Ken Burns cannot be stopped

Reuters has a quick interview with filmmaker Ken Burns, who’s at Telluride and talking about his new documentary for PBS, “Tenth Inning,” a sequel to his nine-part series “Baseball.” What is mindblowing is at the end of the interview when he’s asked what he’s working on now:

We’re in post-production on a three-part, six-hour history of Prohibition. We are in the middle of editing a big series on the Dust Bowl. We’re doing a film on the Central Park jogger case. We’re doing a huge, huge mega-series on the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor. And we’re gearing up for Vietnam.

Three cheers for a documentary filmmaker who doesn’t stick himself in his own films, bases his work on sit-down interviews, and does long looks at big subjects. Amazing.

In a 2007 interview with American Profile, he shed some light on how he’s able to do this:

“There’s really little else that occupies my time,” says Burns, whose seven-part series on World War II—titled simply The War—begins Sept. 23 on PBS. “I put in 80 hours a week when I’m working on a series. I basically work my butt off, then I spend time with my wife and kids.”

Taking a structural view of ‘A Film Unfinished’

Slant Magazine’s Tom Stempel has a piece on “Understanding Screenwriting” that takes a close look at the structure of Yael Hersonski’s “A Film Unfinished.” He sets it up this way:

The problem facing Yael Hersonski was this. She had a rough cut, without a soundtrack, of a Nazi documentary called The Ghetto. It had been filmed in the spring of 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, but not completed, apparently because the Nazis started shipping Jews out of the Ghetto into the camps. For years, various shots from the film had been used as historical clips in other documentaries. Then a reel of outtakes was found, which very clearly showed that many of the shots were staged by the German camera crews. So how do you organize all of that into a film, and what else do you want or need to make it into a complete film?

Hersonski uses archival footage, interviews and other “standard” documentary techniques, but in order to give the film shape, Stempel writes,

…Hersonski introduces the most problematical element in her film. She learned that one of the cameramen on the film, Willy Wist, was interrogated about his experience. She has the transcript, but handles it as a reconstruction, with an actor “playing” Wist. Given the “reality” of the rest of the film, the reconstruction seems artificial, although it is so well done that many people will “believe” it. It is never specifically mentioned in the narration or the titles that it is a reconstruction. On the other hand, that may have been the only way to include the material. And how different is it really from the other actors who read the diaries and reports that make up the rest of the sound track? Still, in a film that is showing us the difference between truth and fiction on film, I find myself a little queasy about it. Only a little queasy, though, since Wist’s statements add a lot to the film. See the moral quandaries dealing with the truth can get you into?

Stempel notes that while it’s not always obvious, all good documentaries have a clearly-thought-out structure. Chronological structure is the easiest, simply plugging in material in the order in which events happens. And what seems a rising trend of “action documentaries” – such as Louis Psihoyos’s “The Cove,” which is a kind of true-life “Ocean’s Eleven” with a wily crew pulling off a big caper as the center – organizing non-chronological work (such as interview-based films on a topic) or less-chronological work (in which events don’t unfold quite so deliberately) can require deeper thinking in the writing and editing. And obviously, a reconstruction or narration can help give shape to what appears on the surface to be an accumulation. How far to take that, or where you cross too far into dramatization, is always a blurry line.

The early scoop on Final Cut Studio 4 suggests major changes… maybe

MacSoda has a post on the impending Final Cut Studio 4, apparently to be released in January 2011. After what has been referred to as “minor change” in the last iteration of Final Cut, this one promises more.

The major feature of the new Final Cut Studio, and the reason the upgrade is taking so long for the team to complete, is a complete architectural code rewriting… i.e. Snow Leopard. The new Final Cut Studio has been re-engineered from the ground up for speed. And apparently, the wait is not in vain. Previewing will be instantaneous. Long renders will be a thing of the past. The secret is that the new Final Cut Studio has been created to take advantage of multiple cores… so if you’re running on an 8-core Mac Pro, you’ll be thanking your lucky stars you stuck it out and didn’t switch to Adobe’s offerings.

