Take A News Break Day

As many of you readers know, I was teaching at Virginia Tech on April 16 last year. The devastation we all felt losing people dear to us was deeply exacerbated by an invasion of a press corps whose satellite vehicles alone filled a football stadium parking lot. To say that these folks were insensitive would be an understatement. I never had any respect for the kind of journalism, especially TV journalism, that chases ambulances. But even my cynicism did not prepare me for what I saw those days. So, in light of the Northern Illinois University shootings, I will be taking a news break today. I encourage you to consider doing the same. The NIU shootings will, no doubt, be the top headline on most news networks and websites and every click or minute spent watching gives more encouragement to these (mostly) commercial enterprises to exploit others' pain for profit. My thoughts will be with the NIU community for today and for the days to come. But I'm not going to kid myself that viewing news reports on CNN or MTV is going to help these folks heal. But I'll stop, because I've written about "pornography of the real" before.

If you must read about the shootings, I encourage you to visit Northern Illinois University's website, or to read the Dekalb Daily-Chronicle. In my experience last year the news sources that were most valuable were the Virginia Tech website and our local newspaper, the Roanoke Times, whose coverage was sensitive, even-handed, and comprehensive. Their coverage only (re)confirmed for me that when it comes to telling stories, place -- where you come from, where you live, the people you call neighbors -- matters.

SXSW: Features Line-up

SXSW announced its line-up of features for 2008. IndieWire has the story. The full slate is listed here. Suffice to say there are a lot promising titles in the premieres. Among the competition features are new works by Jake Mahaffy, Mary Bronstein, and Joe Maggio. Among the non-competition films are new works by Frank Ross, Joe SXSWanberg & Greta Gerwig, as well as Tom Quinn's Slamdance-winning film, The New Year Parade. Congrats to all!

Dance Party USA and Quiet City on DVD

Aaron Katz's second feature, the Independent Spirit Award nominee Quiet City is being released on DVD today. While well worth seeing, the real treasure here, in my opinion, is the second disc, which features Katz's debut, Dance Party USA. A portrait of teenage misogyny (and its redemption) Dance Party USA is one of my favorite DIY movies from the last few years. This two-fer is the second release from upstart distributor Benten Films and, like their first release, this package does not disappoint with extras.

This Conference is Being Recorded: 2007 Wrap-up

Over the holidays, Lance Weiler, Mark Stolaroff and I spoke about the year in review for This Conference is Being Recorded, the Workbook Project's podcast series. You can listen to the show here. I was fighting off a migraine that day, so apologies if my thoughts aren't that coherent. I do recall that Lance and Mark had some typically insightful things to say.

The recording is the second in a two part series. Part one, which features Lance, Scott Kirsner, and Woody Benson, is worth a listen, too.

MacHeist: Indy Mac Software + Good Cause = Insane Deal

If you use a Mac, you absolutely must check out the insane deal that MacHeist -- an alliance of independent Mac software developers -- is offering. For $49.95, MacHeist is selling $428 worth of fully-featured (i.e., not demo mode) Mac software. And to make the offer that much sweeter, a good chunk of the proceeds go to charity. As of this writing, $227,000+ has been raised so far.

Plus, the software is good. I would recommend all three of the twelve titles that I've previously used:

SnapzProX - a screencapture utility that's GREAT for creating screencasts iStopMotion - a great program for shooting stop motion animation 1Password - a browser extension that saves all your passwords in one place, and generates secure passwords

I'm an especially big fan of SnapzProX. Last fall I used it (in demo mode) to create a screencast for some of my students. I found it to be the best application of its kind on the Mac. It normally sells for $69, but for the next four days people can get it, plus 11 other applications, for $20 less. And it goes to charity. So I'm getting out my credit card now.

As for the charities represented, according to the MacHeist wiki:

Purchasers can choose from the following list of ten charities, or opt to split the donation from their purchase evenly among the choices.

* Action Against Hunger * AIDS Research Alliance * Alliance for Climate Protection * Direct Relief International * Humane Society International * The Nature Conservancy * Save the Children * Save Darfur * Prevent Cancer Foundation * World Wildlife Fund

Panasonic HVX-200 for sale...

I'm selling my venerable Panasonic HVX-200 and its 8GB P2 card. No, I'm not giving up filmmaking; I just don't need the camera. I was looking to rent an HVX this summer for a few weeks to do some shooting in Knoxville and Roanoke. For the few weeks I needed it, a rental wasn't really cost-effective, so I just bit the bullet and bought the camera. Now that we've got a few HVX's at Virginia Tech, I don't need to hang on to this one. As many people who read this blog would probably testify, it is an awesome camera. The DVCPro HD codec at 24P is totally impressive. Anyway, if you're interested, email me personally [ pharrill AT you-know-what DOT com ]. You can ask me all about it and I can let you know all the details, accessories, etc. I'd rather sell it to a reader of SRF than put it up on Ebay, so I'll entertain any reasonable, sincere offer.

