Donath developed this installation with students Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba, Aaron Zinman and other collaborators. They describe their piece as an installation about “living in a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication.” After spending some time walking through the piece, one thought that came to mind was Jean Baudrillard’s The Ecstasy of Communication meets the Ambivalence of Information. In The Ecstasy of Communication Baudrillard goes beyond his earlier discussions of “simulacrum” and takes on our state of pervasive digital technology, which he describes as an orgy of pure communication. He takes Marshall McLuhan’s mystical ideas to their logical conclusion: just as the medium is the message, communication is what is communicated. We are floating in a sea of information without grounding, and thus, we have constructed an environment that leads to an ambivalence of information.

When you first walk into the piece you are surrounded by a sea of rectangular shapes, perhaps a virtual city. On these objects are projected changing patterns of information, you can recognize words, names, numbers. The soundtrack is etherial, sounds could very well be from the same space at another point in time, mixed with computer generated voices reading what might be random pieces of information, even some personal data. From where does this data come from? As you wander through the space you come across three flat screen displays, each showing a different view of an information landscape. You are literally transported into an ether, a medium, along with its anesthetic effects. The sounds and visual imagery incorporate live and recorded data ranging from personal updates and private information, some of which apparently are from a search engine that invites you to type in your name or the name of someone you know. It comes back with all the characterizations of the person it can find on the net and then draws a spectrogram-like display showing various colored bands with labels like books, sports, management, family, committees, education, domestic, illegal, music, legal, social, religious, art, design, etc. A curious way to map an identity. Visitors who spend time immersed in the piece may eventually realize their data has become part of the exhibit, their images captured by surveillance cameras, their names entered into databases, their voices recorded and played back by in the echoing soundtrack.

Metropath(ologies) provides a perfect companion to the writings of McLuhan, Baudrillard, and their ilk, for it brings the ideas of a world overflowing with information and non-stop communication into the realm of experience right in front of you, and all around you. It places our post-modern information ecology right in front of your eyes, like helping a fish better understand water. We swim in media every day, we take it for granted, much like I imagine fish take water for granted. Can we imaging a world without constant news, mobile phones, information devices, our lives a constant broadcast and reception of text messages, tweets, emails, information. All of this we’ve begun to take for granted and Donath and her students present us with a new perspective from which we can reflect. The search piece in the installation allows you to type someone’s name and it comes back and shows how that person is characterized based on information available online. The data is easily misunderstood or misconstrued. When I typed in my own name it said I was all sorts of things that I might have been in the past, but I’m no longer those things today. It shows us as a sum total of net-accessible information, rather than the ephemeral pattern we, our friends, our family, imagine us to be. This search engine had no personal context, no input from the wetware, it only knows what data is out in the net, the matrix perhaps. Lots of old stale jobs were front and center. Nothing about my current life and work. Information about information without personal context, without filtering by rapidly becoming obsolete carbon based life units. Another visitor typed in his name. He was disappointed, having a common name, the search engine came back with a composite of people, but not him. He was lost in the sea of information. He had no way to specify his unique id/entity.

Among the abstracted city of information columns in the installations, I felt a constant information flow, without consciousness, without a life as I know it, but pulsing with another form of life, bringing to the forefront the challenge and impossibility of controlling the information about ourselves, as machines, agents, bots, databases, etc. take on a life of their own, making their own conclusions, or perhaps occlusions. Data patterns collected by software agents become a new form of truth. There is a fascinating ambiguity in the piece, the mapping of the data and the space is not clear, how is the information mediated? Is there such a thing as computational understanding? As the search engine is given names, it make sense of that “name” but not the “person,” later I learned that the name is sent to the soundtrack, part of music like, some from the news, computer generated voices read key words. The most fascinating component was the appearance of “data ghosts” in the central monitor in the space, which at first looks like an ordinary surveillance camera view, you see yourself and other visitors on this monitor, but then the screen is occupied by data ghosts, are these real people or data? What is floating in space? Metropath(ologies) is a garden of pure information, de-contextualized, re-contextualized, So what’s missing in our contemporary communication landscape that leads to ambivalence of information? What is the ecstasy of communication? Is it anything akin to Werner Herzog’s wonderful phrase, the ecstasy of truth? Perhaps it is the narratives that ground us in specific human experiences, a synthesis that resembles our lived experience. And that’s the story we seek to find. It may be that the way out of ambivalence lies in ecstasy, but one of human truths, not just communication.

Notes
1. This post was originally posted on the MassArt Design Seminar II Blog, Spring 2009. It is re-printed here with minor editorial changes.
2. Clicking on images will take you to the image photo page on Flickr

Register now for this must-attend event, and do it now to avoid higher last-minute registration fees. I plan to be there on June 5th, and I hope you’ll consider joining me for this wonderful day. The event is organized by Filmmakers Collaborative, a non-profit organization that has been serving independent filmmakers for over two decades and Making Media Now has become the premiere New England independent film conference.

• SFDN101 Documentary Video Boot Camp (Monday through Friday, June 8-12, 9a-5p, 1.5 credits). An immersive hands-on learning experience for those who want to learn the fundamentals of video documentary in an intimate and focused setting.
• MPFV217 Documentary Project Studio (meets Tuesdays, June 16 through Aug 4, 6-9:30p, 1.5 credits). A studio course for students who want to produce their own complete short documentary, prerequisite: Documentary Video Boot Camp or equivalent experience.

In addition, check out the summer schedule of film/video courses available online, especially Maria Agui Carter’s Producing the Documentary class.

More details and sample handouts are available on my Documentary Video Boot Camp page. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about these classes or call MassArt Professional and Continuing Education at 617.879.7200 to register.

Photo credit: Toys by saaby

This book will help you think about new business models, how to build an audience around you work, and challenge the old notion that independent media makers should think of themselves as auteurs waiting to be discovered by the record, movie, or television industries or a forward thinking curator. The mainstream is interested in commercial product, the lowest common denominator, the latest fad. Once upon a time you had no other way to find an audience, the gatekeepers ran the show. Today you can find your audience using your own unique voice, rather than trying to fit someone else’s mold. It’s a brave new world and Scott’s timely book provides practical insights into carving your own path towards nurturing fans, making friends, and building your own following. We may always have mainstream media, however, today, as both audiences and media makers, the internet has opened up an alternative channel of distribution full of possibilities, most of which we have yet to see, which I hope will bring us a viable alternative to industrial media product, and instead, hand-crafted, authentic stories, unique messages with new points of view, and personal media to enrich the soul of a new generation. What do you want to express? You have the answer deep inside of you. What can you do to get your expression out to an audience? Scott’s book provides an introduction to how people have been doing that.

Purchasing the book through the links on this page provides Kino-Eye.com with a much appreciated commission, thank you.

Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.

This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”

I recently taught a class at MassArt, Documentary Video Boot Camp, and one of my students, Adam Weiss, used his new Canon VIXIA HG20 camcorder in the class. As a result of seeing the video Adam shot for his assignments, I think I have to say that the Canon HG20 AVCHD Hard Drive camcorder (street price around $600) has to join my list of favorite video cameras under $10,000, which has at the top of the list the Panasonic HPX170 DVCPRO HD P2 camcorder (street price around $4,930) The HPX170 is similar to the HVX200 which has been a favorite for quite some time since I first used it and wrote the article, “First Look: Panasonic AG-HVX200 DVCPro HD Camcorder back in 2006. This Canon is the first small camcorder that has caught my attention in a serious manner. Last time I was in the market for one was quite some time ago and I ended up buying a Sony HVR-A1 HDV camcorder. The fact that it is tape based has tainted my impression of it, and I’ve often said, “this is the last tape-based camcorder I will ever buy,” but at the time, hard drive recording of HD was a different story than it is today. It has become viable due to the availability of more efficient codecs, the ability to pack more computing power into little cameras, smaller and cheaper hard drives, and SD card prices following suite.

Panasonic HPX170

The interesting thing to note is that the image quality difference between the consumer-priced HG20 and the pro-sumer priced HPX170 cameras is nowhere near in proportion to the cost difference between the two. Much of it has to do with supply and demand. Professionals make up a smaller market segment and thus must pay a premium for professional features. Clearly the overall quality of the image, true 24p, variable frame rates, the many professional features, and the ergonomics of the HPX170 make it a better camera, however, I can think of a lot of situations where multiple HG20 cameras might provide better coverage of an event than a single HPX170. On the other hand, for a formal interview or narrative shooting, the HPX170 wins hands down. But what if your camera budget is in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars? The HG20 is a compelling option.

The Canon HG20 AVCHD hard disk camcorder is a delightfully small and light camera with stunning image quality considering its size and price. It records video in the AVCHD format to an internal hard drive or SD memory card. It has a 1920 x 1080 1/3.2″ 3.3Mp CMOS chip providing gorgeous high-definition images. You can record quite a lot of video on the internal 60GB hard drive at either high quality (24Mbps) or standard quality (17Mbps). The camera also captures 2.76Mp still to the SD card or from video stored on the hard drive.

Other features include 24p Cinema mode and 30p Progressive mode (both are recorded at 60i). The camera does not sport a viewfinder, so in bright light situations you will need some kind of hood for the LCD display. And unlike many tiny cameras today, the HG20 provides an external microphone input. This is an essential feature for anyone serious about good audio recording. This allows you to use professional audio gear via a BeachTek adapter or use microphones that are designed to be used with 3.5mm minijack inputs. The camera has an odd Mini “S” Accessory Shoe for attaching Canon accessories like microphones or lights, but the standard microphone input is the the way to go for connecting quality microphones. Cameras come and go, but audio gear is a long term investment. A wireless remote to control rounds out the features so you can stop and start the camera from a distance.

Gone are videotapes. And not a moment too soon. No more timecode break headaches. No more capture headaches and dropped frames. But, like any technological improvement, we gain something, and we lose something. You now have to keep a good archive copy of your digital media, for there is no tape on the shelf. This is a huge topic for another blog post.

Canon offers a less expensive model with the same imaging chip called the HF-100 (Street price around $530). The major differences are that the HF-100 does not have an internal hard drive (which makes it a lighter), the menu system is a little different, and it records AVCHD video at the 17Mbps data rate only.

And what about editing? When you capture media from this camcorder to Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro, you will experience large file sizes upon capture (compared to the smaller AVCHD files created by the camera). This is because in the case of Final Cut Express, footage is transcoded to the Apple Intermediate Codec and in the case of Final Cut Pro, you have a choice of transcoding to Apple’s ProRes 422 codec or the Apple Intermediate Codec. Although MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 is a nice compact file format for recording and delivery, it is not good for editing because it requires too much computing horsepower to decode and recode individual frames. Editing will go more smoothy, and image quality preserved, when editing is done using an intermediate codec designed for editing like the Apple Intermediate Codec or Apple’s ProRes 422 codec.

Here are some support documents on Apple’s web site you should consult if you’re editing AVCHD with Final Cut Express or Final Cut Pro:

• Final Cut Pro 6.0.1: About transferring AVCHD footage
• Final Cut Express: Ingesting AVCHD clips may not work from the Log and Transfer window
• Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Express: Unexpected quit during AVCHD ingest
• See also Working with AVCHD Footage in the Final Cut Express 4 User Manual.

HG20 Specifications

• Power: Proprietary Lithium-ion battery or AC adapter
• Weight: 13.4 oz
• Street price: around $600
• Sensor: 1/3.2″ 1920 x 1080 3.3Mp CMOS
• Video format: AVCHD (MPEG-4 AVC/H.264) video at 24Mbps or 17Mbps
• Audio format: Dolby Digital 2 channel (AC-3 2 channel) audio
• Still capture: 2.76 Mp JPEG stills
• Lens: 12x zoom, 4.8mm-57mm, f/1.8-f/3.0
• Optical Image Stabilization
• LCD Display: 2.7″ Widescreen
• Viewfinder: None
• Recording Media: built in 60GB Hard Disk or SDHC Memory Card
• Stereo microphone input (3.5mm stereo minijack)
• Stereo headphone output (menu selectable via 3.5mm A/V minijack)
• Video outputs: HDMI (mini, Type C); Component out; A/V out (3.5mm minijack)
• Data interface: USB 2.0 (mini-B)
• Controls: Auto mode or manual control of White Balance, Focus, Exposure
• Power: Proprietary Lithium-ion battery or AC adapter
• Weight: 13.4 oz
• Street price: around $600

In summary, given the price, the HG20 is a compelling contender if you’re looking for a small HD camcorder under $1,000 and are ready to say goodbye once and for all to ye-olde video tape technology. Curious how my other favorite camcorder, the HPX170, is the successor to the camera that introduced semiconductor memory recording in the under $10,000 camcorder category. From P2 cards to SD cards, the speed and convenience of solid-state or hard-drive storage for recording video is hard to beat.

David: You’ve been a working cinematographer for a long time, what lead you to the development of the Blender LED light?

