Celtx wants to give you money!

Celtx - the students' choice for screenwriting software (because it's awesome and it's FREE) - is giving away MONEY for your films. Check out the video below!


These are the rules for the Seeds program from their website:

• We want to see your single best storytelling video of 15 minutes or less.
• If you’re an individual or a team, share it with seeds@celtx.com through your Celtx account. If you’re entering on behalf of a school share it with schoolseeds@celtx.com.
• That’s all you need do. There’s no entry fee and it’s open to all Celtx account holders.
• The deadline for sharing is midnight, 15 April 2012. Selected creators/videos will be announced on or before 30 April 2012.

This is how they’ll be giving away the money:

• 10 x $2,000 grants for individuals or teams
• 5 x $1,000 grants for schools (grade school to high school)
• All selected storytellers and projects receive promotion through Celtx networks on YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo & Google+.

(Original post courtesy of nofilmschool)

Mashable: '7 Free Tools for Creating Your Own Fonts"

For you motion graphics artists out there who grow tired of the same old typefaces - why not cook up some of your own? Mashable put together this handy list of free tools you can use to make your own fonts! http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/free-font-creation-tools/

Cruzine: 'Freebies from Daily Inspirations no. 21 – 40'

I'm a sucker for free stuff, especially free textures, vectors, and fonts. Here's a cool collection of useful freebies from Cruzine, including blood (my fave), lightning, ink drops, Spanish football club logos (!) and more. Happy downloading!

Vimeo's New 'Music Store'

Press release from Vimeo:

As many of you know, finding music for your videos can be somewhat… well, painful. Licensing music on your own can be confusing and finding good free music can take forever. Many of us here at Vimeo are video creators or filmmakers as well and we experience these frustrations on a regular basis. So, we decided to do something about it.

Introducing Vimeo Music Store!

Vimeo Music Store is your one-stop-shop for finding, discovering and licensing high quality music for your videos. We’ve built a simple and intuitive interface for you to easily search for music using a variety of different music criteria, and then purchase and/or download the tracks you want. Search mood, genre, tempo, themes, instrumentations and then use the advanced search to whittle down the results even further.

As of now, Music Store offers over 45,000 curated tracks with a three different license options for you to choose from. Here’s the skinny:

Creative Commons-licensed music is curated and provided by Free Music Archive, one of the most-respected curators of Creative Commons-licensed music. There are many different Creative Commons licenses available, so make sure to learn more about Creative Commons and how to use them in our FAQ.

Paid music tracks are provided by Audiosocket, a music and media company that curates its content to deliver up-and-coming talent to the marketplace. Audiosocket’s catalog includes over 33,000 songs from more than 1900 emerging bands, composers and record labels from around the world. Audiosocket’s catalog offers both personal, non-commercial licenses for $1.99 per track and commercial licenses for $98 per track.

As a a token of our appreciation, we’re offering all Plus and PRO members one FREE, personal license track (a $1.99 value). This offer is only available for one week starting today, so make sure to head over to Music Store and cash in!

We’re very excited about this first phase of Vimeo Music Store and we hope you like it. Look for more features, more partners and more options for bands and musicians in the future!

Love,
Vimeo

Slo Dive: '250 Awesome Grunge Textures'

Grunge is awesome. Grunge rules. Grunge is useful for VFX artists, motion graphics artists, texture artists, and more. Everyone needs more grunge. Need I say more?

Get busy downloading!

InspirationFeed: '40 Free Highly Functional Dingbats Fonts'

This one's for you motion graphics artists! The folks at InspirationFeed have gathered up a cool selection of "dingbats" fonts - great for creating elements for your motion graphics designs. I particularly like this one ("Karate Chop") but some of the others (e.g., "Cafeina") are brilliant as well. Take a look!

The Master of Color Correction

As a regular follower of Stu Maschwitz's ProLost blog (you may remember Stu as the author of our DVA101 textbook The DV Rebel's Guide), I've noticed that Stu seems a tad obsessed with color correction. And if you've seen my feature The Falls you know it's a subject of some fascination for me as well.