On the other hand, Philip Hodgetts takes on MacSoda’s take:

While MacSoda implies they have a solid inside source – it certainly reads that way – there are some points that just don’t fit.

It’s highly unlikely that the next studio release will happen in early 2011, or even 2011. As I noted in the comments on the article, it seems very, very clear that the QuickTime we know will get a complete foundation change. Final Cut Studio would need many of those changes to be able to replicate Adobe’s Mercury Engine performance (along with the need to be 64 bit Cocoa and use Open CL and Grand Central Dispatch). It will need those changes for native support of anything other than QuickTime, which is why everything in FCP needs to be wrapped to QT, if not transcoded.

Stay tuned…

Thinking about how to find your documentary’s audiences, Part I

Last week, in a post in MicroFilmmaker, the distribution guru Peter Broderick noted that “micro-budget filmmakers need to think, instead, about micro audiences and to think of the Internet as a collection of audiences.” While he was talking about all kinds of films, it has seemed to me that this statement is especially true of documentary filmmakers.

Micro budgets mean two things: First, for the money you have, what kind of film can you make? But secondly, the more micro you keep your budget, the more you can stand to actually earn back money. In a post last week in his blog Truly Free Film, producer Ted Hope said, “If I sought to get paid like normal people are, I never would have been able to produce any of my films.” I believe this is true, but that it is less true for certain types of documentaries. The amazing drop in the cost of technology means that more people can make good films, and conversely more films must compete in the market for limited audience.

Hence the notion of micro audiences.

Filmmakers are in many ways a romantic lot, embracing new advances while also clinging to the old notion of success: The opening at Sundance to rave reviews, the wide theatrical release, then national television and the Academy Award. For some, it’s still true, but for every Louie Psihoyos there are thousands of expensively-made documentaries that simply never got anywhere. And the reason for that has much to do with approaching audience.

Micro audiences can be of two types. One costs a lot of money to get, and the other costs much less. Filmmakers who can dispense with the dreams of grandeur can often find success and profit in the right kid of micro-audience.

Documentary filmmakers start their work by choosing a subject, and I’d make the case that for every subject there is an audience that runs like this:

It runs from the top – a small group of the “Insanely Interested” – to the bottom group of the “Not Directly Interested,” which is much larger but harder to get to. If as a filmmaker you can lock in the group at the top of the pyramid while seeking to move down through the levels, you’re going to make some money.

Examine what each audience offers to you, and what your film offers to them.

1) The “Insanely Interested” is a core group of people who live and breathe your topic. While they are a small fraction of the total potential audience, they are the most likely to see or buy your film, and begin the process of offsetting your production costs. They’ll attend screenings, buy DVDs and likely jump in on “extras” you might also sell. These are people who work in professions related to the topic, or whose hobby relates to the topic, or who makes some identity out of what the topic offers. So the question is, How big might that audience be? They might go from the very narrow, such as the audience I perceive for “Between the Folds,” Vanessa Gould’s lovely documentary about origami (I don’t see the “origami community” being huge), to something broader such as Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica,” which is about typography (there are lots of graphic designers and artists who bring their passions to typographical design). Either way, the Insanely Interested may know more about the topic than the filmmaker, and have read many books on the subject. So what does a documentary film provide for them? I call it Legitimization. You’re not necessarily breaking new ground for them, but a film does something to tell this core group that what they do is worthy, and allows it to be shared with others. Your documentary should not be so “inside” that it doesn’t only appeal to this audience; in fact, the more “inside” it is, the less they feel this legitimization.

The Insanely Interested can potentially pay for the film. One reason is they’ll be the easiest audience to find. They often have clubs, Facebook groups, conventions and blogs; social media can help you easily find this group and make them aware of your work.

That seems easy enough, but remember how many documentaries don’t find such a core group of Insanely Interested. Filmmakers can choose topics that are too personal to themselves, and don’t really have a topic at all. Or the topic can be something that doesn’t gather audience that way. A darling of the 2007 festival, premiering at Sundance and winning an award at Cannes, was the documentary “Zoo,” about men having sex with horses. While this film hit what festival programmers love – it was edgy, “artful” and unusual – a bestiality film is not hitting a passionate core group (at least one that’s willing to be found on Facebook). After the festivals, it seemed, “Zoo” had fewer places to go. It isn’t a Friday-night date movie, and you’re less likely to invite your friends to the house for popcorn and “Zoo.”