Tom: A couple of things came to a confluence. One was that I had been working on variable color temperature lights for a number of years. The reason I was doing that is because when I was doing narrative work every once in a while I would need something as a fill, as a special, as an edge, not as my primary light, because I’m usually color balancing to whatever is my key light sources, I wanted something and I wanted to be able to finesse it a little bit this, a little bit that, and be able to do it on the fly and by eye. So I had been playing with that notion. That’s one stream of information. The second one, and the primary reason for this is I started doing more non-narrative work, and in particular, I was in a situation where I was working in a very busy hospital, a very sensitive situation because of the patient care and it being pediatrics, and we were having some filming and some interviews that were near windows, and then we were going into a hallway, and interviewing doctors and nurses in a hallway on the fly and once they got beeped they had to leave, so we had to work fast. And then we’d be in an interior office and be able to have a formal interview and there might be incandescents as well as office fluorescents, so it was always a mixed light situation, it was always in a hurry, I very much wanted light that could be slightly off to the side, so it wasn’t a direct on-camera fill, I wanted something to be able to hold out to the side and have a sense of directionality. I played with, used, rented, LED lights and it was never quite easy enough, fast enough, to get what I was looking for to appear natural. And my source was always sort of insistent and visible. And I wanted it to just blend in and augment the available light. I did not want it to be calling tremendous attention it itself. So I grafted these two ideas together: the variable color temperature and the availability of high power white light LEDs that can be obtained on a black body locus. I worked through all of the technological issues to make it both something that was unique in the technology sense and easy to use.

David: For our readers who are not cinematographers, could you explain what you mean by “LEDs that can be obtained on a black body locus”?

Tom: In the 1930s people decided in France that there would be this large commission that would decide how much available light there is and what are all the colors. This is the CIE Chromaticity chart. Inside that is a line that tracks what we perceive to be white light. White light is what we’re primarily concerned with for film/video imaging, because that’s what we’re used to from the sun, approximately from fluorescents, from movie lights, from all of the different sources we’re usually using white light. And that white light is something that is tracked within this CIE Chromaticity chart.

David: But all white light is not the same, is it?

Tom: No, and especially when you go to most modern sources, and I’m not going to claim all, I’m a cinematographer, not a spectrophotometry expert, but you’ll see a lot of light sources that are both discontinuous spectrum and you’ll see a lot of light sources that don’t provide all of the available wavelengths and things like that, but they are close to the black body locus that white light Planckian locus, that curve that our mind says, “oh, it’s white light” “it’s not too green, it’s not too magenta, it’s not too amber, it’s not too blue. Now it is possible to obtain high power LEDs.

I have custom orders that allow me to select things that are on the black body locus. And that’s one of the functions that I want because I don’t really want to be messing around with a lot of plus-green or minus-green gels if I don’t have to. I want to eliminate all of that and be able to work by eye. So it was essential for me to land on a spot that corresponds to the world and how we perceive white light and what’s photographically acceptable as white light as a starting point.

David: A lot of LED lights come as either tungsten balance (3200K) or daylight balance (5500K) and you have to use gels with the lights if you want to change their color temperature. Now there’s something really different about the Blender, I can adjust between the two with knobs. Tell me more about that.

Tom: By having banks of these. For years I had used things like Kino Flos and other fluorescents that allow you to mix and match daylight and tungsten units, and boy it sure is nice to have half and half sometimes, or one daylight unit mixed with the tungsten, it will be just a little bit cooler, but to have two banks of what are nominally daylight and tungsten white balanced lights, I could dial-in all of my variable situation where I could be one sixteenth more warm, slightly more cool, and I could do by eye what I have always liked to be able to do, which is do something like have a back light be slightly cooler, or have my key light be slightly warmer than the ambient, so I don’t change my white balance, or anything, I can just dial in without having to use any gels, working by the monitor and my eye is trained so by my eye as well, what are warm and cool values that match the natural world and then have the artistic leeway to slightly warmer or slightly cooler, if I choose to.

David: So this light has two banks of lights, and it has two knobs and one switch. So it’s pretty simple to use.

Tom: It’s very straightforward, I’ve had students use it, and once they use it they see immediately what happens.

David: So tell me about some Blender usage scenarios.

Tom: I’ve used these in situations where I’ve had subjects near windows, and I’ve wanted to do what you would call carry the light from the outside. And I’ll bring this on the opposite side of the camera closer to the window and have that cool light from the window wrap more around the face of my subject which it doesn’t do on its own. And then have a second light, perhaps slightly warmer, coming from the inside, indicating the interior light. So I get a fully rounded form that matches my daylight, it can be close enough and bright enough that I can actually expose for the outside world and I have a sense of the presence of the world.

David: Can you share another scenario?

Tom: We were in a building with office fluorescents with a number of people doing a series of interviews. And one thing that was particularly interesting is that we were using the Blender light as a backlight, these were standard office fluorescents, they were somewhere between 3800K and 4200K approximately in terms of correlated color temperature, so they are in between value already. We had actually, for the first subject, used a fluorescent light that had 1/2 daylight and 1/2 tungsten bulbs in it that we were using to match the office fluorescents. Well, the second subject came in and their shirt was much brighter and we didn’t have flags, so here we had approximately a 15 lb. rig lighting as our key light, and we substituted it with one of my Blender lights. We brought it a foot closer, it’s a very bright light, but not too aggressive and not too intimidating for a subject. And just by tilting it up and taping a piece of office paper on it, because it doesn’t get hot [like an incandescent] we were able to flag the guys shirt, it cut perfectly with movie fluorescent we used [in the previous shot], and our backlight was slightly cooler. We were in an office environment and we were able to use it as a key and a kicker.

David: How bout one more?

Tom: Shooting run and gun hand-held in a hallway with fluorescents, with windows, with all sorts of wacky stuff, hand-held with a wooden handle off to the side. I was doing the interview, someone else was shooting. I could have a little bit of directionality. I just did it by eye, and we could roll in thirty seconds, cause we had the light out and plugged in to a battery.

David: Sounds like you might want to have a special pistol grip with the Blender light and a microphone on it.

Tom: That actually is not a bad idea, because sometimes it means asking the sound guy, “hey, you’re booming, can you hold this off to the side so it does not have to be on camera?”

David: That brings me to the thought, the miniaturization of these video cameras has really changed the way we shoot. The cameras are getting smaller, it changes what we shoot, how we shoot, what we can shoot. Well, now we’ve got LED technology that’s getting brighter and cheaper, and it’s changing how we light. How do you think these smaller LED lights like your Blender are going to change how we shoot, and what we shoot?

Tom: I think there’s a couple of things. One, they have sufficiently low power usage, it’s nice that they are more environmentally sound, but for us as shooters that’s way down the list, in terms of what it is that we need to shoot professionally, but it’s nice that you can run them off batteries, that you can run for an hour, you can run for two hours, and you’re OK to go. You can’t really do that a lot of the sun guns and tungsten types because they really drain power a lot more. So suddenly we’ve become a lot more portable. A secondary thing, and something that really surprised me with the Blender light, you end up lighting a bit differently than you would normally. Now I was going towards this myself, so I was not aware of it, until I put it into the hands of other shooters, and have them say, “Aha! I’m doing this now,” I was really surprised, because suddenly, instead of creating a light that is sort of obvious, and it becomes your key light, and it’s clear that you have lit the situation, which is what you see in a lot of interviews, you can actually dial this down, raise your subject to a level where you can control attention, but it’s not obvious. So it’s a naturalistic light in way almost like bounce sheets are. I don’t know about you but there are some times when I would rather have nothing plugged in, I’d rather have like a silver bounce here, and a white bounce there, or negative fill over there, and be done, because it can be very naturalistic, and embed your subject in their environment. As long as you can control attention, and you’re not busy looking at the background, you can actually focus on the subject, you’re good to go. Well, these work, because you can blend them almost like bounce sources that have intensity. And so you can approach it in a much more naturalistic way, and you might find yourself placing the light in a different place than you would normally, because it reads as if it was part of the environment, you might find yourself putting it someplace and dialing it very warm or very cool and saying, I wouldn’t necessarily go that far with another light source, but it feels like it’s the light from that other room, so I can get away with something that’s a little more tasty or more interesting.

David: I imagine the Blender will be popular not only with professionals but with newcomers as well.

Tom: For the people who are not coming into this by being technically savvy, they are coming in because they want to make images, they want to make motion pictures, they want to make narrative, non-narrative, whatever it is they are trying to do, they are not coming from a trained background, they are coming from a place, “these tools let me do stuff, I just want to do stuff,” well, here’s a light that allows them to just set it on auto white balance, or they just white balance to the available light, they can now dial in, look at their monitor, and they don’t have to consider what are the correlated color temperatures of those fluorescents, what’s coming in that window, is it sky?, is it day?, is it sun?, what’s coming from that desk lamp?, is it halogen?, is it incandescent?, you can work in a more intuitive way by eye, and I think that’s a huge difference in terms of making motion pictures imaging function the way us professionals are used to in terms of control, and putting that level of lighting control into the hands of people who can now use cameras, because there are now so many nice aids and assistance to making a nice picture with a camera, now there’s that level of assistance to making a nice picture through the aid of controlling your lighting, controlling attention to the subject.

David: I’ve put together a minimalist on-the-go documentary kit in which everything has to fit into a carry-on size hard case: camera, microphones, cables, batteries, accessories, maybe I’ve got room in here for a Blender. How do I attach the light to a stand or my camera?

Tom: I provide a swivel mount, it’s a 1/4″-20 thread on the bottom, I also have a wood handle, which is actually adapted from a file handle, with a 1/4″-20 stud on it.

David: Does that come with the light?

Tom: It’s an optional accessory. The people who want it, who want the light off to the side, immediately say, give me the handle, because they are running and gunning it. The people who say I don’t care about that, well, why bother loading them down with it.

David: What about powering options?

Tom: There are a couple. One, if you’re using a 2/3″ professional video camcorder, and you have a power-tap, D-tap it’s called, all you need is a 2.5mm center-positive connector on the Blender end and you can run this light. And at 14.4 volts you’ll be getting hours and hours of running time.

David: What if I’m using a smaller camcorder like the Sony HVR-V1U here?

Tom: Optional sleds. What I have are battery sleds that come in many different flavors to fit Panasonic, Canons, Sonys, and what I do then is custom wire them so you can use your existing camcorder batteries and not have to invest in a new battery system.

David: That’s handy, since I don’t have a lot of room left in this case for a whole new set of batteries. I’d love to be able to use the same batteries, the same battery charger, as I use with the camcorder.

Tom: I do not like extra battery systems, I don’t like going into a hotel and making sure every different charger is plugged in (laughter) I just want one battery system, so I knew that this would function that way.

David: With one of the camcorder batteries I have here, how long can I run the Blender?

Tom: They look like 2,800 mA batteries, or something like that, so it will last about an hour and a half, that’s what I’ve tested it, from an hour and thirty to an hour and forty minutes. Now there are two things that are worth noting, as it drains, it does not change the light output, what will happen, is this will simply blink off when it’s done. It does not change the light output as the battery drains. The electronics raise the voltage to the base level needed for the LEDs. It’s meant to accommodate [a range of sources] and it will simply blink off [when the voltage falls below a threshold].

David: Do you have plans for larger units?

Tom: Yes, this light, what you might call “pint-size,” is only the first in the line. The design is scalable and we will be making larger units in the future.

David: How can people purchase a Blender?

Tom: Blenders are currently being manufactured here in the United States. They can be ordered from my web site at blenderlights.com.

David: Good luck with the light, Tom, it’s a great idea.

Tom: Thanks so much, I appreciate you taking the time.

Update: Since I spoke with Tom, he has entered into an exclusive manufacturing and distribution agreement with Lowel who will be manufacturing and selling the Blender light. LED lighting will continue to make serious inroads into professional production, especially in run and gun documentary and ENG production.

Practical Sound Recording and Editing Techniques For Better Video
Friday, March 20th, 3:00pm to 5:00pm, Poolside Room, Fee: $25.00
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Sound is half the picture, yet most often it receives only casual attention. Viewers can’t articulate what’s wrong, but quite often it’s the soundtrack that either engages or distances them. This session will present practical techniques and a guide to the tools for recording and editing sound for video that will improve your work whether you are a beginning or intermediate video maker. Real-world problems in a range of shooting situations and their solutions will be presented. Discussion topics include microphone selection and placement, recording strategies for noisy locations, improving intelligibility of dialog, mixing in music without interfering with dialog, making sure your video sounds good on a wide range of devices, and doing it all in a manner that flows nicely with video editing. Special attention will be paid to working on a tight budget and getting the most out of modest gear.

Lighting Techniques for Better Documentary Interviews
Saturday, March 21st, 3:00pm to 5:00pm, Room TBA, Fee: $25.00
(REGISTER NOW)
This session will present through discussion, examples, and demonstration a practical approach to lighting documentary interviews ranging from low-budget existing light and one light techniques to classic three-point lighting and beyond using professional lighting instruments. The first half of the session will cover lighting fundamentals, a survey of popular lighting fixtures, screening of examples with a discussion of aesthetic and technical tradeoffs, and suggestions for putting together a kit based on your specific needs. The second half of the session will consist of demonstration using a variety of lighting gear so participants can gain some practical experience with the topics discussed during the first half of the session.

If you live in the Boston area and are interested in video production or post-production, this is the place to be on March 20th and 21st, 2009. A schedule of workshops (for fee) and free seminars is available at the Camera Company web site in the near future.

You can order replacement pads from Sony, but I did not like the idea of replacing the pads with the same pads that I knew would again fall apart and in addition, I was never crazy about their plastic feel. Over the years I’ve noticed that other folks have replaced the original Sony pads with velour pads made by Beyerdynamic (model number 942704) which fit the Sony MDR-7506 and V6 (it’s predecessor) headphones perfectly. So I decided to give them a try.

