Check this out. Some clever engineers at a company called Eye-Fi have apparently figured out how to cram wi-fi capabilities into a class 6 SD card, and are claiming that this allows you to automatically download photos and video as you capture it. They call it “Endless Memory” mode. But what snaps me to attention about this isn’t the fact that I might no longer need to carry a fistful of SD cards on shoots. What’s really interesting is the possibility that one person with a video camera and an iPhone could theoretically broadcast in an almost live mode. That is, using these, it should be possible to download video as you shoot it to your iPhone, and have your iPhone configured to then automatically post video to your blog or social media.
Obviously most people wouldn’t want to dump everything as they shoot it straight to their Facebook profile. Everybody needs an editor. But if you were filming, say, in a sensitive situation where there was a chance of having your “film” confiscated, this could give you a lot of peace of mind. Like if you were James Longly filming last year’s election in Iran, for example (provided he were using a camera like my JVC HM100, which uses class 6 SD cards). How cool would it be to just shoot shoot shoot while posting your files to your hard drive back home?
Last night I screened The Burden of Dreams at my place, joined by Seattle documentary filmmaker Nassim Assefi and Seattle Film Institute cinematography instructor Steven Bradford and a few other friends. The 1982 documentary by Les Blank is a cutting portrayal of legendary filmmaker Warner Herzog during his 5-year quest to make Fitzcaraldo. I’m not keen on “making of” movies, but this one is far more about Herzog as a character than his film.
A psychotherapist once told me that to understand the behavior of people, including ourselves, it can be useful to think of them as actors starring in their own movies. The problem is, people don’t know when to stop acting. They get attached to the roles they define for themselves. Even when the results don’t make any sense or are harmful to themselves and others, they just keep playing out their parts, long after any adult in charge would have yelled “Cut!”
This film is a journey into Herzog’s vision of himself as a hero in his own movie, literally, with no one to tell him no. Except his film’s investors, who waste no time in doing so when it becomes clear Herzog is making what my psychotherapist pal might have called “poor choices.”
Everything continues to go wrong for Herzog, in large part because he insists on putting the cast and crew into extreme conditions of isolation and physical stress, in the name of extracting more authentic performances out of them. But it’s more than that. It’s as if Herzog WANTS to spend 5 years in the jungle. “I don’t want to live in a world where there are no lions, where there are not people like lions,” he says in one interview. In the jungle Herzog sees “overwhelming misery and fornication and lack of order. Even the stars look like a mess” here, he says, in his frighteningly ordered German accept.
I got so distracted by my repulsion for Herzog that I forgot to pay close attention to how the documentary was made. Nevertheless, I managed to come away with one useful observation, made by Steven. He reminded us that this film was made during a period when filmmakers, for the first time in history, came into the possession of film cameras that could also record sync sound while at the same time being small enough to shoulder-hold. That represented a technological breakthrough, just as momentous as the one many of us are buzzing about today with the arrival of HDSLRs like the Canon 5d. Directors like Herzog felt suddenly freed of the constraints of big studios. They were breaking free. Or at least, they were trying.
After the film, Steven showed us this 3:58 clip on YouTube, as an example of just how effective the studios have been in keeping directors out of the jungle and safely delivering earth-shaking apocalypse, on time and on budget. Check it out. Almost made me nostalgic for the sound of Herzog’s real steam ship crunching into real rocks. Almost.
Today’s the late deadline for SIFF, a deadline I’ve been aiming to hit for months. Sure enough, I did it with about 15 hours to spare. I hit the submit button sending Shine on it’s way via withoutabox.com at about 9am this morning, after a successful all-night render of the final file (it took more than 12 hours to render on my 2.5gz Macbook Pro – a sign that I need to start looking at a Mac desktop that has more editing horsepower).
The final film is exactly 24 minutes long. It took 8 months from beginning to end (although it’s not fully over yet, since we still have to produce a DVD with extras and such). I spent most of the day yesterday fussing with title slates, credit roll tweaks, and audio transitions. After I made the SIFF deadline this morning, I went down to the Biznik office and gave Lara and Andrew the first private screening of the final film. They liked it!
It feels great to have it complete. I’m sending a big thank you to everyone involved, especially the more than 100 volunteers and financial contributors who made the film possible. You guys rock.
Northwest Film Forum is bringing director Zachary Levy to Seattle to screen his documentary film Strongman. It plays from Jan. 8 – 14 at the Forum, and the director will be in attendance on opening Friday and Saturday. I’ll be attending the Friday 7pm screening.
But here’s what’s really cool: Zachary Levy is teaching a pair of documentary workshops while he’s in town, one of them about my favorite style of documentary, cinema verite. I’ve signed up for both of them. Here’s the descriptions:
Strengthen your documentary filming techniques with visiting filmmaker Zachary Levy (Strongman). Each day, Zach will show clips demonstrating different documentary styles, and then lead a hands-on workshop. With Zach’s direction, students will arrange lighting set-ups and practice camera techniques. Saturday will be spent simulating verite style shooting, while Sunday is entirely focused on interview-based portraiture set-ups. Students are encouraged to bring clips from their own work as a starting point for solving the kinds of challenges they might face in the field.