2) Let us say you feel you’ve saturated your Insanely Interested group. The next cohort is going to be what I call that of “Rising Passion.”

This group is on the way to insane interest, but is less knowledgeable. They are still seeking out every shred and detail about their topic of interest, and what your film offers may indeed be  news to them. There is also a bit of soul-stirring going on, be it the amazing creations showcased in “Between The Folds” or the pleasure of good design in “Helvetica.” This group may be on the edges of full participation – they don’t go to the national convention, or yet have an ID on the chat board. But they are almost there.

A documentary on their topic of choice provides a level of “confirmation.” It helps lock them in. They see in the film what they cannot read in a book, magazine piece or web post: They see living people, who share their passion, talking about why they love the subject at hand. This audience member says, “That’s me.” It brings them, perhaps, to a next level.

Buy-in for this group is likely a purchase of a DVD, and this group is much larger than the Insanely Interested. Interest in a given subject – whether it be an art form or environmental matter, whether it be troubling or celebratory – is a form of self-image-making. “I am one of these people.” In Ron Mann’s documentary “Know Your Mushrooms,” the lead player is Larry Evans, a mushroom aficianado who has enough ideosyncracy but enough charisma for someone who’s into mushrooms (and indeed the film was featured at the Telluride Mushroom Festival as well as SXSW) for a Rising Passion to decide to fully join the fun.

In the graphic, the pyramid widens. The Rising Passion group is going to be much larger than the Insanely Interested. As you broaden out the distribution, the trick is to not lose these groups as you seek out more general response. We’ll get to that in Part II.

Is shallow depth of field getting used to death?

What was once the Holy Grail, the shallow depth-of-field look that distinguished the “35 film look” from video, getting so overused that it will become passe?

Here’s a rant this week on APhotoEditor, which in turn reposts a piece from 2009 by Mike Jones:

Shallow focus and Rack-Focus is lazy. A ham-fisted and overtly slothful technique with little impetus other than to lead your viewer around by the nose, to force them to look exactly where you want them to look, when you want them to look there. As a tool, like all other cinematic tools at the filmmaker’s disposal, it can and may be very useful. But as a staple and default way to depict moving images it is as articulate as a house brick.

There are some great new camcorders coming out that are not playing to the shalllow-depth crowd. Those include the Canon XF100 and 105, which put out 1080p in a quality 4:2:2 50mbps stream, all with 1/3-inch sensors. There are some filmmakers who are already scoffing at these because they don’t have big sensors.

One obvious place a documentary filmmaker would want deep depth of field provided by such camcorders is in fact-moving action in which an EOS 5D would find focusing problems unless in the hands of a seasoned pro. But even in sit-down shooting setups, cameras with more depth allow for a better look at surroundings, rather than making them blur out. There are times when that can be good.

HD video is here to stay and fully accepted by film audiences, especially in documentary work, and there may be a counter-wave of people shooting to go against the trendy shallow-depth look. The reason: Because what was once a look associated with super-expensive 35mm film cameras is now a look assoiciated with relatively cheap DSLRs. When you see that indy film at the local festival with nothing but blurred background, you’re likely to say, “Oh, that was shot on a 5D” than to say “this must be a highly funded professional production.”

It can be funny how technology meant to do one thing can do another. We’ll see what happens next.

Jones, in his post from last year, notes that the technical challenge of filmmaking back in the day was actually “deep focus,” a look that only came at great expense – to shoot at small apertures with the slow film of that era, lighting had to come to a set by the truckload.

In film, the quest for deep focus led to sets blitzed with light; once everyone was getting that look, others came along and played against the grain: ‘The Godfather” used fewer lights, created shallow depth in many scenes, and was then quickly mimicked in the films of the 1970s. Around it goes. But when video cameras came out, the flat deep-focus look was associated with those who could only afford cheap equipment.