I ordered them from B&H for $19.95 a pair and they turned out to be good purchase. They have breathed new life into the headphones and they are much more comfortable to wear. I found it was a little tricky getting these pads onto the headphones, but with a little stretching of the pad and the use of a credit card to helped guide the plastic ring around the groove in each of the headphone’s metal shells, I completed the installation. The pads come with plastic adapters for other headphones, those can go straight into the recycling since you will not need then for attaching the pads onto the Sony MDR-7506 and V6 and headphones. It’s been about six months or so since I purchased the pads and I’m very happy with them, the headphones are very comfortable to wear, even for long periods of time. These velour pads transform these excellent headphones into most excellent headphones. Good headphones are an important investment. In this disposable world we live in, it’s nice to be able to refresh an old standard.

In an earlier post, I sung the praises of the Sony MDR-7506 headphones.

Kodak Zi9 is small enough to take with you everywhere you go, it’s simple enough you can hand it to anyone to shoot, and it’s cheap enough you don’t have to worry if it gets lost, stolen, or suffers damage when used in a risky situation. And the 720p image quality (encoded as H.264) is pretty good given the price. As the quality of camera sensors goes up, and the price of camera sensors and flash memory goes down, expect to see small cameras get better and better. They could soon rival the traditional camcorder, the only issue is over time how much are the camera manufacturers willing to cannibalize their traditional camcorder market. It’s a fun little camera, I hope to get a chance to do more shooting with it.

Click to play

This test was not about how pretty the video can look, it’s about how does the camera do in a common documentary situation. Here are the basic specs on the Kodak Zi9 camera:

Camera Type: Point and Shoot Camcorder
Resolution/Sensor Size/Type: 1.6 megapixels 1/4.5″ CMOS
Lens: 4.1mm - F/2.8 (fixed focus) with 2x optical zoom
Minimum Focus: 27.6″ (macro focus: 2″)
Display: 2.4″ TFT active matrix LCD (no viewfinder, no flip-over display)
Video Format: 16×9 H.264 (MOV, AAC, LC) 720p @ 30fps or 60fps
White Balance/Exposure: Automatic
Sound In: Built-in Microphone (mono)
Sound Out: Built-in speaker (mono) and audio on composite video output
Computer Interface: USB 2.0
Video Output: Composite video and Component video
Digital Still Features: also shoots digital stills in JPEG format and has a built-in flash w/ close-up and normal modes, and red-eye reduction
Internal Storage: 30 MB Flash Memory (built-in, specs do say 128M, however, only 30 can be used for image storage)
Storage Slot: SD Memory Card, Kodak recommends use of SDHC High-Speed Card
Additional Features: YouTube capture mode
Power: Uses 2 AA NiMH rechargeable batteries (included along with a charger) or 2 AA Alkaline batteries (nice not to have to deal with a built-in LiIon battery like some other devices)
Accessories: carrying pouch, cables, manual
Warranty: one year
Weight: 3.8 oz.

The Berwick Research Institute joined with the Island Alliance and Studio Soto to present the 2nd Annual Artist Encampment, a "homesteading" experience on Bumpkin Island, Boston Harbor Islands, on Labor Day weekend, August 28-September 1, 2008.

Ten artists and artist collectives were each given one plot of prime, arable land on Bumpkin Island. As island "homesteaders" during the five days, they built temporary shelters on the land, lived on the land for four nights, and improved the land via site-specific project or performance. The various installations I managed to see (text borrowed from artist encampment project descriptions) while I were:

New England Expeditionary Alliance: Dedalus Wainwright, Bryan Long, Michael Andelman and Jeff Cleary - A scientific mission that mapped Bumpkin Island’s metaphorical, literal, and sensual parameters, Alliance members lead expeditions, generated hypotheses, established a classification system, created analysis, and gave lectures on their findings.

Astrodime Transit Authority: Bebe Beard, John Gayle, Ali Horeanopoulos, Mary Ann Kearns and Sam Smiley - C Celebrated the 150th year of the first attempt to lay the Transatlantic Cable by creating Bumpkin Island’s first "trans-gut" phone.

Spirits in the House: Then & Now: Sharon Haggins Dunn explored change and continuity of natural and human forces over time and the spirituality of place in an installation based mostly on materials from the ruins of the children’s hospital that was operated on the island.

The Camoufleurs: Hanna Rose Shell and Dan Hisel: Drawing on artisanal weaving techniques, military concealment strategies, and bird nesting practices, the camoufleurs transformed their land, and its particular human and natural ecology, into a camouflaged homestead environment.

Stone House, Urban City: Wenxiong Lin, Lynn Lee, Jens Stenger, Annie Wilker - Juxtaposing two themes of time (history and modernity; reality and romanticism), the artists created a model urban city in the stone farmhouse ruins, and framed windows of the naval mess hall ruins with brightly colored curtains.

Leave one for your ancestors, one for your children, and take one: Tiffany Dumont, Else Eaton, Raymond Garrett, Rory Jackson - Artists foraged island materials to create interactive, multimedia installations based on past, present and future. Artists encouraged visitors to add to the pieces, forage responsibly, and participate in performance.

Tactilist Theatre: Erik Conrad engaged in sensory deprivation for a week on the mainland, allowing him greater sensitivity as he identified island objects according to their tactile values. Arranged on the island in "theatre of touch," the artist, in the role of impressario, invited visitors to engage in a narrative performance based on a tactile values.

Survival Kit: Gabe Moylan & Rachel Roberts: Living off only the bare-bones survival kit provided by the Federal Emergency Management Association, the artists will use island-found objects to recreate family photos, common domestic objects and items of spiritual value often overlooked in disaster recovery.

Cecy and Camilo Ramirez

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin made the film over the course of 5 years and tells the story using a mix of cinéma-vérité digital video, Super 8 and 16mm film, and home movie footage shot by Cecy and Camilo. After watching the film, in addition to being moved by the story itself, I also found myself reflecting how this film could not have been made in the era of 16mm documentary from the 1960s through the 1980s, it would have simply been impossible in terms of shooting logistics and cost. The availability of small inexpensive digital video cameras made it possible for the filmmakers to give cameras to their subjects to expand the points of view of the film. Intimidad is currently playing in film festivals around the country and recently won the Best Documentary award at the Sidewalk Film Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. What follows is a transcript of my conversation with the filmmakers with some light editing for readability.

David Tamés: We’re here at the Independent Film Festival of Boston where I just attended a screening of David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s Intimidad which was followed by a lively question and answer session. David and Ashley, thanks for talking with me again.

David Redmon: This is really exciting, we were here last time talking with you about Mardi Gras: Made in China, right?

Tamés: Yes, that was it. So I wanted to ask you both a few questions, about the film, and top of my mind, is your relationship with the subject, this is not your typical cinéma-vérité film where a filmmaker observes a subject and it’s not your typical home movie where people are making films about themselves, it seems to be a fascinating hybrid of home movie and cinéma-vérité, could you say a little bit about that?

Ashley Sabin: It’s kind of interesting, because especially, I mean, each film the production is different and the relationships that you develop are different because it’s based on personalities and how people feel open to the camera and what the camera does to their everyday life. With Cecy and Camilo, it was this sort of immediate connection that I feel that we all felt, and they got really comfortable in front of the camera very early on, to the point where they didn’t even notice that the camera would be on or off and we would were learning Spanish with them, so there were funny, awkward moments of trying to pronounce something incorrectly that was an ice breaker and we stayed in Rinosa we would spend time with them and time is very different for Cecy and Camilo, it’s much slower, the sort of time that ticks by and what they do during the course of the day, people can view very simple things, washing their own clothing, or cooking, but it’s in those small moments that to me were you could see the film as a home video, but then you look at the cinéma-vérité side and it’s really telling, these patterns that would develop over days and days, and you look at our footage and we would like have days of Cecy washing her clothing on the ribbed tub and that was part of their lifestyle so it was really important to convey that and to convey that warmth, and the feeling that we had when we were around them, but also at the same time which is the home video side, but at the same time having a cinéma-vérité where we would have these scenes and it’s building towards something, but we’re observing with this camera sort of in a hands-off way, so it’s this tricky tango that goes on with those two elements of the film.

Tamés: How did you meet Cecy and Camilo in the first place?

Redmon: I grew up in north Texas, and then went to school in Texas, and several times I went to Reinosa and meet with people who work in the factories with different organizations and I met a woman who made Victoria’s Secret bags, the pink bags, and she made them inside her house, with her children, and I did an interview with her much like you’re doing now, and I wrote an article about it and promised her I’d come back some day and she said, “wonderful,” and for years later we went back, and when we went back she wasn’t there, so Ashley and I ended up renting a house just down the street from Cecy and Camilo. When I say street, it’s a dirt roads and if it rains it’s very muddy, and that’s how we met Cecy and Camilo, they were thousands of pallets out of which people would build their homes, their outhouses, and their fences, so we knocked on Cecy and Camilo’s door one day, and Cecy came and said, “hi” and we started talking with her about the pallets and I think we were filming ten minutes later in a very conversational way and she was incredibly comfortable, she said she’s never been to a movie theater, there was much more to the conversation, but that’s basically how we met them.

Tamés: So what kept you filming, what got you engaged with their particular story and with their daughter Loida, what kept you going back and shooting over the course of five years?

Redmon: We became intrigued with the idea that they were making fire hydrants and Victortia’s Secret bras, [it started out as a] thesis film […] but once we found out they had a daughter in southern Mexico, then we thought we were going to make a short film where we simply go to southern Mexico and reunite with the daughter, and be a happy ending, and the film would be over, but in fact, that’s where the film really begins, and the other idea was the thesis film, which is not the film at all.

Sabin: It’s interesting with documentary films today there’s a pretty rigid form of telling the story in which there’s a thesis, in a way, I find it uncomfortable, because directors use their subjects to tell the story the director wants to tell, as opposed to seeing what’s inherent in the actual story and in the footage, and with Intimidad we decided, we wanted to make a thesis film we went in and [thought that] Victortia’s Secret is really interesting contrasting the sexy images of the models and the advertising campaign vs. the intimacy that the family is experiencing, so it’s like these two kinds of intimacy, and so we wanted to tell that story and actually at one point had Victortia’s Secret models and all sorts of montages in the film, but it didn’t work so we slowly had to take it out of the film and realized this is a slower film, this is a film about family, and hope, and the desire to want to be together, and struggle together, and it’s not really about what we want it to be about, it’s about about what Cecy and Camilo’s lives are, so, it was kind of interesting to go through that process and realize, you know, we’re wrong and we have to figure out, like, we have to stick to their story because that’s what the story that really rings true in the end.

Tamés: That’s one way this film really differs from Mardi Gras: Made in China, that you had the opportunity to spend five years with your subjects and get very close to them.

Redmon: Intimidad is different than Mardi Gras: Made in China in that Mardi Gras: Made in China follows a commodity chain […] that brings us into contact with different people, whereas Intimidad we spend five years with one family to find out where they go geographically and where they end up, so it’s there are similarities but Intimidad could have been a story about the commodity chain of a bra, the manufacturing in a Mexican plant, the selling in a United States Victortia’s Secret shop, and then a woman buys the bra, she throws the bra away a year later, and that bra gets recycled and goes down to Mexico, where people sell it as second hand clothing, and then Cecy comes and buys that bra, when in fact she probably made that same bra, she’s buying second hand bras, and there is a story there to be told, but, that’s the story we had to set aside because we really listened to the footage and listened to what their story was about and set aside that thesis film.

Loida Ramirez

Tamés: So as a filmmaker, what was it like giving Cecy and Camilo cameras and having them shoot part of the film, and what was most surprising about that experience?

Sabin: I think what was most surprising about giving Cecy and Camilo a camera and leaving it with them is how they were watching how we were composing shots and how we were holding the camera steady and learning in that hands-on way to the point where you can clearly see the footage, we’d go down there and look at this footage and look at that footage it’s not only just a way of communicating and saying look at what’s happened in the past couple of months but when you haven’t been down here, but also, they were proud of how they were fiming it, it sort of nurtured a desire to film and document and tell a story in a way that it’s their own life story and what’s also interesting is we showed them footage all along, but then we showed them a rough cut of the film and it was about seventy minutes long, and because we asked for advice, and what they thought about it, first of all, [they said] “it’s way too short, it needs to be longer, it needs to be like four hours,” and “your missing this scene,” “there’s not enough Loida,” “you need to put that in that scene,” it was this interactive dialog that was really interesting, because they just don’t have the access to a camera, so if we hadn’t come upon them and in this haphazard kind of way, they would not have had the same form of communication, and to me that’s really interesting, and with Loida being two years old when we started filming, it’s really interesting watching her first of all grow up in the film, but then also how she’s responding to the camera now is very different than how she responded to it when she was younger, and I’m equally interested five years from now, how she’s going to respond because she’s also a child and her parents are giving us consent to film her, but is she going to reject us, is she going to say, why have you been filming me all these years, I really don’t understand this, and it actually makes me film uncomfortable, maybe when she gets to be a teenager, or something, so it’s a dialog: them having a camera, us having a camera, and being able to communicate through the cameras.

Tamés: So they’ve seen the completed film, what was that experience like, showing them a film in which they were both subjects in and co-authors of?

