I can’t wait to see this film. It’s coming to Seattle’s Harvard Exit theater on April 23. This film is especially interesting because it’s being self-distributed, sort of, as much as that’s possible for someone whose identity is a secret. In any case, it’s coming to a theater near you, and if audience reaction at Sundance was any indication, it’s going to rock. Here’s the first 5 minutes:

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Last night I invited 40 members of the cast and crew of Shine, my first short doc made with Ben Medina, as well as the biggest financial supporters of the film, to a private screening at Fremont Studios. It was also the first time I’ve seen the film on a biggish screen (30 feet or so), and the first time I’ve had the experience of showing a film to the people who are actually depicted in the film. I was a bit nervous, and I expected a wide range of responses. I wasn’t disappointed.

The good news is that by far, nearly everyone liked the film. The entrepreneurship experts in particular, like Connie Bourassa-Shaw and Steve Brilling, and Mark Lacas said they felt we struck just the right balance between hope and dreams vs. realities and failures of entrepreneurship. Chris Julian, who teaches film editing here in Seattle, said that at 24 minutes, we got the length just right for a film of this kind, too, and complimented me on the color grade, which I did myself with a lot of help from a handful of Red Giant Software plugins.

The theater screening revealed that the audio mix still needs work. What sounds great on my Sennheiser 280 headphones actually sounds VERY different on surround sound in a theater. Chris Julian tipped me off to using a good pair of external speakers when editing beats phones every time. Lesson learned.

Another reason I’m glad we screened the film to as many of the people featured in the film is because we were able to catch one huge mistake – I misspelled Connie Bourassa-Shaw’s last name! I can’t believe that made it past all of our rigorous checks. Luckily it’s easy to fix that before the film gets out.

One woman featured in the film objected to her face being shown so large (the film is built around close-up interviews with people looking directly into the camera). It was a little too intimate for her. And the fact that it was in HD meant that there’s no place to hide any blemishes. I really like that level of intimacy, and that’s not something I would change. But it’s an interesting observation about HD vs SD – HD can be a little TOO good for some people.

One of the entrepreneurs in the film sent his publicist to the screening, and she objected to the color grade I did on him, which really surprised me. I spent a lot of time making him look good, and in fact, Ben shot his interview to look positively glowing very intentionally. Film is a subjective medium, that’s for sure. Luckily for me, Chris Julian was standing nearby when she cornered me and backed me up on how good it in fact looks.

But the biggest revelation of the night came when someone who will remain unnamed here threw a temper tantrum after the film, in the hall outside the theater, objecting to not receiving a larger credit. That one really caught me by surprise.

Ultimately, making a film is a deeply subjective, personal process, and I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to have collaborated with so many talented people in its making. It’s a true film. And I’m proud of it.

No word yet on whether it’ll get it’s public premier at SIFF – they have until the end of April to notify us. Fingers crossed!

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I’ve had my Canon T2i dslr for just over two weeks, and I’ve been absolutely blown away by the video it shoots. However, I picked up the camera yesterday and noticed some strange, lava lamp-like formations on the LCD screen. At first I thought it was actually recording them, but I soon realized that they are only affecting the display, not recording to video. Clearly, the LCD pixels have been damaged or corrupted somehow.

Anyone ever seen anything like this before? Googling “damaged pixels” doesn’t show anything like this, though. I’ve taken good care of the camera, and I’ve got a Zacuto Z-Finder attached to it all the time, so I can’t imagine how anything might have damaged the LCD directly by striking it.

I’m already so in love with this camera that I can hardly bear the thought of sending it to Canon for repair.

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VNV Nation is an internationally acclaimed band whose melding of goth industrial riffs with uplifting electronic anthems instantly made me a fan ever since I discovered them via Paul Aleinikoff’s On The Edge radio show 5 or 6 years ago.

One of the things I love about this band is their surprising ability to transcend genres and defy easy classification. So when I was looking for the perfect music to match with a video I created for Eton School, I skipped through every one of their songs in my iTunes collection, more because I wanted to hear them than because I expected to find a fit. But when I heard As It Fades (2nd Movement), I froze. The angelic, almost haunting harmony of the last track on their Reformation 1 CD conveyed exactly the feeling I was going for with this video. I dropped it into my timeline in Final Cut thinking, there’s no way you’re going to be able to use this – it’s a well-known band, and this project is for a local non-profit school. They probably won’t even return my calls. But I’ve always been a believer in aiming high, so I went ahead and cut the video with the music. It was perfect.

I looked up the band’s label, and called the contact person for licensing. No answer. I left a message. No reply after two days. That was kind of what I figured. I started thinking, OK, now I’m going to have to find some music more within reach. But I’ll call one more time… this time, a person answered, and he politely told me that his label didn’t represent the album I was asking about. Could he help me find the right person to talk to, I asked? “You should just talk to Ronan Harris,” he said, the band’s founder, main songwriter and lead vocalist. “Do you have his contact info?” I asked. “Sure, here you go.”