Jones said in his post,

In the 21st century I would attest that Shallow Focus and Rack Focus aesthetics have lost all meaning as useful creative problem solving techniques and instead have become banal, unimaginative staples of cinema. And it prompts us to ask loudly…. “What the hell happened to Deep Focus?”

DSLRs meet BBC broadcast standards (but only kind of), and the upshot of that

This is kind of like the joke where the man says to the doctor, “Doc, it hurts when I do this, what would you suggest?” and the doctor says, “Don’t do that.”

The BBC has exacting standards about the quality of footage it will broadcast, for good reason, but their technical demands also has created a proper British club of filmmakers who can afford expensive equipment. The hoi polloi with these “prosumer” cameras just haven’t cut it. The BBC has required 50mbps quality; HDV and H264, compressed down as they are to about 24Mbps, are on the outside looking in; even the great Sony EX1 at 35Mbps doesn’t technically cut it.

So now comes the news that the BBC is accepting EOS 5D footage, which provides a 38mbps bit rate, but also has well-documented flaws in regard to moire and aliasing.

The HD Magazine article quotes the producers of the drama “Road to Coronation Street” as saying,

“We shot a lot of tests which looked wonderful but the engineers at the BBC were saying that there was aliasing and moiré patterns that would make them fail the use of the camera for HD broadcast.

“However we’d done a lot of independent research and shot more tests and shown them to people. When the tests came back from the BBC they said there was aliasing but they suggested that we shoot more tests in a type of scenario that the production would encounter, like a scene with actors looking backwards and forwards with mid-shots and close ups.

“The head of technology at the BBC, Ian Potts, who was very supportive in our early days saying ‘You have these technical issues that would fail our broadcast tests but it’s very interesting what you’re doing and please do some more tests because we’d love to see what you do’. After seeing the four day’s worth of rushes he was so completely smitten with it and said it was some of the best material they’d ever had, ‘finish the film on it’. It went from nought to 60 in half a second.”

So, basically, it’s a “Don’t do this” scenario. That means avoiding such moire-inducing patterns as checked shirts and window screens, not setting long focus on straight-lined patterns, and keeping everything fairly tightly focused. (Other discussions such as this are common among DSLR users) There are many other technical considerations beyond that, but it’s the simple idea of being aware of the limitations of your equipment.We’ll see whether there’s a more general acceptance of DSLR footage out of this.

Peter Broderick on hybrid distribution: Micro budgets and micro audiences

Peter Broderick has been one of the leading voices in the new approach to distribution, and in Micofilmmaker Magazine he breaks down the approach on how filmmakers with limited resources or a more narrow topic can find small but profitable audiences through “hybrid distribution.”

The piece, by Tony Levelle, really details Broderick’s notion of separating rights and finding the right audience, with the right channel, at the right time.

He says micro-budget filmmakers need to think, instead, about micro audiences and to think of the Internet as a collection of audiences. Some of those audiences are at certain websites, some of them are on mailing lists, some of them are on Facebook, and some of them are on Twitter, and so on.

Here’s one snippet worth considering:

TL: Do you negotiate deals for filmmakers?

PB: There are some situations where I agree to negotiate deals for filmmakers but I am not a rep (distribution representative). I am not the person who goes out and pitches the movie to every distributor in town. I am really a strategist.

I only agree to negotiate a deal if somebody gets an offer from a company that I think is a good company. Then I can be the point person with the distributor, negotiating the deal, because I have had a lot of experience with a lot of companies and a lot of deals.

TL: Should filmmakers try to negotiate these deals themselves?

PB: I do not recommend that filmmakers negotiate deals themselves, because whoever is on the other side is going to have a thousand times more knowledge and experience. I can bring much more knowledge and experience to the negotiation and the filmmaker can end up—hopefully—getting a fair deal, a good deal. If there is no good deal to be had, then I do not recommend that they take it. I think that no deal is better than a bad deal.