Redmon: We showed them the finished film [in February], and they loved the film, and it meant a lot to us for them to love the film, but at the same time, like Asley said during the Q & A after the screening, if they would have had conflict, and arguments, we definitely would have showed that, but the way in which they resolve their conflicts was through conversations, and there’s a little bit of that in the film as well, but Cecy said, as Ashley said, “why don’t you have Loida’s birthday in there,” “why don’t you have this in the film,” but in a very charming way, and so she is now is requesting that we give her all of the footage that we shot of Loida so they they can put together a home video about Loida, and this is something we have absolutely no hesitancy in doing, in fact there was one time when the electricity went out, and we were in the middle of editing a little short story about Cecy’s dad (you know what happened in the film) and the electricity went out, so we carried our little computer over with their hard drive and hooked it up to their neighbors wall and we’re sitting here on the ground in the middle of the yard editing on Final Cut and they are doing it as well, they are learning to use Final Cut, and it was just this remarkable way of us telling the story but at the same time they are using Final Cut to tell a home video story, but what they cut never made it into the final version, but that’s not to say it won’t make it into the next film.

Tamés: So are you going to continue following them?

Redmon: Yes, we’re going to continue following them, I have some ideas on a hybrid, and I’ve already shot some footage of Camilo selling piñatas, human looking piñatas and animals, gigantic piñatas, but at the same time Ashely came up with the idea of filming Loida, but we don’t know how, she’s seven years old, how can a seven year old give consent? It’s easy when a mother and a father give us consent to film their two year old daughter, their three year old daughter, their four year old daughter, but what happens when she turns fourteen or fifteen? And we’re just outsiders coming in filming her life, for why? Observational purposes? What’s the real reason going on here of why are we filming her? In addition, Cecy and Camilo want to continue filming, but they want to film not only because they love her, we love her too, but also they just want to look back at these memories and see what Loida how she grew up, who she is, and I’m sure they want Loida to see this footage fifteen years from now as well, and we have common interests, but we also want to impose a story on it somehow, it’s jumbled right now because we don’t know what to do, the only reference we have is Seven Up, but I think we’re going to do it in a much different way than Seven Up, if we decide to do it.

Tamés: Clearly when you started making the film Cecy and Camilo had no idea what your financial arrangement with them might be, but now it’s probably pretty clear, what is your arrangement with them, and how do you think that might influence your relationship and subsequent films?

Redmon: It’s funny, at one time Camilo asked us, “hey, if you give me a camera can you pay me to be a cinematographer,” and that was interesting, they still are filming, so I think it’s only wise and fair that we pay them for the footage that they shoot.

Sabin: I don’t think it’s even us paying them for the footage, we’re filming together, so I think it’s very much them earning it as much as we have, because they are capturing moments that I don’t think we could even capture, they are really comfortable with each other, and there’s some footage of them in the shower that they shot of each other, and moments that are really sort of dark, where the top of the house is caving in on itself because of the wind and Camilo has to sort of jam it out, and if you looked at that it would be disturbing, why aren’t we trying to help them to prepare them for this oncoming storm, but they filmed it of each other so it has a different kind of context, but I think it’s really important to have the film be a tool to provide [for their] needs that they want because Loida has this high aspiration of becoming a doctor, and if Cecy and Camilo continue to do the same work they are doing, though it provides for everyday needs, [however, in the] long term [for what] Loida [wants it] will not provide that. If the film could do that, then it would make me think how films makes change in a different way.

Redmon: At the same time I don’t want them, or us, to think about the footage as just a commodity, “oh I’m going to go film this now and that’s a way for me to make money,” once we introduce the concept of money, then it introduces another variable, it becomes much more difficult, now we’re talking about commodification, of people, of footage, of lives, and are they filming now because it’s money? Are we filming now because we’re thinking of money? But of course we never ever make money from our films, we always pay ourselves back, but if we sell this film, we’re splitting the money with Cecy and Camilo, but we only told them after we sold the film. The issue [of money brings about all] kinds of problems, there’s no handbook on how to to address it, on how to do it, but it’s good that we’re conscious of it, but none of that has happened yet, they are filming because they love their daughter, and filming each other.

Sabin: It’s also this awkwardness when we go down there, people tonight donated $40.00 so that Loida could get a month’s worth of taking a bus to her school, it’s really this awkward feeling of OK, going down there and giving them that money, it’s this awkward moment, but I never feel that they expect it, they are much more excited to see that we’re down there and to talk, and cook food, and spend time with each other, it’s an afterthought, so I think that’s really important too.

Redmon: We’re selling their Jewelry for them, so I mean, they are making the Jewelry and we’re selling it and people want it, and it’s fair trade at it’s maximum effect,

Tamés: Your film is a beautiful and interesting hybrid of cinéma vérité observation and intimate home movie footage, how do you think documentaries are going to change over the next ten years, I think your film represents two dimension of change, first, an evolution of the relationship between filmmaker and subject, and second, a change in how you find your audience, from what I know from Mardis Gras: Made in China, you’ve done the film festival and college circuit promoting and distributing the film on your own rather than depending on a traditional distributor, so it seems to me with Intimidad that it points in two directions that documentary filmmaking is moving.

Redmon: I don’t think we did it out of a conscious choice to make our film different from other people’s films, but it’s just something that occurred by accident, knowing that we couldn’t financially live in Mexico the entire time, so we bought cameras for Cecy and Camilo, and it turned out the footage they shot was absolutely warm and intimate, even though it was shaky, who cares, and so I don’t know, it’s a really interesting question, I don’t know, I love the question more than the response.

David Redmon and Ashley Sabin
(view full-size on Flickr)

Sabin: As being an audience member that goes and watches documentary films, I’m getting tired with thesis driven films that seem far removed from their subjects and seem more like this sort of soap box that the director can get up and say that “this is my point, I’m going to make my point and then I’m going to make a conclusion,” I’m talking about films like Michael Moore’s films, or these political diatribes that go on, I like Michael Moore’s films, but to me it’s becoming too popular of a style, and it’s like speaking to the masses, it’s trying to get people to become converted but in reality it’s not even doing that, it’s just speaking to an audience that already is going to go see Michael Moore’s films, so they can walk away and be patted on the back and say “I believe the same thing,” and for me what’s more interesting is having these screenings that are about people, so that other people can connect to them, this may sound vague, but it’s about people that other people can connect to that doesn’t overtly have a traditional sense of politics, it has everyday sense of politics: water, electricity, these things you want everyday, it allows the audience to experience that and then in the end I feel that’s more moving and that’s going to stay with an audience member, cause I know it stays with me longer, when it’s a much more personal film, so you feel that you’re there, so that these these people in the film carry over into days, weeks, months later, where you’re thinking about that person.

Tamés: The title of your film is the Spanish word “intimidad,” which translates to english as intimacy, and in some ways it’s a love story, and the two of you met here in Boston, why don’t you tell me a little bit about that?

Redmon: Well even though the title of our film is translated to “intimacy”, there’s no way we captured every intimate moment between the family, nor would we want to, and therefore I’m going to say, the same thing about us, we’ll leave it up to mystery.

Sabin: I think that’s a good position, I think it’s much more interesting that way.

Redmon: Absolutely, we met in Boston, the idea of going to Mexico was created in Boston, our collaboration, love interest, professional interest, business interest, began in Boston, the first film festival we ever attended was this film festival, the Independent Film Festival of Boston, the first time we showed any of our films in this region was at this festival, everything just keeps returning to this festival and this region, the only exception was Kamp Katrina, but even Miss Pearl we met in Mardi Gras: Made in China, so it keeps coming to Boston, who knows what is going to happen next.

Sabin: We’re pretty big on those sort of connections and how all things are connected like putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward and that last step connects to the first step.

Redmon: It’s like the end of Intimidad, when you see Camilo walking, he’s going for a walk, and he’s putting one foot in front of the other, and that’s what they do and it continues throughout the film.

Tamés: Ashley and David, thanks for talking with me again, it’s a really beautiful film and thanks for sharing it with the audience and the world.

Redmon: Thanks for making time again, we hope our film will open up space for conversation.

###

The film is currently screening in festivals and is available for purchase online. Visit the Intimidad web page for purchase information and upcoming screening information which includes: University of Southern California, LA (October 28-29, 2008), Leeds International Film Festival, Leeds, UK (November 4-16, 2008), Museum of Modern Art, NY (November 14 & 19, 2008), East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee (November 18-19, 2008), International Latino Film Festival, San Francisco Bay Area (November 7-23, 2008), Cinema Latino, (Fort Worth, TX), (Aurora, CO), (Pasadena, TX), (Phoenix, AZ) Dates TBA, Skyland Arts Center, Hendersonville, NC (TBA) and Mobile, AL (TBA).

1. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee presents a detailed account of the origins and evolution of the web, and who better to tell the story than the inventor himself, who is currently Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (the organization responsible for setting web standards) at MIT. In the 1980s while working at CERN, Berners-Lee defined the core standards and wrote the first web server and browser that began the growth of the Web, which transformed the Internet into a document universe (similar to Ted Nelson’s docuverse but much simpler in design) by allowing users to hyperlink between documents that can reside on any computer connected to the Internet. The design of the Web balances decentralization and centralization in a manner than retains simplicity and allows for unrestricted growth and innovation. Berners-Lee’s writing is clear and concise, which should appeal to a wide audience. A lot of books have been written about the web. You have to be very careful when reading histories of the Internet and the World Wide Web, there are many articles, and even books, that present misleading histories. For example, Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business by Robert Reid gives much of the credit for the development of the World Wide Web to people who did not actually invent it and fails glaringly to properly credit, and sometimes even ignores, those who played key roles in the design, development, and evolution of the Web. For example, Tim Berners-Lee receives very little space in the book and other important figures are completely ignored. On the other hand, Weaving the Web is written with tremendous humility and grace and helps to set the record straight.

2. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler might at first appear to be a dense academic tome best left on the shelf, however, don’t let that stop you from making the effort to read it cover to cover. It will reward you with a comprehensive and insightful perspective on the networked information economy. The book passionately discusses how the Internet empowers individuals and groups working outside of the market economy to become (in some contexts) more productive than for-profit organizations. Examples include projects like Wikipedia and Linux. The production of information, knowledge, and creative works outside of the market system has profound implications for democratic discourse, culture, and justice. There are serious dangers posed by government regulation that protects old-world information companies, for example, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Benkler makes a persuasive argument that non-market production and innovation is a good thing that should be allowed to exist and thrive alongside the industrial information economy. The book provides a clear picture of the state of the internet and shows the Internet enriches peoples lives and has become an essential component of a free and open society. If we want to remain a vibrant liberal democracy, we must push back the dangerous encroachment of corporate interests that want to restrict the free flow of information on the Internet which is critical for the proper functioning of an open society and continued technological innovation. Benkler demonstrates a clear understanding of the information economy worthy of the title which is evocative of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Lawrence Lessig wrote that The Wealth of Networks is “the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years.”

3. Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web by David Weinberger provides a fascinating definition of the Web as an idea rather than a technology and discusses how it is challenging fundamental concepts of our culture. Weinberger writes: “If the Web is changing bedrock concepts such as space, time, perfection, social interaction, knowledge, matter and morality–each a chapter of this book–no wonder we’re so damn confused. That’s as it should be. A new world is opening up, a world that we create as we explore it.” The book provides thoughtful answers to questions such as: Why do we perceive the Web as space when it’s not? How is the Web threading and weaving our concept of time? Why does Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web, say it will always be a little broken? How does the web resolve the contradiction between viewing ourselves as members of a mass culture and as unique individuals? How does the Web change our concept of knowledge? How can the Web be so social and meaningful while traditional notions of technology has been that it’s alienating? How does the hyperlinked architecture of the Web reflect the structure of morality? David Weinberger answers these questions with clarity in a manner that will delight readers from both technical and humanistic backgrounds.

4. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins explains how media convergence is changing the relationship between audiences, producers, and creative work in the context of the emergence of participatory culture. Jenkins stresses this is not a technological revolution, but instead it is a cultural shift from a focus of literacy as individual expression to a process of community involvement. Jenkins presents examples like Survivor and The Matrix to demonstrate how participatory culture can be harnessed by big media who up until now have not been able to capitalize on fan-generated content, which has flourished outside of commodity economics, but is now in the sights of big media.

There are lots of excellent books on this and related topics, but this is my short list as of 2008. In future posts you can expect me to discuss more titles worth a read that cover specific applications and issues related to the Web and Internet.

Note: If you plan to purchase any of these books, I would appreciate it if you start from the links to Amazon on this page, as this will provide a small commission to Kino-Eye.com that goes towards hosting and production costs. Every little bit helps to keep this blog going. Thank you!

Navigating The Distribution Divide

Lance Weiler (filmmaker and DIY Days co-organizer) gave a presentation comparing traditional independent film distribution and a hybrid DIY model. Much has been written about the erosion of the independent film distribution business over the past year, including the widely circulated and discussed “Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling” message delivered by Mark Gill at the Los Angeles Film Festival’s Financing Conference.

Many distribution companies have closed, specialty films are experiencing lackluster box office results, and with the replacement of video stores with big-box retailers, shelf space for independent films is shrinking. And all of this is happening at the same time the supply of independent films is skyrocketing due to the democratization of production, post-production, and distribution. Here’s a juicy quote from Mark Gill’s piece in IndieWire:

Here’s how bad the odds are: of the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.

Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.

OK, so we have a problem, but where are the new business models? What models can independent filmmakers use to get their film in front of an audience?

Lance’s presentation slides are available as a PDF download: diydaysBoston.pdf (the two charts in this post are from the presentation).

Lance began his discussion with an explanation of current release windows, which is rapidly compressing due to changes in the marketplace. Right now, mainstream distributors think in terms of the following windows and in this order for the most part:

1. Festivals: indie filmmakers have traditionally seen this as a gateway to a distribution deal and did not have to worry about the other windows, I think a classic example of the old way is Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, the film premiered at Sundance where it picked up an award and the producers quickly sealed a distribution deal, however, this is rarely the case for independent filmmakers, these stories are exceptions to the rule, and it’s becoming more and more rare with the decline of speciality film distributors. Arin Crumley and Susan Buice’s Four Eyes Monsters, provides a classic example of the more realistic and difficult DIY model, none of the specialty distributors saw a way to make money with the film, however, the film did indeed find an audience, but the filmmakers had to take distribution into their own hands (which at this point has been written about widely, it has become an excellent case study).
2. Theatrical: classically this has been the window after festivals, but a lot of studios now start with a single festival and go right into wide release, classically the independent filmmaker’s goal was to get a distribution deal that included a theatrical release, and this “builds value in the ancillaries” and is an effective marketing campaign for for all the other forms of release of the film (home video, pay-per-view, etc), but this is becoming more and more expensive to do, and independent specialty films are being shut out as the number of screens for specialty films dwindles, distributors are taking less risks, and audiences for specialty films are increasingly watching them at home rather than in a theater.
3. Pay-Per-View: 90 to 100 days, only a few ways to get into cable and telcos, only a few players here, pay-per-view has been good for Lance, he’s managed to negotiate deals for this, his suggestion is to carve out each release window and negotiate rights separately, this can be very complicated, but worth it in the end, as you retain control of the destiny of your film.
4. Home video and DVD.
5. Pay cable, black-out deal, no competitive releases are allowed.
6. Basic cable.
7. Network TV.
8. Internet. Right now this is seen as the last window, but this is certainly on the verge of change with a growing number of aggregators and online distributors experimenting with direct distribution models. There is lots of room for innovation and experimentation in this window.

This multi-tiered strategy offers exclusivity to each exhibition and distribution entity in the value chain during its particular stage of release. In essence, each tier operates as an exclusive window in which an exhibitor or distributor may screen the film. Day and date, on the other hand, eliminates exhibition and distribution exclusivity, as more than one entity in the value chain (e.g. theater chain, DVD distributor, internet aggregator) is allows to show the film at the same time. Historically theatrical releases have had the largest advertising budget because it clearly helps create value in all of the other tiers down the chain

As release windows shrink, theatrical release no longer operates as effectively as an advertising campaign for releases in other formats and therefore this may have a serious impact on the viability of theaters, who have depended on the traditional model for their survival. As the release window model is undergoes change, traditionalists feel it’s a problem to move the Internet window sooner in the process, however, this perception is changing among some people, you can do an internet release sooner, in fact, why not consider doing it immediately after a successful festival screening that might have gotten you buzz and press for your film (as Scott suggested in his session)?

Lance urges filmmakers to make sure that in any distribution deal you make, negotiate caps on expenses, marketing, and promotion. Otherwise you provide the distributor with a way they can have a creative accounting loop.

Lance stressed that it’s very important to make a deal with an exit strategy, this is critical, you need to be able to walk away with your rights if the distributor does not perform, otherwise they might shelve your and you can’t exploit it. The moment a distributor thinks they are not going to make lots of money on your film, or think they will lose money, they will abandon it, they are in a portfolio management business, you film is just one of many assets they are exploiting at any one time, and often good films get shelved and end up in distribution limbo. Sometimes distributors do this to take a competitive title off the market.

If the contract does not have the distributor releasing the distribution rights to you after a certain amount of time, you can’t exploit your own film, so make sure you negotiate an exit strategy. I know of several films which ended up stuck in distribution limbo and the only DVDs that have been released after the theatrical run are bootleg DVDs made by the director himself, this is a horrible situation to be in, unable to distribute your own film and giving away bootlegs which in theory the distributor could sue you for releasing.

Lance thinks it’s essential when dealing with a distributor that you look and see what other films have gone through the process with them and ask the filmmakers what it was like to work with a distributor. I would add to this you need to find a good entertainment lawyer with experience negotiating with distributors. Some even will take a percentage of their fee now and the rest when a deal is made. It’s always good when your critical partners have skin in the game. Share the risk and reward. Lance also discussed what has become a horrible stumbling for many independent filmmakers: the average $15K to $20K cost to prepare all of the deliverables for a distributor (these figures are for small films in the under $1M budget category). I suggest looking over a couple of deliverable contracts to see what kinds of things are expected. They vary from distributor to distributor, what Lions Gate expects is very different from what ITVS expects. Sometimes you might get an advance to cover the cost of the deliverables, but this is not always the case.

Lance reminded us that if you give something away, you get nothing below it, therefore Lance’s strategy is to carve it all up and break it down, multiple deals across and have movie revert back to him and this allows him to repackage his work again and again. Lance provided some ranges of figures you can expect from distributors for specialty films:

• Overall global rights: $0 to $450K
• General domestic rights: $0 to $250K
• Home video rights: $0 to $60K
• Video on demand rights: $0 to 40K
• Pay cable rights: $45K and up
• Basic cable rights: $5K and up
• Internet rights: $0 to $5K

Try to cut a deal with at lease a $15K advance towards delivery costs, which can kill you. You will spend between $8K to $12K for E&O Insurance. Get E&O rolled into the deal is an option, so try to negotiate for that. Transfers can run you $3K to $1K for HD, DigiBeta masters etc. Music and effects tracks can run you $1 to $2.5K. Clearances and title search, music clearances and release forms and contracts could cost you $1K to $100,000K for this. Legal fees $2K to $30K. In other words, many first-time filmmakers fail to account for the cost of finishing their film from a legal and distribution perspective. If you want to get your film out into the world, you need to know what it costs, in summary, traditional delivery averages around $15K, with a wide variance depending on your specific film. Original music, for example, is much cheaper than negotiating music rights and clearances. Look at a sample deliverables contract, all sorts of arcane requirements, you typically get paid for all of this at delivery.

In the traditional distribution model, there are lots of players taking a piece of the pie, which is why in the traditional model the filmmaker get a very small percentage of the retail DVD price. Along the chain you have: Consumer DVD « Retailer/Rental (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Netflix, etc.) « Distributors (e.g. Ingram, Baker & Taylor, Studio Labels, entities large enough to talk with major retailers) « Sub-distributor (with enough volume to talk with the big distributors) « Filmmakers. It costs $20K for endcap placement in a large retailer, lots of pressure in the marketplace to sell mainstream, not specialty, titles. So what’s an independent filmmaker with an excellent specialty film to do?

Lance showed a digital distribution version of the chart, with iTunes, Voodo, Amazon, aggretors, studio labels, sub-aggregators, indie distributors, and with the exact number of steps, the same number of gatekeepers as before. So there remains lots of layers in the “value chain” between filmmaker and audience, each step extracting value at each stage and leaving very little for the filmmaker at the end of the chain, which reminds me that there are some similarities with the specialty coffee business, with retailers taking a larger percentage of premium prices so the coffee growers don’t see as much additional revenue as they should for their premium crops.

A new model may be evolving, from Festivals to Home Video DVD + VOD/Streaming, cable/sattelite/online + Pay or Basic TV. Shrinking release windows. Retailers might have issue with you being online, but From Here to Awesome is experimenting with this approach. Head Trauma started out as a virtual reality game before the film came out, then did the festival circuit, Lance did theatrical on his own. Lance also mentioned how Four Eyed Monsters did a podcast on their distribution saga. These have all been attempts to invert the model. DIY is flexible. Lance talked about 50/50 split vs. four-walling (you take all the risk) for doing theatrical screenings.

There’s lots of experimentation with new models going on right now. With Brave New Films Robert Greenwald has changed his style and distribution techniques based on political needs, clear calls to action, spreads the political message, he’s building a strong relationship with his audience, in contrast to Hollywood which has a hollow relationship with their audience, most of the interesting stuff that comes out of Hollywood properties like fan fiction are things that the Hollywood studios have nothing to do with, at least traditionally. I think the studios are getting smart and understand the value of storytelling across multiple media forms (known as transmedia storytelling), but so far, they’ve only controlled the movie and commercial tie-ins, not fan-generated media, however, in the near future I’m sure you will see some serious attempts to create new transmedia experiences by the studios, but but what makes fan fiction and fan media special is that it is NOT commodified media production, it’s all labor of love, so it will be interesting to see what happens when the studios try to step into this world. Some researchers at MIT are providing guidance in this area.

Lance believes that Audiience 1.0 was about traditional “broadcast” one to many marketing and distribution. Now with the emergence of Audience 2.0 the audience becomes part of the distribution network, they can amplify the message and become distribution hubs, all the people who help make a movie can become distribution points for the film. Examples of this include Wreck a Movie which provides a way to creating a film through connecting people and spreading information which was born from the film Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning. The producers of the film worked with people across the Internet to make and distribute the film. Lance reported that 3,000 people worked on the movie for 7 years, there’s real value in “crowd-sourcing” and all of those people can become distribution hubs. Another example is Swarm of Angels, driven by creative crowdsourcing and peer production, essentially a people-powered film studio.

Lance provided an excellent list of things to think about in terms of how to build an audience for your future:

1. Consider your own viewing habits
2. Who is you audience and why do they care?
3. Spend time thinking like your audience, how do they consume media?
4. Create a two-way conversation
5. Be prepared to spend time responding, this is huge, and time consuming
6. Build trust
7. Think of your audience as collaborators, never think you are smarter than them, they can revolt at any time
8. Have a clear call to action, consider the Dr. Horrible example, let your audience (collaborators) know “this is what I’m doing and why, help us spread this was the message,” this turns out to be one of the things people click on the most, consider why the Obama campaign has done well online, they offer people need simple steps in a call to action
9. Reward and respect the audience
10. The audience can not be controlled, can’t be stressed enough
11. Some tools are not for everyone, social media, it will not build the audience for you
12. Creating accounts won’t build the audience for you
13. Be willing to experiment
14. Share your findings openly with other filmmakers, this is the most important part and what DIY Days is about, this will help everyone in the community, this is about cross-pollinating audiences, and this can lead to real numbers

Lance also suggested five web tools that every filmmaker should understand:

1. Blogging with WordPress: blogging tool, make active, not static sites, updating constantly, people can subscribe, repost your content, other blogging tools include Blogger, Typepad, and Moveable Type (I think WordPress is the best among them), see wordpress.org if you want to host the blog on your own server
2. Sharing updates with Twitter: Lance uses it as an update tool, now CNN is twittering, lots of people are getting into this wonderful “micro-blogging” tool which is excellent for timely updates known as “tweets”
3. Content syndication with Feedburner: let people pull, easy to have blog posts sent as email to people, people can get your blog via RSS or Email
4. Social bookmarking with Delicious: share the things you enjoy, share with others, the more you share, the better, actively engage with the community, be conscious how you use these communities, sharing bookmarks is wonderful
5. Photo sharing with Flickr: this has helped Lance for high-res photos on presskit, prepared to link for photos, different versions of images, etc. document your work

I would add a sixth item to to this list, any one of the popular video sharing site like blip.tv, Vimeo, or YouTube, provides excellent way to embed trailers of your film on your web site or blog without dealing with any video hosting or bandwidth fees, also a good way to give away free shorts and behind-the-scenes materials.

Members of the audience suggested other sites that filmmakers should be aware of: Exposure Room for sharing your work and/or reel online for exposure and Seesmic for asynchronous visual conversation kind of a Twitter meets Video kind of thing, which was used successfully at Cannes. There’s also direct distribution start-ups doing interesting work like Caachi and Super Indie Films. All of these tools are a new part of the distribution and publicity mechanism available to independent filmmakers. There is a tipping point, the more you use it, the more people will help to amplify, many people think the filmmaking process is glamorous, tap into that using social networking tools.

Lance believes that “audience direct” is the future, especially for international distribution, some DIY solution providers worth looking into include:

• IndieFlix is a one-stop shop for non-exclusive distribution with a focus on community and discovery. They provide multiple revenue streams via PPV, sponsored streaming, download and DVD delivery direct from IndieFlix.com, and via third party delivery partners all at no cost to the filmmaker.
• B-Side is a technology company that provides acquisition, marketing, and distribution services to filmmakers, festivals, and distributors. Their mission is to find great films at festivals that fall through the cracks of the traditional distribution system and connect them with distribution opportunities.
• Breakthrough Distribution helps content creators maximize their distribution possibilities via online, retail, theatrical, broadcast, and other channels. Its independent producer platform provides rights holders with services, tools, and strategic frameworks to leverage new business models, technologies, and marketing approaches on a global basis.
• Neoflix is an integrated e-commerce, fulfillment, and customer support platform created specifically for self-distributing independent films.
• E-Junkie provides you shopping cart and buy now buttons to let you sell downloads and tangible goods on your website, eBay, MySpace, Google Base, Craigslist and other websites using PayPal, PayPal Pro, Google Checkout, Authorize.Net, 2CheckOut, ClickBank and TrialPay.
• CreateSpace, formerly CustomFlix, acquired by Amazon in 2005, allows you to sell directly through Amazon,and now Without a Box has become an Amazon company, they are buying lots of movie companies, interesting huh?

