Formats: Quicktime | YouTube | Blip | .flv | .mp3If you like Dorian Nuskind-Oder and Chris Elam’s vision for the future of performance art please get everyone you know to go vote for them at ideablob.com where they can win 10K to make this all a reality. For more about their dance company visit Misnomer.org and for more of my videos visit www.arincrumley.com.

Also check out the video that Apple made about Misnomer’s work with Tronic Studios.

Any of your own thoughts on the future of performance art?  Please post a comment below:

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Putting real life into film, podcasting to extend the narrative, captivating social network audiences, Google mapping the audience demand for a theatrical release and digitally distributing to millions of internet viewers around the world.   The pioneering efforts of Arin Crumley haven’t gone un-noticed as Indiewire, MovieMaker, The Wall Street Journal, The Spirit Awards, The Sundance Channel, IFC TV, & many others have jumped into the echo chamber further demonstrating all that new media has to offer.

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Today The Wall Street Journal lists Arin among the top 20 new media moguls, and applauds the co-creation of the popular independent film and online video series, Four Eyed Monsters.  The film won the Sundance Channel Audience Award and was nominated for two spirit awards.  Millions of viewers have engaged across multiple mediums with the project from podcasting, to MySpace to YouTube, facebook & twitter.  The community around the film has participated in DIY theatrical screenings around the world and the audience has created material that has been put back into the project.  The phenomena of Four Eyed Monsters has also attracted deals to air the film on IFC TV and the Super Channel as well as other foreign distribution interest.

Continuing his exploration into new media Arin also co-founder a research and development project called From Here to Awesome which has been uniting filmmakers to create the future models of collaboration, funding, production and distribution.  All of this has lead to the development of many future films and interactive experiences to come.  Keep track of all Arin’s projects and ideas on his blog at arincrumley.com

ANYONE CAN USE THIS PHOTO, JUST CREDIT MIKE HEDGE, CLICK FOR VARIOUS RESOLUTIONS:

 

Q&A:

1. What excites you about the future? 

I’d like to have a list of all the films I’ve ever had the notion of wanting to see stored in my pocket at all times and to be able to program an alert that I want to go off when I’m walking past an underground movie theater that will be showing one of those films in 20 minutes.  I also want to see myself and others shooting video on topics we are passionate about and then digital connections sending material straight from the camera to online environments where people can immediately start commenting on various aspects of the footage and integrating the material into films edited by hundreds of online collaborators.  

2. What’s something you wish you would have known before you found out the hard way? 

Thought shall not make thy movie with thine credit card.

3. What’s on your playlist, reading list, or in your movie queue? 

I loved David Lynch’s Book Catching The Big Fish and am often listening to my Radio Head, Beck and anything else more obscure I can find, especially when I know the musician or they find me online and say it’s alright to use their music in films.  My movie queue is so back logged that I can’t even begin to go into it, although I can say that I’ve been carrying The Cell around in my bag for the past 2 weeks excited by the notion I’ll soon have time to watch it.

4. What’s a site you couldn’t live without? 

I’d have a tough time without gmail and facebook since they are the main ways I stay in touch with everyone.  I love the feature of being able to send a text message from my Gmail to other peoples phones and a number of the other Lab functions I’ve switched on to experiment with.  I also am just super pumped about twitter.  The idea of a micro-blog is great.  It’s showing us that it’s the little things that sometimes count the most.  It also makes me feel that from my cell phone I can keep tabs on letting people know what I’m up to.  On twitter I feel like I’m really a part of something while at the same time nothing is expected of me because if I don’t post anything, I know that everyone else has it all covered.

5. What are you currently working on? 

I’ve started a new company called The CoCreate Inc which is handling the continued self distribution of Four Eyed Monsters and using the relationships being formed with iTunes, Netflix, DogWoof, and other marketing and distribution services to provide a pipeline in which future projects will be able to be pumped into.  I’m also developing several media experiences that will unfold in the coming months.  I’m being lead to all of my upcoming projects by the various interests I have including Filmmaking, Burning Man, Video Journalism, Cooking, Music, Collaboration, Modern Romance, and Consciousness.

