pCAM for iPhone

David Eubank's pCAM and pCINE were great applications for the Palm OS. They helped you compute depth of field, hyperfocal distance, angle of view.... Together, they were like a computerized version of all those charts in the American Cinematographer's Manual that you always referred to on set. Now, Eubank has outdone himself with pCAM for iPhone, which combines the pCAM and pCINE applications in a new interface. If you have an iPhone and you shoot film or video, this is a supremely useful tool. At $39.99 it may seem pricey for an iPhone app, but in my opinion it's well worth the price.

pCAM for iPhone [iTunes store link]

DIY project: Car Dash Camera Mount

I've not posted a DIY film tool link in a long time, but the Car Dash Camera Mount listed in this morning's "Weekend Builder" email from Instructables grabbed my attention. If you need a way to film yourself (or someone) straight-on while driving, this could be pretty useful. Unless, of course, you're using a big-ish or heavy camera... in which case you probably can afford to rent the "proper" tools.

Wyoming Film Contest

I usually don't post film contest, and especially film festival, deadlines and guidelines. There are just too many out there to keep up with it all. But the Wyoming Film Contest got my attention. First, I like to promote regional cinema efforts. Secondly, the winner receives $25,000 towards producing a feature film (in Wyoming, 'natch). You don't have to be from Wyoming or live there to enter the contest, but your film must "reference Wyoming in some way."

Visit the Wyoming Film Office's blog for more details.

Fat Tuesday: The Order of Myths

I've been meaning to catch up with The Order of Myths since for about a year now, and tonight is my chance: it premieres on Independent Lens (check local listings). In case you aren't familiar with its subject, here's a summary:

Mobile, Alabama threw its first Mardi Gras more than 300 years ago; since then the party has been trying to stay true to tradition. But tradition gets tricky when it comes to race and class.

Separate but unequal royal courts preside—one queen, from a family of outlaw slave traders, the other, a descendent of runaway slaves. Beneath the surface of pageantry lies a complex story about race relations and the ever-present racial divide that persists in America today.

Read more about the TV premiere here. Film website is here.

[hat tip: Agnes Varnum]

Moved. Moving. Moves.

I took a blog-holiday for a few weeks while my lady and I moved out of one house and prepare to move into a new one (this one with some land). Since the second place is in need of some renovation before we can really call it home, all of my computers, files, and thoughts have been scattered. Today, catching up on my reading I found this week-old piece of blogged advice from John August that speaks well to my current status, and I wanted to share it with you (and with myself, for posterity's sake). The following is in response to the question, Which project should I write?

If you have four ideas, all equally viable, I’d recommend writing the one that has the best ending. That’s the one you’ve thought through the most, and the one you’re least likely to abandon midway. But whatever you do, just pick one and write it without delay. If you have great ideas for your other projects, absolutely take some notes, but don’t switch. Finish what you’re doing, or you’ll have a folder full of first acts.

The full post can be found here.

Scott Kirsner's ITVS Case Studies

A few weeks ago Scott Kirsner blogged about a series of case studies he recently authored regarding independent filmmakers connecting with their audiences. Commissioned by ITVS, the case studies focus on, as Scott puts it,

indie filmmakers who are pioneering new ways to: - Open up the production process to more audience participation

- Find and connect with new audiences for their work

- Distribute their finished film in new ways.

While all of the case studies focus on documentaries, there are a lot of insights here that are not limited to any one genre. In fact, I've made these case studies required reading in the Movie Business class that I teach at Virginia Tech. If you read this blog, chances are they should be required reading for you, too.

Read Scott's introductory blog post. Or go straight to the case studies.

Inauguration Day

Watching televised coverage of the inauguration, instead of being there, is probably like watching Dick Clark on New Year's Eve instead of standing in Times Square. The difference, of course, is that today's party is so historic that you might actually want to tune in. With just a few hours until the main event, here's Lifehacker's Guide to Catching the Inauguration from Anywhere. After reading this, you'll be able to tell your grandkids, "I remember the day President Obama was elected... I watched it on something called an iPhone."