UPDATE: Looks like it's sold folks. Thanks for your interest!

From Here to Awesome

For filmmakers it is the best of times and worst of times. The tools are more accessible but the market has become saturated....From Here to Awesome is an attempt to answer some of the largest issues facing filmmakers today - discovery, distribution and sustainability.

- From Here to Awesome festival co-founder Lance Weiler

From Here to Awesome is a "new" film festival -- both in the sense that it has just launched and in its aims and approach. I encourage all filmmakers using film festivals as a gateway to larger distribution efforts (theatrical, DVD release, etc) to check it out.

Billed as a discovery and distribution festival, FHTA has been dreamt up by three filmmakers with unassailable DIY credibility: Lance Weiler (Head Trauma, The Last Broadcast), Arin Crumley (Four-Eyed Monsters) and M dot Strange (We Are the Strange). Their ethos and aesthetic run through the festival, from the way that they plan to use existing web community portals (YouTube, MySpace, etc) to conduct the submission and selection process, to the festival's filmmaker-friendly guidelines (e.g., no entry fee, all rights remain with filmmakers, etc).

Submissions are open (as of yesterday); the deadline for submissions is March 7.

In all, it's an ambitious undertaking, one that seems to be nothing less than a reinvention of the film festival. Here's wishing them -- and the filmmakers that submit -- the best of luck.

Check it out for yourself.

An Oscar Antidote for Documentaries

Today, Thom Powers, Documentary Programmer at the Toronto International Film Festival, and AJ Schnack (filmmaker of Kurt Cobain: About a Son and blogger of All These Wonderful Things) announced the launch a new award for nonfiction filmmaking, to be held in March at the IFC Center in New York. Nominees in eight categories will be announced in Park City on January 20.

The new awards are a direct response to the Oscars. From recent debates over confusing (and shifting) eligibility guidelines, to its long history of jaw-dropping omissions (e.g., neither Hoop Dreams nor The Thin Blue Line were even nominated their respective years), the Academy's treatment of the genre has long been a source of consternation and disappointment for many within the documentary community. That's not to say that many worthy films haven't been nominated and awarded over the years... but clearly the AMPAS doesn't give documentary the attention that it does to fictional feature films.

Hats off to AJ and the others behind this initiative.

indieWIRE has the first report.

Documentary Interviewing Techniques

... from a surprising source: ESPN.

John Sawatsky, ESPN's senior director of talent development, has tutored reporters, anchors and producers around the world. Since 1991, he has devoted all his time to teaching interviewing to professional journalists. ESPN asked him to assess the prospects for the upcoming "60 Minutes" interview of Roger Clemens.

Sawatsky's assessment amounts to a lesson in interviewing technique (and rips Mike Wallace to shreds in the process). Fascinating reading.

Five Best 10 Bests (and then some)

My favorite part of the year-end (or year-beginning) "Best Of" lists is how these lists serve as a kind of aggregator for the movies that I should give my time to in the coming year. Let's face it, if you live in the USA and you don't live in New York or L.A. (I don't), and/or you didn't make it to the Toronto Film Festival or Cannes last year (nope), and/or you're not a member of the press with access to advance screenings (ditto), you might have had the chance to see only three of, say, J. Hoberman's picks for the ten best. That's what region-free DVD players and video projectors are for. So, without further ado, here are my five favorite Top 10 (or more) lists of 2007.

indieWire Critics Poll Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll Two polls that are virtually identical in their results... because they poll virtually the same group of people. Don't ask me why there are two polls.

IndieWire 2007 Critics Poll: Best Undistributed Film Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll: Best Undistributed Film Same as above.

Michael Atkinson's Straight Outta Digi: The Best Non-Theatrical Debuts of '07

DVD Beaver's Best DVD Releases of the Year

Jonathan Rosenbaum's Top Movies of the Year

***

Oh, and the best film I saw last for the first time last year? The restoration of The Whole Shootin' Match at SXSW. Over twenty-five years since it was produced, it's still not available on DVD.

