New Moon Looking To Make The Official Film Of The '12 London Olympics

New Moon, makers of “bite-sized promotional sports films for cities and countries bidding to host important sporting events, is pitching to make the official film of the London Olympics,” according to Roger Blitz of the FINANCIAL TIMES. It is a “deeply mysterious selection process.” There is “no structured competition, no information about who is competing, merely an indication that some kind of outcome will be determined at the end of July.” New Moon has “made films for cities that went on to win three bidding contests.” The company produced films that helped London win the Olympics, Sochi “secure the 2014 Winter Olympics and Qatar the 2022 World Cup.” New Moon CEO & Exec Creative Dir Caroline Rowland “has been jetting to Korea to work on Pyeongchang’s 2018 Winter Olympics bid.” The company's one “failure” has been working on Tokyo’s ultimately unsuccessful bid for the '16 Olympics. New Moon “will be all over the London Olympics, with a film already made on the torch relay.” The company is “stepping gingerly into the sporting film genre, and not just with a pitch to be 2012 Olympics official film-maker.” The IOC has also sanctioned a feature film called “5 Rings,” something of “an extended version of its London bid film, about a London boy who finds a magical ring.” Rowland: “That ring becomes a symbol of the opportunities that he has to open up in order to achieve things he never thought possible.” But the project is “caught up in an age-old funding hitch, involving Paramount in Hollywood, and its [US$10.5M] budget is not attracting a distributor.” Rowland said, “The truth is that sports films are not about sport, they’re about the human spirit that is expressed through sport. So, in a way, it’s our responsibility to describe these films in a way that doesn’t make them sports films. And they’re not” (FINANCIAL TIMES, 6/18).