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.
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!
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?”
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 allthegreatfilms 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!
This isn’t for everyone, especially those that don’t own their own equipment or those that are concerned with resale value. But if you’re going to use your camera until the wheels fall off, so to speak, then this article may provide some tips or, at the very least, inspiration.
The best part of digital filmmaking is that it can be highly innovative, and of course, such innovation lies in the imagination of the beholder! Leapfrogging technologies and the ever expanding internet with its plethora of options has been instrumental in bringing about a seachange in the way films are made.
Today, I am talking about a do-it-yourself collaborative filmmaking website called RootClip.com, where the creative team make a short video clip or “Rootclip” to start the story. Amateur filmmakers watch their video, then shoot their own rendition of what should happen next in less than 2 minutes. The result is an entire short film made by amateur filmmakers.
I think it’s pretty exciting. Their last film actually debuted at the Travese City Film Festival. ust say this has got a lot of potential.
CHIEF – a short film written and directed by Brett Wagner and produced by Dana Satler Hankins, has won “Best Dramatic Short” at the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival on August 22nd.
Jurors included actress Sandra Oh, HBO Executive Producer Andrew Reimer, and L.A. Weekly film critic Ernest Hardy. L.A. Shortsfest is an Academy Award accredited film festival whose winners are eligible to be nominated for an Oscar in the short film categories. CHIEF was among thousands of shorts submitted to the fest for consideration.
CHIEF’s winning run started in January, when it became the first Hawaiian short film ever to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. IndieWIRE declared it “one of the 10 must-see shorts of the festival.”
The film received a British Academy of Film and Television Certificate of Excellence and won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Short at the Maui Film Festival. CHIEF has been recently screened at the Festival of Pacific Arts in American Samoa.
Thanks to a sponsorship from Hawaiian Airlines, Wagner and lead actor Chief Sielu Avea were able to travel to Pago Pago and present the film to enthusiastic audiences at the quadrennial event. CHIEF’s Honolulu premiere will take place in October at the Hawaii International Film Festival.
Yours truly was just looking through interesting filmmaking jobs at mandy.com when one particularly interesting one caught the eye.
The New York Film Academy (NYFA) seems on the lookout for a new film editing instructor. The invite for applications looks something like this:
Vacancy: Editing Instructor Employer: New York Film Academy Location: Universal City Duration: part time, starts ASAP
Los Angeles area film school seeks instructor of Editing. Topics include: basic and advanced editing, color correction, sound editing, compositing, titles and the fundamentals of VFX. All classes are taught on Final Cut Pro. MFA or equivalent industry experience required. Position is part time and starts immediately.
Once an expensive, difficult and inaccessible profession to break into, filmmaking has now opened up to the masses. With the digital revolution, anyone with a digital video camera and access to basic editing software can make a film.
Along with this accessibility has come a new wave of collaborative, open source filmmaking, where writers, videographers, musicians and producers share their work on a film project — often entirely in the virtual realm. Sometimes these collaborators know each other, and sometimes they don’t.
Solomon Rothman, 27, who runs Solomon Rothman Films, is one of those on the cutting edge of this trend. In 2006, he released a film called “The Boy Who Never Slept,” and at the same time he released all of the footage as open source material, so people could tweak, remix and reshape it however they liked. It was used by teachers in video editing classes, made into a music video in Romania and put on Finnish television.
“I still receive e-mails every week [about that film]. People are still playing with it.”
Rothman’s latest project, “Jathia’s Wager,” is an even more thoroughly collaborative project than his first. It began with him posting a seven-page script on his Web site in 2007, calling for people to send in different versions. He now has five versions he’s received back that are ready to be shot, and he’s hoping to have online, open source casting for the different versions of the films, with people voting on who will play what role. Ultimately, he wants to produce all the versions, using the skills and perspectives of the people who are gathering around the project.