Fundraising Tips: Money Trees and House Parties

I was speaking with a fellow filmmaker the other day who was asking me for tips on finding grants for fiction films. I've been successful at finding grant-based funding for my work ("Gina, An Actress, Age 29" was supported by the sadly now-defunct Aperture Film Grant), but I had to break the disappointing news that those sources are few and far between for fiction work these days. Having said that, if you're developing a not-for-profit film/video project -- say, a social-issue documentary or a youth video project -- there is money out there. A great introduction to finding money is Morrie Warshawski's Shaking The Money Tree, 2nd Edition.

I read Shaking the Money Tree years ago when it was still in its first edition. Since then I've probably raised close to $100,000 in grant monies for various projects (my own and others') since reading it. Documentarians will probably benefit from it the most, but I strongly recommend it to filmmakers that need help raising funds for their films, or fund-raisers new to film and video production, regardless of film genre.

One fundraising strategy that's discussed briefly in Shaking The Money Tree is given its own extended treatment in Warshawski's newly revised The Fundraising Houseparty, 2nd Edition.

As Warshawski points out in this slim volume's introduction, individual donors account for 87% of all non-profit endeavors. Fundraising houseparties are a way to bring such individuals together and introduce them to a project that might deserve their support.

I've never hosted a houseparty (nor had one hosted for my work), but I have attended a couple, so I have a decent grasp of what works and what doesn't. Warshawski's guide is the best I've seen on what can be an intimidating process for the uninitiated. The basics are spelled out in easy-to-read prose, with straightforward diagrams and illustrations helping to walk you through the process. The appendix even includes sample invitation letters and a worksheet. Yes, some of this stuff is common sense ("Thank People as They Leave" states one heading), but other topics aren't ("taxes").

As the saying goes, you gotta spend money to make money. At $20 (or less) each, these books are a pretty good investment for anyone considering or pursuing the not-for-profit realm of moviemaking. If you have other tips or reading suggestions, share them in the comments below.

Happy New Year Wishes (recipe included)

Best wishes for a creative, productive, happy, and peaceful 2008. Where I come from (East Tennessee) it is tradition to eat black-eyed peas for good luck in celebration of the New Year. Sometimes that means beans out of a can, sometimes it means more: Today Ashley treated me to a plate full of not only Hoppin' John, but also greens and macaroni and cheese. Yes, 2008, we're off to a good start.

Follow along at home:

If you have the Joy of Cooking, and you should, there's a good recipe for Hoppin' John in there.

Of course, there are variations. Here's one. Vegan? I haven't forgotten you.

Happy New Year to all!

HD-DVD Burning with an "SD" Mac

This may be old news to some of you, but it was news to me: You can burn HD-DVDs (not Blu-Ray) on a Mac using a standard DVD burner, Final Cut Pro, Compressor, and DVD Studio Pro. I tried it last night. It works. The limitations?

- Standard single-layer DVD media storage limits mean that you're limited to burning shorter projects (under 60 min). - The article states you can't play these on an HD-DVD player. I don't have an HD-DVD player, so I haven't verified this. You can, however, play them on a Mac.

Hooking up my MacBook Pro to a television and screening the DVD played flawlessly. And it looked a lot better than a standard definition DVD.

The trade-off? As anyone who's done it before can tell you, encoding a project to H.264 takes a long, long time.

Billy The Kid

I caught some flack this summer when I was complaining about all the sequels and remakes in theaters. The folks that were most frustrated with me almost seemed to be asking, "Okay, fine, smarty pants. What would YOU rather see?" One easy answer to that question would be Billy The Kid, Jennifer Vendetti's superb new documentary, which opens for a limited engagement tomorrow at the IFC Center in New York (more theatrical screenings are soon to follow nationwide). Don't miss this one. It's easily one of my favorite films -- fiction or non-fiction -- of the year, and probably the best film about growing up that I've seen since Spellbound.

The film is a portrait of a Maine teenager, an awkward, troubled, and wise kid named Billy. What happens? Just life. Billy meets a girl. He deals with kids that don't like him. His mother loves him and talks straight with him.

As far as plot is concerned, that's "it." But to explain the appeal of this movie, I would have to relay specific scenes from it. And the last thing I want to do is spoil the moments of discovery that Vendetti captures. All I can say is that the film does an uncommonly good job of capturing the raw awkwardness, pain, anger and tenderness of life at 15. The moments of Billy's I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-myself reactions to first love, and his mother's sensitivity to his plight, are especially priceless.

Since Billy's thoughts and feelings are so close to the surface, throughout I kept fearing that Vendetti's might teeter into the realm of exploitation. For me, it didn't. Billy's an outsider, and while there are undoubtedly some very funny moments in the film, whenever I was laughing at Billy it was because there was a shock of recollection of some similar moment (like his scene of electric guitar heroics) from my own childhood. And even in these moments, I was cheering for him, admiring his combination of guts and innocence.