Documentary Camera—Verite
Saturday, Jan 9, 12–3pm
Tuition: $35/WigglyWorld member, $40/general
Max Attendance: 12 Register
Documentary Camera—The Interview
Sunday, Jan 10, 12–3pm
Tuition: $35/WigglyWorld member, $40/general
Max Attendance: 12 Register
We threw an amazing birthday party here on the 30th. And to commemorate, I made my last short film of the decade. For my extraordinary wife, Lara. Enjoy.
Technical notes: Shot on JVC HM-100 (most at +9db medium gain). I used a small obie light that did a great job filling the eyes on the roving handheld camera shots. Color correction: Red Giant Software’s Magic Bullet Quick Looks (I applied a warm spot focus). Music: “Birthday” by Bird & Bee from the CD Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future. Stabilizer: Glidetrack SD 1-meter (I’ll be posting a full review of the Glidetrack soon).
I read a thoughtful interview with Marshall Curry recently, whose work I greatly admire, in which he explained how he become a filmmaker:
I really loved documentaries. I watched them and read about them obsessively, and for years I thought, “That’s what I’d really like to do.” Eventually I realized that if I wanted to make a documentary, I just needed to leap into the abyss and try.
No film school – he just picked up a camera and began a personal project that eventually became Street Fight, his first feature film. It ended up being nominated for an Oscar. The film is about the 2002 mayoral race in Newark, New Jersey, which pitted an idealistic political newcomer, Cory Booker, against a long-time incumbent, Sharpe James, famous for his use of questionable campaign tactics. (Bonus info: watch the film (you can instant-play the film on Netflix), then click here to find out what Cory Booker is doing today).
I’m looking forward to seeing Curry’s latest film, Racing Dreams, which won best documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year and continues to rack up more wins as it makes its way through the festival circuit. (Side rant: I wish major festivals would offer an option to screen their selected films online when they are at festival for those of us who can’t fly to the festival to see it in person. Gigantic Digital is one ray of hope on this horizon, but their list of films is still pretty short, although you can screen some seriously great documentaries online there like The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill. I’d gladly pay the festival ticket price to be able to watch this current-year major festival films online.)
To continue my own education as a documentary filmmaker, I’m taking a cue from Marshall Curry by promising myself to screen 100 documentary films in the first 100 days of 2010.
I’ll be posting brief reviews of each film that I watch here, with an eye for how they were made, and outline the techniques and approaches aspiring filmmakers can learn from each.
It’s my wife’s birthday on Dec. 30th. And it’s a big one: she’s turning 39 … for the second time. It was tough for me to find a birthday present to equal the weight of this event, but I found one: I’m painting the entire upstairs of our home in the colors of her choice. That’s something we’ve been putting off since we bought the place nearly 7 years ago. And after spending the last three weeks splattered in paint, I know WHY we’ve been putting it off: it’s a ridiculous amount of work. But damn, it’s looking good, and the end is finally in sight.
To complete the transformation of our upstairs, we found an amazing, huge sectional couch on Craigslist, and hired can-do Seattle contractor Bruce Blessing, whose been doing great work for us for several years, to install some killer lighting. We’ll have it all done in time for Lara’s birthday bash here on the 30th.
As it turns out, I have a secret motivation in doing all of this: to create an amazing screening room for documentary films. The more I work on my own films, the more I appreciate the great work that other filmmakers have done and are doing, and I’m tired of watching them on my laptop. We’ve got a projector that shoots an 8-foot picture, and I just upgraded our internet to 12 mps. Netflix documentary queue, here we come.
What’s a year if it’s not full of changes? 2009 held some particularly big changes for me, most significantly my largely accidental decision to make a film, Shine: The Entrepreneur’s Journey. The film grew out of an event Biznik hosted in May, which was designed to help entrepreneurs create video profiles. Trouble is, nobody was signing up to attend the event. I was brushing my teeth one morning and had the idea: why not tell people we’re making a film, and the best stories will be included? 500 people showed up. So, we actually had to make a film. I ended up falling in love with the process of research, discovery, conversation, techno-geekery and collaborative magic that is documentary filmmaking.
So in August, I handed the reigns of Biznik to our hugely capable cofounder Lara Feltin, and chose to dedicate myself to documentary filmmaking full time. It’s a bit of a scary move, as career changes tend to be, but I know it’s the right one for me. And it’s a homecoming of sorts, signaling a return to my roots as a journalist, but with the freedom to strongly express a point of view that is all my own.
I’m creating this blog to share my personal journey into the fast-changing world of documentary filmmaking. In it, I’ll share the latest tools, techniques and resources for powerful visual storytelling, and spotlight the extraordinary work of other documentary filmmakers who are dedicated to doing meaningful work. And of course, use it to promote my own work with behind-the-scenes looks at work in progress.
A good blog, like a good business, should have a concise mission statement. Here’s mine:
To promote myself and all filmmakers dedicated to producing rigorous, inventive documentary films that matter.
Check this out. Some clever engineers at a company called Eye-Fi have apparently figured out how to cram wi-fi capabilities into a class 6 SD card, and are claiming that this allows you to automatically download photos and video as you capture it. They call it “Endless Memory” mode. But what snaps me to attention about this isn’t the fact that I might no longer need to carry a fistful of SD cards on shoots. What’s really interesting is the possibility that one person with a video camera and an iPhone could theoretically broadcast in an almost live mode. That is, using these, it should be possible to download video as you shoot it to your iPhone, and have your iPhone configured to then automatically post video to your blog or social media.
