OpenIndie was asked to participate in the DIY DAYS incubator on April 3rd 2010 where Kieran & I spent the whole day reviewing the strengths and challenges of introducing OpenIndie to the world.

The tail end of the day was spent preparing and rehearsing this presentation that I then gave to the DIY DAYS participants. It felt great to just let loose with the crowd screaming at the top of our lungs, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” The message was very well received.

Afterwards Kieran detailed the incubator experience saying, “We arent the OpenIndie that went into the DIY DAYS Incubator.” It was a truly transformative experience.

So lets get this ball rolling guys. Lets build phase 2. Lets get investors on board who can fund this effort so we can do it right.

If you know anyone who should be a part of the OpenIndie effort, please send referrals and suggestions along via twitter or email ArinCrumley @ Gmail (dot) com

And please join the site and start requesting films or add your own film.

CREDITS:
Filmming was done by Alex Liss, Mike Hedge & Raffi Asdourian.
The scene is from Network copyright by the studio that owns it and we are using under fair use law.
The music in the “request” video is by our friend Drew Danburry. That video is a part of the Four Eyed Monsters Case Study Presentation we originally  gave at Power to the Pixel 2007.

David lynch is pretty set on people really missing out if they try to watch a film on a phone. But this doesn’t mean that smart phones can’t enhance the cinema experience.

Here are a few obvious things I see as valuable in designing a new film experience:

• Discovering near by screenings of movies made by filmmakers you love.
• Engaging in an interactive experience designed to be the pre-show to the film. An example would be the Four Eyed Monsters Video Podcast.
• Managing the screenings of movies you plan to attend as well as receiving alerts when a close friend is going to be going to a screening that you are near.
• Engaging in an application designed to be used in sync with the film. The app could interoperate the wave form of the audio of the film to gain it’s sync. User comments and additional info about scenes could add an interactive layer to the film.
• Interactive advertisements placed on portable apps could be a smart use of marketing dollars and increase discoverability of a film. Targeting could be focused around geographical and other demographic information.

Steve Jobs at Apple Inc recently gave a presentation that I watched online demonstrating all the new features of the iPhone that will be available this summer and will come to the iPad in the fall.

Below are my notes from his presentation.

Making an iPhone, iTouch, or iPad app puts you in front of up to 85 million users.

The new iPhone OS handles multi-tasking.

Pandora has 50 million users. Now in the new iPhone OS you can listen to music while you also check your email. 20 percent of the music they stream is going to iPhones and they expect that to grow.

Skype connects 1 out of every 9 international calls made on the planet. In the new iPhone OS you can get a skype call anytime. Even when the phone is locked and in your pocket. Before you had to have the app launched to get the call.

Background location is now possible in the new iPhone OS which means that for very little power usage the iPhone can figure out if you’ve changed locations and an app can automatically find out you’ve moved.

Task completion is a new feature that allows you to finish an upload while you’ve moved over to another application.

Fast app switching lets applications use only a tiny bit of battery power when you leave the app so you don’t get a sluggish experience.

You can also have a unified inbox now in the mail application and open attachments in iPhone apps.

iBooks is the ebook store that was made for the iPad but will now also work in the new iPhone OS.

Encryption API lets application builders have high security over any information transmitted to an application.

Wireless application distribution means a user could get an application from a company that they work for pushed to their companies iPhone.

They’ve also added a social gaming network. you can invite friends to play a game with you.  You can automatically match with others who are playing a game.

iAd is a new mobile advertising platform. “It’s about helping our developers make some money through advertising so they can keep their free apps free,” is what steve jobs said explaining why they are doing this.  He made the observation that  ”people are not searching, they are using apps,” which struck me as apples way of explaining to the ad industry why apple is now in the Ad game.  It also made me think of the growing Google vs Apple competition for world domination.  Hehe.  I personally love both companies.  Even though each frustrate me at times.

Average iPhone user uses iPhone app 30 minutes a day. If a small banner add appeared every 3 minutes in the bottom of that app then Steve predicts 1 billion ad opportunities per day.  ”A huge opportunity”, he says.

Apple will be selling and hosting the ads. They are built with HTML5. Advertisers can show videos, provide a free game, theater listings, provide the user with wall papers and even sell applications or games. You can have the user shake the iPhone to get new random new content within an ad. Ads can also integrate location.

Hiring an iPhone app developer is a way to build an iAd. Developer who makes the app that the iAd is attached to will get the majority of the revenue but apple will also take some.  I am curious how an advertiser pays signs up to have their ad appear in apps.  I am also curious how an app can define which ads they feel comfortable existing on their apps.  Also I’m curious if advertising that doesn’t use the iAd system would violate any kind of terms and service.

Developer.apple.com has the new iPhone development tools.  Developing iPhone apps strikes me as a profitable skill for someone who loves designing user experiences.

Here are a few screen grabs from the Video.

Today, March 1st 2010 OpenIndie launched in beta to the 100 filmmakers who provided over 12,000 dollars to have the site built by myself (Arin Crumley) and my co-founder Kieran Masterton.

I was blown away by Kieran’s quality of programming and design at launch. The site is truly inspiring to me and I’m glad to have co-designed it and to be bringing OpenIndie to the public.

The first 18 films were added and 7 screenings were entered into the site one of which was We Live In Public, one of the films that contributed 100 dollars towards building OpenIndie. Today the 7 screenings We Live in Public was having were added to the site as part of the effort to promote their multi-city and multi-format release. The screenings were in celebration of the films VOD & DVD nationwide release.

The live Q&A was streamed online from Chicago with filmmaker Ondi Timoner and main character of the film Josh Harris. They bantered over audience questions pipped in from the 5 other cities asking about the authenticity of love that takes place in-front of cameras, the goal we all have with our online identities and the likeliness of Andy Warhol’s promise of 15 minutes of fame in our life times.

Josh Harris gave his predictions of the future of the internet and then explained he’s working on a wired city project of living spaces that are streamed online to interacting participants and mentioned having hollywood support for the project.

Ondi Timoner dissected Josh explaining her assessment of Josh’s tendency to shut off to intimacy and then mentioned she’s working on a film that explores the under exposed solutions to help climate change as well as her first scripted narrative which will be about the life story of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Ondi is a freaking radical. I love her.

This up coming week for me will be all about further editing the copy on OpenIndie.com, the homepage design, the uploading of films feature and fixing any bugs that arise.

Also of course I’m deep into editing here with Christie Strong and have the support of Niklas Schrimpf who is the causual kinesiologist on the film we are making. More info soon on how I hope to bring that film to an OpenIndie release learning from Ondi’s amazing release tonight. Provided we can get all the powers that be on board. Stay tuned.

twitter.com/arincrumley
facebook.com/arincrumley
youtube.com/arincrumley

While coming to terms with it all I also was dedicating all my creative energy into figuring out what I could make for Google. They’d given me the unreleased Nexus One a few weeks prior and asked me to make a video about the phone offering a substantial financial incentive.

So I really wanted to do something that we both would be proud of but literally couldn’t get organized enough to get it done. The result was this video crammed together in the final day before the deadline.

I do sincerely hope that this phone helps me get organized and therfor change my life and I do plan to post in the future more videos like this that explore my progress.

So subscribe in whatever way works for you to check out what happens.

