In light of the weekends events in Japan, I thought I’d take this moment to acknowledge our readers in that part of the world, and to let you know that all of us here at fernbyfilms.com are thinking of you. Like the rest of the world, we’ve been horrified by the images of entire towns, cities and lives being washed away in a torrent of water, or large segments of the population who haven’t been killed suddenly being displaced by a devastating nuclear emergency.

It’s times like this that put life into perspective, and to witness the horror inflicted upon our Japanese brethren is truly heartbreaking. Large-scale natural disasters in Australia (fire, flood and cyclone), and across the pond in New Zealand (earthquake), have brought sharp focus onto the fragility of life in recent months, and while we sit here debating the merits of film in ways that make it seem like life and death, it’s easy to forget that, by comparison, films really don’t matter all that much.

Fernby Films is proud to have made a contribution to the International Red Cross, and we urge our readers to perhaps consider doing the same. The images of destruction – sweeping tsunamis and shaking buildings – are no special effect, no Michael Bay extravaganza: this is real life, and we need to help our fellow man as best we can, even though we may feel entirely powerless.

To those affected, either directly, or indirectly through family and friends caught up in the disaster, our thoughts and prayers are with you.

Rodney T – EIC, fernbyfilms.com.

Morning folks.

Just wanted to touch base with all our regular readers to some of the changes around the site, as well as announce a very special event coming later in May. First, across in the sidebar is a new widget allowing you to change the language display for the site – a feature we hope will allow some of our overseas readers whose first language isn’t English to get more out of what we do here. Simply click the desired language flag, or choose from the many options in the dropdown menu, and the site will refresh with the text converted to your language of choice! It’s that easy!

Returning to the site after a prolonged absence is the wonderful Skype Device, by which you’re able to communicate with me instantly via Skype (should you have it on your computer) if I’m available. We used to have this on the site, but nobody made use of it (:() so I’ve brought it back to share with our wonderful readers as of now!! Don’t be a stranger, drop me a line or say hi!!! Check the Skype widget in the sidebar to see if I’m online, and get to messaging!!!

On another front, you may have noticed the new promotional banner for Beneath The Earth, an online short film festival (similar to Cannes or Tropfest, but online) to which yours truly has been invited to participate. I’ve been invited to be on the Grand Jury for the competition, which kicks off in April and goes through until May. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be offered this exclusive invite, and I’ll be attempting to get some of the related footage and information to you as I get it. Watch this space.

Lastly, I wanted to formally announce the upcoming May-trix Week Event, taking place (rather curiously!) in May – we’ll be reviewing each of the three Matrix films, as well as the Animatrix, and some of our friends – Dan, Al, Rory and a few others – have accepted my invitation to scribe some words about it too. May-trix Week commences in the second week of May, and will finally get the long-awaited Matrix films onto the site. I’ll even publish a couple of old promotional posters I made up to announce them from back in 2009 – that’s how long ago I thought I’d get around to it. A few weeks ago I slid a new poster up on the homepage to announce it, but that was before I actually put any thought into how I’d do it – expect to see some promotion for it around the site as well.

Afternoon folks.

Just thought we’d put something up in recognition of those who are suffering at the moment across our great land, particularly in Queensland today, where raging flash-flooding has devastated many low-lying towns (including Toowoomba, Gatton and others) and is set to hit Brisbane any time now. We wanted to let you guys in Qld know we’re thinking of you during this difficult time. News reports are (typically) highlighting the increasing death toll, as well as the utter carnage currently being inflicted on local communities in the southern Queensland area, and we urge all our readers not affected to spare a thought today for those who are. Anybody wishing to donate to the flood fund, can do so at this link.

Breaking news can be found here.

More flood images can be found here.

One of my friends here at fernbyfilms.com, a man by the name of Robert Nowotny, runs his own website Need To Vent, which publishes reviews and such much like we do here. Robert’s been a mate of mine since we came together over at Move Smackdown, a US based site which also publishes reviews of films. Robert and I have since communicated numerous times on various topics (usually film related), and he’s asked me to put out the word to all and sundry (well, everyone who reads this site, at least!) that he’s looking for funny, interesting, anecdotal material for a new book he’s publishing, entitled How I Got Screwed By Hollywood. I’ve added the text of his email to me below. Needless to say, to the many of you who have an interest in film, have made (or tried to make) a film, or have some sort of incident or story to tell about your bad luck Hollywood story, Robert’s the guy you want to speak with.

Robert’s told me the book will go to press mid-year, so if you wish to submit something to him, please do so with the utmost urgency, lest you miss this opportunity to dwell on failures and resentment borne of Tinsletown!

Roberts spiel is as follows:

HOW I GOT SCREWED BY

Welcome to 2011 everyone! It’s great to be here, and we hope you all enjoyed your holiday season as much as we did. We’re still away from the office at the moment, and the site is currently running on autopilot (in a good way, not that sinister WALL-E way!), but we thought now would be a good time to show you our new look! We promised that we’d have a little bit of a spit-and-polish around the site over the last month, and we’ve streamlined much of the content as well.

You may have noticed the shiny new logo at the top of the page, it’s a format we liked while doing the redesign we’ve decided to adopt it as our logo for the website – our original logo will still appear on all our film and video projects, but this new one is a little spiffier, a little classier, and we think just that much more easy to look at. Many of our page links have been modified accordingly, and we’ve changed the layout of our sidebar a tad, too. Don’t be frightened, this is still the same fernbyfilms.com, just a little different. Enjoy!

