The Celtx Blog

St. John's International Women's Film Festival a Success!!

October 25th, 2006, St. John's, NL - As the dust settles on 17th annual The St. John's International Women's Film Festival, exhausted filmmakers from Canada, USA and the UK head home after 5 days and nights of film, fun and networking in St. John's. This year's festival screened a total of 81 films that were picked from a pool of 462 submissions.

Closing night featured these films by local Newfoundland filmmakers "The Sparky Book" by Mary Lewis, "Treat Day" by Janet Mcdonald, Victoria King's "Becoming 13", 2D in 2Days, 24-HR Filmmaking Challenge "Hector in Hiding", and a screening of the Celtx sponsored FRAMED film by Jessie Meyer "I Was a Teenage Vampire"

As a proud sponsor for the festival, Celtx provided volunteers with snazzy volunteer t-shirts and delegates with funky swag bags.

Guerilla Networking at FTXWest, Vancouver

October 16, 2006, Vacouver - Phew!...Just packing my bags to head home from the FTX West ( Film and Television Expo) Conference and Trade Show held here in Vancouver over the last 4 days. Met lots of great people and learned lots about guerilla filmmaking from the author and filmmaker himself, Mr. Chris Jones.

Co-Author of 'The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook', Chris flew the distance from the UK to enlighten, teach and entertain us with ALL the details and how to's related to the creating, making and propagating of your film masterpiece. In this intense 24 hour guerilla seminar approach, I think all the writers, directors, producers, actors, filmmakers, and animators who attended would agree that Chris's mix of experience, knowledge, sense of humour and honesty made it very much worth our while.

The conference offered seminars for all roles in the biz... from filmmakers, to financiers, to screenwriters, all of whom had the opportunity to strut their stuff at The Great Canadian Pitchfest. And as with most Trade Shows, this one exhibited the latest in Industry technology, services, hardware and software. Overall an impressive event.

As an added bonus, I also had the opportunity to finally meet the wonderful and talented Mr.Keith Loh. Celtx is delighted to have Keith on board as a Co-Moderator of the Celtx Forum. This impressive, talented fellow has been selected twice now, for the prestigious and highly competitive Praxis Screenplay Competition. From each competition 4 - 6 scripts are chosen and then workshopped with a veteran story editor or screenwriter. ( And to think that I got to share some Pumpkin ale with the guy!!) We'll be rooting for you, Keith!

And what a better location than the beautiful City of Vancouver for immersing yourself in the thick of filmmaking. The Film and TV industry is buzzing here, with at least nine major productions shooting at various venues around the city, passing Vancouver off as New York City in one case and Minneapolis in another. Cops and cameras everywhere. Even from the comfort of my hotel room, I witnessed the making of some great action scenes for Fantastic Four - Rise of the Silver Surfer... gotta like it!

Thanks for a good time, Vancouver!
See ya next year.

Sheila

Filmmaker and Author, Chris Jones graciously agrees to a photo op

Me and emerging screenwriting star, Keith Loh

Celtx Helps Creators Express Themselves - Adds New Media Publishing Tool

October 5, 2006 - St.John's, Newfoundland, Canada - Greyfirst Corp. has just released the latest version of Celtx, the open source media pre-production software used in over 90 countries to create film, video, machinima, animation, comics and computer games.

Tapping in to the insatiable thirst of consumers for access to back stories, cast details, production notes and ‘How to’s, Media Creators can use Celtx to enhance their published projects with any information generated during or after the pre-production process, enabling them to produce a more compelling viewing experience to help drive interest and demand. The new technology will also help search engine indexing, making it easier for consumers to find appealing projects.

Greyfirst Co-Founder and CEO, Mark Kennedy stated, “Users can create an online "Bonus Disc" to augment their media project, publishing background details on key characters, locations, and scenes or to provide information about an interesting Prop or Wardrobe item. Anything that is in your Celtx project can be published. And anything that’s published will be indexed by a search engine, helping to raise the Creator’s profile and improve a published project’s visibility on the Net.”

The new Celtx publishing tool supports the posting of any pictures, sound files or video clips used during or after pre-production. Creators can provide details about any item in any one of the over 30 supported production categories – everything from Animals to Vehicles.
“Anything that was used in creating their story – or even after – can be published to their own project page on Celtx Project Central”, Kennedy added. “Future versions of Celtx will extend this capability to enable publishing to the Creator’s own web site or blog.”

About Celtx
The Celtx software is available as a free download from the Company’s website www.celtx.com. Published Media is hosted by Celtx on Project Central www.pc.celtx.com The free, open source client software is augmented by a set of integrated web services that are delivered by the Celtx server.

About Greyfirst

Greyfirst is an independent software development company with expertise in RDF database designs and Open Source technologies. The Company develops core Semantic Web technologies using the Mozilla Application Framework; then fosters their growth into successful applications that run across multiple platforms, and in multiple languages.