Arin Crumley

http://twitter.com/arincrumley

http://youtube.com/arincrumley

http://arincrumley.com

P.S. So what do you think of the phone?

http://google.com/phone

http://youtube.com/googlenexusone

I’m headed to Madrid for a very short trip. Landing 10 am tomorrow and leaving 11:30 am the following day. Ridiculously short. I’m in the thick of preparing for a shoot this upcoming weekend so I’m really forced to ping over there then ping back. Normally I’d want to stay a while. I’ve never been to Madrid but I hear it’s amazing. So I’ll get small tease sit in a lot of planes which is always introspective. I’m bringing some writing to work on.

Here is the info cut and pasted for you that they sent me about the panel I’m doing at this conference in madrid called FICOD 09.

Tuesday, 12:15-13:45 (after Kevin Spacey speech)
Does a Viable Business Model Exist?
The large increase in the number of social network users will be the basis of a still unknown business model (around 70% of net users are social network users). The information included in the profiles could be a great asset for highly-effective campaigns, but it could be perceived as an attack on user privacy. On the other hand, there may be paid or subscription value added services. What other strategies will make it possible to get a profit out of the efforts invested in these projects?
Speakers:
Koro Castellano – Managing Director – Tuenti
Daniel Pérez – Country Manager – Xing
Mariano Klein – Partner/Director – MyEgoo.com
Gonzalo Gómez-Acebo – Founder and CMO – Bookioo.com
Rodrigo Miguel Pineda – Director of Internet Media – Telefónica Spain
Antonio Miguel Fumero – Independent Researcher – ETSIT – UPM

Any research on any of the above people that anyone would like to do and inform me about or any suggestions on what I should bring up on the panel are gladly welcomed in the comments below or tweet them to @arincrumley. I’ll tweet a link to the video of the panel if these guys happen to publish it later.

You are not the only one struggling. Everyone is. And we can do something about it. But first you’ve got to get mad.

Post a video or tweet saying, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Put @openindie and we’ll find it and make a mash up of screen grabs and video clips. Actually do it. It will feel good. You’ll feel better about what a panel of indie film experts at the Moma recently declared an indie film crisis.

Once you’ve gotten mad, donate to OpenIndie here

Then blog about it.

Here is the video that explains what OpenIndie is.

Below is the text from the end of the above video incase you want to quote it for a blog post, re-read or fact check (links included):

Ted Hope, producer of Thumbsucker & many other films donated $100 to help build OpenIndie.

3,666 feature films were submitted to Sundance last year and only 178 got in. Source.

Lance Weiler, founder of the Workbook Project, self distributed his two films,The Last Broadcast & Head Trauma & has donated $100
towards building OpenIndie.

Only 10 films found distribution at Sundance 2009. Article

Ondi Timoner, filmmaker of Digg & Join Us donated $100 to sign up her new film
We Live in Public on OpenIndie.

In 2008 Mark Gill declared the sky is falling on independent film. Article

Ira Deutchman manages a network of 65 digital theaters & donated $100 to help build OpenIndie.

The Independent Film Channel licensed Four Eyed Monsters but then failed to release it &
didn’t pay until the filmmakers settled out of court for a third of the original deal.

http://twitter.com/4eyedmonsters

Arin Crumley, co-director of Four Eyed Monsters has now co-founded OpenIndie & will use it to distribute his upcoming feature film at the same time as it’s festival premiere.

Learn more at: http://openindie.com
Subscribe for future videos: http://arincrumley.com/subscribe
Follow: http://twitter.com/arincrumley

During my talk at the Filmmakers Forum I presented OpenIndie.com to a room full of filmmakers and got very positive response including someone cutting me a check for 100 dollars to join the list of pioneering filmmakers that will launch the site.  I didn’t have the heart to tell him it’s actually better to make the donation through the site so it counts towards our goal of raising 10,000 dollars to build the site.

The session I was a part of was moderated by Peter Broderick who also had invited Lizzie Gillett from Age of Stupid to discuss their recent synchronized world premiere in 63 countries featuring green carpets, celebrities arriving on elephants and satellite connections creating a “not stupid” dialog after the film that let people know the actions they can take to prevent premature human extinction.

After our talk someone asked me how I felt about major studios coopting the campaign that was used to distribute Four Eyed Monsters.  He was referring to Paranormal Activity released by Paramount Pictures who used a campaign very similar to the Four Eyed Monsters theatrical self-distribution where we asked online fans to request our film and then booked screenings in their area.

Here is a video recorded in september of 07 explaining what we done in 2006 releasing Four Eyed Monsters.  You can also watch a full case study video of the entire distribution process.

So to see Paranormal Activity take a somewhat similar approach was extremely flattering. Here is a quote from a recent LA times article by Ben Fritz:

Whatever savvy went into distribution and marketing — and there was certainly plenty of it — Paramount indeed has a miracle on its hands with “Paranormal Activity,” a movie produced for $15,000 and acquired for $300,000 that vanquished four new pictures with combined production budgets of more than $155 million to finish No. 1 at the box office this weekend.

When asked if  I was upset the studios had co-opted our technique, I explained that it’s not my technique, although we may have been the first film to show a list of cities allowing people to request the film, the basic concept of finding out what your community wants and giving it to them is community organizing 101.  The concept is simple.  Give the people what they want.  So it’s really just the way it should work.  And now apparently studios agree.  It’s the people that should get to decide what shows in their local cinema, not the marketers or even theater owners.  When people curate a series with special attention and care, that is obviously really cool, but when executives sitting in offices try to guess what people want to see, well they clearly can only guess. So thanks to social networking it is possible for everyone to know what people want to watch in various geographic areas.

But we can’t applaud ourselves yet because what we need to remember about Paranormal Activity is that they had a multi-million dollar ad campaign promoting the idea of demanding the film in your area.  The real question is how can films with a studio marketing budget successfully track and then act upon demand for their film.  This is much trickier.  Right now there is no easy answer.  There is what we did with Four Eyed Monsters, but that was a lot of work to manage and we needed a full time computer programmer who had to also know the film world and have a good sense of marketing savviness.

>Enter OpenIndie.com.  A simple way to give this function to a filmmaker.  They enter the details of their film and then get a button they can spread around the web.  When ever anyone clicks that, they can track that there is a new person that wants to see their film.  But more importantly then that, it’s also a helpful tool for audiences.  A way to keep a list of films that the person wants to eventually see when they get a chance.  And even a way to automatically be notified of screenings taking place near where they live or near where they have traveled too.  So like many web tools, it’s an organizational tool combined with a community and a full range of ways participants can get involved.  They can simple flag films they want to watch, or they can put on a screening causing invitations to automatically deploy to near by fans of that film or they can even make their own films and put them on the network providing a license and file to anyone who’d like to organize a screening.  There is even a revenue model attached to help filmmakers sustain themselves by accepting donations from audience members and hosts of screenings either at the venue or online afterwards with reminder emails encouraging those who RSVP’d to a screening to provide a one sentence review and optional donation to the creators of the film or causes the film is promoting.

So anyway, it’s a very neat project that I’m proud to be a co-founder of and hopefully you, the reader of this post, can be a part of.  All you have to do to get into this community now is make a small donation to help us fund the creation of the site.  1 dollar or more gets you early membership.  15 or more gets you a bonus CD from Four Eyed Monsters in the mail.  And 100 dollars or more gets you one film that will be one of the first 100 films that will launch the site as well as 1 hour of my time as a free online social media consultant for your film, organization or business.  And each 100 dollars gives you an extra slot for a film and an extra hour of consulting.

