Things have been quiet in film-world this year, as I have spent most of the year focusing on other things such as my photography and travel blog 'JC's Australian Daydream'. However 2011 looks set to be a big one. We're in negotiations on three feature films a series of Australian travel documentaries and much more. I should be able to go into more exciting details about them early in the new year.

Whatever it is you celebrate this festive season, I hope you all have an amazing time with a bright and safe  beginning to the new year.

James Cole

So I thought it was time to tell you all about a little side project I'm working on called JC's Australian Daydream. For something a little different, it's not film or video related. Some of you may already know this but last year I went on a three month trip from Melbourne, up the east coast of Australia to the very northern tip and back.

I had an awesome time driving solo in my four wheel drive, exploring this great land. Most importantly however, I documented the whole adventure with a photographic travel blog. At the time, I couldn't take advantage of all the technologies that are available to me now that I'm back home, so I'm relaunching the site from the beginning.

There's a whole new look and the entries have been rewritten to include stories I just could tell at the time (I didn't want family to worry to much). The best part is the Photography. Now that I've got time to sort through them and process them properly, they are looking amazing. And best yet, they are all for sale.

Another addition to the blog is the maps. Something I could do while on the road but I saved all the GPS tracking data and now you can see exactly where I was in the adventure. I'm sure this will be useful for anyone planning their own road-trip.

It's still in its early days but I'm constantly adding new and exciting stories and there's plenty more awesome Australian landscape photos to come.

To join the adventure, vistit

www.jcdaydream.com

A few weeks back while I was posting some tweets on twitter, I received an email stating that I had a new follower. I clicked on the link to see who it was and read some of their tweets. The follow was from Tim Beachum with a screen name of moviebizcoach.

Needless to say, being a filmmaker, I was curious. I clicked on the link to his website fully expecting to find some book or DVD set for sale at an enormous price. Not so. What I did get was a fairly standard sales pitch page stating some of the people Tim would be interviewing in the coming weeks. The difference was that all he is asking for in return is your name and email address and no money.

This seems to be one of the big things lately. To build an email list of people that you can market to later. Subscribing to these often results in useless crap and endless amounts of spam being sent to your email inbox. So I did what any sane person would do. I signed up. The site was fairly new, so it was a few weeks before I got an email to say the first interview was coming.

I was intrigued by how Tim was operating these interviews. He was recording them as a live conference call that anyone who had subscribed could call in to. This meant live questions and answers. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it. I got my time conversion between the US and Australia all wrong and well it just didn’t happen. Thankfully Tim placed the recording on his web site a few days later.

I have to admit that I was really impressed with the interview and quality of information that was being presented. Even though I’ve been working in the film industry for twelveish years now, I actually learned quite a bit.

A few weeks later and there was another interview. Once again I missed the conference call (I feel no need to point out my short-comings in regards to working out time zone differences a second time). I got to listen to the recording a few days later and was once again impressed and inspired by the information presented.

These are no short five minute podcasts either. These are half to hour long, in-depth interviews that are crammed with useful information. The information has been covering a lot of areas of the film biz but there is a leaning toward distribution and in particular self distribution. This is information for all of us indy filmmakers.

So if you have any interest in filmmaking or the film business, take a trip over to Tim’s web site http://www.moviebizcoach.com/, sign up to the newsletter and start working on your future of filmmaking. Maybe I’ll finally get my sense of time right and meet you in one of the conference calls. This is proof once and for all that even for antisocial folk like myself, this social networking stuff and in particular Twitter, can actually be worth while after all.

I've been busy over the last few weeks, tweaking the design and functionality of the new web site. I'm still not 1005 happy with it but who's got the time to fiddle with web sites when there are movies to be made...

What I have done though is ad some content to the portfolio section (at last).

I've split the work into two areas 'Motion' and 'Still'.

Motion is where all of our film and video productions will go, such as show reels, movie trailers, commercials, corporate videos, music clips and short films. At the moment I've added our Visual Effects Show Reel, a short little western film that was made for fun but turned into our I.D. tag, the Trailer for the horror film The Gates of Hell (which I edited and produced the visual effects for), and a slideshow of before and after work on a number of my digital art pieces.

Still is where a number of galleries will be, that show off my photography both commercial and for-the-hell-of-it work, artwork, graphic design and other still imagery. Right there now I have a small Commercial Photography gallery, Graphic Design gallery and Movie Posters gallery.

There's a lot more to go up in both areas so stay tuned for that.

Til next time.

J.C.

So I thought I'd see how easy it is to post a blog entry from my iPhone. I have to say, it's pretty damn easy. I can see this being useful down the track. I'll be able to post up to the minute details about projects I'm working on, wherever I may be working on them. I wish I had this set up for when I travelled around Australia... Oh well, I guess that's an excuse to do it again...