Remember, there are plenty more videos clips, still pictures and news about each of these movies on MovieSet.com including unique coverage of Comic-Con San Diego (see also: Comic-Con Round-up).

Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) in 2012

‘2012′

Woody Harrelson introduces 2012 director Roland Emmerich to say a fond farewell to disaster movies:

Synopsis: Never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures, so many religions, scientists, and governments. 2012 is an epic adventure about a global cataclysm that brings an end to the world and tells of the heroic struggle of the survivors. – In Theaters November 13th, 2009.

‘District 9′

Catch what Neill Blomkamp and Peter Jackson have to say about District 9:

Synopsis: DISTRICT 9 depicts a fictional world where extraterrestrials have become refugees in South Africa. – In Theaters August 14th, 2009.

‘Legion’

Hear what Paul Bettany has to say about playing Michael, and how Director Scott Stewart fells about his upcoming fantasy thriller ‘Legion’:

More:

Remember, there are plenty more videos clips, still pictures and news about each of these movies on MovieSet.com including unique coverage of Comic-Con San Diego (see also: Comic Con Round-up).

The article ran as a full page on the Entertainment section and you can explore two versions online in both the Technology and Entertainment sections. The print edition includes a screenshot of the Behind the Scenes vidcast show with Shaun and Eric, while the online version features a video with Director of Fan Communities Dave Olson giving a tour of MovieSet.com (including Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus).

The article kicks off by asking: Care to wander onto the set of a movie shoot, chat with the actors, see the inside story on the stunts?

Well, do you?

This kind of set access has been the goal of MovieSet CEO Colleen Nystedt since 2005 and she continues to educate and push her industry forward with the belief that there is a universal interest in how movies are made and that the action on-set is something fans care about. MovieSet seeks to satisfy that hunger by delivering value to both the film industry, with the suite of production tools, and to all passionate movie fans, by providing exclusive access to great content.

Here’s a snippet from the article to explain:

The site flips traditional movie marketing on its head, much the way online music has transformed the relationship between music makers and their fans. Like many traditional content-oriented industries, movie making has been more about closely guarding the content and releasing it on a prescribed schedule than in sharing it and offering inside sneak peeks.

“It is part of the Hollywood thing that they think they don’t need to communicate with fans,” said Nystedt. “To hold things back is very old school thinking.

“On the web, exclusivity is dead. If you hold back stuff it is either going to get stolen or it is going to get ignored.”

The article quotes the erstwhile leader of the “social media renegades,” Dave Olson, who relates the focus on fan participation as the key to traffic growth and enthusiasm for the site, using our recent Death Warrior campaign as an example (links added):

For small very specialized films, such as Death Warrior, a mixed martial arts film that included livestream video among its offerings for fans, Movieset allowed it to find a core audience that shared a passion for the action film.

“We found out where fans of that genre hang out, we communicated with them in their language and we invited them to take part,” said Olson. “We even gave away the bloody sweatshirt that Georges St-Pierre was killed in to a fan at the end of it.”

Finally, Ms. Shaw’s article outlines some of the other tactics we’ve used to bring movie fans behind the scenes and a call to action for movie makers of all kinds ~ from indies to majors ~ to hop aboard the MovieSet cluetrain:

“The site’s front page is refreshed daily and we’re outreaching to fans through Twitter, a Facebook trivia application and a behind-the-scenes vid cast,” said Olson.

While it still goes against the grain to loosen their grip on content, traditional studios are stepping aboard.

“Studios one by one are starting to realize there is some value here,” said Olson. “They see it is a conversation that is going on and it will go on without them.

“They are saying ‘we should start to participate whether we want to or not.’”

Dave Olson gives a tour of MovieSet.com

Indeed, there are now excellent examples which demonstrate the power of MovieSet’s two-headed monster. Cast and Crew members are employing our tools to streamline their daily workflow, they deliver content directly to their movies page including still photos, videos, news, or blog posts.

Once uploaded, the rich content gives the social media conversationalists an opportunity to reach out to an engaged community of fans interested in the film. Fans then become active contributors by following, supporting and commenting throughout each phase of production. And so on, and so on …

Read the full article: Online and on the set by Gillian Shaw (@gillianshaw on Twitter) in the Vancouver Sun, June 9, 2009 – please consider leaving a comment or sharing with your movie fan and filmmaker friends.

One of the easiest ways to polarize a room full of film fans is to call into question the standing certain indie directors have in the pantheon of greats. Rarely in dispute are the reps of helmers like Altman, Fellini and even Malick, but the elevation of names like Greenaway, Jarmusch and even Canada’s own Guy Maddin to iconic status is considered by some – like the feisty folks at Chunklet Magazine – to be not just premature, but wholly undeserved.

In Chunklet Issue #19 (The Overrated Issue), writer Sam McAbee tosses a snark-filled Molotov cocktail at
“The Most Overrated Indie/Underground/Art Filmmakers of All Time” and gives a salty tongue lashing that some might dismiss as mere hipster cynicism… except that the sacred cows of hipsters are precisely the ones being dismissed. And why not?

Blithely unscientific and unapologetically subjective, McAbee manages to hit the mark with a few of his salvos, taunting Maddin’s recent work as “silent film parody that looks like it was produced by Saturday Night Live”. (On the surface at least, the look is cringingly similar, although clearly the overall kookiness owes way more to SCTV than SNL.) Talking about Hal Hartley, he says, “I used to co-own a video store and we had a ‘respected American directors’ section. Hal Hartley was not in it. People wearing untucked dress shirts would always ask me why he was not in that section, and I would reply ‘Because we don’t respect him, his movies are over here with the Mike Leigh and Atom Egoyan stuff’.” Inflammatory invective, to be sure, but why should the Michael Bays and Brett Ratners of the world take all the critical lumps?

Where the writer snuggles up next to my own shrivelled walnut of a heart is in his lambasting of Peter Greenaway. Cod liver oil served from a Shakespearean pimp chalice by a corseted Helen Mirren still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, and for me, Greenaway’s efforts have never managed to go beyond a series of thinly scripted yet prettily filmed wardrobe tests. Like Thomas Pynchon novels and organic vegetables, they seem like they’re going to be good for you, and for those reasons, I always try to digest them, but whether it’s laziness or obstinacy on my part, I ain’t feelin’ it. And it’s not that I’m immune to reworkings of Shakespeare, cinematic explorations of allegory or modern takes on Miltonian morality. But beyond a mere “puzzle picture”, movies like The Cook, The Pillow Book, Prospero’s Books and The Draughtsman’s Contract have ultimately left me annoyed that the crisp linen production values (some with costumes by the likes of Gaultier and Paul Smith, or music by The Piano’s Michael Nyman) used to woo me in the first place were being wasted on stories rife with the kind of corporeal slumming one might expect from a movie whose characters wax rhapsodic about memorable incidents at band camp. But maybe that’s just me.

So, let’s offer this up to you readers for your opinions… who in the art-house/indie scene is wildly overrated, and who’s just tragically misunderstood?