3 Days remain to get the above listed perks, so please, act now and come on over and donate.

And special thanks to the Filmmaker Forum for being the platform for announcing OpenIndie.com and allowing us to show the above video.  Thanks also to all the other Filmmaker Forum speakers I’ve listed below partly to get a google alert going to them so they are sure to understand the scope of what we have planned.  We need help getting the word out as this site is being built buy the film community, for the film community and the only way we’ve raised 75 percent of our goal has been through people referring the site to others as well as blogs and articles that have come out about the project.  So please, blog away, embed away, twitter away in these last 72 hours.

Looking forward to comments to this post people might have and to keep up with everything on my blog, add your email address to the side bar and you’ll be kept in the loop.

Thanks again!

As a tribute to the brave video journalists that risk imprisoned to bring us news from the front lines I have teamed up with DogWoof & The Co-Operative to produce a series of videos that teach people how to Be A VJ. The more video journalists there are the less effective it is to silence them by arrest. You can make a difference in the world by being part of the mirror that allows humanity to look at it’s self. You probably already have technology in your pocket that can empower you to start to participate in citizen video journalism today. Each episode of the Be A VJ series will give you tips on how to use to better use the technology you already have to Be A VJ. To make sure you see each of the Episode you can follow along on my website, my twitter or grab the RSS feed that has only Be A VJ episodes from BeAVJ.com

There is also something very important you should do right now which is sign the petition to help free the VJs that are currently in prison in Burma. The footage shot by these five VJ’s has aired internationally on CNN, BBC and many other networks and was the material the film Burma VJ was built around.

In order for us to maintain the strengths of our collective voice we must not allow the silencing of individuals.

Every signature counts so please take a minute to visit this site and contribute your name.

Free The VJs

Exactly a year ago a room full of filmmaker and technologists got together to discuss what was wrong with the film industry and how we might go about fixing it. Parts of the discussion turned into almost a screaming debate as we all struggled to get our ideas heard by the rest of the table. In the end, I’m not sure what productive outcome the talk had, but we had a good time. And at least we got the entire thing on video. Haha!

Lately I’ve been taking a much less critical approach to the question. My thought now, a year later, is that there is nothing wrong. The changes that are happening are good. I’m now just looking for more ways to ride the wave of change that is washing over all of the creative industries.

How would you ride this wave?

I first saw this Ghandi quote on my friend Eugina’s myspace profile several years back and vaguely remembered it from elementary but mostly it felt fresh to me and really thought it resonated. At the time I had been trying to talk about new film industry models which my friend Andrew A Peterson referred to as trying to “solve the words problems”. That basically was us talking for hours and hours on the phone about how social media should work, how internet neutrality will be maintained, how the film industry should evolve, the new expression that is possible with new media and the collective evolution that should can occur with these tools.

But then this quote about “Being the change” was in front of my face. I realized I’d done enough theorizing about what the world should look like and it was time for me to just embody what I believed in and let that be my biggest contribution to the a progression in that direction. I felt I had been doing that intuitively with the creation and distribution of Four Eyed Monsters, but with that mostly behind me I was a bit directionless. It was especially hard because I had defined myself by that project so much. Defined myself even by that relationship with Susan. I needed to build up a new identity that wouldn’t just come and then go as fast as a film project does. I realized I need to just be myself.

So I started my own blog. Began my series of virtual film school posts. Decided to try to teaching others by simply explaining how and why I’m doing what I’m doing as I’m doing it via my blog.

This got me slowly really amped up for starting From Here to Awesome and again I went to town discussing all of the ways the new film industry could function, newer cameras making truly cinematic experiences now within reach, new ways to monetize films digitally and royalty splits amongst collaborators to add incentive to work on lower budget productions to everyone on the crew.

But then conversations with my good friend Roger Edward Ingraham who had been studying Eckhart Tolle reminded me again, that your only duty is to attend to your own awareness. This pretty much emphases to me this “be the change” concept again. That you don’t have to live in the future where everybody else gets on board for an idea but instead you can live in the now where you are on board for an idea. By this time I had gotten really exhausted traveling around with the DIY DAYS and realized it would be a huge relief to not put so much effort into changing the world but instead just relax and be the change myself. I was learning to set aside the end goal of what the film world should look like and instead focusing how I can use filmmaking tools and distribution pathways right now.

So I stepped away from From Here to Awesome for a bit and even stopped pushing or promoting Four Eyed Monsters in any way to go back the drawing board and ask myself what filmmaking tools and story telling techniques I was interested in. Essentially begin to work shop from scratch. Rediscover what filmmaking could be for me right now.

In that process I began work on As The Dust Settles which then lead me to another film we just got done shooting that will in the end all be part of a slate of films.

But then, full circle, this re-introduced the question, how shall I come out with these new films?

How shall they be distributed?

How shall the film industry work?

What do you all think?

You can friend me on facebook for discussions like this we often have in the comments of status updates, or feel free to message me anytime, everyone helps me out so much that I of course want to do what ever I can to help you guys back.

Thank god for the internet and thank god for all of you. Thank you to everyone who contributed and/or asked others to do so.

We reached our goal of 2,500 dollars and it keeps climbing. (see current status of campaign here) Amazing! This is huge for me and is opening my view into a whole slew of other projects that could happen now that I see a style of gaining support for my ideas, getting the money to make them a reality, then being able to follow through continuing to use the newly formed community to make it a reality.

It’s really very exciting to me to see how this is all possible and to see it all work. Wow. That is all I can say.

You guys inspire me. You keep me going!

SOCIAL NETWORKING TIPS FOR ARTISTS:  The above discussion is happening by me updating my twitter page and then people on my facebook friends list commenting on the automatically imported twitter updates.  Also I used kickstarter.com to create this fund raising campaign and verticalresponse.com to do an email blast to everyone who supported Four Eyed Monsters to let them all know about this new project.

A new video is in the works to post tonight giving us tomorrow to be the big final 24 hour count down to when our kick starter campaign ends at 10 AM on wednesday August 26th. So tonight I’m hoping to quickly resign up with iContact.com (is this the best?) for a bulk email service to reach out to the 25,000 Four Eyed Monsters mailing list people to let them know about our kickstarter campaign. I get the sense a lot of people who liked Four Eyed Monsters are really not in the loop with my blog or twitter, although of course many, many are, but we really haven’t done in email blast in about a year and a half to them, so this will be interesting.

So the video that I just finished editing and will show to josh and susan in a few hours will act as a summary of what we shot last year and tease the ideas and themes driving this years shoots.

The way kickstarter and indiegogo and all of these fund raising sites work is that you set a goal and if you don’t reach a goal then nobodies card gets charged and you get nothing. So we’ll really need support once the video is live.

Subscribe to my RSS feed using reader or any other service that you like so that the moment I post to my blog you’ll get it. Or you can also follow me on Twitter or friend me on facebook to also stay instantly in the loop.

If you haven’t yet, follow me on twitter for more updates, quotes and filmmaking tips.

This song is ‘Videotape’ by Radio on ‘In Rainbows’ and is available in iTunes & amazon.

So here is more about the software I talk about in the above video that I hope a developer can start a kick starter page to create.  My hope is that my ideas can be credited in the software “about” notes and that the software could be made free for all to download and the source be provided for others to use for more free software.

So here are my personal needs from the software and how I see it being designed:

I need software that maintains the time stamps from AVCHD clips by putting them into the file names when I conver them to pro res for editing in final cut pro.

So here is what the work flow would be.  Put in the SD card that had AVCHD footage on it.  It would prompt me with the question, “who filmed it” I’d type in my name, then it would ask for camera nick name and i’d put in “GH1″.  Then it would ask what project I was shooting and I’d put either a job, film or I’d just type in “LIFE-LOG” if it was just general footage.  Then it would ask for a city and state and I’d enter that.  All of these fields would be optional and the user could make more fields if they wanted.  These fields later will determine the file names that get transcoded.