From Here To Awesome Filmmakers Roundtable

Arin Crumley led a discussion with From Here to Awesome filmmakers Matt Von Manahan, Zeke Zelker, Raffi Asdourian, Javier Prato, and Fritz Donnelly on how social media is working for them, how has the festival experiment changed the ways they think about making and releasing their films, and what they learned from “day and dating” their films.

Day and date is a release strategy in which a film is screened theatrically on the same day it goes into home video and/or broadcast (cable, broadcast, video-on-demand) distribution. This strategy been tried with films like Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble and Ten Items or Less. One reason for the day and date strategy is to maximize economies of scale in marketing and distribution expenses for films that are not expected to have a long theatrical run. Given current distribution trends and shrinking release windows, many experts predict more and more films will be released theatrically, on the internet and on home video formats at the same time. The day and date strategy diverges dramatically from the traditional release window model that Lance discussed in his presentation.

For Javier, From Here to Awesome was “the only festival” he submitted to (presumably because as a short film his piece has it’s best chance to find an audience online). Raffi said, “the results has been amazing.” Zeke said it was good for his film since it was “too controversial [for traditional distribution]” and people are “afraid of the [sexual] content.” Matt shot his film on 35mm and made in his parent’s basement. From Here to Awesome is a “user generated film festival,” viewers curate what films come in, filmmakers do their own social networking and see what opportunities are available, and they can get other filmmakers in this pool of opportunities. Javier said, “I had no idea of all these tools,” for him the “experience [was] amazing,” and he said, “I think this is a revolution and it’s happening, it’s just the beginning, it’s basically a school, a little bit of effort in learning all this amazing tools to get your work out there.” The panel also mentioned tools like Hulu and Our Stage for getting your work out there. Matt said that “YouTube was a good fit for us, 170,000 subscribers,” so he plugs his movies through videos on YouTube, which he said was a “creative way to market the film [that] does not cost anything.” Fritz said he sold his film To The Hills the on the streets of New York one on one and sold 3,000 copies that way, a lot for him, his perspective coming into this, screenings in little venues, movies in the hallway. When Matt was asked why in this day and age an indie filmmaker would shoot 35mm, he replied, “I wanted to it to look like a real movie,” but lamented that it involved, “dealing with the sacrifices, so much of the film was one or two takes” and apparently he would not do that again, because “the medium should not dictate the story that you tell.”

The panel spoke of a need to start establishing standards and best practices for DIY distribution and to get the word out how important it is to clear rights before putting the film online, especially if you worked with SAG, who starts chasing you after you start with making money with your film. It would be good to have more resources on DIY and the law, another example is that filmmakers need to establish best practices for brand inclusion as that has gotten several filmmakers in trouble. Some brands see inclusion as free product placement, others see it as trademark infringement.

There is a strong need to broaden the community, we’re not watching each other’s films, why not? We should be watching each others films and helping each other out in terms of distribution. My take on this has always been, people watch lots of movies, the competition is not really among indie filmmakers, it’s between the majors with the large advertising budgets and indies that have to vie for attention, but people have time to watch more than one indie film, so cooperation in this endeavor of distribution can go a long way in floating everyone’s boat.

An Open Conversation About Workflow

Andy Williams (Executive Producer, DIVE division of Shooters Post & Transfer) discussed the workflow involved in making and releasing a film and preparing deliverables that digital and traditional outlets require. The process of making and releasing a film can be a complicated process but a clear workflow path can ease the pain and reduce anticipated costs. In this session Andy took questions and comments from the audience and provided advice and suggestions. There were several questions about the new Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI) specification for digital theaters and Andy said mastering for this is a pain in the ass, it adds significantly to delivery costs, and you should do whatever you can to have the distributor pick up the cost if they want to release your film to an emerging number of digital theaters that are using this standard. So much of the DCI standard is about piracy protection rather than digital distribution, so it’s complex as a result. Standardizing on your video and audio formats for finishing your film in post and knowing what your deliverables are going to be will help you streamline your workflow and reduce costs.

Related post

On a related note, take a look at my post Distribution in the Digital Age for various lists of interest: Resources for independent filmmakers, Good blogs to read, Organizations, and start-ups doing interesting things, Related articles and interviews, and a list of industry publications.

Modern Filmmaking

Arin Crumley presented an indie filmmakers perspective on recent technological changes and how it has changed the creative process. In spirit the presentation was in the context of the possibility of a two way conversation between filmmakers and their audience (or better yet, community). It’s a recurring theme: create a dialog around your film, what does something like that look like? Arin talked about his Four Eyed Monsters experience and his travel around the world of conferences and filmmaking seminars (the case study has been covered extensively so I will not repeat here) and it’s a fine example of finding a community (rather than an audience) for your film which fits in nicely with the theme of DIY Days.

Arin had just returned from Burning Man where he was collaborating with Mike Hedge on a documentary about the event titled As the Dust Settles, that’s been his focus for the past few months, now in post. They shot with the Red camera and it’s a participatory documentary project designed to allow any individual who attended Burning Man to contribute their photos, videos and edited segments to the project as well as share in any proceeds from the project as well. Given the journey Arin has been on with Four Eyed Monsters, I’m looking forward to see what happens with As the Dust Settles.

Arin asked the audience about examples of interesting use of new technology and techniques in filmmaking, lots of examples were provided, including:

• _Cellular_ Cinema, a cellphone film festival;
• Todd Verow’s Hooks To The Left, a feature-length film shot on a cellphone
• David Redmond and Ashley Sabin’s documentary Intimidad, the film mixes cinéma-vérité footage the filmmakers shot and home-movie footage their subjects shot with a camera the filmmakers gave them in order to shoot their lives when the filmmakers were not around
• Awesome; I Fuckin’ Shot That a Beastie Boys concert film shot at a concert in which the band distributed fifty camcorders to the audience with the instruction, “keep the tape running” and the result is a ninety-three minute film with over six thousand cuts
• This is What Democracy Looks Like, a film shot by over a hundred cameras in the streets of the Seattle WTO protests providing multiple perspectives that could not have been created prior to the introduction of the consumer camcorder.

Film becomes more subjective, rather than objective, what does an individual see? There are an increasing number of participatory filmmaking projects starting up, the idea of a community participating in making a film is exciting, film is inherently a creative and collaborative experience and new tools are making this easier to do. From the old model of “Filmmaker, Subject, Audience” we are moving towards “Collaborators in Conversation.” Is it still “filmmaking” or is it something new? I’m reminded of Janet Murray’s list of characteristics that make computers an ideal medium for literary expression: they are Procedural, Participatory, Spatial, and Encyclopedic, which she discusses in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck.

Some of the “cool new tools” that were discussed includes the new Scarlett from Red (what the Red One Digital Cinema camera is to 35mm the Scarlett will be to Super16, small, hand-holdable, etc). And a new generation of D-SLR cameras that can shoot video, nice form factor, optics with cinematic depth of field, things are leaping in terms of technology. Apple Final Cut Pro has made non-linear editing easy and affordable, cheap hard drives you can record to directly, disposable cameras, give cameras to your subjects, you can now take crazy risks with cheap cameras, and things like Google Docs support internet-based collaboration, project planning, writing and more. And let’s not forget LED lighting, and portable digital audio recorders like the Zoom from Samson. Cheap hard drives. And Media Indexer Software allows you to browse indexes of your removable media as if they were inserted in your computer. This makes the process of finding your archived files fast and supports indexes export.

Some tools Arin is using on As The Dust Settles includes the Red camera (great for interviews, hard drive, long interview times, straight to a hard drive is a lot better, yet the camera is so heavy, it can be a pain in the ass to shoot with cause of the weight of the camera, but there’s a quality trade-off to be made), the community around the Red camera is a cult bordering on the insane, an amazing open source community around the camera, lots of feedback, corrections, you don’t get that from Sony or Panasonic (I think you get something like it but not as intense from Panasonic), Red really gets the concept of community.

Arin talked about collaboration at a distance and explained the process of emailing FCP project files (each person has a copy of the media files on identical hard drives) and using Google Docs for collaboration (this is how I collaborated with my editor Elissa Mitz while editing Smile Boston Project in order to avoid Boston cross-town traffic). It’s not up to the filmmaker how the audience experiences the film, viewers will do what they want, give full control to the audience in this case, a way they can experience it the best waty and have then decide the scaled down experience. From Here to Awesome is making a list of digital screen 600 movie theater database, so people know where they can show their films, an environment where filmmaker taps into a network. Arin is supportive of open codecs, DIY Filmmakers should be using open source codecs.

The Era Of Digital Creativity: Opportunities & Challenges

Scott Kirsner talked about living in the era of digital creativity: ideas can take shape and reach audiences with an ease that was not possible one generation ago. Now the tools of production and the channels of distribution have been democratized. The old forms like half-hour TV shows, hour-long dramas, 90 to 120 minute feature films don’t seem to work as well in the new environment. So Scott asks: What forms and storytelling strategies might replace them? What will evolve on the internet? And most importantly to everyone who was at the confernece, how are we going to build audiences for our work and earn a living?

One problem, however, is a glut of independent movies competing for audience attention. Scott shared an interesting statistic: in 2000 973 independent films were submitted to Sundance, in 2007 the number grew to 3,624. There’s a lot of noise out there, and I’m always reminded of this sobering point: viewers still have the same number of hours each week for their leisure activities, and not only are there more movies to choose from, there are many new media forms. In spite of this, Scott suggests that “this is the best time ever to be a storyteller” and he presented the audience with five challenges and five opportunities.

The opportunities are:

1. Collaboration and Participation. The approach of “I have my crew, I have my vision, it’s my project” is being replaced with “everyone can help me.” For example, consider the model being used by Robert Greenwald and his collaborators, using field producers to conduct interviews remotely, collaboration, new ways to make films, an example of this is Iraq for Sale, anyone can contribute to a wiki, films cam be made by more than you and your team, it’s tapping into the “society of audience” to borrow a phrase from the MIT Media Lab used a long time ago before the web changed everything.

2. New Forms and Formats. Much of what we talk about when we say “I’m making a film” is the traditional 90 to 120 minute program designed to watch in one sitting, it’s crazy not to work in new forms and new formats, right now we see growing ways to distribute and not a lot of experimentation in forms. Joss Whedon, during the writer’s strike, made his own project, explores new forms and formats, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is well done video in the $100,000 to $150,000 budget range, 7 minute segments, what is the movie musical going to look like on the internet? Here’s an interesting example. New Forms and Formats are where it’s at. Try it.

3. New Tools and Software. Two examples are machinima going mainstream with things like the Red vs. Blue series in which the producers used video game software to render characters for their film. Another example of this is the wonderful new Red digital cinema camera that provides 90% of 35mm quality to independent filmmakers at a cost that’s at or lower the cost of shooting on High Definition video.

4. New Distribution Channels. A mix of established and new generation aggregators are getting films onto iTunes, for example, Michael Buckley satirizes American celebrity culture on his vlog What the Buck, one of the most popular shows on YouTube. He has makes more from YouTube than from his Day Job, which he recently quit, since he got a development deal with HBO. These new channels should not be overlooked by independent filmmakers. Theatrical has always been the holy grail, but in terms of what’s really practical, new channels are opening up much more interesting opportunities for filmmakers.

5. New Marketing Modalities. Lance Weiler developed a game around Head Trauma, his new film, a game is a way to market a movie, another example is the way the King Korn documentary has been marketed with online activities for fans.

And the challenges are:

1. Giving up control. Indie filmmakers might have to get used to being a ringmaster rather than an auteur, a good example is Brett Gaylor’s Open Source Cinema, a collaborative project with the goal to produce Basement Tapes, a documentary film. The site was launched in 2004 and serves as a repository for all of the footage for the film licensed under a Creative Commons license, which the audience is free to remix. The site also hosts user-generated remixes that have subsequently been edited into the final film.

2. Experimentation is really hard. It’s hard enough to make an independent film. It’s even harder to do it in an experimental manner and try new things. It’s a challenge, and at the same time an opportunity.

3. Rights and Windows Conflicts. It’s time to take advantage of the instant gratification culture of the internet. Sundance will get your film know, why not sell the film right then and there, release window conflict with home video or theater downloads, conflict one example is the film 10 Items or Less, tried to release 2 weeks after theaters on clickstar, the problem is no movie theater wanted to show it for that reason, Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner are into experimenting with WIndows

4. Getting Paid is still a pain. This is a problem that will not go away, there have been various cases of aggregators not paying filmmakers, for example, Sundance recently ended its relationship with Mediastile, a new media aggregator, after the company failed to send royalty payments and traffic reports to the festival directors who screened films online through iTunes and Netflix. No matter what you do, you should always have rights revert back to you if an aggregator fails to properly distribute your film and pay you. This was good advice with traditional distributors (I know several filmmakers whose films ended up in limbo when the distributor decided to shelf the film) and it’s double good advice with new media distributors who may or may not be here tomorrow.

