or act out. I simplify difficult concepts for myself by drawing diagrams, often spending a lot of time on them. For me it is the most enjoyable part of learning, and so I thought it would be fun to draw an animated video. If I get the chance to do it again I think I’d use lots of colours.”
So, what are you waiting for? Take a look at the 12 films and pick your favourite of these amazingly creative and intelligent entries.
Chloe Foster is from the Very Short Introductions team at Oxford University Press. This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only VSI articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
The post A Very Short Film competition appeared first on OUPblog.
The Guardian - The British newspaper, not the defunct TV series - has offered us all a joyful online Advent Calendar centered on books for children and teens. These are British books, mind, but a whole lot of those have captured the American readers' attention - Harry Potter, for instance.
 |
| The selection for Dec. 2 is a slide show about Raymond Briggs. |
Click here and then bookmark the page so you can check back every day for quizzes and author interviews and other fun for us older fans of kids' lit.
The long ordeal of the 33 trapped Chilean miners is finally at an end – and the buzz about book deals and film rights to the men’s dramatic story has already begun.
The miners themselves are reported to have made a pact to collaborate on their own book, but in the UK the first book was signed up on Monday, before the rescue had even begun. Freelance journalist Jonathan Franklin, who has covered the dramatic story for the Guardian from day one, is to pen an account of the saga, provisionally titled 33 Men, for book publisher Transworld.
Franklin, who is an American but has lived in the Chile’s capital Santiago for 15 years, spoke about the book on his mobile phone from Chile, after 48 sleepless hours covering the emotional scenes as the miners emerged.
“This is one of the great rescue stories of all time,” he said, admitting he himself had wept as the first miners were released on Tuesday night. “It’s the reason we all want to be reporters: a remarkable story of the world coming together for a good reason. It taps into human altruism, the desire to work together, perseverance, faith that good things happen, never giving up.” The early chapters of the book, he said, were already written.
As a journalist, Franklin had had “a backstage pass to the whole thing. I was allowed to tape record the psychologist talking to the [trapped] men, I spent last night in the hospital talking to the [newly freed] miners.” He intends his book to reveal the characters of the miners themselves (“You could probably do a book on every one of them”) and reflect their black humour: one of the men played dead, for a joke, during the first 17 days spent in the collapsed mine without food, while another attempted phone sex with the nurse who was attending to him 700m above.
Transworld book publishers, a division of Random House, which bought 33 Men at last week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, said: “As far as I’m aware, Franklin is the only print and publishers journalist in the inner circle at the mine, party to a lot of the strategy and to the stories of the relatives at the top, the wives and girlfriends.” He added: “What I think is really interesting, apart from the drama of the story itself, is the miners’ lives in this isolated outpost in Chile, which is a bit like the Wild West. People seem to live by their own rules, and it’s a very rugged existence – tough people living in a tough place.”
The publication date for the book is still to be confirmed. “It’ll be sooner rather than later, but I don’t want Franklin to compromise the depth and breadth of the story by making it a rush job,” Scott-Kerr said.
Literary agent Annabel Merullo at Peters, Fraser and Dunlop, who is handling the book, said it had also sold to France and Germany, with self publishing film interest from the US.
“It’s happened so quickly,” she said. “When the story broke, we talked about it at the agency and said, ‘Is there a book in it?’ We decided there only was if we could get someone really good to write it. Jonathan’s coverage was so much better than everyone else’s. He has incredible access at the mines and he’s covered the story from day one.”
By: executivepublisher,
on 1/7/2011
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
The Guardian,
industry gossip,
schiel and denver book publishers,
book publishers,
book publishing,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
book publishing industry,
Harvard,
literary agent,
online book publishers,
Print On Demand Publishing,
Add a tag
McClelland & Stewart Book Publisher (Fiction) and Executive Vice President Ellen Seligman announced Michael Ondaatje’s highly anticipated new novel, The Cat’s Table, will go on sale on August 30, 2011. It will be published in the fall in the US by Knopf and in the UK by Jonathan Cape.
“I am completely blown away by Michael Ondaatje’s stunning and original new novel,” says Seligman. “The Cat’s Table is a surprise and a sheer delight — a brilliantly told story, with unforgettable moments and characters the reader comes to care deeply about. It is perhaps Ondaatje’s most thrilling and moving novel to date.”