Then it would ask if I wanted to off set the time base at all and in most cases I’d say no.  But if I had discovered my cameras clocks were 1 hour off from each other from having travled from another time zone then this is where I’d fix that.

Then it would ask the user to designate one, two, or three locations where you want the cards content to be backed up.   It would save the info from the previous ingest so in most cases you could just glide through that step.  Then it would ask you the resolution you want your “proxy” to be and your “master clips”  to be.  Now your proxy will be usually 640 by 360 in pro res.  And for the master it would be 1920 by 1080 in Pro RES HQ.  And finally, an option for a “thumbnail” that would be 120 by 90 could be checked off.  After that page you could hit “next”.

Then it would ask you what frame rates you wanted.  The default would be that everything that was shot 30p becomes 23.98, everything that is 24p becomes 23.98 and everything 60p becomes 23.98.   In the case of footage from the GH1 it’s important that it recognize the 24p material that camera shoots even though it’s in a 60i wrapper.  So those would of course end up at 23.98, but not by being slowed down like the 60p material would, but by doing the magic that other applications have been able to do where it just sucks the 24p signal out of the 60i wrapper.  This app would be built for the GH1 more so then the other AVCHD cameras out there so this functionality is completely critical.  All indie filmmakers using the Gh1 wil want to shoot in the 1080 24p mode so they’ll really need true 23.98 files at 1920 by 1080 to be spit out.

Also being able to set rules on incoming frame rates and outgoing frame rates filmmakers will be able to freely shoot 60p and then 24p and then 30p all depending on the speed at which they want their footage to play back.  In my case I’d want all footage to have it’s speed changed to 23.98.  That way I have two types of slow motion I can do, slight, shooting in 30p or extreme shooting in 60p.  The other huge advange here is that by simply setting my proxy size and my master size, all the footage I shoot will be scalled to a universal pixel dimension regardless of what resolution the camer recorded it in.  This is great because all my 720 footage will be upscalled to be the same resolution as my 1080  footage.  So they’ll work best on one timeline.  Plus the offline to online jump would happen more smoothly.  In the most ideal world all up resing 720 or even lower resolutions to 1080 would takes place in a super souped up high end technilogically advanced way like many of the up res software and plugins that exists.

Once all that is filled in, you’d hit “GO” and it would imediately do the following.

In the destinations you choose earlier it would then make a folder for the shooters name that would look like this:

ARIN_CRUMLEY

Inside that folder it would make a sub folder called:

RAW

Inside that subfolder it would make another subfolder called:

VIDEO

Inside that subfolder it would create another sub  folder that was named based on the range of the creation date and time stamps of the AVCHD video files and that would look something like this:

2009-08-17-102054-to-2009-08-18-124520

Inside of that folder would be the exact contents of what was in the “private” folder of the SD card.  Or, if you were running this application on a folder that had previously backed up the SD card, that would work too.

The files would back up to one destination at a time.  The way I’d do this is I’d have two 500 gig 2.5 inch drives hooked up to a macbook pro and one would be named LOVE 006a and the other would be named LOV 006b.  When I was prompted early to choose two destinations to back up the cards I would have choosen the root of each of those drives.  That way I’d have a folder on the drive for each shooter.  Regardless of when they shoot, and regardless of what camera or what project they are shooting.  This might seem counter intuitive, but trust me it works out to put everyones footage they ever shoot in one place.  So anyway, this process would cause these two drives to be identitcal if I always used them in this way which I would.  I’d store all my FCP and other project files on my internal drive and just be using these as media drives.  So after backing up the AVCHD “private” folder contents  it would check the size and file count in all three locations and give an error in a log if something didn’t add up right letting you know that maybe an SD card had dismounted or something.

Once it was done backing up to both drives it would then start to transcode.  At this point it would first eject your SD card and give a pop up that said, “your SD card has been backed up and ejected, you may now remove it.”  Then it would ask if you wanted the transcoding to begin or if you wanted it added to the que.  This alert would be said in computer voice so you knew it was ready from acros the room.  If you didn’t do any action with in 30 seconds it would start the transcoding.  What it would do would be that in the “ARIN_CRUMLEY” folder it would create a folder called “COMPRESSED”.  Inside of that folder it would create a folder called “VIDEO” and inside that folder it would create a folder called “640_by_480_23_dot_98_fps”   All of the 23.98 640 by 480 pro res files would be set in there as they were getting compressed.  The pro res files would be named like so:

2008-08-17-102335-ARIN-GH1-EVOLUTION-BLACK-ROCK-CITY-NV-USA-89412.mov

Now I should mention here that this is the applications main purpose.  It would be looking at the time stamp of when the AVCHD video file was created and it would be using that date and time to create the file name you see above.  And it would creating the rest of the file name based on the other optional information the user had entered.  This is helpful because it prevents you from ever having two files named the same thing.  There is only one Arin with a GH1 at that zip code that hit record at that second.  So it’s a completely unique file name.  Unique file names are important because final cut pro gets very confused when it tries to reconnect to two different file names with the same name.  They are also imporant for web sharing and further transcoding where you want a trail of meta data saved in the file name it’s self so that where ever the file goes, this important time, shooter, project and location goes with it.

So as each video clip finishes it’s proxy transcoding it would then be copied from drive A to drive B in the same destiantion folders keeping those drives in identical and keeping the computer multi-tasking.  The bottle neck here will probably be the processor, not the drive speed, so copying while also processing should be fine.  Once that was done it would cross check the number of files in the AVCHD folders and the number of files that had been transcoded and it would also cross check the durations and it would give you an error and let you know if anything did work out and add in the Log it was successful.  Then if “master files” had also been checked off it would begin to transcode the 1920 by 1080 files.  All of those would go in the “COMPRESSED” folder inside a folder called “VIDEO” and then inside a newly created folder called “1920_by_1080_23_dot_98″  For different resolutions and different frame rates it would create different folders.  If a folder already existed from the last time this proceedure was done, it would just utlize the already existing folder.  And finally, after the masters, if that “thumbnails” had been checked off, it would make those and put them in a folder along side the others called “120_by_90_23_dot_98″.

Now one thing I should note is that all of the media files have the same name no matter what resolution they are.  This is for easy offline editing and then simply reconnecting to the larger or smaller files as needed.  The reason this won’t confuse Final Cut Pro is that the files are in folders that are different.  So the destinaton of a clip is unique even though the file name is not unique.

Once everything was done it would cross check it’s self to verify it really got everything done and then would give you the log file and make a sound letting you know it was all done.

It would then ask you if you wanted to create a final cut pro project file or add all the clips to an existing final cut project file.  It would allow you to choose which of the three sizes you had just made and what I’d do is I’d choose the proxy and to make a new project.  Then it would launching FCP, make a new project and put all of my 640 by 480 files in a new bin which I could then renamme.  I’d then start editing away.  The first thign I’d do in editing is I’d drag the 640 by 480 clip down into my timeline.  FCP would ask me if I want to adjust my sequence settings to match my clip and I’d say yes.  Then nothing on that sequence would require any rendering.  And if I did color or effects it would all be real time since it’s pro-res.  And if I was doing heavy filters i’d use unlimtted mode which would allow play back even when heavily processed.  I’d also likely change my render settings to render things that i want to simply just quickly preview in lower resolutions.

