" The Scent Of Oak " spearheads 1st Travalling Carribbean Film Showcase : April 14-18 at Unesco, Paris.

This new travelling film showcase from the Caribbean region, chaired by Cuban filmmaker, Rigoberto Lopez, at Unesco, recently showed a selection of features and shorts chosen among 21 participating Caribbean countries.

Hello from afar, my fellow bloggers. I write my final Oscar-themed blog of 2008 from the capital of the best coffee in the world, Quindío, Colombia. On my week away from the Openfilm headquarters (located in an undisclosed Cyberfilm Paradise), I had two major topics running through my head. #1: Coffee, and #2: the 81st annual Academy Awards. As a Colombian filmmaker, I was in heaven this week. First of all, because I came to this beautiful country to shoot a video of the entire coffee cultivating-to-packaging process, from growing the coffee beans on the lavish Colombian fields 1400 feet above sea level in the beautiful lands just above the vast Amazon, and finally to the final smile of happiness of the java junkies sipping some of the best coffee in the world.

For a lot of people, filming movies and shorts is something they do as a hobby on their time off from "real" work, whenever they can gather enough friends to donate time and efforts into working as crew or actors. But those who have chosen to expand that passion and take on film and video production as a career might find it hard to figure out where to start. There are many paths one can take to making filmmaking an actual paying career. One isn't more adequate than the other. It all depends on what speaks to you the most.