The Cat’s Table has received enthusiastic and exited responses as well from Ondaatje’s book publishers around the world including:
“The Cat’s Table is written with wisdom and poignancy, filled with the superlative storytelling we’ve come to expect from Michael Ondaatje. I was completely moved by the way he inhabits the voice of his narrator and conjures the innocence of childhood and the challenges of making one’s home in a strange land. The novel resonates on many levels.” – Sonny Mehta, Chairman and Editor in Chief, Knopf Publishing Group
“What a book it is! In my view, the best thing Ondaatje has done.” – Robin Robertson, Jonathan Cape UK
“It is so beautiful, the way it unfolds and becomes more and more complex and becomes many types of a novel — memoir, Bildungsroman, adventure novel and something like 1001 Nights…” – Anna Leube, Hanser, Germany
Michael Ondaatje is the author of four previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. His most recent novel Divisadero won the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award and was a finalist for the Giller Prize. The English Patient won the Booker Prize and was an Academy Award-winning film; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Ondaatje now lives in Toronto.
.jpg?picon=1806)
By:
Celia Rees,
on 2/14/2011
Blog:
An Awfully Big Blog Adventure
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Nicole Krauss,
Leslie Wilson,
Martin Amis,
Lucy Coats,
The Observer,
Children's Books,
The Guardian,
Huffington Post,
Faulks on Fiction,
Celia Rees,
BBC,
Add a tag
Lucy Coats has already blogged (Wednesday, 9th Feb) about the remarks that Martin Amis made when he was interviewed by Sebastian Faulks for the BBC 2 programme, Faulks on Fiction. Her blog has attracted 60 comments and the outrage felt has resonated as far as the national press and the Huffington Post. Martin Amis, as the Guardian on Saturday pointed out, is no stranger to controversy.
I, too, saw the programme and after the first dropping of the jaw, I thought that he actually had a point. Just in case anybody doesn't know, or does not want to scroll down the page and see his words in purple 18 point type, he said:
'People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say: "If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book."'
So far, so insulting. He then went on to say:
'The idea of being conscious of who you are directing the story to is anathema to me because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.'
Once I heard that, I could see where he was coming from. I did not think he was saying 'all children's writers have half a brain', that would be false logic. He was just explaining his own writing stance and he is entitled to do that. He writes literary fiction for adults, as such he sees it as his task to write to the top of his register and would not, could not accept any restraints on that.
The disregard for the reader that Amis expresses is just not possible when one is writing for children. Children's writers, and I include writers of Young Adult fiction, are ALWAYS aware of what their readers will and will not tolerate, or will or will not understand. Anyone who denies this is being disingenuous. Quite apart from the target readers themselves, there are other agencies involved. We have to worry about things that would not trouble writers of adult fiction in the least - see Leslie Wilson's blog below. How many writers for adults would feel the need to explain and justify their use of swear words or the incidence of sex in a novel? How much we take these factors into consideration, how much we allow them to limit our fiction, is up to us, but those limitations are there. We do not use our full palate, as Patrick Ness would say. How can we? We have to write at a lower register because we are adults and our readers are children.
There are other pressures on us, too. Pressures that have nothing to do with our writing but everything to do with the market place. In a squeezed market, there is more and more demand from publishers for novels that will sell. Books that fit into an obvious, popular genre - action, dark romance, whatever. A book that is perceived as 'too literary' is seen as problematic. The equivalent of the literary novel is a rare beast, and becoming more endangered by the minute. If one or two do sneak through, they usually turn out to have been written for adults in the first place and tweaked a bit in a bid to capture that holy grail, the crossover market.
In an interview in the Observer Review (13th February, 2011)) Nicole Krauss attests that the comment she heard most frequently on a U.S. book tour for her novel, The History of Love, was: 'this book is difficult'. Krauss worries that 'we are moving towards the end of effort'. Readers don't want to have to think too hard, it appears, whatever their age. That is the spectre that frightens me. In the hope of keeping that at bay, I actually want Martin Amis to write to the limit
These brilliant words on historical fiction—what it should do, why it matters—come by way of
Andrew Miller, by way of the Guardian, by way of Shelf Awareness. In all that I write that looks back, I am, like Miller, looking at now. He says it better than I ever could:
As a boy I understood perfectly that history is not something apart from us, sealed off. It is in our blood, our music, our language, the buildings we pass on the way to work. And at its best, historical fiction is never a turning away from the Now but one of the ways in which our experience of the contemporary is revived. Janus-like, such books look both to the past and to the present, and there is no need to laboriously draw out the parallels for they suggest themselves, inevitably and plentifully.