Medicine for Melancholy: Screenings

One of my favorite films from 2008, Medicine for Melancholy, opens in New York on January 30. You can also catch M4M at home with IFC In Theaters (Video on demand) starting Feb. 4. Strikeanywhere, the folks that made MfM, tell me that if you're a member of FIlm Independent, there are two Spirit Nominee Screenings left that you can catch:

Los Angeles - Sunset 5 - Monday, Jan. 19, 2pm. (MLK day) New York - Tribeca Cinemas - Wednesday, Feb. 4, 9pm.

One way or another, see it!

Self-Reliant Film on Facebook

Via the new "network blogs" tool Self-Reliant Film can now be seen on Facebook. If you're on Facebook, click the link above and join the page. In addition to seeing some of the other readers of SRF, the SRF feed will start broadcasting on Facebook as soon as a four more readers (like you) join up and confirm that I am, in fact, the author.

Back to School Textbooks

Whether you're a student gearing up for the start of the semester, or someone who's just looking to develop your talents, a good textbook can come in handy. Amazon.com is running a promotion via their Textbook Store, so I thought I'd link to some of my favorite books. All of the books below are books I've either personally assigned as a textbook in my classes, or a book that I've recommended multiple times.


Please note: I do get a few pennies for the click-through if you end up purchasing something. Amazon links are my way of keeping this site advertising-free. And remember: If you're broke you can always try to find these at your nearest public or university library.

On the Utility and Futility of Year-End Lists - Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone. I wish you nothing but peace and happiness in 2009. In keeping with the holiday spirit of 'out with the old, in with the new', here's a link to indieWIRE's 2008 Critics Poll '08.

Since many of the films are year-end specialty releases and art house films, one hopes that, at some point in 2009, these movies will find their way into more provincial cinemas and onto DVD so that the 290 million (or so) people in the United States living outside New York and LA (of which I am one) have the opportunity to judge these films for ourselves. In effect, the 08 poll essentially becomes a "to-watch" list for those of us out in the hinterlands. I am thankful for it.

That said, a survey of this list also exposes the increasingly problematic nature of assessing and classifying films by their release date. Take film #35, Ronnie Brownstein's Frownland. This would have been made my "Best of 2008" list this year... except I saw it at its premiere at SXSW in March 2007. Similarly, the best film I saw in 2008 was There Will Be Blood. Of course, TWBB was not released widely until January, yet it made many critics' Best of 2007 list. Should I include Frownland or Blood on my best-of? Does it matter? Not really. It only highlights the fact that, now more than ever, time and memory are the true arbiters of what lasts.

Enough hand wringing. Of the films I saw in 2008, these are the ones that have stayed with me the longest:

Favorite doc, favorite studio film, and favorite american indie: At the Death House Door The Dark Knight (or There Will Be Blood, if you want to count it as 2008) Frownland

plus two foreign films... Chaturanga In the City of Sylvia

three shorts... Merrily, Merrily (short) Second Egyptian (short) Voda (short)

and four Microbudgets.... Medicine for Melancholy The New Year Parade Wellness Nights and Weekends

And that makes a dozen.

Happy New Year!

"Herbert" - ContemporAsian @ MoMA

Indian filmmaker Suman Mukhopadhyay recently visited Blacksburg to screen his two features and speak with filmmaking students at Virginia Tech. Talking with Mukhopadhyay about Herbert and Chaturanga was a real highlight of the semester, and a great way to end to the year. Today, Mukhopadhyay shares Herbert, his debut feature, with New Yorkers as part of the Museum of Modern Art's ContemporAsian film series.

Nathan Lee, writing in today's New York Times, calls Herbert "mad, messy, and frequently amazing." It is.

Showtimes are as follows:

Thursday, December 11, 2008, 8:00 p.m. (Introduced by Mukhopadhyay) Friday, December 12, 2008, 6:30 p.m. (Introduced by Mukhopadhyay) Saturday, December 13, 2008, 1:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 Sunday, December 14, 2008, 5:00 p.m. Monday, December 15, 2008, 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, December 17, 2008, 8:45 p.m.

