Specs released for the nonexistent Scarlet
Life is what happens to you while you’re waiting for the Scarlet. Red has been threatening to release this camera for a seeming eon (they were touting it in 2008, which is an eon in camcorder years). In the meantime, it seems, other makers are moving toward matching its quality. So Red made ripples today by releasing even better specs to a camera that continues not to exist, completely blowing away the specs of cameras that actually do exist. How humiliated those real cameras must be! Because the nonexistent specs are very impressive. To wit:
More often the twain shall meet: The ‘hybrid documentary’
Re-enactments are becoming more of a fixture in documentary films – note “Man On Wire,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Taxi to the Dark Side” being just a few – in which actors play out scenes that have come from the recollections of interview subjects. These are, invariably, non-speaking roles. They invariably reconstruct events that purportedly happened. There seem to be no hard and fast rules to this; avoiding SAG by staying away from speaking roles might be the primary inspiration.
But how about a “hybrid documentary,” as opposed to a “mockumentary”?
Coming out Tuesday on DVD is “Paper Heart,” a “hybrid documentary” that “features real interviews with people talking about whether love exists mixed with a fictional storyline about love skeptic Charlyne Yi falling for actor Michael Cera.” Yi is the writer and director.
The film ran at Sundance under the Narrative Feature” category, but the film includes a significant amount of interview material. That isn’t unusual or new – if you’ve never seen Warren Beatty’s “Reds” it’s a trove of interviews of people like Lillian Hellman, Henry Miller and others speaking about the real-life Red John Reed, whom Beatty dramatizes in the film. But those interviews account for only a small fraction of screen time. What if there are more interviews than dramatization?
Here’s a bit on “Paper Heart” from California Chronicle
The project started off as an idea from Yi, sparked by conversations with her older friends, to make a traditional documentary. The questions she had about love had more to do with how a person knows when they have found true love and whether divorce means there never was true love in the relationship.
Once Yi started talking with filmmaker Nicholas Jasenovec about the project, he suggested 90 minutes of people talking about love might not be too interesting. It was his idea for the Yi-Cera storyline to serve as an arc to hold together the interviews.
The notion of the made-up story serving the factual interviews, rather than the opposite, is an interesting premise. But would you call it a documentary?
Robert Greene, director, ‘Owning The Weather’
Robert Greene, Director, “Owning The Weather” from DocumentaryTech on Vimeo.
Filmmaker Case Study: Robert Greene’s ‘Owning the Weather,’ Part 1
When Robert Greene, a longtime film editor, set out to make his first feature-length documentary, he knew he was doing it in the midst of a seismic shift in the way documentaries are made.
Owning The Weather” didn’t necessarily start out to be an example of filmmaking in the new landscape, it just happened that way. Amid changes in technology, exhibition and distribution, “OTW” has come out of that particular storm as an on-demand film that is currently being released.
The film premiered at The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and has had screening at festivals in the U.S., Austria and Italy.
Greene had funding, then funding fell through, had an estimate of $1.7 million in production costs and did it for nearly nothing, mailed a camcorders halfway across the country to nail an interview he needed to get, and made the project work by combining shoots with family road trips, using his wife as a production assistant. He had a pledge of financing, but only if he could prove he knew how to stop hurricanes in two years.
I suspect that all made it much more fun that if everything had gone to plan.
Greene is the postproduction supervisor at 4th Row Films in Manhattan, where he shot and edited “An Omar Broadway Film,” which premiered at Tribeca Film Festival last spring and will be aired on HBO. He’s also made several short documentaries.
In January of 2006, Greene read an article in Harper’s Magazine called “Owning The Weather,” by Ando Arike, which was subtitled “The Ugly Politics of the Pathetic Fallacy.”
The film credits the article, but was departure, and its evolution shows the demands put on films that seek financing.
The original plan was to “follow a specific character, and this character – who ended up not even being in the film – wanted to modify hurricanes… basically, the way we would get financing was if we knew he could stop hurricanes in the next two years.” “That’s ludicrous,” he says.