Armed with that info, I composed an email to Ronan explaining why I believed this particular track was perfect, and asking for permission to use it, including a password-protected link to the video which contained his music. I hit the send button figuring that the message would probably never actually be read by Ronan himself, and doubting I’d ever get a reply.

Exactly 19 minutes later, I get this personal reply from Ronan Harris:

I am utterly flattered that you wrote asking this. You have my full permission to use this track for this documentary. I watched it and was extremely moved. This is very much the spirit of what VNV Nation’s message is about – self betterment and finding a path and personal strength, no matter the adversities being faced. I applaud you for making this. I wish I’d had the benefit of this kind of school when I was a kid.

I’ve learned several things from this experience. The first is, always strive diligently to do extraordinary work (which incidentally is part of VNV Nation’s band motto “It is better to strive diligently than to sit in bitter regret”), and never fail to ask for what you want. Finally, no matter how famous you become, take time to answer your email. I was a fan of VNV Nation before – now I’m a raving fan for life.

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Louis Psihoyos was for many years a photojournalist before he embarked on making his first film, The Cove, which earlier this week won an Oscar. And in this interview with the National Press Photographers Association (which I used to be a member of), he said this: “It was really refreshing to step outside the journalistic box.” Hallelujah to that. Journalists will always be constrained by facts; filmmakers are free to explore truths.

Once you’ve had a taste, there’s no going back.

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I found this great list of 18 cult documentaries you must see, which is how I discovered this deceptively simple Czech film.

Synopsis: Two Czech film students convince an ad agency to help them pull a huge hoax: opening a fake “hypermarket.” Not only do they successfully fool the public into believing that a huge new “hypermarket” is about to open, causing hundreds of people to wait in line on the “opening” day – they also managed to fool me into expecting more of a dramatic climax than actually happened (by faking footage used in the trailer). As a viewer, you end up feeling a little bit betrayed, like the people who attended the grand opening must have felt. And aren’t films supposed to be about making you feel things? It’s infuriatingly brilliant on more than one level.

Story and Structure: Straightforward chronology. I’m envious of filmmakers who choose to make films with this obvious of a structure – it makes their job so simple. It’s a film about an event – and the obvious thing to do is begin with the idea, and how the idea is developed, building up to the event itself – the climax – and tie up a couple loose ends before rolling credits. Done.

One thing worth noting: They did NOT opt to begin the film at the obvious place: the end. I might have opened with the crowd rushing toward the fake building and then flash back to how the plan was hatched.

Cinematography: There are more glidecam shots in this film than any doc I’ve ever seen. The camera is fairly flying – in and out of crowds, circling around people multiple times, enough to make you dizzy in the hands of a less skilled operator, but this guy was ON IT. The technique called attention to itself, but that was part of the story – the idea that slick production values can sell anything. The quality of the cinematography certainly rose above that of what I’d expect from a couple of film school students. You see the one kid filmming everything with a handheld camcorder, but I didn’t see any footage in the film that looked like it had been filmed on a crappy handheld camera, so that apparently was just a prop.

Editing: The story manages to move along, despite taking a long time with arguments among members of the team who developed the marketing campaign, lots of time spent with focus group participants, etc. It appeared there must have been a ton of footage, because we get many many camera angles during the event day. They must have had a dozen camera people operating to get the coverage they got.

Sound and Music: The most memorable music was the crowd singing prior to the opening of the fake store – that was precious. Otherwise, audio was good – lots of boom poles visible in the film as they filmmakers made no effort to hide the fact that this was a film being made.

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I’m heading to Vancouver next week on March 9 for a Final Cut editing workshop presented by Larry Jordan. The seminar cost is $99. Any Seattle filmmaker want to carpool with me? I’ll be leaving at about 6am and plan to return to Seattle the same evening by around 8pm.

I pretty much learned how to edit from this guy’s video tutorials, both those posted on his own site and via the outstanding Lynda.com resource.

This particular workshop is sponsored by Red Giant, makers of outstanding Final Cut plugins, and I’m looking forward to learning in more detail how to use their stuff in my own projects. Also a big reason for attending: Jordan will be showing tips on how to use Sonicfire, a scoring app. I’ve used it on one project and loved it, so I’m looking forward to learning more about how to integrate it with my Final Cut workflow.

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Big news from Canon earlier this week: They announced a new DSLR that is a bold step forward where it matters to me most: price. I’d been holding off on taking the plunge into DSLR filmmaking, because the field is moving so rapidly and I didn’t want to plunk down a couple thousand bucks on something that would be outdated in a few months. But at a retail price of just $800, Canon just removed that concern with the Canon 550d/T2i.