“The entire process is being built by the community. With the digital revolution, it’s all accessible. Filmmaking used to be really expensive and inaccessible. Now anyone can make a film if they want. Technology has broken down that wall.”
Rothman said he sees open source filmmaking as an extension of the open source software model, which gives people a chance to collaborate in order to improve the creative product.
“People are really creative, when they work together, they can do so much more than they can alone. It’s done wonderful things with software, making it more efficient, and of better quality. It’s time for that now to go into films.”
Rothman thinks of what he’s doing with “Jathia’s Wager” as being more crowdsourcing than open sourcing, since it’s not just releasing footage to be remixed, but harnessing the power of people.
Dominick Del Bosque, owner of the Open Source Film Project in San Francisco, has a similar perspective.
“We don’t view the source as the tangible parts, we see the ’source’ as the people in a project.”
Launched in 2005, the Open Source Film Project’s vision is to bring together writers, directors, producers, musicians and financiers for the creation of independent films.
In Final Cut Pro, an alternate way to sync clips of a multi-camera production is to use timecode as a reference. When clips share the same timecode, you don’t have to set an In point to sync them together. A timecode number in one clip should identify the same action in an event as that same timecode number in a different clip. The method of switching and cutting angles in the multiclip is the same, no matter how the clips are synchronized.
1. In the Browser, Ctrl-click the Sequences bin and choose New Sequence from the shortcut menu. Name this sequence Timecode, and open it in the Timeline. Each new sequence you create contains the same PAL settings you chose from the Easy Setup window earlier in this lesson.
2. Hide the contents of the Audio Pops bin, and display the contents of the Timecode bin.
3. Double-click the Gilly_cu clip, and play from the beginning of the clip. When Gilly steps up to the mic to start singing, stop the clip and look at the timecode number in the Current Timecode field in the Viewer.
4. Open a few other clips from the Timecode bin and compare the timecode numbers at the location where Gilly starts to sing.
The same timecode number in all of these clips identifies the same event or clip location. For this group of clips, you can synchronize by timecode, even though they don’t all start or stop on the same frame.
5. To make a multiclip of all the clips in the Timecode bin, Ctrl-click the bin and choose Make Multiclip from the shortcut menu.
6. In the Make Multiclip window, click the Synchronize Using pop-up and choose Timecode as the sync option.
The blue bars of each angle reposition to align the clips by timecode. Notice how the blue bars seem to cover the same relative area. They were taken from the same portion of the song but are not exactly the same length.
7. Click OK. In the Timecode bin, rename the new multiclip Timecode, and double-click to open it in the Viewer.
8. In the Viewer button bar, click the Show Multiclip Overlays button to toggle off the overlays in this multiclip.
9. In the Viewer, click the View pop-up and choose Multiclip 9-Up from the pop-up menu to see all the multiclip angles. Play this portion of the music video.
10. To edit this multiclip, use the same process you used with the Audio Pops multiclip. Start by changing the sync to Video+Audio and selecting the CD Track – Timecode clip. Then change the sync to Video and select the first video angle. Set an In point and an Out point where the angles are all in view, and edit the multiclip to the Timeline.
11. To see the clips play in the Viewer as you play the sequence, click the Playhead Sync pop-up, and choose Open from the menu, or press Shift-Ctrl-O. This will allow you to see the angles as you play and cut in real-time.
At this point, you can edit these clips as you did in previous exercises: either by moving the playhead to an exact edit location and cutting to a new angle, or by cutting live.
NOTE If you are using a laptop or slower computer, this nine-clip multiclip may play slowly. Digital Filmmaking is the way to go…
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In Final Cut Pro, an alternate way to sync clips of a multi-camera production is to use timecode as a reference. When clips share the same timecode, you don’t have to set an In point to sync them together. A timecode number in one clip should identify the same action in an event as that same timecode number in a different clip. The method of switching and cutting angles in the multiclip is the same, no matter how the clips are synchronized.
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