LINKS:

BLOG:  http://arincrumley.com
MICRO-BLOG:  http://twitter.com/arincrumley
FRIENDS & PICS:  http://facebook.com/arincrumley
FILM: http://foureyedmonsters.com
NEW PROJECT:  http://asthedustsettles.com

RECENT PRESS: 

Movie Maker Magazine’s Cover Story (July 2009)

Filmmaker Magazine’s Comparison between Steven Soderberg’s & Arin Crumley’s use of the Red Camera (Nov 2008)

YouTube | .mov | .flv

Karl Jacob, Sara Mayti, Brian Chirls, Amylin Loglisci, Brian Jacobs, Sharon Van Etten, Joe Griffin, Susan Buice, Josh Steinbauer, some british girls that randomly joined us, and myself all at my favorite karaoke place in New York called Sing Sing. Best Bday ever! And we took tons ofpictures that are up on my flickr.

For more of whats going on in my world subscribe to arincrumley.com.

Sharon Van Etten performs “Damn Right” to at the noisy bar in Brooklyn. The back room there is a little bit better but right at the bar in the front room it’s hard to grab peoples attention on this particular night. Only some of the room is engaged and that tension really works for a song about unrequited love.

Sign up on Sharon’s Mailing List to get information about future shows. Also check out my twitter because I usually post when I’m planning to go to a show.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

After a previous post I was asked to continue creating online film school style blogs so here goes:

I got the following message on MySpace:

—————– Original Message —————–
From: Ryan
Date: 18/12/2007

i am an aspiring filmmaker.

the only one in my school.

so its hard to shoot the movies i wanna shoot.

because no one will help me.

im a senior

and im thinking about attending new england institute of art.

im in the process of making a short right now, but alas, its difficult. and im on a deadline. plus i dont have any actors, just my friends who wanna jack around when im trying to get things done.

any ideas or advice?
sincerely yours
ryan

Ryan,

Here are my thoughts:

Only work seriously with people who can take things seriously and if that means all you have is yourself, then put yourself in front of the camera and use a tripod.

For the rest, use reality where all you need is for people to take themselves seriously which most people do and then document them being their true selves.

Your message that you just sent me was a short story. You have characters, you and your goofy friends who we could see poorly act in your attempts at movie making as a voice over explains nobody takes what you want to do seriously. We have a setting, Milford MA, and a high school where you are the only filmmaker, meanwhile all these other more popular activities are constantly keeping everyone else entertained. Sports, cheerleading and other popular activities could flash by.

Kids at your school probably all eat together and laugh at lunch, this could easily be shown. You probably sit in the corner drawing story board ideas for films (or something like that) and this could easily be shown to provide contrast.

You want to make films and have an eye. This can be shown via textures or up close things or something random but amazing that you have caught on video, maybe a few things flickr by.

And then end on explaining you think you should attend the art institute of England. Film the website or brochure or whatever it is that made you start thinking about their school.

But also consider the notion that you might not need the Art Institute and you just want to make your films after high school and find some other way to collect a team of serious people. My friend Roger started making a film called Moonshine when he was 19 and it was in sundance when he was 21. He didn’t go to film school. He just used the internet to find people serious about acting and got a cinematographer who knew what he was doing.

That would be my advice.
Arin

* Does anyone have any more advice for Ryan? Please post a comment below.

Brian Chirls emailed me about this wondering if I had any thoughts on what to submit. Right now I’m interested in so many different topics that narrowing down to one might be hard. But as it stands now, these are the ideas on the table.

Potential Ideas:

Peer to peer distribution of local organic food. A carton of apples comes to your door and you take the number of apples you need and then carry the carton to the next stop your computer tells you needs the carton. Then they take what they need and pass it on to the next house. Helping with distribution by carrying the box of apples helps you have more points in the system. The number of apples you took for yourself uses up your points. You can eat for free if you have a bike and want to pick up packages and take them to their destinations. You can avoid ever needing to carry or distribute anything if you simply buy your points. Or you could do a combination of both. It would be a good way to make friends anyway. A cute girl needs three apples, you bet your sweet button your picking up three apples and bringing them to her house. Worst case scenario her boyfriend comes to the door and you get a few points for having delivered the apples. I know, what about creeps. Well creeps will get bad reviews and will have no digital trust so you won’t approve them bringing the apples because you won’t want them to know where you live.

Neighborhood dinning collectives. Another similar spin off idea to the above peer to peer distribution of food. This one works by having a dinning hall that everyone who is a member pitches in to cover it’s monthly rent and monthly food delivery bills. Instead of paying you can work hours preparing food. A head chef is in charge. A network of these collective dinning halls could do a similar peer to peer distribution of food and help deal with surplus of left over materials that won’t get used.