Oh, welcome to 2011!!!!! It’s sure to be a great year.

Rodney T – Editor, fernbyfilms.com

Well, we hope you all have a great Christmas Day, and are enjoying a little R&R in the holidays. We also hope you’ve enjoyed some of our Christmas themed reviews last week – we’ve been sitting on them since last Christmas and it’s great to finally get them out of the way.

This week, we’re on holidays, so there won’t be any new posts until New Years Day, and no new reviews until after the 3rd. We’ve got some great reviews lined up for Q1 of 2011, so make sure you check back every so often to find out what’s new around the site!

As I mentioned back in November (regular readers will know what I’m talking about), we’re currently in the process of doing some minor modifications around the site at the moment, and you might notice this occurring over the next week or so. It’s part of our effort to refocus the site to its original priority: film reviews. In our effort to try and bring in more readers, we’ve attempted to include news on upcoming films, such as The Hobbit, Superman and Transformers 3: Dark Of The Moon, film trailers and other newsworthy events – a policy that we’ve felt detracts from our main goal of providing you with quality, well intentioned film reviews. So we’re ceasing that side of our site, returning to simply bringing you our thoughts on films we watch. We’re also going to undergo a little change in review policy, as well. We’re going to introduce the Mini-Review, a quick-fly guide to some of the films we watch where a full-blown review may not be warranted. Look for these to start in the months to come. They’ll contain a capsule review (as well as the technical info we already give you) of the film, with plenty of room for a more explanatory article down the track if desired.

Fernbyfilms.com currently averages about 400-500 views per day, all completely advertisement free (aside from internal promotion, of course). We intend to keep this policy of no advertising on our site, and we hope to keep the regular readers coming back to read our stuff, not just to look at the pretty pictures. For those of you who are keen on our stuff, you can now find us on Facebook, at this link here, which will update your own profile each time we post something. It’s an easy way of following us via the social network…. Go on, click “like” right now!

A few thank-you’s to get through here too, if I may. Firstly, to my wife Lisa, who has put up with regular bouts of Computer Wife Syndrome, whereby I seem to spend more time watching films and writing reviews than doing anything else. It’s great to have a wife so understanding. To Mick, my trusty admin guy, who has taught me so much this year, I thank you for the ready supply of emergency assistance for my blundering programming! I’d also like the thank the various folks who’ve contributed and supplied their feedback over the last year – in particular Dan, Al, Castor, Tieman and Rory, as well as the many single-digit commenters who’ve graced our pages – without you guys this site would be the lesser for it.

So enjoy the rest of your holidays, many thanks for reading our stuff over the last 12 months, and we’ll see you in 2011!

A little bit of housekeeping today folks, as we get set for our run through to Christmas. As regular readers will be aware, we’ve recently moved headquarters, which has been a little hectic to say the least. We’ve taken the time to stop and reflect on things about the offices, and across the site.

You’ll all be happy to know that I’ve re-registered the Fernby Films domain through until October 2012, so you can rest assured knowing we’re gonna be around for the foreseeable future – although after that comes the end of the world, according to Roland Emmerich, so stay tuned for further post-apocalypse plans in the years to come! We jest, really. Since we’re predominantly a film review site, we’re going to start scaling back the more non-review posts we present on a weekly basis – particularly the trailers and breaking news. We’ll still pay tribute to those who pass on, but our future-looking posts are going to be fewer and further between. We don’t want to become a site based on news, but continue to focus on reviews, which is where we started this whole thing.

Speaking of our reviews, you may have noticed that we post reviews bi-weekly these days, since writing and prepping each review takes a substantial amount of time. We’ve been tweaking our review structure over the last few weeks, including a modification on our “star rating” logo at the bottom of each review – we did this since noticing Dan over at Top Ten Films added a snazzy little star system to his reviews, and we thought imitation would be the best form of flattery. To complement this, we removed the rather redundant /10 rating in the summary section of our newest reviews, since we want you to read our review to get to our rating, rather than reading why we gave a film a certain rating anyway. More modifications are planned for our reviews, to streamline them going forward.

But the most important news, as far as the site is concerned, will take place in the new year. As of January 2011, we’ll be going over the site in a major revamp. You’ll notice a lot less clutter about the site as we remove a lot of pages, links and stuff currently visible that nobody reads. This will represent a major streamlining and refocusing of fernbyfilms.com towards its key target - film reviews. In the last 12 months or so, we’ve drifted into the realm of gossip and upcoming news site, which isn’t where we really wanted to be. A lot less clutter around the place, that’s our aim!

Over the course of the last two months, we’ve been breaking all kinds of viewing records, averaging around 450 views per day here at the site. While not competing with many of the bigger sites, many of whom have budgets and advertising, we’re pretty much a one-man-band here at fernbyfilms.com, so the numbers we’ve been recording since August, upwards of 400+ per day, have been astounding. To all our regular readers, I thank you for keeping fernbyfilms.com on your internet radar!

So keep an eye out for a fresh new look and feel come January.

Rodney T – Editor In Chief, fernbyfilms.com

A while back we were scheduling in our reviews for November, and came across the fact that our regular Thursday upload came around on Remembrance Day this year: so we’ve pushed our next review back to tomorrow. This allows us time to reflect today on those who fought and died in wars around the world; in particular World War II, for which 11/11 is important.

To those who’ve given the ultimate sacrifice in service of their country, we salute you today.