Then once I have an edit done, I’d highlight everything in my timeline and from the tools menu I’d choose, “make media offline”.  Suddenly everything would turn red on my timeline and their would be no picture.  Then I’d choose under file, “reconnect media”.  Then I’d navigate to the master files and when I found my file I’d select it and hit choose.  Then I’d say “yes” to reconnect everyting in this path.  Then it would warn me some of the settings had changed and i’d say “okay”.  Then everything might look zoomed in.  So what I’d do is I’d highlight everything and then hit apple C.  Then I’d hit “apple” 0 and then I’d choose a the preset that matched my mast clip settings.  So I’d choose 1080p PRO RES HQ.  Then I’d hit okay and with the new settings now in effect I’d hit “apple V”.  And the whole zoomed in problem should go away at that moment.  Also nothing should need any rendering unless it had effects or plug ins.  At that point I’d be able to further tweak the color correction which I’d do with the 3 way color corrector and the 1 way color corrector and then I’d be done.  I’d master my picture locked video and then take it to an audio environment to mix 5.1 96KZ sound.  Then I’d bring back that sound and master my final blue ray files.

Now a future version of this app would actually automate all of those last steps I described.  So it would basically have an FCP plug in that you could choose “make master quality” and it would take a proxy edit and just up res it all to 1080.  And in a even further along future version it could do that but even handle the sitaution in which the 1080 files were never created and what it would do is it would go in and it would create them from the original .mts files that were still backed up.  And it would even use handles and time code to just take a few seconds on either side of the clip that got used.  And in an even further in the future version of all this, you could be editing the thumbnails on a server where a bunch of users are commenting on parts they like and the server would give you local packages of content that were in the right directories to sync up with FCP projects.  So you could start to make an edit on the website using the thumbnails someone uploaded, then once you felt you had the right 24 clips you wanted to be working with, you could use a peer to peer network of video editor computers that could seed you those 640 by 360 files and you could then pull those in and edit them locally.  And in an even more future version of this all.  Your computer would join a video editing “cloud” and when someone went to go master an HD master of a video that you had some of the shots on your computer to complete, the designated 15 percent of your computers processing speed or 100 percent of it, if you weren’t using it, would be utlizied to transcode and render out just the clips that you had on your computer, even if they didn’t exist as pro res yet, it would make them from the .mts files, just the lengths of the clips that got used in the edit, then it would either transport the resulting files to the master editor or it would possibly even just provide through the network the information that describes the frames letting the other main computer actually encode the final rendered video which at the end would already be uploaded to the cloud computer that had been managing all of these local CPU’s and hard discs.

Using the above technolgoy we can transform DIY filmmaking from a single camera activity to an enivornment where films are made from thousands of shooters all across the world.

And the first step is really being able to keep the time stamps, shooter, project and locaiton all in the file name and then starting to standardize the folder structures in which footage is worked with.

I know AVCHD has a lot of problems, but what I’ve described above addresses almost all of them and if you consider how efficient the file sizes are of AVCHD, it really makes sense to store raw footage in that file size because you can back it up easily, transfer it on the web and do so many other things that you could only do with really light weight footage.  Also, no matter what these days you have to transcode footage you’ve shot before you can edit, so you mine as well have it be that the transcoded files are the big as bad ass color correctable files.  But also everyone is portable now and many edit on the road.  So being able to only really need to worry about small 640 by 360 files makes for a very doable portable post production environment.

So that is the system, who ever thinks you can do make this, figure out how much of your time it would take, how much you need to get paid, copy and paste and edit as needed what I wrote above into a kickstarter.com project.  I’ll help promote the kickstarter project and we can get this software made.  And quick, I’m shooting a feature film in 9 days and need this!  haha, if it’s not ready in time, I’ll understand, but man, if it was, we’d make history with that behind the scenes story.  But either way I’ll need all this functionality and so will thousands of other filmmakers.  So if you are reading this and you are excited about making this a reality, lets do this!

Search vimeo.com for “GH1″ and you’ll find great samples of this amazing camera.

Here is my new philosophy, DV & HDV are for filmming weddings.  An SLR camera is an artists tool.  If DSLR cameras can now shoot beautiful HD video then it’s time for all filmmakers to sell off their shitty tape based super heavy cameras and go for these new inventions that get you all the resolution and control you need to capture great images.

Pannasonic is not paying me to say this, yet, I do hope they can help market the film once it’s done. We’ll be part of a slew of films to be first to be shot on the GH1.

For those wondering, the audio can be the H4n which gives you time stamps.

Anyway, get involved in our creative process and help back us financially with our kickstarter page.

And those with technical expertise, I need to find a way to Get the AVCHD files to keep their time stamps in tact when I convert them to pro res.  A way to some how rename the .MTS files to have their time stamp in the name with out messing up the file structure that allows me to turn the files into Pro Res.  Any ideas, post as a comment below, thanks!

Here is where I bought the GH1 by the way. We needed them fast so we went to their brooklyn location and paid cash.  We didn’t want this “kit” and all these extras but that is the only way it was being sold.  Over all, I’m super glad to have it even though the buying experience was a little off.

So today a lot shuffled around but the team is now locked.

I’m heading out into the desert to shoot with Roger Ingraham, Tarynn Weihahn, Susan Buice & Josh Steinbauer and AJ Abucay will be my second camera operator.

I’ll write more about what the story and concept is later, but for now, here is a video that lets you into the head space I’m in preparing for this ambitious next 3 weeks.

*Update:  To get involved in the project first become a backer of at least 1 dollar and you’ll get all of the notes and updates I post on the projects kickstarter page.

I don’t know what’s worse, the situation in Burma, or the world finding out via smuggled footage what was going on and not doing anything about it.

As in Iran there are other governments that open fire on their own citizens when the people try to have a say in how their society is governed.

Freedom of speech must be maintained world wide so we can all safely express how we want to live together rather then having a small handful dictate to us how we shall exist. Dictatorships make very few people happy and they are dangerous as they can spread.

I was asked to interview Richard Gere and edit this clip to promote the UK release of an amazing film called Burma VJ being put out by the by The Co-Operative in association with DogWoof. I gladly stepped up to do this because nothing excites me more then the idea that I can use these tools to help spread awareness of what we are doing to ourselves so we can begin to stop these patterns and build a more peaceful reality.

Please spread the above video around, give your zip code and email address to the film’s website and and follow the film’s twitter account to stay in the loop about what more you can do and ways to soon see this film.

After Alex Johnson and Lance Weiler worked their asses off for 6 months they’ve now completed 12 episodes of the Radar Series that have gone live on Babelgum. The episodes document innovative artists in snazzy 3 minute powerful mini documentaries. The basic concept is this series can be your Radar for up and coming neat stuff you otherwise would hear about until months and months later after it blows up.

Through out the process I’ve been helping out a little behind the scenes with a little extra camera work, projections, searching for documentary subjects and generally keep everyone from going too insane in the pretty insanely ambitious effort.

The result is a very neat series and a newly announced commitment from Babelgum for another order of 24 more episodes!

Here are some photos I took at the party.