Socially backed virtual currencies. Normal money and credit cards are a clumsy way of paying exchanging value in the internet age. What we need instead is a way to record your good deeds and build a digital karma that makes you more attractive to getting good deeds done to you. Free food, free places to stay, free education etc.. Freely give and freely get and have a social networking digital trail that makes you feel that everything you give is leading up to you getting stuff in the future. Also if someone needs your help you can see that they help a lot of other people and that you should do it. And there can even be more weight given to help towards those that help a lot. For example, a musician who has made music they’ve given away for free to millions of people and all of their lives are enhanced needs a place to crash. Well, you just helped Radio Head and now you’re ratings and digital karma just shot way up. Then a free loader comes along who never does anything good or helps anyone and you could help them but if you yourself are a bit exhausted, the value of helping them isn’t as great because they don’t help others so you aren’t as inspired to help them, but you might anyway. And they might learn that if they want to freely get, they are going to start having to find a way to freely give and provide something of valuable to their peers. This might sound a little like capitalism but keep in mind, it can be things that normally you wouldn’t charge for. Also the problem with money is that you simply need to hold onto it and you have all this value. In this environment I’m describing you have to always do good valuable things in order to be rated high and have help that comes to you be considered more valuable to the one giving help. It’s complex I know.

Distributed Semantic Social Network. Turn the entire web into one social network that is both machine and human readable so anyone can build social tools. Instead of the worlds social networking being hosted at facebook.com or MySpace you’d have a standard social identity language that any person or company can host on any server. Then simple queries like arincrumley.com/age.rdf would server up answers like giving a number. So reviews, ratings, listening history, watching history, photos, videos, bookmarks, search history and anything else you want to be public information could be broadcasted from your universal online identity. This could turn the entire world wide web into one large social network. Also the discovery of media and search results could be way more based on social information and less on digital information. INstead of searching google or looking at amazon recommended books or netflix recommended movies, you can have a steady supply based on your social networks and digital groups and published ratings and websites you’ve recently liked and music you’ve recently listened to. So a movie with a bunch of music you’ve been listening to or a documentary about a topic you’ve been bookmarking lately can be thrown into your radar.

Subscription model to compensate creators. Create a universal license that creators can put on their content that defines the royalties they need if someone financially exploits their work. Then let any company create a subscription service using peer to peer technology or any other distribution mechanism for content and charge a monthly fee and use voluntarily provided listening and viewing history to find how to divide the money based on the splits in the standardized licenses.

Communal pods on tracks to replace cars in cities. Instead of cabs, huge trucks and SUV’s blasting pollution all over a city you could have electric tracks and very lightweight energy efficient vehicles that are on a network. That way you don’t need any drivers. Just get in and type your destination. Or call one via SMS and the next available pod will appear, scupe you up and zip you to your near by destination. Then you could tie these inner city pods into High Speed Rail between cities and you could even have cargo pods to deliver food and products to stores instead of having huge trucks killing our planet.

Publishing carbon footprint data on packaging and receipts. Get some organizations that can estimate the carbon dioxide footprint of a candy bar and then print the number of pounds of C02 that your creating. Then integrate this information into a stores database of products and prices. So as you check out and pay for what ever you bought, part of your receipt can tell you the number of pounds of carbon dioxide totalled up in all of the products you just bought. Then you could even use online services to total that information up and find out what you can do to balance your foot print down to zero. Maybe you then pay for 10 trees to be planted and get your self to a zero carbon footprint and then get a tax break. But more importantly you could get digital badges to put on your social networks to let people know that you are maintaining a zero carbon footprint for you as an individual. Or to brag that you as a company are maintaining a zero carbon footprint.

Digital Microcinema Network. Become a member of a digital microcinema in your near by neighborhood and pay 10 dollars a month and have voting power over what films screen. Get notifications when the movies you wanted are screening and have rating and reviewing tools be built into the movie theater along with live chatting and commenting over the movie on a separate screen on the back of the chair in front of you. This way their would be theatrical proceeds that could be divided up and sent back to the creators of the work. Also it wouldn’t matter how long a film was. It also wouldn’t matter if it was a digital live event like a sports game or what have you. This idea ties into the universal license idea for media content that allows any distribution of that content provided you pay the royalty back. And if you screen public domain material or simply do a live event that is open to the public in the space to non-members then obviously no one has to be paid. Anything. But if it’s a film in which ownership is important then the published owner of that content will get x percent of that months proceeds sent to them. I guess the idea is sort of like a netflix for movie theaters. It would work best when every 5 blocks in major cities you have one of these and it’s very community based and is connected with places to get food and drink.