He says at that point, “The project was essentially dead.”
“We had to decide what to do then, but for me the story still resonated. Weather modification has become more intriguing to people, because it’s about stopping or mitigating climate change. So for me, that sounded like an issue that was going to be something in the next few years.”
So he took a borrowed camera – a Panasonic 24p AG-DVX100a Mini-DV camcorder – and started work.
After a few interviews, he found a subject in Boulder, Colorado, who consented to an interview. Greene decided to buy his own 100a and have it shipped to a friend in Boulder who could do the interview for him. She then shipped the camcorder with footage back to New York.
“Once I got my camera back, it was four or five major trips to do the film. My wife and I had a newborn baby, and so we just decided to make family trips out of it.”
In San Francisco, they visited his wife’s sister and he lined up a crucial interview with a climate-engineering expert. “He said he’d give us a half-hour and he ended up giving us two and a half. But the baby was being babysat because the PA was my wife, and when we were going out the door I trying trying to get everybody in the car so this guy wouldn’t know that this was such a small operation. When he saw the film he said, “It looks a lot better than I thought it would be – wasn’t it just your family doing this?”
One trip involved the Greenes flying from Maine to Texas, driving to Arizona, and then flying to Ohio. “We tried to mix family things with shooting.”
Greene notes that the way people can make films – light, mobile and relatively inexpensively – clashes with interview subjects’ perceptions of how films are made, but is changing. People are beginning to understand that a shoot doesn’t have to be done by a large crew.
In some ways, it helped to do the film on such a small scale, he says.
“Some of the scientists I interviewed were very wary, and the fact this was so small was a benefit. They speak very openly in the film. I don’t mind of they thought it was a small thing, because I knew what I was doing. I knew the camera was good, the microphones were decent, and that I was going to come out of it with something that was fine.”
One interview was with a scientist who has proposed putting 16 trillion mirrors in space to block the sunlight and reduce global warming. When Greene began to set up his equipment, “he said, ‘I thought you were The Weather Channel.’ I don’t know how he thought that, but you could tell he was thinking, ‘This isn’t much.’ And then he spoke very, very openly. That’s all I care about.
Greene says the important thing “was that I knew my subject well enough to ask good questions, and that they felt at ease with the whole process.”
In Part II we’ll look at funding and distribution.
Hear an April 2009 podcast of an interview with Robert Greene on Public Radio here.
Is it “straight to stupid” to get a Mac Pro for editing?
Ah, the Mac debates. Scott Simmons of Studio Daily takes on the debate started by Mark Wilson at Gizmodo, who makes the case that an iMac is a cheaper buy that does everything as well. “The old power tower is a lazy design,” Wilson says.
But, for video editing, Simmons notes that the Mac Pro still has advantages (if not necessities).
Here’s a bit of Simmons’ rejoinder:
But you do have to monitor that video that you are editing. Without any expansion slots an iMac doesn’t have the ability to add the Final Cut Studio industry standard AJA Kona or a Blackmagic cards. Neither can you add an Avid Mojo DX. You might be able to add an original Matrox MXO at some point but as of this writing the new iMacs aren’t on Matrox’s supported hardware list. The newer Matrox MXO2 requires a PCIe adapter card for connection. You could connect an AJA IO HD as it connects with a single Firewire 800 connection but since the iMac’s only have a single Firewire 800 port you are left with only USB drives for your media. You can’t do high-end editing with USB drives. Plus the IO HD is expensive and given Apple’s recent moves to shy away from Firewire I wouldn’t trust the IO HD as being a good investment for the future.
The possibilities of small cameras and cell phones: Burma VJ
Video editing tips from Josh Shea, NPPA editor of the year
Newslab has a podcast by Deborah Potter interviewing Josh Shea, who was named the editor of the year by The National Press Photographer’s Association. His winning entry was for a portfolio of work done at KCNC in Denver.