Billy The Kid opens today at the IFC Center. Theatrical screenings in Chicago, Seattle, and elsewhere are upcoming. Check the Billy The Kid website for details. It's worth seeking out.

Not Playing At a Theatre Near You

IndieWire has a great summary of the Gotham nominees for "Best Film Not Playing at a Theatre Near You." It's a sad commentary that five of the more intriguing films I've read about (or, in the case of one of these, seen) are films that have received no distribution beyond film festivals. The films are:

Ronald Bronstein's Frownland Lanre Olabisi's August the First John Fiege's Mississippi Chicken Jeremy and Randy Stalberg's Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa Chris Fuller's Loren Cass

Unfortunately, the article, which was meant to promote the exhibition of these films at the MoMA, only went out in indieWire's email service today, after most of the films have already screened. The only remaining screenings are Frownland and Loren Cass. If you live in New York and you don't want to miss these screenings you get the screening details here.

How to Send Big Files

Over the last month or so I've needed to send and receive a lot of large files (Final Cut project files, songs in AIFF format, DVD burn files, and so on). By "large" I mean in the 20mb - 4gb range. These files are usually too large to be sent via email because of file size limits, using an FTP site can be a hassle (as David Pogue has noted), and sending files via DVD-Rom via mail or FedEx is (comparatively) slow and pricey. For me, the solution has been to share these large files via a few of the several services that exist online. I have used YouSendIt, FileFactory, and Pando. All have worked just fine.

The first two are file-hosting sites; Pando, on the other hand, is a stand-alone application. It requires a (free) download, but it also allows for the sharing of much larger files.

If you find yourself needing to share large files and don't know where to start, a fairly comprehensive listing of file hosting sites is available on Wikipedia. You can also check out this article, which surveys some of the main services.

Dimmer Boxes

When I was looking through the new edition of The Filmmaker's Handbook, I noticed a lot of little changes and additions. An example: In a list of equipment to bring to the set, in the lighting category I noticed one addition: "dimmer boxes." I can't argue with that -- dimmer boxes help one light with finesse, and they're fairly easy to come by. I went to the trouble of making a couple dimmers (aka "hand squeezers") myself about a year and a half ago. I made a couple of 600 watt boxes, as well as a 1000 watt box. The supplies I got from the local home improvement store, though I remember that the 1000w dimmer was not widely available. If I remember correctly, I built all three dimmer for about $100 in supplies. They would have been cheaper, but the 1000w dimmer was considerably more expensive than the 600w.

In retrospect, instead of making those boxes, I would have been better off simply purchasing one of the many dimmer boxes or router speed controls (which can be used as a dimmer box) that are commercially available. They're cheaper, they're probably more reliable than anything I could build, and the heavy duty router speed controls can handle more power than the ones I built. Plus, the router speed controls have a safety fuse, which my self-built dimmers lack.

Shopping for some last week, I ran across lots of varieties. Here are some:

Dimmer Boxes:

Ikea Dimma - 300 Watts and under - $7.95 Note: Not useful for most motion picture lights, but if you just need something for practicals, these are nice and cheap.

Smith Victor - DC-1 Dimmer Control - 600 Watts and under - $23.95

Router Speed Controls:

Harbor Freight Tools - 15 Amps and lower - $19.99

MLCS Router Speed Control - 15 Amps and lower - $20.95 and $28.95, respectively, for the "home" and "industrial/commercial" use boxes

Grizzly G3555 Router Speed Control - 20 Amps and lower - $31.50

Rockler Router Speed Control - 20 Amps and lower - $39.99

If, however, you wish to build your own, you can find instructions in Blain Brown's Motion Picture and Video Lighting, 2nd Edition (p. 241) and, of course, there are plans aplenty on the 'net.

Resource for Writers: Occupational Outlook Handbook

Doing some researching and writing earlier this month, I was trying to decide on an appropriate occupation for a character I was creating. One of the most helpful online resources I found was the Occupational Outlook Handbook published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. If you visit the site, go to the search box in the upper right hand corner and type an occupation. If your search terms are too specific, just make it more general (e.g., try "dental" instead of "dental technician", which will give you lots of results). Eventually you should be led to an overview of the profession you're seeking, including the types of wages that might be expected, the type of education required, and so on. Useful stuff for writers, particularly the stuff about the downsides to each job. Can you say "conflict"?

Of course, besides its usefulness to writers, people that are actually, you know, looking for jobs might appreciate the link, too. Being the lucrative, high-demand profession that independent filmmaking is, though, I doubt many readers of this blog would ever need to use the site in this way.