Those are just a few of the ideas I’ve thought about for a while. So help me out here, which one should I make in a video for DAVOS?

Here is a video from last year in which Bill Gates actually says some kind of cool things:

iPod Quicktime | .FLV | .MP3 | YouTube

Sharon Van Etten invited me to her show sunday night at Zebulon and I decided to film it. I had captured an event that she was a part of two nights earlier but this was cool because it was a full length set. Also had back up vocals on a few songs from Ben Sanabria and myisha from Forest Fire who had performed earlier.

The thing that amazed me about the show was the transition from noisy bar to mesmorized audience. Now and then you hear the squeek of the bathroom door but other then that the entire bar was sitting in captivated slience.

Earlier in the night I also filmed a couple songs performed by Leah Hayes who goes by Scary Mansion and who is also in the band La Laque. Unfortunatley the footage is very dark so I’m probably not going to post those songs. I had asked the sound man to brighten the stage for Sharon which helped a lot.

I’d love to hear peoples thoughts about Sharon’s music. Also I always love suggestions of other indie underground material to listen to or possibly go see live. Please post a comment below.

This is the third live show video I’ve posted and plan to do more in the future as well as continue blogging about indie film, the creative process and the digital art landscape. Grab my RSS feed or get an email everytime I post new stuff online.

 

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Real music, with real instruments. Novel thought.

A friend Josh is in Woodpecker so I decided to go to their show and film it.Susan and I have been listening to their music pretty often while we are working on stuff and it was great to see the band and find out who sings each song. Also randomly my friend Sharon Van Etten knows the Cello player Andy because they went to elementary school together. He’s kind of my favorite in the band in a way, nothing like a solid Cello.I love all these instruments and how good they blend together. My favorite songs kick in about half way into the video. Can’t wait to here what comes out of these guys next. Susan is especially in love.To get this video download in HD Seach iTunes or Miro for “Arin Crumley” and subscribe free to my video channel there. The file can play on Apple TV and is in 720p and looks pretty amazing. And feel free to re-cut and re-post if you have a favorite song or section you want to put on your own video channel. Just make sure to link to the band.Also I’ll be posting more music and performance videos of events I go to and like. Subscribe to the RSS feed at arincrumley.com to make sure you get it all.

Here is what happened, we sent out 15,000 emails and bulletined to 20,000 friends about how it’s a good idea to buy FEM DVD’s this Xmas instead of supporting corporate America.

We also re-designed our store to make buying the smoothest experience we can.

http://foureyedmonsters.com/store

The email costs 200 dollars to send using a Vertical Response which is supposed to prevent the messages from ending up in junk mail boxes and that can handle sending huge volume of emails like that.

So instead of a follow up email, I decided to post a follow up bulletin explaining that a week later we had only sold 35 DVDs due to that campaign.

One of the responses was the the following:

This guy has a good point, and not just about the spelling feedback.  (I know, I’m a bad speller, I hope to improve one day.)  But he’s right, we are in a pretty good spot in a lot of ways and I’m totally thankful for that.  And selling 35 is selling 35 and now since the bulleting we are up to 40, but the number sold vs the online audience we obviously have are just not as matched up as one would think.  As of posting we have sold 1436 DVDs which again, I’m greatful for.  However, we all have to acknowledge that selling DVDs off of one website alone is not enough.  The DVD would have to get to more places other then just our site to ever really see that number go substantially up.  So we are working towards that occuring and in the meantime would love to prove as much as we can about whats possible in terms of selling your own DVDs directly to audiences.  Because I think people who have the ability to make content that is relevant to decent size audiences should be able to survive doing that so they can keep doing that and not have to sell our souls to pay rent.

So anyway, what do people think, is there a better tone we can have to our campaign to sell DVDs this holiday season?  Any input on our new online store?

A longtime online friend of mine Mike Krumlauf is making a feature film called External Memory and has two parts up on their youtube channel. He emailed me today asking for feedback and since I rarely have the time to take people up on that request, I thought I’d post my feedback here incase it’s helpful to anyone else also learning to make films.

So Mike, I watched the two parts. Nice work guys. Some good shots. Getting hit by the car and him running through that garage and jumping all looked really cool. The story is not bad either. One thing to be careful about is having your story be too preachy. You know how in a fable, there is always a moral to the story. Well I think you should resist the temptation to have super clear morals. It’s not bad to have them when your writing but really, if you make the characters real enough in terms of writing a very complex and dynamic character then the morals of the story will all be implied and you wont have to articulate them so much. But this becomes even more of a challenge to keep feeling real when you introduce non-realistic elements which seems to be at the core of the style. So your going to have to create a balancing act between the invented reality and realistic characters that feel like people we know as the audience.