This new camera, which is rumored to begin shipping any day, features virtually the same video capabilities as the 7d, complete with selectable cinema framerates and a fat APS-C sensor. The result, when paired with good lenses, is dreamy shallow depth of field in a handheld camera.

Another big factor for me: This camera uses SD cards! This might not seem like a big deal, but I absolutely HATE having to plunk down the big bucks for different types of media. I already have invested in 3 SD cards that I use in my JVC HM-100, and absolutely LOVE them: they’re tiny, and hold nearly an hour of 1080p HD video per 16gb card. Sweet.

This camera allows me to join what I expect will be legions of videographers who want to take the visual quality of their work to a whole ‘nother level – without breaking the bank. This camera will allow me to put my money where it belongs – on buying great lenses.

This camera doesn’t address the issues that have kept me out of the dslr filmmaker fold previously – it still is a 35mm stills camera with video bolted on. No articulating screen, no good audio features, etc. But at this price, it doesn’t matter. A camera will come along before too long that will fix that, and let me use the glass that I’ll begin buying. I already have two very fast 35mm Nikon lenses that, with a $10 adapter I bought on Ebay, will work fantastically on this new Canon. Thanks Canon for making a game-changing product that allows me to join the DSLR filmmaking revolution.

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One of the child characters in Ross Kaufmann and Zana Briski’s 2004 documentary, Born Into Brothels, is now attending film school in the United States. A fund set up by the filmmakers to help the children of prostitutes, who were the subject of their Oscar-winning film, enabled 20-year-old Avijit Halder to follow his educational dreams to the United States. He plans to return to India and make a film about one of the other children who was in the film, a girl who has since become a prostitute.

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After watching Gates of Heaven, I can understand why Errol Morris found the theater completely empty at the end of it’s first screening at the Berlin Film Festival. I’m also beginning to recognize the subtle thing that makes a filmmaker potentially great. It’s visible in this film. Roger Ebert saw it, and put this film on his top 10 list of best films of 1978. Here’s my stab at describing it: it’s not necessarily a filmmaker’s ability to record great on-screen action, exotic locations, or big budgets. It’s his ability or need to transcend the subject at hand and turn it into an exploration of deeper questions. In this case, it’s about success and failure, and life and death.

Synopsis: When a poorly run pet cemetery closes and 450 animals have to be dug up and moved to a more successful cemetery, first-time filmmaker Errol Morris introduces us to the failed owners and the successful owners in a series of interviews that raise questions about business, death, and the banality of existence.

Story Structure: In a fascinating preview of his later style, Morris structures the entire film around interviews in which the characters at times directly address the camera, but most often look close beside the camera in telling their stories. The film is roughly in two halves; the first half deals with the failed cemetery owners telling their story, and the second introduces us to the successful cemetery owners and their stories. The interviews slowly reveal character. Morris’ voice is not present, as it is in later films. The film gets really interesting toward the end as the Bubbling Springs cemetery owner talks about God and we realize that the religion he created for the pet owners convenience is really no different from the religions of the rest of the world.

Cinematography: The interviews are all different, but they are set up to say something about the person. For example, filming the oldest son with all of his trophies on the wall, or the dad with a name plaque on his desk, or the owners of the failed cemetery with an open can of Coors. Simple backgrounds work wonderfully – cactus behind pet owners, dry grass behind pet owners, and nothing else.

Intriguingly, the film is almost entirely interview, and it works (but that’s likely why most people walk out on it – it’s a bit tedious to sit through a feature that’s mostly interviews for many people). There is light by highly effective use of b-roll to illustrate the story: for example, there’s a couple of newspaper headlines illuminated by light falling just on the headlines, the rest of the page in shadow. There are shots of the cemetery location, and of workmen digging out the bodies of pets. There’s a shot of a guy drawing what he’s talking about on a pad of paper.

Editing: Morris is credited as the editor, producer and director of this film. I read somewhere that he consulted with a ton of editors who didn’t think they could make a film out of the footage, so perhaps he had no one except himself to edit it! One moment in the film feels really tacky, when Morris inserts a newspaper headline by doing the old-school spinning-spinning-spinning paper which suddenly stops and we see the headline. It was almost like, hey, I figured out how to do this technique so here it is. Kind of like I was doing on Final Cut yesterday.

Music and Sound: No music in the film except two memorable scenes in which the youngest son of the pet cemetery plays music he’s recorded on a tape recorder, and the second scene where he hooks up his guitar and blasts it out over the cemetery. There are a number of airplanes heard droning overhead while someone’s talking in an interview, car noises from busy streets during interviews, people talking a bit in background. But it manages to work.

As an interesting aside, this is the film that Werner Herzog famously ate his shoe over. Apparently, he had observed that Morris had an inability to complete projects that he started. Morris proved him wrong by completing this film. And a few others since then.

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