Mukhopadhyay's newest film, Chaturanga, which is still playing cinemas in India, is even more impressive. It trades Herbert's surrealism and self-reflexivity for a more contemplative approach, as befits its story of spiritual searching. Chaturanga is currently screening in theaters in India. Catch it on the festival circuit if you're lucky right now -- and let's hope that a smart American distributor picks it up.

Best Film List, By Alphabet (x 2)

Chris Cagle at Category D tagged me for the Alphabet Meme. Here are the rules:

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.*

2. The letter "A" and the word "The" do not count as the beginning of a film's title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don't know of any films with those titles.

3. Thanks to some clarification by The Siren, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number's word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under "T."

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type "alphabet meme" into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you're selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

I have rejected Cagle's new guideline that with foreign titles one should "rely on the original title if in Roman alphabet, the translated title otherwise." This rule had me making even more tough choices than I wished, so I threw it out. I've cheated, in fact, by using foreign titles or translations whenever it helped with difficult letters, tough choices, etc. My guilt is nil.

And to make the choosing even less painful, I have created two lists: One satisfies the theme of this website, the other lists more general favorites. Of course, MANY of my favorite films -- a ridiculous number of them beginning with the letters "M", "T", and "G" -- are left off of both lists. And if a film got listed on one list, I tried to list a different film on the second list.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder) Black Ice (Brakhage) City Lights (Chaplin) Dance Party USA (Katz) Edvard Munch (Watkins) Frownland (Bronstein) The Gleaners and I (Varda) The Hours and Times (Munch) Isle of Flowers (Furtado) Jo Jo at the Gate of Lions (Sjogren) Killer of Sheep (Burnett) Last Chants for a Slow Dance (Jost) Meshes of the Afternoon (Deren) Night of the Living Dead (Romero) O Dreamland (Anderson) Pather Panchali (Ray) Les Quatre Cents Coups (Truffaut) Rome, Open City (Rossellini) Shadows (Cassavetes) Thirteen (Williams) The Unchanging Sea (Griffith) Les Vampires (Feuillade) The Whole Shootin' Match (Pennell) Xala (Sembene) Zorns Lemma (Frampton)

Harrill's list:

The Awful Truth Best Years of Our Lives, The Chinatown Diary of a Country Priest Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind The Fly (Cronenberg) Grand Illusion The Hours and Times Isle of Flowers Jacquot Killer of Sheep Love Affair The Mortal Storm Night of the Living Dead Ordet The Parallax View Les Quatre cents coups Ruggles of Red Gap Starship Troopers Tender Mercies Unforgiven Vivre Sa Vie Woman Under the Influence Xanadu Yi yi Zero for Conduct

Finally, I want to hear from David Lowery, AJ Schnack, Darren Hughes, Alison Willmore, and Karina Longworth.

Dallas Video Festival

Quick Feet, Soft Hands will be screening at the Dallas Video Festival this evening at 7pm. Details for my screening are below, but the main reason I wanted to post about this was to draw attention David Lowery's fantastic trailer for the festival:

Quick Feet, Soft Hands @ Dallas Video Festival Screening as part of the "Don't Give Me No Grief" program of short films. Sunday, November 9 @ 7pm Angelika Film Center (5321 E. Mockingbird Lane)


Wet Dream (DVF 2008) from David Lowery on Vimeo.

Election Day +4

Just wanted to drop this as a follow-up to my last post, which concerned Video The Vote. For me, the day began at 6am, when I walked to my polling place in Roanoke and stood in a 40 minute line to vote. The line was the result of an electronic voting machine that didn't work and some poll workers who were getting on the job training about how to use the machines. Needless to say, it wasn't reassuring. I had a Flip video camera and took some very rough footage from my spot in line of the problematic machine. Needless to say, this was an inauspicious start to the day.