5. Being a filmmaker is really hard work. It’s a big job and add to that being an entrepreneur, which is also a big job. You have to ask what is the business model, what is the strategy, what is the target market for the film, this is a producer’s job, and if you’re lucky you will partner with a good producer, but for many of us, it’s hard to be an independent filmmaker doing it all ourselves. Two good examples of filmmakers taking matter into their own hands successfully include first-time filmmakers Josh Caldwell and Hunter Weeks’ 10 MPH, Tiffany Shlain’s The Tribe, and We Are The Strange by M dot Strange. All of these projects point to new ways to distribute to the market and it takes a lot of work.

So here’s a thought for filmmakers to consider. The whole world knows about movies when they play at their first festival, “you have to wait until we distribute it” then wait longer to get into DVD, Scott suggests that it is becoming absurd to wait, you need lots of time to market, the first time someone hears about it they want to buy it then, you can’t tell someone “coming in June” unless you have a serious marketing campaign, you have maybe 500 people see you film at a festival, 2,000 festival audience, still millions out there, lots of movies that play at top tier festivals are never picked up for distribution, no DIY strategy, no sugar daddy distributor, Scott’s point is for 80% of films that are not picked up, creating another moment like the SXSW premiere is not going to happen again. Holding out for theatrical, playing roulette at the festival, reality the odds are against you, the odds are not great, no money for festival screenings, sometimes you can get screening fees but it’s rare.

A Sundance premiere can get you the leverage to demand a screening fee from second tier festivals, but it’s very rare, festivals run break-even or at a loss (as Anna Feder, Director of the Boston Underground Film Festival was quick to point out), not a good source of money for your film, though there are exceptions as some filmmakers in the audience pointed out. Scott Kirsner a little while ago asked the folks at Sundance, is there any rule to prevent from selling during the festival, no rule against it, Sundance does want premieres, however, Sundance said no one had done an online release at the same time as a festival, use the big festival thing to be there you can see it on my web site, if you think about it, use a film festival as a launching point for an online release. I think this might become an emerging pattern. iTunes does not deal with indies at this time, but their top shorts have come through festivals.

My notes continue in this post:
DIY Days Boston, October 4, 2008 (conference notes, part 3) (added 13-Oct-08)

An Investor’s Perspective On Indie Film And Digital Media

The conference got off to a good start with Scott Kirsner (CinemaTech) moderating a fireside chat (sans fire, but the room did get warm) with Todd Dagres (General Partner of Spark Capital) and Lance Weiler (filmmaker and DIY Days co-organizer). Todd Dagres has a unique perspective on the funding of film and digital media. He’s led Spark’s investments in start-ups like Veoh Networks and EQAL and has also been involved in the production of several films including TransSiberian which was released by First Look Studios. Todd suggests that even though for a while it looked like technology was “king,” content is really “king,” and he chose to invest in creative properties because he wanted to be inside the circle rather than a looking from the outside looking in.

Scott asked Todd to share a painful lesson. Todd replied, “Once you’re done with your film you have to get it distribution, you basically give up control of the baby,” since distributors are people who “just want to make money, the second they believe they are not going to make money with your film they move on to the next film.” Todd sees lots of opportunity in disrupting the established industry and said, “the 30 second commecial is dead, TV programmed to a time of day is dead […] I don’t watch TV when I’m supposed to, who watches commercials anymore?” And therefore he’s “investing in companies that are trying to break [the existing model].”

Scott suggested that all “these companies are still having trouble making a profit,” and Todd replied that we’re in the same place as the early days of TV, producing the content is expensive, sponsors are needed, and he said, “I can prove with data [that] monetization is not on par with what is being spent on the web.” And this creates a huge opportunity for people who figure out how to package stuff. Studios, for the longest time had a model based on extracting value from a library of content, and up until two years ago it was all about protecting the library, now they are broadcasting and allowing you to stream content, but still figuring out how to monitize their content, with a TV show you have ads. Todd mentioned that “on Next New Networks Obama girl gets more views [than most TV shows],” but Scott reminded us that “lots of gems are not there online yet.” Todd suggests that the networks are “still waiting to sell you the stuff in BluRay form.”

Lance suggested that community plays a big part, the new models have to be about viewer to engagement, the key to success on the web is community, if you are a traditional television or film person, you think of audience, you think of a demographic, that’s thinking in terms of a passive medium, people watch and then go somewhere else, Lance suggests, “forget the word audience, the new word is community,” and explained that content should be the seed that gets the community interacting with the content, and viewers must have some impact on what happens. It’s interesting that with most popular shows like Lost there are very active social networks with people talk with each other about the show, why would producers not want to foster that? Todd suggested that it’s because they are “still addicted to nielson ratings and ads,” since they can make a show for $3M and sell $4M in ads and make some more money selling figures and tie ins with McDonalds. What are the major barriers to new forms of distribution and reaching an audience? One of them are are guild and contract barriers, as Todd said, “great ideas can get bogged down by the Hollywood machines structures put in place by lawyers to protect them from other lawyers who are going to sue them.”

So in the end this creates many opportunities for doing shows in a new way, for reaching out to find your audience, or better yet community. It’s still very hard to convice investors they are going to make money with this, the odds are against you to be realistic about it, but you have to think out of the box. Todd brought up the example of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” which is one big product placement, they “almost pay for production” with the product placement. Very fertile ground for artists, not everyone knows what they are selling and how to sell it, Todd said, “the most relevant ad for me is content, things I care about and things I want to see,” which is good, but that seems to make more sense for episodic content, what about movies? The market is shaken, traditional models disrupted, things fragment, what happens is there is a natural consolidation to a few, that means we move from people with lock-in to people with new locks and then that wil be disrupted, but that will take a long time. How can we move to a new model so indie filmmakers can be more successful. Lance and Todd are suggesting that the community must start interacting more with each other and consume each other’s films, american idol of indie film, we could create a social network that would promote these films and share promotion and start to work on the problem of how to finance these things. It’s the same message I’ve heard ever since I first got involved in independent film in 1988, however, there is one thing that is significantly different now compared to then: the internet really does level the playing field. Instead of working through gatekeepers to find our audience, we can now find our audience directly, however, it’s not easy. It never has been. But building a relationship on your own allows you to capitalize on the relationship and own and control you own destiny. It still takes investors. And you still can’t promise anyone you’re going to make money. But I’d rather work on building a community than struggling to find a distributor whose agenda is at odds with my own.

If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead: Creating Value In A Spreadable Marketplace

Xiaochang Li and Ana Domb from the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium gave a presentation from an academic perspective how media spreads in the current landscape and how the audience engages with it. They suggest moving away from thinking about the “viral” and “sticky” metaphors because they strip users of their agency. Instead, they suggest a framework based on “spreadable media” which is in sharp contrast with older models that emphasize centralized control over distribution. They were hesitant to share their slides or research report because the research they did was supported by corporate sponsors, the very organizations that are being disrupted. Gone are the days when academics could share their ideas openly, now they give is brief overviews while the corporate sponsors get the juicy details. It was strange to listen to a presentation at a conference based on open source ideas and sharing that could not be shared with the participants. But this puts in sharp relief the tensions between private enterprise (which thrive on competitive advantage and secrecy) and professional organizations (that thrive on sharing of information and techniques among peers). Ana said that eventually the embargoed research will be made public. Of course the slides were videotaped, so you can get them that way, but no deck in digital form was forthcoming.

They spoke of viral concepts and memes as a unit of cultural dissemination. I’m surprised they did not mention Douglas Rushkoff, who has written a lot about these topics over the years, his Media Virus was one of my favorite books in graduate school and he’s written many others, and while some are now dated, they provide a valuable historical perspective on how this internet media distribution and media sharing thing has evolved since the early 1990s. But back to Xiaochang and Anna. They suggest more open ended participation in media distribution and that humans are part of the spreading equation, Social Networks, Web 2.0, Technology is an enabling agent for what people want to do. They provided a nice discussion of the moral economy, the gift economy, sometimes money takes the back seat (like professional conferences like this), sometimes money is front and center (like when research can’t be shared). My examples, not theirs.

It’s clear that big companies are freaking out, they are focused on commodity culture while people also engage in the gift economy, file sharing and piracy makes it hard for companies making sense of circulation of media. It’s not polite not to share what you have (social contract) when you can share it, but corporations want to sell you things again and again, they don’t want you to share a book, they want to sell a book to everyone. Producers work on economic dictates while many consumers work on social dictates. From an economic standpoint, companies think file sharers are stealing, but in a gift economy, not sharing would be socially damaging. This is all interesting stuff and I’d suggest reading The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler.

We are moving away from a filmmaker / distributor / audience model to a filmmaker / {Supporter, User, Consumer, Advocate, Investor, Fan, etc.} model. The relationship is becoming much more rich and complex. Media theorist John Fisk suggests that content is flows when it’s producerly, people can take the it as raw mateiral and communicate their own messages, so we have to start thinking of the things that we make as more open ended. Spreadable media good for active commitment, audience integral part of film’s success, online world of mouth, you can reach niche audience, communicate w/ audience in a way they want to be addressed and where they already are. This all results in building a stronger emotional tie with audience. As filmmaker Orlando Sena, a Brazilian Filmmaker suggests, “right now, imagination is much more important than information.” Mashups and remixing is huge part of this, giving audience a way to play with mashups, engage with the content, examples include Lance’s Head Trauma mashups, and sites like JumpCut and Kaltura that allow people to pay a part in editing your material and creating new things from it, our new role is to facilitate that process. Or, as Lance said, crete s seed from which to build a community.

Show Me the Money

Slava Rubin talked about crowdfunding and fan participation. Through a direct connection through social networks, email, blogs, house parties, twitter, etc. and a call to action, filmmakers can transform their niche audiences into a fundraising and promotional base. Slava’s own company, IndieGoGo, is helping filmmakers with a process they call DIWO (Do-It-With-Others) Funding and Filmmaking. They describe themselves very well on their web site, so I will not go into detail here. The film Flow, currently screening at Kendall Cinemas, was among the first films to use IndieGoGo as part of their fundraising and release strategy. In summary, Slava suggested filmmakers need the following to succeed in this new environment: 1. the medium by which you take your project viral, 2. the content has to be great, really great, and 3. a very clear call to action, what do you want people to do? Good resources for learning more include Kevin Kelly’s blog, Peter Broderick, Cinema Tech, IndieGoGo’s Blog and DIWO Guide Online, and the Workbook Project.

And then we broke for lunch. I’ll continue my coverage of the conference in a second blog post. Right now it’s time to go to sleep. It’s been a long, fascinating, wonderful day.

My photos of the event are on Flickr at: flickr.com/photos/kino-eye/sets/72157607770556279/ or check out all photos on Flickr tagged with diydays and boston

My notes from the conference are continued in two posts:

• DIY Days Boston, October 4, 2008 (conference notes, part 2) (added 9-Oct-08)
• DIY Days Boston, October 4, 2008 (conference notes, part 3) (added 13-Oct-08)

• 7:00 P.M., Friday, October 3, 2008
• Tower Auditorium, Massachusetts College of Art and Design
• 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston (Directions | PDF Map)
• Easy T access via Green E line (Longwood Stop) or 39 Bus
• For driving and parking directions, see note at the end of this post
• The screening is free and open to the public

A group of us will be going out to one of the local watering holes for a drink after the screening, so check in with Bren Bataclan or I immediately after the screening to find out where we’ll be headed.

This takes place on the eve of DIY DAYS Boston (the conference is also free, however, registration is required to attend the conference, but not the Friday night screening).

Screening Lineup for the Evening will be:

Smile Boston Project (2007, David Tames, 20 min.) In the summer of 2003 Bren Bataclan began leaving paintings of his colorful characters in public places with a note attached that says, “This painting is yours to keep if you promise to smile at random people more often.” The film examines the artists influences, his goals, and the reactions of people who have found, purchased, and critiqued his paintings.

Ring of Blood (2008, Javier Prato, 4 min.)
A mercenary hired by the Asian mafia to steal a diamond ring worth millions of dollars decides to go against them and keep it for himself. Starring Davis Choh as the unruled mercenary and Viktor Murakami as the villain. It’s only a matter of time to see who finally gets that precious ring.

Book of Caleb (2008, Matthew Von Manahan, 108 min.) Twenty-something Caleb Callahan, a crusader without a cause, ventures back to his homeland of suburbia where he reunites with his childhood companions: a mastermind serial prankster and a trusty sidekick. After one of their prank has consequences, Caleb is forced to be the hero, save his friends, and give his life direction.

Driving/Parking information
The best way to get to MassArt is via the T, however, if you need to drive, free parking will be available for screening attendees in the MassArt Ward Street lot on a first-come basis if you enter the lot between 6:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. on the night of the screening. Here are the details:

• If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue: as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light onto Longwood Avenue, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left. This is pretty clear if you take a look at the Google Map.
• If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue: take a right at the light onto Longwood Avenue, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left. This is pretty clear if you take a look at the Google Map.

This screening is made possible by the generosity of MassArt Professional and Continuing Education, DIY DAYS, and From Here to Awesome.

 Play Video (7:53, Flash Video)

Note: if a video player does not appear in your browser when you click the play button, visit the blip.tv video page to see the video.