TECHNICAL NOTES:

This video was shot on a Cannon TX1. Once I arrived in Berlin I put the SD card into the computer and used ‘a better finder rename’ to rename the files so they looked like this: 2009-05-25-055944-ARIN-TX1-TRIP-TO-BERLIN.AVI Then I dragged all of those files into Final Cut Pro with them still on the SD card because I was in a hurry and the 16 Gig sd card was full so I didn’t want to back them up to the 1 terabyte drive I have with me on the trip. Then I made a timeline in FCP with the preset of apple pro res 720 by 1280. I then changed manual the timebase from 29.97 to 30 on a drop down in the sequence settings. This is because all of the TX1 footage is 30p and I didn’t want to run cinema tools to change it to 29.97. Then I changed the the sequence play back settings from “safe” to “RT” so that I didn’t need to render my AVI files. THey played perfectly real time on my 2.16 core duo Mac Pro that has 2 gigs of ram. I could even add color correction but then the cross dissolves didn’t play back completely real time but instead looked like I was getting 10 fps. I then made a aiff of the song ‘Nude’ by Radio Head from the album in Rainbows that I bought directly from inrainbows.com which is no longer available as a download but that you can get on iTunes or Amazon. I didn’t actually get permission from Radio Head so there is a chance that some video sites might not accept this video. However, I did credit the song right when it begins to play and my hope is that it’s considered promotion for the song and basically fair use because it’s only part of the song and my video doesn’t replace the need for someone to get the song but instead encourages the need for someone to get the song because it’s an amazing song. I don’t know if this argument wouldn’t hold up in court for a feature film but I do think it could hold up for a short video blog of this nature in which I’m not to worried if a few sites end up not wanting to host the video and kicking it back. I spent 3 hours editing, just playing around really. Some of the time was spent color correcting in which I just boosted the mids and adjusted the blacks clip by clip to have detail while being as black as possible. I also put a photo of myself at the end which was constructed in photo shop from test shoot I did with Ella Manor. I was standing in while the Models were getting made up and we wanted to see what the projection looked like when her flash was firing off. I overlaid a tiny bit of Nancy Bakers artwork as an abstract layer on top of the photo sort of pretending that image had been projected onto my face. I also chose to include all my social media links at the end since I’m trying to increase awareness of the different places I exist online. After the edit I showed the result to Patty and Gabe who were pretty blown away that they had just met me and already have been put into my video blog a few hours later. It was a new experience for them and Patty said it was good for Gabe to be seeing something be created in very little time cause it demonstrates that it’s helpful to sometimes just get up and do things with out too much forethought. I made a couple more tweaks to the where the music begins and I used compressor to export to the quicktime apple TV codec. After the first export I saw a couple things I wanted to tweak so exported again then uploaded to tubemogul which cross posted to YouTube, vimeo, myspace and a bunch of other sites. At the point I render the finished product I had changed from “RT” mode to “Safe” mode and then hit apple R having highlighted the entire timeline and I should mention that it wasn’t working too well to have the clips be on the SD card. Maybe my computer was over heating because of being on the bed with the vent on the back blocked by the blankets but my computer did crash in the middle of rendering. I transfered the clips to the drive I have with me, reconnected media, and then rendered.     

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How do we do anything in life? How do we walk? How do we digest food? How the hell did we develop language and story telling?

The answer? I don’t have a clue. All I can tell is that we look around us at the objects and landscape and other creatures before us and we take a step into it all. Then another step, and then another step. And pretty soon, we are surviving as a product of our environment and doing so with out even much thought. Each next step is just the impulsive step we want to take.

This has been my experience in the film industry. Everything changes when you least expect it and suddenly there are a new set of objects, landscapes and creatures. All I can do is try to stay in touch with what is before me, and take the step my involuntary impulses tell me that I should take.

This video is my presentation at power to the pixel back in Oct of 2008 and gives you a pretty good snapshot of the steps I’ve recently been taking.

I met up with Michael Morlan out at SXSW 2008 to talk about the RED camera.

Thanks to Mike Hedge for filming.

DIYDays Boston

Originally uploaded by stevegarfield

Great attendance, great vibe and a really cool conversation. Todd Dagres really grabbed my attention and woke me up and gave me that feeling of, “oh my god guys, this is a DIY DAYS event!”

I loved hearing lance break down all of the traditional deal land mines and how to navigate them and then how to just ultimately say forget all that and just go direct to audience.

And there was an amazing session at the end of the day brainstorming distribution ideas for David Tames film “Smile Boston Project“. Every body in that room was really smart!

And it was great to see an honest discussion by the filmmakers in From Here to Awesome about what it was like to deliver their films to all these digital portals as well as what they’ve learned from this process.  The whole experience they reported supports directly the future direction we’ve been planning to take From Here to Awesome.

And scott kirsner stole my thunder!  He was leaning over my shoulder as I was preparing my notes for my presentation, literally, and then he went up and hit everything I was about to talk about but in a much more well researched way.  But I didn’t let that stop me and talked about the same concepts but in my own kind of different way.  But seriously, this is a guy that really gets it all and I saw a copy of his new book Inventing The Movies as he sold it to an eager filmmaker.

When it was all over I had the same feeling I have at the end of each DIY DAYS event. My brain is fried, huge head ache, but totally jacked up and high off of all the good ideas that get thrown around. Truly an altered state of mind. I think I like it.

Thanks to everyone who participated in the event, volunteered, bought DIY DAYS DVDS and be on the look out for high quality videos online of all the talks and soon a DVD with our NYC, Boston and London DIY DAYS presentations all mashed up into volume 2 of the workbook project DIYDAYS DVD.

I shot this video on the Cannon PowerShot TX1 ($350) in 720p 30fps on a 16 gig SD card ($50). To get really close up on the screen I went into the Manual mode and used the little joy stick to press it in once and then from the pop up menu went into super macro. Then while still on the plane I popped out the SD card and put it into my USB SD card reader ($20). Then I hooked it up to Clay’s computer which is a mac book pro with OSX.5 ($2000) and opened up Final Cut Pro 6.0.4 ($1200). Then I chose a custom pre-set for apple pro res 720p 29.97 in the final cut pro sequence settings. Then I dragged clips onto the timeline and they all needed to render. Which sucks, there is no way to play back the TX1 clips with out needing to render. This may change in future versions of Final Cut Pro which would be great. So then I used the typewriter tool in FCP from the viewers little mini-menu and choose “impact” as the font and did all my titles that way. I also used a scrolling text title from the same mini-drop down menu. Then I layered in the Dan Deacon song and back timed the dramatic ending of the song with the change to the white text on black backround. Then I chose “export with quicktime conversion” and “iPod” as the setting. Then I showed it to Isis who was standing right here and noticed that this video isn’t really funny. She did laugh at the part where I was looking for a cab which was good. She then recommended I take out the Hurricane condolences line at the end. I told her I thought it was a good move and instead decided to cut it’s length in half so that title wasn’t staying up too late. Then I exported again and uploaded to TubeMogul.com. Then as usually, I logged into blip and found the video tubemogul had uploaded there and then chose the “redistribute” options to get it to myspace, blip and this wordpress blog.

3 DVD set with over 10 hours of keynotes, panels and case studies. To see a list of speakers and topics visit www.diydays.com

To get a DVD make a donation to the project and receive your copy of DIY DAYS LA & SF. Pick the donation you’d like to make and receive the 3 DVD set today.

Pick your donation amount:

$40 donation
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The effort is called MovieMobz and is being spear headed by a friend of mine named Fabio Lima.

The cool thing about this is that we hung out at the Guadalajara Film Festival in 2007 a year and a half ago and I recommended he do something like this with his RAIN cinema network. And he took the suggestion! Amazing! The world of cinema is changing before our very eyes.

Variety has picked up on their effort and so has one of our Partners indiegogo who actually references the connection back to what we had done with Four Eyed Monsters theatrical release. But eventually this will be as simple as the idea of bookmarking a website that you want to visit later. Except you’ll be bookmarking films you’d like to see once that film crosses your path.