Shea is an editor of very traditional television-style video, but his thoughts on editing are worth listening to. He talks a lot about “referencing,” and how to avoid the redundancy of words and images.
His work mostly involves heavily narrated pieces, but it’s interesting that some of the pieces back out the narrative voice and have a lot of the hallmarks of documentary work.
Mumbai Film Festival to have cell-phone documentary category
Mumbai Film Festival Director Kuldeep Sinha speaks the truth when he says, ““The field of short films and documentaries was once a pond, but it has now become an ocean with the advent of digital technology and mobile phones.”
He also says, “There is a growing demand for films shot on mobile phone. We wanted to create an infrastructure for such films. The next film festival will have a full fledged section catering to this category of films.”
Now that can’t be right, but this is according the the Indo-Asian News Service.
Other than the novelty of shooting on a cell phone, it doesn’t make a ton of sense, except as cell phones converge with the technology in small HD camcorders like the ubiquitous Flip. Yes, cell phones can be onobtrusive, but there are so many really great small-format HD recorders, such as the Canon HF-S10 and even DSLRs such as the Lumix G1.
But movies you can see on your phone, well that’s a horse of a different color. We suspect that the demand is for documentaries that can be viewed on a cell phone, and India seems a place ripe for such use. Why? Public transportation.
I was in New York Wednesday shooting interviews for a couple of projects, and that evening, on a crowded commuter train out of Grand Central, I took out my iPod touch and continued my viewing of a documentary I had started on the train in. What I noted was that in my immediate area were two other people doing the same thing. There were three other people texting on either iPhones or Blackberries and another couple scrolling through their music selections.
These devices have changed the nature of the train, which five years ago would have been a place to read magazines or paperback books. In other words, where people are forced to sit in small places for long periods of time, there’s a market. I was surprised how few laptops I saw, compared to personal devices.
So as the number of films on the iTunes inventory, and other places, grows, these small devices have a future.
Do films made on cell phones have a future? Probably, based on the quality of the video they can shoot. Many of them are starting to look more like camcorders than phones as we think of them.When RED comes out with that 4k cell phone they’ve been promising, we’re golden.
As for Mumbai’s phone films,
Sinha said that mobile phones represent the future of documentary films and the forthcoming MIFF would serve as a perfect barometer to gauge the popularity of the medium.
There are films being made on cell/mobile phones, often for reasons of either portability or surreptitiousness. One such film is “Africa Diary,” by L.M. Kit Carson, made on a Nokia N93 cellphone. Here’s an interview with Carson about that.In 2008, the Museum of Modern Art had a program of cell-phone films, and VCEStudent had a piece a while back about making films that take on the limitations of cell phones.
Peter Broderick’s 7 tips for online distribution
Peter Broderick spoke at the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA), and NFB.ca’s Marie-France Côté spoke to him about the “Seven Website Principles” that will help filmmakers get their work out there.
Côté promises to post more of his conversation with Broderick, but the point is simple – that the web is the place to both promote your film and potentially distribute or exhibit your film, and that starts with web visibility.
The Broderick tips are:
1- Content is Crucial – Not just promoting your film. If your site lacks content, people won’t come back.
2-Content Must be Dynamic – It has to grow, change and evolve.
3- Your Site has to be Customized – You want to connect with real people, and you have to make sure that users know who the site is aimed at.
4- Your Site Should Convey a Bigger Idea Than Just the Film — It should be related to a cause or a social project associated with the film. The RIP: A Remix Manifesto site is a good example because it taps into issues of open source advocacy and copyright activism.
5- Start by Creating a Quick, Inexpensive Site – You can always develop it in subsequent phases. Make sure you have a vision before hiring a designer. You also need to make sure that you can make changes yourself.
6- User-Generated Content – Give your community a chance to participate and add content.
7- Regardless of your vision, It is Important to Have Fun! – If not, your site will soon be buried in your “urgent things to do” pile.