The question of whether to go to film festivals is also interesting. Broderick seems to be of a growing number of people who see festivals not as the bottleneck through which one must go to find success, but rather a fun option if you want to go for it, which may yield some positive results.

‘Freakonomics’ will have iTunes release before theatrical – a truly Freakonomic decision

Another sign of the changing landscape in documentary film, and film distribution in general, is that “Freakonomics,” the doc from a best-selling book and using an all-star team of directors, is releasing Friday on iTunes, a month before it hits theaters.

TechDirt reports that our friend Sheri Candler spotted this on the trailer. Techdirt also notes that in “flipping the windows,” there might be some trouble.

The first window, normally, is the theatrical release — and the theaters go absolutely livid if anyone suggests shortening the theatrical release window. Heaven forbid anyone go so far as to suggest something as “radical” as a so-called day and date release, where it’s released in all formats at the same time, and watch the theaters go ballistic and boycott the film, as a startling admission that they don’t think they can compete with home theaters.

Remember, this film is about the against-the-grain theories of economics that shake up the conventional wisdom. There, I said it – is that what they want me to say? Because getting some buzz for making a counterintuitive marketing decision is exactly telling us what the film explores. Bravo!

Testing the 5D’s dynamic range, and assessing the 60D

For technical geeks, the debate rages about the video quality of DSLRs. What seemed gained in sharpness and low-light performance seemed lost in such negative effects as shutter Jell-O, moire and aliasing.

But ProVideo Coalition has done a more definitive test on the Canon EOS 5D Mk II’s dynamic range, the ability to find detail over a number of f-stops.

The testing shows the $2,500 EOS 5D to cover 11 stops of dynamic range. In comparison, the $6,000 Sony EX1 has 10 stops, the $30,000 RED One is said to have 11.3 stops, the $150,000 Sony F23 has 13, and the $70,000 Arri Alexa about 13. Kodak claims 15 stops for its color negative film stock.

These studies only further what we know. That these DSLRs, despite their limitations, have been game-changers that have allowed more people to even think about doing film. Ten years ago, video cameras such as the Canon XL1 had only about 7 stops of dynamic range, which meant you had to light carefully and evenly. You would never have put a subject in front of a black background (such as in the clip at the bottom of this post, from Nathaniel Hansen’s “The Elders”) because the camera would have converted those blacks into noisy artifacts and blown out the whites on the other end. But the gap between video and film has grown so much smaller, newer filmmakers don’t even have to worry about such considerations (and may laugh at older films with very flat lighting).

Meanwhile, the EOS 60D has hit the market at $1,100, filling the gap between Canon’s $1,700 EOS 7D and the $900 T2i.

Philip Bloom posts about the 60D, and the Wired’s Gadget Lab calls the 60D “Frankencam,” cobbled together out of lower- and higher-end stuff:

It’s clearly the season for new camera gear, and today it’s Canon’s turn in the spotlight. Along with a few new lenses comes the EOS 60D, a “replacement” for the two-year-old 50D. Those looking to upgrade from their 50D should look elsewhere, though, perhaps to the 7D, as this new camera is more for consumers than enthusiastic amateurs.

The magnesium body of the 50D is now plastic, and the 60D uses SD-cards instead of Compact Flash. It also gets a slew of gimmicky image processing features (Toy Camera, anyone?) and the obligatory video capabilities.

One 60D feature that is getting praise is the articulating screen.

Coach from Nathaniel Hansen on Vimeo.

Just don’t forget that tape doesn’t suck

Amid all the craziness about DSLRs and shallow depth of field, it’s important to remember that the budget-minded documentary filmmaker can pick up some real deals by going against the grain and picking up a Mini-DV-tape-based camcorder. They’re selling on Amazon for $750 new. Five years ago, this technology would have cost you four to five times that.

The HV40, in our opinion, is a gem. Real 24p, great color, and with a Beachtek adapter, able to do a lot. HV40 users who gain “higher powers” by learning the “cell-phone trick” can control gain and depth-of-field.

Here’s a video plucked off Vimeo to make a simple point:

Canon HV40 footage from Orcun Jenan on Vimeo.

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