It's probably a futile hope, but I just hope books are selling in other places besides bookstores. Because PW reports that while retail sales overall grew 4% through June, bookstore sales have dropped a total of 4.6% in the same time period.
My gut says people are spending more time on the Internet, and that has to come from someplace.
What do you think?
Subscribe with
JacketFlap's
Children's
Publishing
Blog Reader
"Quentin Blake is one of Britain's most famous children's illustrators, with over 300 books published and still working into his 70s. Hogarth Brown is a young artist with no books (so far) but a passion for the artist he has never met ... until now."
A young illustrator from The Guardian gets to meet Quentin Blake. I like the part where Blake comments-- "...What's good is that you actually draw things."
Just popping in to let you know the Guardian has published a slew of fun top 10 lists:
ETA:
Enjoy!
I stumbled upon the following "advert" for a DVD on The Guardian's website. (Where you can also buy a "space-saving water butt." See what I mean? Those guys across the pond are a riot!):
New restored BFI version of 'Night Mail' with lots of extras for only £12.99.
You can buy 'Night Mail' on DVD, the critically acclaimed film which remains one of the most popular and instantly recognised films in British film history. (That's my boldfacing. Such high praise! Let's see what it's about...)
An account of the operation of the Postal Special - the Royal Mail train delivery service - it shows the various stages and procedures of that operation, through mail collection to sorting. (I'm all a-flutter!)
As the train nears its destination we see the best-known sequence, in which WH Auden's spoken verse and Benjamin Britten's music are combined over a montage of racing train wheels. (Well, no wonder. A montage of racing train wheels. With a literary connection, no less.)
How can you not love a country that's sort of one big nudge in the ribs? I mean, with the left-hand driving and all, and their funny words like "water butt."
Which reminds me. I need to go order mine...
By: executivepublisher,
on 10/10/2010
Blog:
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog
(
Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:
Amazon,
Amazon Kindle,
Book Publishers,
Man Book Prize,
Man Booker Prize,
Mario Vargas Llosa,
Nobel Literature Prize,
The Guardian,
book publishing,
booksellers,
book publishing companies,
book publishing company,
book publishing industry,
books,
Schiel & Denver,
Schiel & Denver Book Group,
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers,
Schiel & Denver Publishing Limited,
Schiel and Denver,
self-publishing,
Shiel & Denver,
Add a tag
The nights are drawing in and it’s book prize season – Nobel, Man Booker et al. This is the moment in the year, as the Flat draws to a close and as the National Hunt book publishing season gets into full swing, when literature becomes a horse race. That just might be the good news. John Steinbeck once observed that “the profession of book publishing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business”.
Many people who care about books are not so blithe. They worry that the turf accountants of our culture (tipsters who know the price of everything but the value of nothing) are reducing art to a crude cash value to publish a book. That’s one consequence of the credit crunch.
Every bookie is quoting literary odds now: Ladbrokes, William Hill, Paddy Power and Unibet are all at it. I can see some sense in giving the betting on Peter Carey or Howard Jacobson – they’re on a book publishers shortlist – but the whole point of the Nobel prize is that its shortlist is confidential. It beats me how anyone could come up with starting prices for it. According to its website, the Swedish academy makes its choice based on submissions from “professors of literature, book publishers and language, former Nobel laureates” and members of similar bodies, the Académie Française for example. The Swedes usually get about 350 nominations, all secret. How on earth can any bookie make sense of that?
Yet, such is the power of the market, and the importance of the prize, in a prize-conscious culture, that before the announcement of the great Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa as the long-overdue winner for 2010, both Ladbrokes and Unibet were quoting odds of Les Murray (8/1), AS Byatt (18/1), Vaclav Havel (35/1) and even Bob Dylan (150/1).
Mad as this seems, it is no more improbable than the founding of an important literary prize by a would-be poet who happened to invent dynamite. Alfred Nobel published a verse tragedy, Nemesis, inspired by Shelley’s The Cenci, just before his death in 1896.