Thankfully, things did improve. The lines to that polling place shrunk by 8am, and I remained "on call" for Video The Vote for most of the day. I did drive out to Cloverdale, Virginia to document a woman whose voter registration address change had been lost; she had to vote provisionally.

The real story of the day, though, was in Blacksburg, where students from Virginia Tech were having to wait for several hours at one polling place. I heard about this late in the day, and a few minutes after reading the story (oddly, on Huffington Post instead of via The Roanoke Times website or from friends), Video The Vote called me from NYC, asking me to document the situation. Ashley was already in Blacksburg, so she went to capture footage. She got some great stuff with her Flip camera (videos 1, 2, 3).

NOTE: My name, not Ashley's, is on the footage because I was the one that registered for Video the Vote.

When Ashley returned home, we spent the evening uploading her footage. Video The Vote's website was SLAMMED, so uploads took forever. The fact that we were hitting the "refresh" button on our browsers to see election results wasn't helping.

Pennsylvania was called for Obama around the time that we were close to done uploading all of our videos from the day. We knew what was coming, so we headed over to an Election Day party.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Literally.

The Election: How Filmmakers Can Help

If you're reading this, you're probably a filmmaker with access to a video camera. Video The Vote needs people like you and me on Election Day. What's Video the Vote? From their website:

Video the Vote is a national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. We organize citizen journalists—ordinary folks like you and me—to document election problems as they occur. And then we distribute their footage to the mainstream media and online to make sure the full story of Election Day gets told. Watch our 2006 highlights and join us as we Video the Vote this November.

If, like me, you find yourself in a swing state this year, you might feel like it's especially important to be a part of this.

It takes less than a minute to sign up, and you can volunteer for just part or all of Election Day. So get involved. And spread the word to your filmmaker friends.

Finally, if you're not sure why such an organization even exists, check out this interview between Bill Moyers and NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller. Warning: Viewing this will keep you up at night.

iPhone Film Calculator application

The folks at 2.1 Films have just released an iPhone Film Calculator. From the description:

Film Calculator has three basic functions:

Length & Time Converter: This function allows the user quickly convert length to time and vice versa for a variety of film stocks and speeds. Choose from Super-8mm, 16mm, 35mm or 70mm stocks and preset frames per second rates (12, 24, 25, 48) or enter your own. Then enter the time and you'll get the length or enter the length and you'll get the time.

Hard Drive Storage Calculator: Select a format and enter a time and this function will tell you how much hard drive storage space you need. Dozens of formats are included. Contact us to request more!

Script Supervisor's Assistant: This function provides a stopwatch that counts both time and length. Select the stock and frame rate and then operate this like a regular stopwatch. Saves scripty's from having to use a calculator at the end of each take. Always know exactly how much you've shot on a reel!

Read more about it here. Buy it (for $2.99) here.

True Story (for those suffering from writer's block)

From an email that I recently wrote to a student suffering from writer's block:

Have I told you my story about William Stafford, the poet? He made it a habit to write a poem every day. (A great poet, he won the National Book Award, etc.) Anyway, I saw him read his poetry shortly before his death. A budding writer stood up after his reading, during the Q+A and asked, "You said you write a poem every day. What happens on the days when you're not feeling inspired?"

Stafford replied, "I lower my standards."

I think that about sums it up.

IndieMemphis: Quick Feet, Soft Hands, etc.

Quick Feet, Soft Hands will be screening at IndieMemphis this weekend. If you've not seen it and you're in the area, check it out on Sunday. Sadly, I won't be able to attend. Instead I've got to run to D.C. to do some final post-production work on the Quick Feet television version, which I need to deliver to ITVS by the end of the month.

In addition to missing all the great films that IM's new festival director Erik Jambor has selected, I'm also bummed that I'm missing out on an all-to-infrequent opportunity to feast on authentic Memphis BBQ.

If this year's IndieMemphis is any indication, Jambor is going to do great things for the festival as it chugs into its second decade. Hopefully I'll be able to be there with the next one. To all that attend -- enjoy!