So lets say you’ve bookmarked a film. The next thing that would ideally happen is that a theater ends up noticing a reasonable size demand for a screening of that film and books it in an area you are in. Then your little personal digital assistant will let you know about the screening and you could imediately RSVP and lock it into your schedule. Then your friends see you are coming and decide to jump on board as well. Then of course at the screening, everyone has a blast because you and all your friends and like minded strangers get to share an experience together. It could all be much more social then the current movie going experience. And if it’s not going to be social and fun, then there is no point in seeing it with other people.

At that point this would step out from being a novelty and become just part of the back bone for how things work. And thats the goal. Which is why it’s on the agenda for the distribution and discovery research and development project I co-founded known as From Here to Awesome.

So if you want to join the growing team help program or get involved in creating grant proposals for our effort, please get in touch or at the very least, subscribe to my blog and stay tuned.

Thoughts? Would love a comment…

Also we are doing this cool thing where people get to decide what gets screened in the theater using their cell phones.

I was one of the 20 people asked by the 20×2 organizers to answer the question “What’s the difference” in 2 minutes. They said I could do a film, speak, play music, what ever I felt like and since I had recently had fun making music, I decided to write this song. It was a cool event and but it happened at the same time as the From Here to Awesome party so I could only stay to see one other performance which I really liked. Special thanks to Mike Hedge for filming.

Formats available: MPEG-4 Video (.m4v), Flash Video (.flv)

Tech Notes:
Mike Hedge filmed on his VX-2100 on mini-DV tapes. He rolled on about 10 tapes or so at SXSW 2008 and then gave me the tapes at the end of the event. I took them home and brought each tape in it’s entirety into Final Cut Pro onto a new blank hard Lacie Hard Drive. I did this by hitting “Apple 8″ to open the log and capture window. Then I rewound the tape to the beginning, pressed play and hit the “now” button. This is the easiest way to bring in tapes. Some say it’s better to sit around and label each 1 minute of footage but that would be 60 cilps if I did that and thats way too much work. But one key capturing footage this way is that you have to set a couple preferences first. In final cut pro hit “option Q” to pull up the system preferences window. Then make sure the “abort ETT/PTV on dropped frames” is unchecked. Then also uncheck “Abort capture on dropped frames” and in the “on time code break” drop down menu choose “make new clip.” With these settings you’ll be able to hit “now” and walk away from your camera and computer if you want while all your footage gets brought in to Final Cut Pro. If all this sounds like a pain, iMovie is another good way to bring footage in. Then you can take your iMovie files to Final Cut Pro and edit them there.


After the footage was all brought in I did nothing for 3 months. Then suddenly I found this material and edited it together and quickly posted it. But after posting the performance I watched more of the pre-performance anxiety and realized that if I don’t add that material in then there isn’t enough context around the performance. So I edited a second version. As described in previous Tech Notes, I use TubeMogul to post videos to over a dozen video sharing sites. On draw back to this is when I change an edit as I just did. So to deal with that I just double post and leave the early one up too. No sense in logging into myspace, youtube, blip and all the others and deleting the last version. Some day I hope that I’ll be hosting my master file of a video and if I enhance my edit then all the other sites will be “ping” each other and will then re-cache their copy of my video. Until then, this system seems to work.

Also there is some basic color correction going on and during the black and white parts I just dragged the saturation all the way down. With color correction my general rule is always to lower the blacks, raise the mids and adjust the whites so nothing is too bright.

I went to this event last year to shoot video with my friend Isis Masoud who produced the ‘Art for Life’ portion of the conference. Sara Mayti shot photos of the whole event as well. We had a complete blast hanging out and it was my introduction to Macrobiotics. Eating food prepared this way made me feel completely different after the week so I’ve kept it up.

Roger Ingraham just finished taking the footage I shot last year to make a promo for this years 2008 Summer Conference. Also the footage will be utilized in an up coming short documentary about food. As I’m posting I’m currently on a farm that Roger’s Sister Sarah Ingraham runs getting more footage for that short doc. If anyone needs any of the raw footage for their own projects, feel free to get in touch since it’s so far all under creative commons 3.0 meaning anyone is free to utilize for their own documentaries.

Tech Notes:
Shot on HVX mostly in DV mode. Edited in final cut pro. Graphics all done in final cut pro. When I shot I’d shoot the entire presentation with good audio piped out of the PA. Then isis watched all of the footage and pulled out some clips and transcribed some portions. Then Roger sat down and just started pulling all the clips he liked into this promo. Then Isis, me and myself sat down and came up with good lines for the voice over recording into the audio recorder. Then roger edited those into the piece. Then he added reverb. Then we encoded in the iPod codec using compresser and uploaded to a youtube account we made for the Kushi Institute.

Watching at home I had now idea what to name these pantings, but once I was on the show getting 20 dollars per tittle I was 100 percent focused on the task.

Game shows are fun. Give a points system to something and people get more engaged. A miniature version of real life. So weird.

A giant cash register blows money all over the studio audience at the end. I admit, the second time this happened I couldn’t help but leap up and grab for the money. But it felt really wrong and I started using the paddles to swat at the dollar bills in the air.

Please support our filmmaking and come out and get this jam packed DVD/CD set!!!!!

Also I’ll be doing an appearance at at Borders in Chicago. The plan is to project episodes 9 to 13 but the borders location doesn’t have a projector so i’ll be making some calls tomorrow to line one up (any leads welcome). Also Ben and Bruno will be attending and performing a few songs. They are an amazing band that did the music in Episode 13.

Time: 6:30 pm

Location:

Borders Book Store
595 Central Avenue
Highland Park, IL 60035

After this event I’ll be going with Ben and Bruno over to their show which is taking place at a bar called Quenchers. It’s on the corner of Western and Fullerton. That show is at 9:30 pm.

Come to both these, should be a lot of fun!

Here is their flyer for the 9:30 show:

If you have a film you are self distributing you should strongly consider coming to the workshop that susan and i have been asked to put on at Boston University in the last week of May and first week of June.

Details and registration here.

April 21st, 1:00pm
Antoinette Westphal College of Media Arts & Design: Drexel University
University Crossings Room 028
N. 32nd St. and Market St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104

April 23rd, 1:00pm
University of Miami School of Communications
Studio A
5100 Brunson Dr.
Coral Gables, FL 33146

April 28th, 4:00pm
Northwestern University – Radio, Television & Film
Louis 119
1877 Campus Dr.
Evanston, IL 60208

I’ll be at all of the above talks and Susan will be at this one:

April 18th, 2:00pm
Department of Radio-Television-Film University of Texas @ Austin
Studio 4d in the CMB Building
W 26th St. and Guadalupe St.
Austin, TX 78705

submit films | watch films | learn to make films | fest news | fest streamGet the special Embed code or quicktime download links here. This is a video about how film festivals are suppose to function as a filter to decide which films are seen by distributors and therefor end up getting in front of audiences. It details some examples of how filmmakers have become empowered to side step that system and find audiences directly.

We want to share with other filmmakers the opportunities we’ve had with our own films so we’ve banded together a growing team of filmmakers, web developers and distribution partners to create From Here to Awesome.

If you have a film you want the world to see or if you want to see films outside of the standard hollywood status quo then Subscribe to From here to Awesome’s Video Channel.

Formats: Quicktime iPod | Apple TV | .flv | YouTube | Blip | Vimeo HD

I’ve been thinking a lot about clothing lately. I think there is a big potential for the whole clothing experience to be re-invented so we don’t have to hurt the environment and humanity so much. Instead of always using new fabric and shipping clothes made in sweat shops by little kids all over the world a very different approach can be taken. One major step in the right direction is what a friend of a friends clothing line is up to.

