The Hallmark bible defines the content of their TV movies as “…very family friendly and PG/G in nature. A rule of thumb when watching our movies is you want to be able to watch with your 80-year-old ...

I crunched the data on over a million shots of faces across 3,655 movies to see whether modern lighting is getting flatter.

Films evolve in many small ways that are easy to miss if you are not looking for them. One area I had not studied before is shot composition. It is such a basic building block of visual storytelling ...

In previous years, I have run a deep data dive into whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and also tried to predict which will be the next controversial Christmas movie. This year, I wanted to take a ...

I have been asked for years whether “Go Woke, Go Broke” is true for movies. So it was a real honour to be able to give the keynote today at the Zurich Summit and answer the question. Over the last few ...

Last week in an article about how long your film needs to be to be accepted into film festivals, I mentioned in passing that a 90-second short film was eligible at nine out of ten film festivals I ...

Colour is one of the quickest ways a poster can tell you what kind of film it’s selling. Before you’ve read the title or registered the actors, your brain has already clocked the palette and filed it ...

Today’s research is a mix of two things - researching a reader’s questions, and also accepting a methodology challenge. First, the topic. A reader forwarded me a recent article by Ben Child in The ...

This is part two of my collaboration with Screendollars in which we spoke to 246 cinema owners and film professionals affiliated with exhibitors. We quizzed them on a range of topics, and their ...

An oft-repeated mantra among film distribution professionals is “Drama is not a genre”. By that, they don’t mean that films cannot be dramatic, nor that there are not films you could call “a drama”.