Man Booker also has its roots in trade. Britain’s premier book prize was initially sponsored by a food conglomerate and is now backed by a hedge fund, the Man Group.
At this year’s Booker banquet in the Guildhall, there will be an awkward moment when a middle-aged bloke in a suit rehearses the trading achievements of his company to the assembled literati, makes a segue to his commitment to the arts and sits down to polite, slightly mystified, applause.
At such moments, it is hard not to recall Dr Johnson’s definition of the patron: “Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery.”
Under the coalition, it’s back to the 18th century. According to some, this is the worst crisis in books since Paternoster Row was destroyed in the Blitz in 1940. To paraphrase Macaulay, contemporary writers sometimes know luxury, and often face penury, but they never know comfort. Writers and self-publishing artists in austerity Britain will be grateful to sponsors such as Man and Costa.
The future may be Orange, but it’s hardly bright. The Arts Council, the British Council and the BBC, to name three traditional patrons, all face outright government hostility or death by a thousand cuts.
In this climate, writers may have to take their lead from George Gissing’s indigent hero Jasper Milvain who, more than 100 years ago, declared in New Grub Street: “I am the literary man (of 1882)… I a
For me the problem is Amis's 'lower' register. The idea of a 'lower' register implies a hierarchy. Children's and young adult fiction are 'lower' and adult fiction is 'higher' by implication. Amis did not equate brian injury with 'mainstream' as opposed to 'literary' fiction. He equated it to writing for children. Amis, it seems is tolerated for these views and I am insulted by them.
With respect, I don't believe Amis should be given the benefit of the doubt re: his remarks about children's fiction. While it could be argued that there's been some overreaction to his comments, Amis has too long and notorious a track record when it comes to tactless, thoughtless commentary; in the interest of genuine fairness, his history should be borne in mind. Amis knows full well that every author, consciously or otherwise, tailors their work for an appropriate readership, so his position is disingenuous in the extreme. Sadly, I suspect that Amis's remarks about the absence of constraints in his fiction are an example of his air of superiority and pretentiousness - all that's missing is a sweep of the smoke-filled air with an elegant hand - after all, these are the kind of self-indulgent conversation pieces that an amateur poet might stoop to. Finally, even his few champions do him a disservice, and display the kind of condescending conceitedness natural to the man:
'Like any ace reporter, I Google Martin's name and find that a fatwa has been declared against him over shock-horror comments he made an interview that have inflamed fine-feeling people everywhere and could easily be interpreted as an insult to the unborn, if they knew how to read.
Because of this, entire villages have risen up in wrath and occupied Trafalgar Square, Leicester Square too, demanding that he recant or face witch trial for being conceited.'
More talk of proles and their literary and social superiors here:
http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/02/a-dismaying-development.html
Ps I'd like to point out that I actually agree with much of Celia's post (which I think is both articulate and well-written); I'm just not so sure that the reaction against Amis's comments should cause children's fiction authors to examine themselves and their work. As one can see by the clumsy and insulting 'religious fanaticism' analogies of the article I linked, Amis and his champions have little interest in truth, let alone the truths revealed by introspection.
SJ
http://spauljensen.wordpress.com
Celia, that was also the meaning I took from his remarks. (I was watching the original programme and the person I was watching with also didn't think he was saying anything disparaging, though the use of the word "brain-injury" was very misguided.)
I also, to be honest, am not as offended as some by the use of the phrase "lower register". As long as we don't think that it's easier to achieve - but the problem is that too many people DO think it's easier to achieve. And that is what makes us all most angry, I think.
But I agree with your comments.
If - and it has to be true - writing for children involves writing within certain constraints (re: a child's understanding, descriptions of sex, swearing, etc), then it is a form which demands as much, if not more, technical skill as writing for adults. There should be less of this tacit assumption that writing for children is somehow easier. I mean, why? Because children's books are shorter? Sonnets are shorter than epics, but that doens't make us despise them. Because children are smaller and less experiences than adults? Does that make books written to delight and thrill them, and expand thier imaginations, automatically puerile?
I agree Amis may have been thinking about himself much more than he was thinking about children's authors (quite possibly he's never even met one, and I wonder how long it is since he read a book for children?) but I think the disparagement and disdain in his comments was quite real and unthinking.
