BBCi Launches One-Minute Movies – “It’s not a competition.”

One Minute Movies is a new site from BBCi, and it’s designed to give everyone the chance to show their short film to the world.

The site gives the reason they’re doing it: “There are many websites about making films but we thought they were all a bit too serious, a bit too technical. The spirit behind One-Minute Movies is to just pick up a camera and shoot.”

With strong advice and tips on story, directing, sound and editing the site even has a small collection of classical music you can download and use for your own project. Tips come from professional film makers like David Lynch and Ann Coates and there’s also a facility for sending on your own tips and discussing them on the message board.

The rules are simple – basically it has to be all your own work and not break any laws. It doesn’t even need to be only a minute long.

We like this idea. Although the idea is not unique to the BBC, they are getting high profile exposure for what we feel will become a popular form of content, particularly on mobile devices.

They have made the smart move trying to ensure a certain degree of quality by providing lots of information about the process. The site concentrates on making films with the equipment lots of people would already have, without requiring any additional expense from software or hardware.

Although just about anyone could shoot a short film and host it themselves, having a movie on the BBC site will give it a much larger audience. Be aware though, as with all these things, submitting your film to BBCi gives them the right to do whatever they like with it, forever.

Making something only a minute long might seem simple, but it can be extremely challenging – and rewarding. Perhaps we’ll get round to finishing that stop-motion Lego film that nearly drove us insane at Christmas.

BBCi One Minute Movies

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Fraser Lovatt

Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people. Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon. At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC. After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video. These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?