There are a lot of acting and directing tricks to make what ever your script is come across as extremely natural and believable. Try these two things with your actor. Play an acting game called “I see, I feel”. You can do this at your rehearsals with the actors.

Two people sit down across form each other and stare into each others eyes. It’s okay to blink but you can not look away. Do this in silence until it becomes comfortable. Then one person says “I see somebody who is…” Then the other person says, “I see somebody who…” and you basically just fill in the blanks. You can start with very physical observations like, “who is wearing a baseball cap.” But then you evolve into, “…someone who is a friend.” But basically just say whatever comes into your mind with out thinking or censoring. Then you move to “I feel…”. The two people trade off saying things they feel.Now these should all be things the real people really feel, not the fictional characters. Maybe someone feels glad to be in a movie maybe somebody feels stressed about school, whatever they really feel. Then finally, as an option, if there is a certain mood they need to capture for a scene, they can start throwing back and forth, “I feel…” and describe how they know the character is supposed to feel. At this point they need to insert their own true selves into what the character is supposed to be. At this moment they’ll be both. They’ll be themselves operating as real people, but also the character in the head space the character is in. And thats where you want your actors to be in this kind of fictional work. Essentially just themselves but in state that the character is supposed to be in.

You can even do this on set just before a take if your actors have previously done this.

Now here is another thing you can do with actors. You can hypnotize them. Learn online about how to hypnotize people because thats basically what directing is. You should be able to find some audio and video tutorials on that. Once you know basically how to do that. You can get creative with what you have people do. The thing about hypnosis is that you don’t really make people do things, you just make suggestions that they willing go along with and they fill in all the blanks. So it can be very minimal. And you can do very creative things with it.

For example, what if you had convinced your actor momentarily that he was an orangutan physically but that verbally he was a drill sergeant. The angle that tells him to jump. This would produce a stronger presence we’d be able to connect with as the audience. His arms might swing in a bit more of an intimidating way and his weight might be exaggerated as he jumped in front of your lead to stop him from continuing. And the orders coming out of his mouth would have an authentic authority because for a moment your actor really would believe that he was a drill sergeant. And then if you didn’t like that take, you could hypnotize him to be a whole different combo for the next take. All of this can be worked in in rehearsals with your actors.

And a final directing tip. Be sure to not give too much direction. People generally aren’t as aware of their mouth, eyes and limbs as we are watching them. So it kind of freaks people out to say, “do this with your mouth.” Instead, get used to throwing abstract ideas at your actor that have nothing at all to do with the scene. You can even do this in the middle of a take. Just be sure to always speak loud and slow because during a take hearing what a director is saying can be difficult.

An example of that would be when your actor wakes up on the roof. Artistically you might decide that when asleep he’s in a gentle state but when he wakes up he’s sort of jolted by this weird reality he’s stepped into. So when the actor is laying on the ground, you can say, “your on vacation.” And say it as a directing instruction. He might say, “what do you mean.” But if you work this way with your actors a bit, they’ll eventually learn that you give them things that can evoke a feeling for them. If the actor knows how to take that kind of direction and you’ve sort of hypnotized them, then in their minds, they will suddenly be totally relaxed and on vacation and that will change look on their face pretty noticiabily and you’ll know if you have what you want. This is referred to as an “inner secret”. It’s something the audience will never know they were thinking but at the same time, the audience will be affected by the fact they were thinking it.

Another thing that struck me was the lack of peoples eyes. Something weird happens with the eyes of human beings where when we look at them we just understand where they are coming from. So cinematically this should be taken advantage of. Get a little closer when you can. And maybe even have a reflector on hand with a PA to bounce some light into peoples faces. Your using available light pretty well and exposing well and color correcting pretty well, but if you get a little bit more light into the eyes, then the audience will be able to see where the characters are coming from. And while your directing, you’ll also be able to watch their nuances yourself to see if it’s all convincing and if you need to stop and enhance the performance with some more direction.

Thats about it, good luck with all your filmmaking and with this feature.

From time to time I might use my blog as sort of an online film course so part of the vision there is that other people chime in and also give feedback to the work. So again, here is the link, go watch for yourself and then come back and post some thoughts below.