Mandate of Heaven makes their clothes from recycled fabric. And they distribute their clothes primarily locally which cuts down on shipping and packaging pollution. They’re also all very expressive clothes which gives the person wearing them a strong individuality and uniqueness which helps break out of the manufactured mindset of manufactured clothes.

I was invited to check out their show and decided to bring my camera. Then I couldn’t help myself and wanted to edit their show into a video with music by one of my favorite local bands Forest Fire who I’ve posted a performance by in the past.

Here is the complete list of lovely models: Paige Wood, Sophia Casanova, Montana Queler, Valerie Ponelli, John Lustig, Claudia Lopez, Rachel Antonoff, Sarah Moran, Noelle Lynch, Jessica Gallucci, Alexa Weir, Lisa Goodwin, Eugina Williams, Alia Shawkat, Maria Christina, Brissi, Ying Li, Sara Copeland, Carissa Ackerman. For more info about the models visit the Mandate of Heaven MySpace Profile.

There is also a flickr photo set from the show.

Technical Notes about making this video: I shot on the HVX-200 with all default settings in terms of gama and color manipulation. The recording setting was at 720 60p and the Scene setting was put to ‘film cam’ rather then what I normally shoot on which is ‘video cam’. Then while shooting I took into consideration everything getting slowed down and did some more radical camera work that I otherwise wouldn’t have done. I tried to run around a lot and get different angles.

Then I captured the footage into FCP using Log and transfer. Because I shot on ‘Film Cam’ the 60 frames per second that were recorded played back at 23.98 which is the beautiful slowmotion you see in the video. I then proceeded to slow the footage down even further to 50 percent and sometimes 25 percent. I did this by clicking the clip and then hitting “apple J” and then typing in the speed that I wanted it to be. Normally I avoid frame blending but in this case it gave it a nice dreamy blur that I like so I used it on almost every shot. Then I used WireTap Pro to record the forest fire song off their myspace profile. I set the software to record the computer audio at 48Khz with no compression and then brought that music into FCP. Then I downloaded some elements from my website like the earth and the pattern and dragged those from my desktop to the FCP timeline in order to have a background for my graphics. Then I color corrected by crushing the blacks, lowering the whites and boosting the mids. Also dragging the color temperature towards blue as needed for each shot. Then I used compressor to export to web and chose the iPod 640 by 480 preset and then uploaded to YouTube. Then I hopped over here and wrote the blog post in my wordpress blog and next will export the video in the Apple TV codec and then use tubemogul to post that across my various video services.

Question for Commenter’s: How else do you think the clothing experience can be re-invented?

Download this Song: Mp3 | AAC | .FLV | iPod Video | Apple TV

Bookmark this Video: DIGG

This is a mash up of real hate comments and hate mail I got in reaction to my last video. The 4 places I collected the hate comments were Williamsboard, Gawker, YouTube comments and my own blog post.

In addition to a parody video, a confession video has also appeared in which the creator anonymously claims to have met me at the party introducing himself with his real name and shaking my hand. According to a commenter on this guys profile posted back in August, the individual behind this account might be named, “Adam Pearse”.

Going through these comments looking for leads on the stolen bike and coat was sometimes hilarious but left me feeling kind of depressed. Until I had the idea for this song which has made me feel way better. To create this song I pasted any good lines into a document that I then tweaked to add rhythm and rhyme. Here are the lyrics and chords.

Tech Notes: I filmed on the HVX-200 with a soft light above the camera and a back light you can see hidden just behind the de-popper. I always try to use a fast shutter speed for web video because you don’t want motion blur, compression doesn’t like it. So I went with 250 or 120, I forget. I used a Shure KSM27 Microphone hooked up to mic input 1 and a 1/4 to XLR cable to go out of my guitar straight into the cameras mic input 2 of the video camera. I recorded in 720pn making sure I had the entire song down in one single take, which took a few tries, most of which I deleted after trying it. Also I re-wrote the lyrics slightly after each take to fix what was tripping me up. Then I used, “log and transfer” function in FCP to get the footage in. Then a color correction filter to crush blacks, boost mids and drag the color temperature towards a cooler less red tone. Then I used sound affects provided in Sound Track Pro for the gun shots and bullet landing on the ground. But I didn’t use soundtrack Pro, I just found those files on my drive and pulled them into FCP. Then I added a slight delay using an audio plug-in to my singing voice and compression using an FCP default plug-in on my voice and guitar. That just generally smooths out the volume change as I’d move closer and further from the mic. Then I chose export to compressor and selected iPod 640 by 480. Because the video was 16:9 compressor knew to actually make a 640 by 360 video and I double clicked on the settings to insure that was the case. Then I hit “submit” and waited for it to encode and then I posted to YouTube. Then I used senduit.com to get a copy over to susan and she suggested i take out one extra line I had at the intro and I agreed so I re-exported the same way and posted to YouTube. Then I used compressor to make an Apple TV version which I posted to TubeMogul.com which cross posts to all my other video accounts including blip.tv which means this video is freely downloadable in iTunes and Miro in HD.

I’ve been exploring the macrobiotic diet since my friend Isis Masoud brought me to the Kushi Institute Summer conference in August 2007. I’ve recently been getting it down pretty good and making meals for friends.  As a result people have started to turn to me for advice about diet and health. Below is a correspondence on MySpace replying to a friend who was overwhelmed with macrobiotics.

Oh my goodness.

To be honest, I’ve not looked at or followed a single macrobiotic recipe yet. I’ve just read instructions on how to use the pressure cooker and read the general descriptions of what to eat and also I ate for two solid weeks on two different trips where ever meal was prepared by a macrobiotic chef. So from that I kind of figured out what was going on and have just tried to mimic it and have experimented a lot.

The challenge with a hard start date is stuff might not be perfect from day 1.

I think you should read the hip chicks guide to macrobiotics and as you read just make a list of ingredients you’ll need. Everything you find in the book can be found at Whole Foods. Also a lot can e found at Tops or Sunnac in Williamsburg. But you really have to go up and down every single isle to find all this random stuff. But once you’ve done it, it won’t seem random and you’ll go straight there the next time and it will become normal. Also you can always order stuff online from the kushi store.

The whole foods on Houston st in manhattan has a few more things I’ve noticed.

And a general rule is to get everything organic and everything local if possible.

Oh, and once you’ve bought things like sea vegetables, read the instructions on the back and they’ll tell you ways to prepare. Or some organic azuki beans and on the back they’ll say how long to soak for before pressure cooking.

But there are millions of ways to prepare things and it’s really kind of up to you and your own experimentation.

And in terms of quick breakfast. Brown Rice Miso can be used to make a quick soup with some boiled carrots, onions or other vegtable and left over from the night before grain (Millit or short/medium grain brown rice). Take the soup to work in a coffee mug and it will still be warm when you get there.

Hope that helps,
Arin

—————– Original Message —————–
From: Eugina- Joie de vivre!
Date: 30/01/2008

My macrobiotic book only have a few recipes in it! And they all list so many ingredients! I tried searching for recipes online but it seems like so many people are trying to get away with making macrobioitc versions of other things… i’m looking for well balanced recipes that doesn’t require alot of time or ingredients! i really want to keep things as simple as possible, which is the whole point right?? do you know any websites that have recipes? i’m looking for a meal plan. let me know please! our diet starts feb 8th and we are going food shopping soon so we need to know what to get ..especially since they are putting me in charge of cooking the food.

If you know any good, quick well balanced breakfast recipes please let me know , because i only have an hour to get ready for work and i plan on eating my breakfast at my job!

peace brother!