Typos... sorry.
You have expressed very well, Celia, what I wanted to say. Thank you.
I do strive to produce work that is 'articulate and well written' because... I'm a professional, adult writer, even though I write for children. Far from being crass and stupid, I think Amis was being rather clever (a trait clearly not shared by his 'supporters' - as quoted by Steve). I don't think he is saying that, as writers for children, we have to use a lower register, but that we choose to, because of what we do. Also, I'm sure he would acknowledge the problems we face, the difficulties, the challenge of what we do, but would probably reply that he would not choose to use his writing ability in this way. His choice - and ours.
But isn't everyone constrained by something? I think it is the constraints that tend to make the best art - the need to write for an audience tends to limit self indulgence. None of us are free and he himself confines himself to a narrow range of milieus and types. For me the great skill of great children's writing is its exploitation of the constraints to produce something that appears simple on the surface but which has been shaped by adult intelligence and insight.
I think to call that writing at a 'lower register' is not entirely accurate as it suggests the lowering applies to everything.
As I mentioned in my own blog - http://steepholm.livejournal.com/156057.html - I think it would be idle to deny that Amis was being intentionally snotty about children's writers with his 'brain-damage' remark. Nor was it off-the-cuff - he's used it before, and knows exactly what kind of reaction it's likely to provoke.
The idea of not writing for an audience but for oneself is of course a widespread one, and in one sense I think it's something we all do. But the opposition between that and having an idea of one's audience in mind is a false one, and in any case it's a stick one could equally well use to beat Shakespeare, Virgil, etc ad nauseam, all of whom tailored their work for an audience. Amis may imagine that his indifference makes him their artistic superior, but we don't have to share his New Critical delusion.
As for 'lower' register, I don't believe, having watched the clip carefully, that he was talking about children's literature at all at that point, but about the language of his protagonist John Self. But it's really an example of trying to make a virtue out of what is in fact a stylistic limitation - the fact that Amis can't create a voice like Self's in a manner that is both convincing and interesting from a literary point of view. In this case it's not a matter of not using the full palate (which no writer or artist does at any one time, of course - the result tending towards brown sludge), but of arguing that a small palate is superior to a large one. Personally I don't buy it.
I agree with what many people have said: children's writing is just a different art-form. A lower register? That does seem disparaging to me. There are, as has been said, constraints in writing a sonnet; in a short story or a novella you can't allow yourself the same spread that you can in a novel. That's not to say that these forms aren't worth practising.
However!! Amis can say what he likes. I get artistic satisfaction from writing my novels, I got artistic sustenance from reading children's books when I was small. And whatever the constraints, someone like Tove Jansson, for example, can put a world of feeling, aching, yearning and humour into the Moomin books which is the artistic equal of a lot of literary fiction.
incidentally, a lot of very distinguished authors for adults have produced wonderful kids-lit. Look at Ted Hughes's The Iron Man.
So why should we make the man's vapourings so important, one way or another?
While pottering down to Waitrose, I had the following additional thoughts: I doubt whether adult literary fiction has always been so very free of constraint. Even ten years ago, there was a demand for a recognisable product, for a book that was 'like' the previous one. That's the market side. On the other side, there have always been subtler cultural pressures; the kind of things other people write; the kind of subject matter and mode of writing that the reviewing (and prize-awarding) establishment regards as cool. There is never any need for anyone to consciously censor themselves ; it's implicit in the literary climate, which is not, and never has been, I suspect, immune to fashion.
Celia, he may not have been saying "all children's writers have half a brain", but he was quite clearly saying:
"Writing for children is so easy that I could, and probably would, do it if I had a serious brain injury."
He was certainly, as you say, making another point besides this, but that doesn't mean he should be allowed the insult.
And I agree with Anne & others about the implied hierarchy. What does it actually mean, to write in one's highest register?
A very good post by Charles London:
Why I Write for Children: A Response to Martin Amis
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-london/why-i-write-for-children-_b_823497.html
Well done for trying to see where Amis was coming from. You have helped to make some sense of it, but I still think his comment that "fiction is freedom..." is arrogant nonsense!
Just imagine him coming to your house and swearing in front of your kids, then explaining 'sorry, but conversation is freedom to me and any restraints on that are intolerable'. :D