Archival Image Credits: Kinetoscope Parlor, Publicity or news photograph of San Francisco Kinetoscope parlor, ca. 1894–95, British Film Institute; Publicity photograph of man using Edison Kinetophone, ca. 1895; Serpentine Dance (1895), produced by the Edison Co., part of the Open Source Movies collection; Thomas Edison, half-length portrait, facing left and looking down into glass, experimenting in his laboratory, United States Library of Congress; The Edison Home Kinetoscope, 1914, Thomas A. Edison, Inc.; Advertising photo, Net#Work BBDO, South Africa, Graeme Jenner, Julian Watt (Creative Directors), photo by Brian Gibbs, 2007, copyright material used under industry best practices guidelines for fair use; iPod video en la palma de mi mano by Pedro Aznar, 2005, copyright material released under the terms of a creative commons license; Viewing iPod by Michael.M, copyright material released under the terms of a creative commons license; Half Nelson audience at IFFB, courtesy of Adam Roffman, Independent Film Festival of Boston, copyright material used with permission; Pixar Lobby by Elia Diodati, 2007, copyright material released under the terms of a creative commons license; Technicolor Camera, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Photographic History Collection.

Maria’s Story (1990, Monona Wali & Pamela Cohen, 53 min.) is a documentary portrait of Maria Serrano, a 39-year-old woman who is a peasant, mother, and guerrilla leader who at the time the film was made, had spent over a decade of her life fighting in the hills of El Salvador. Some might condemn the film as agitprop, others would argue it provides an insightful point-of-view of the late-eighties struggle in El Salvador from a highly personal point-of-view. The film is also interesting and important because of the manner in which it was made. More on that later. The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 1991 Sundance Film Festival, had a modest theatrical release, and was broadcast by PBS on P.O.V.

I would argue the film is not propaganda due to the fact the filmmakers focused on one woman’s story through which the filmmakers explored the injustice of the situation of El Salvador. Reminds me of the old film school adage, “show don’t tell.” The film was made in conjunction with CISPES (Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) and was a very effective fundraising tool for them, definitely in part to film’s personal perspective. Viewers might disagree with Maria, her politics, her approach to the problems she faces, but they could not disagree with the reality of her life and the people around her. Not only is there no such thing as objectivity, the duplicitous “objectivity” of the mainstream media stifles real dialog, real debate, real understanding. I like my documentaries with a point-of-view from perspective of real people, and if the filmmaker has an agenda, so be it, as long as they are willing to go to bat for their facts and perspectives and the social reality they are depicting.

But I digress. This post is more about what makes this particular film interesting from the perspective of media technology history: the production of the film was made possible by the use of a new Sony Video8 camcorder that recorded high quality audio and introduced around the time the film started filming. This film was made at a watershed moment in documentary film history. The filmmakers have told the story (ref. Q&A session during a San Francisco screening of the film, circa 1991) of the first time they went down to El Salvador with their 16mm film camera, audio recording gear, and many cans of 16mm film. Maria’s response, in summary, was “with all that gear you can’t move fast, you’re going to get us killed” and the filmmakers returned to San Francisco and had to rethink how they were going to shoot the film.

This was just around the time that Video8 (and soon after Hi8) were being discussed in documentary circles as viable alternatives to 16mm film and Betacam SP for shooting documentary films. There was lots of talk about whether PBS would accept Video8 (and later Hi8) documentaries and the video engineers and film snobs were out in full regalia for this debate. John Knoop, the cinematographer on the project, came up with a solution, using Sony’s new Video8 prosumer camcorder, a small shoulder mounted camera that had high-quality built in audio recording capabilities with real audio meters, and he fashioned some solar panel powered battery chargers for the camera batteries. The prosumer Video8 (and later Hi8) video cameras, were lighter and a tad smaller than most 16mm film cameras like the Aaton LTR popular at the time, but they required more electrical energy than their 16mm counterparts, so a methodology of charging the batteries in the jungle was critical.

With the new smaller gear and a way to charge their batteries far from the power grid, the filmmakers returned to El Salvador and this time Maria allowed them to follow her and her army of children and men as they travel through the hills to their campsites in preparation for what they hope will be their final offensive against the government. With very little resources and a small number of weapons, they are not the revolutionaries we see in movies but this film is about a social reality we often don’t see. Revolutionaries who are also mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, fighting for basic human rights. No stars or effects or steadicam or sweeping crane shots in this film. Just life as the filmmakers observe it day to day living under harsh conditions. The quality of the video image actually works in favor of this film, constantly reminding you this is a mediated experience, not a mimetic virtuality.

The film is also interesting because for the theatrical release the filmmakers had no choice but to produce a film print. This was at the time that a post firm in Los Angeles called Image Transform has perfected a video to film process that was helping filmmakers make film prints that looked good enough to entice some distributors and theaters to program films that had been shot in video. We don’t get hung up on shooting medium these days, but circa 1990 people sure did. The video vs. film as an acquisition medium debate was raging like a California wildfire.

The film is primarily a document of political struggle, but it’s also a turning point technologically because it was among the first films shot in Video8 that presented a compelling and important portrait that could not have been made with the analog photo-chemical film medium. The electronic Video8 format provided for a smaller camera, recording sound and picture in the same camera (16mm required the use of a separate Nagra 1/4″ tape recorder) which further reduced the technological overhead, making this film possible.

The use of a small video camera improves the filmmakers ability to record everyday life in a more intimate fashion. One of the more poignant scenes in the film is when Maria travels back to her home village, devastated by long years of fighting, and talks about the events that transformed her from a young girl into a guerrilla leader, and the story is all the more intense through the unvarnished video image with it’s matter-of-fact starkness, we observe how she’s become a hero to her people, inspiring her troops as they prepare to engage with the government.

There’s another scene I remember in the film when Maria, her soldiers, and the filmmakers are attacked by government troops. The filmmakers dive for cover. The camera, dropped to the ground, continues to record the skirmish, and while the picture from the camera laying on it’s side is not interesting, the soundtrack is about as real as you ca get and brings you there into the moment in a manner that post-production sound effects just can’t do, you know this soundtrack is real, it’s a part of Maria’s life. For this scene, the filmmakers take the actual audio footage of the attack and lay over it images they had shot at a different time. We’re a visual culture and we need images as a frame upon which to experience a film, even though sound carries most of the emotion. Some people complained that it was a re-creation. The documentary purists cried foul. But they did not understand the role of sound in conveying the so-called reality of the moment, and providing authenticity, but that’s a whole other discussion.

At their best, documentary films provide us with points-of-view we could not, or would not (possibly due to ideological bias), ever see on our own. They are extensions of our collective selves that allow us to share social reality with others, and the evolution of cameras from analog film, to analog video, and finally to digital video has made it possible to show so much more, to go places that we could not have gone before. Maria’s Story was made at a very important inflection point in this history, among the first films to show us a social reality we would not have been able to see here in the United States had it not been for the introduction of viable prosumer camcorder with decent image and audio quality from Sony.

I saw the film and heard the filmmakers talk seventeen years ago, so my memory might be sightly inaccurate here and there, but the gist is right. The film is currently distributed by Filmmakers Library and is available on DVD and VHS. A wonderfully effective example of intimate documentary filmmaking and making good use of new technology to produce a story that otherwise could not have been told.

Who should attend? Anyone who makes creative work: film, video, music, games, especially if you would describe yourself as an independent filmmaker. The day consists of both structured and free form activities to encourage open discussion and the opportunity to break into groups and get everyone talking to each other. Register now, the event is free but space is limited due to the size of the venue, designed to encourage an active and participatory discussion among participants.

This conference, inspired by the success of “unconferences” in other professions, is quite special because it’s being organized by filmmakers and supported by generous sponsors, hosts, and volunteers, rather than driven by vendors. It started last year when filmmaker Lance Weiler (Head Trauma, The Last Broadcast) reached out to Arin Crumley (Four Eyed Monsters) and Mike Belmont (We Are the Strange) with the idea to create a virtual conference and festival. After a series of discussions they decided that the virtual event would be a way to connect filmmakers directly with audiences and the event itself could become a model for open content distribution, one which allowed filmmakers to have a say in how their films were reaching audiences. It also enabled them to take concepts from the Workbook Project (an open source project for content creators) and to put them into practice. To make a long story short, the virtual event evolved into an online and real world event in two parts: (1) The From Here to Awesome festival which is playing out in theaters, living rooms, online and via mobile devices and (2) a series of live conferences with participatory discussion know as DIY DAYS.

The organizer’s goal is to create an open discussion and debate that will evolve as the conference travels around to several cities. At the end of the process, the organizers intend to share the results and then go back to the drawing board to plan for year two. I’m excited that this conference is coming to Boston, and being hosted in such a wonderful location. See you there!

Anna Pinker works for a multimedia production company producing museum exhibits and blogs at stillindie.com which is building an interesting collection of posts of interest to independent filmmakers.

Julie Donnelly is a journalist with eight years of experience in radio and television, mostly with public and international broadcasters. She hopes to transition to a public affairs or media relations role. She is trying to learn as much as she can about new media and interested in fun video and audio projects. On Twitter she’s djcitymaus and she’s also can be found on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Steve Garfield is now teaching at Boston University and did a recent blog post on trying to mail in his Boston Absentee Ballot that got quite a few hits after he submitted it to CNN iReports. It’s quite a story. Check it out.

Steve mentioned that Bre Pettis has a new show pilot for the History Channel called History Hacker. Looks pretty cool (there’s a trailer on his site at the moment).

Yours truly mentioned that DIY DAYS is coming to Boston. How do independent filmmakers sustain themselves as filmmakers in this day of shifting film distribution systems? How do filmmakers monetize their work and get the word out without mainstream distributor support? DIY DAYS aims to answer these questions with a day of panels, roundtable discussions and workshops. DIY DAYS will be held in Boston on Saturday, October 4th, along with a screenings of From Here to Awesome films the night before on Friday, October 3rd. Both events take place at MassArt.

We’re looking for suggestions and/or volunteer presenters for upcoming Media Tech Tonic sessions, this is a series of monthly demos/seminars on media technology topics for media makers and artists held the third Wednesday of each month at MassArt which allows us to go into more depth on a specific topic than we can during Boston Media Maker meetings.

John Herman is a web video producer, artist, and teacher. He talked about the various web serial productions that he is working on. First looks at ‘Odd Noggin’ and ‘Thomas in Wonkyland’ are on his blog. He is also working a second season of interactive web series Gravityland and the energy conservation reality show EnergySmackdown. Apart from his web video work, he asked for support in promoting an exciting bipartisan grassroots Voter Registration Night that his brother Justin Herman is hosting at the Washington Nationals Stadium. Also John is the host of New Hampshire Media Makers and invites everyone to attend.

Chris Herot (blog | twitter) is an entrepreneur, consultant, working in the digital media space, video conferencing, digital video, digital music, etc. who is currently in the process of starting a company, something in the area of digital media, television, and the internet. He’s looking for creative people to collaborate with.

Jennifer Goodwin runs InternetGIRLfriday.com, a group of virtual assistants that will do your work (administrative, bookkeeping, marketing, websites, shopping carts, project management etc.) so you can have your free time back to do whatever you want with it. They can provide administrative assistants, graphic & web designers, bookkeepers, travel/event planners, marketing & PR gurus, receptionists, computer organizers, lead generators and partners of many business vendors. For freelancers and growing entrepreneurs, just-in-time personnel can help you remain small and nimble as you compete with “the big guys” delivering better quality and lower cost with more efficient resource allocation.

Matt Searles makes ultra modern super awesomeness type experimental electronic music. He also blogs on philosophy, archetypal psychology, comparative myth, music production, composition, aesthetics, new media, guaranteed to creep out a few of your brain cells, as I can attest after listening myself several times. You can keep up with him on Twitter too: mattsearles. Some people are x-axis or y-axis off center, but Matt is z-axis off center (that’s a good thing).

David DeBlaiso (dm Design started doing graphic design, moved to web design, 3D rendering, store redesign, hands-on work with owners, he’s now working at APC as a production designer, he’s interested in where television and the web is going. He suggested that MosaicGlobe is a good place for artists to place their portfolio sites with multiple pages, galleries, blogs, audio, and more.

Sean O’Connor is a filmmaker who made a short mockumentary which is in the festival circuit and is now in the process of writing a feature length feature, he wants to discuss issues of independent filmmaking, DVD release, and alternative distribution. He also wants to get his hands on a Red. So do I, but I’m actually waiting for the Scarlet which I think will be as significant to documentaries today as was the Eclair NPR forty years ago.

Cort Johnson is co-founder of goSwoop, a site that helps international students accomplish their education goals to study in the United States. The site started in Madrid and moved to Boston and now most of the team lives Dhaka. The site seeks to connect international students to students and institutions here and to talk with admissions counsellors, etc. They just launched a newsletter/podcast series, interviewing college counsellors, high school counsellors, and getting this information to interested to students around the world. They are interested in learning how they can get their word out more effectively to students.

 Play Video (19:01, Flash Video, note: if a video player does not appear in your browser, visit the blip.tv video page to see the video.

Special thanks to Steve Garfield for providing me with the video he shot with his Nokia N95. I had originally planned this to be an audio interview, but when Steve Garfield gave me his video of the discussion, it became a video. When I combined his video and my audio, I was impressed that the audio sync drifted less that a frame from start to end. Many of the little cameras drift a lot (like my Canon TX1). The N95 is an impressive little camera.