Stu's most recent color correction post "Memory Colors" got me looking back through some of his earlier posts on the subject and it looks like this exploration of the how the human brain processes color is an extension of his earlier examinations of how Hollywood's blockbuster film all seem to be utilizing a color correction scheme that places great emphasis on skin tones.

From October 2007 - "Hue are you?" looks at the fact that all human skin tones, regardless of ethnicity, fall onto the same axis of teh vectorscope and therefore are a lot more homogeneous than we realize.

From March 2008 - "Save Our Skins" takes that a step further and looks at the Hollywood color correction trend of keeping people "porange" (pinkish-orange), regardless of the overall "look" of the film.

From June 2009 - "Got Me a Side Job" talks about Stu's gig working with Red Giant software on their Magic Bullet product line. But most importantly, in the included video tutorial Stu walks us through how to recreate the looks of several Hollywood blockbusters using said software. But even without Stu's fancy plugins, his logic and methodology can be adapted for use with whatever color correction filters you have on hand. Worth a watch!

And now from February 2010 - "Memory Colors" further explores the topic and how human memory affects our perception of not just skin tones, but everything from cabs to coffee beans.

One of the coolest tips I've picked up from Stu - this free tool from Adobe called "Kuler" which can be used to very quickly develop a color scheme for your designs, artwork, color correction, whatever. Be sure to bookmark it!

Free Guide to All Photoshop Filters

Scott Simmons of the Studio Daily Blog writes:

Everyone out there working in post-production is bound to have Photoshop and use it on a regular basis. It’s one of those must have applications for Avid and Final Cut Pro editors alike. Richard Harrington, video trainer, author and creator of the Photoshop for Video series, has pulled what looks like a chapter from one of his Photoshop books and placed it out on the interweb for all to download for free. The chapter is called Maximizing Filters and while there is a lot of good basic filter information the real handy thing in this 39 page document are the descriptions and photo examples of pretty much every Photoshop filter in there. It also includes a lot of tips and tricks in the document as well. It’s a big file, around 25 megs. Here’s the direct link to the pdf file. When you’re done with that check out Rich’s other books as well. There’s always something new to learn about Photoshop.

44 Free Texture Sites

Topher Welsh over at AE Tuts+ posted this one a few weeks back and I thought I'd share it with you. For those of you working in 3D, motion graphics, or visual effects, good textures are a MUST.

Check out Topher's list of the 44 best FREE texture sites out there!

Free Concrete Textures

Here's another collection from Best Design Options - 110 Free Concrete Textures, Volume I. This one is PERFECT for all you 3D modelers in need of some photorealistic textures to wrap around your models. Bookmark this one or just download 'em all.

100 Websites and Blogs Where You Can Download Free Vector Graphics

The title says it all... Best Design Options has compiled this great list of resources where you can find free vector graphics - great elements for any motion graphics you might be working on. Bookmark this one!

Free HD Greenscreen Plates

The fine folks at Hollywood Camera Work, makers of the excellent DVD series "Visual Effects for Directors," have posted some of the greenscreen plates and other VFX elements used in that series for educational use. Most are in 720p or 1080p HD and are available for you to experiment with techniques such as basic keying, 2D tracking, 3D matchmoving, and advanced keying with transparencies. Check them out here and get to work!

588 Free Film Contracts and Forms

This one comes to us from our good friends at L.A. Shorts Fest - Filmmaker IQ has compiled a great list of free film contracts and forms from all over the 'Net.
Upon examination of the list, it seems that a lot of the contracts came from another site, FilmContracts.net - another great resource you ought to bookmark.

30+ High Quality Metallic Texture, Pattern, Brushes and Photoshop Tutorials

This one is for you 3D modelers, texture artists, and Photoshop fanatics. Hongkiat.com has published this list of textures, brushes, and tutorials all having to do with metal.

VFX artists might also find it of use, particularly for elements such as bullet holes and the various metallic grunge textures.

Check it out here.