What is it about this crazy stuff we find on the side of the road that I love to shoot? Is it the broken dreams? The shear realism of it? Or is it the degradation brought from abuse or carelessness? I think it just reminds me how this is all temporal and fleeting….
More Powerful Facebook Fan Pages
Facebook! A name that draws fear or disgust from many web developers. Fan or Foe, facebook is the hot place right now, as everyone is using it. What does this mean to developers and graphic designers? It means we get to learn yet another constantly changing API.
To add more interest and stickiness, there are some new tricks that will allow us to add images, video, tabbed browsing, and many other features normally reserved for only our blogs.
Mixing for Film
We’re in the process of editing the sound mix for a documentary that we are releasing in 2011. The concept of reference is always a big issue.
Director: “That sounds muddy”.
Composer: “It didn’t at the studio!”
Director: “Did they mix this on near-field monitors? No sub?”
Composer: “Yes”.
Producer: “Sigh…”
It’s a lot of fun mixing for a feature documentary. We have a huge range of types of venues the film will be played at, from straight televisions, to home theaters, to peforming arts centers and hopefully top rated film theaters. How does one make it sound good, everywhere?
A new reel for bluedot!
Having gathered footage all summer for our latest projects, many of our friends and associates have asked us what the heck we have been up to.
Realizing we hadn’t updated our reel in (gasp) 2 years, we thought it time to cut something new and exciting! A big thank you goes out all the people that are within its frames, on camera and off.
The Making of History, Writing, and You
The poet is to memory what the hero is to action. It is the poet, writer, and storyteller who memorializes the actions of the hero, considers things good and bad, and brings them to future generations.
Despite his military and political accomplishments, Napoleon wanted above all to be a writer. He wrote memorials, histories, dialogues, even a short novel. When he wasn’t writing, he talked of writing as when he addressed his troops after Waterloo, “…that I may further serve your glory…I shall write of the great things we have done together.” Why would a man who so thoroughly directed the course of history want so badly to record it, and even more strangely, to write fiction; to record a world which doesn’t exist?
Napoleon knew that his actions would end, but that the memory of them would continue in the hands of writers and storytellers. He was ambitious, and not content with the transience of his heroism, he wanted the longevity, nay, the immortality which only the poet can offer.
Deactivate Visual Editor – WordPress
I just recently had a client that needed a sniffing javascript to serve up an iPad version of their cinematography. While this was easily added in the WYSIWYG editor within wordpress, if you hit the “visual” tab, Poof! The javascript would become broken in a strange enough way that required too much debugging. Instead of leaving a possible trap to our clients, we needed a solution: A great plugin to deactivate the visual editor when editing specific pages or posts within wordpress.
The visual editor is nice when pages and posts are simple, but when you try to add special text such as php code to a page then the visual editor oftentimes has to be deactivated to edit the page. This plug-in allows you to set which posts should not use the visual editor by setting a custom field ‘deactivate_visual_editor’ to true. This allows the visual editor to be deactivated for the given post/page, but remain active for all others.
Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/deactive-visual-editor/
Writing: Foreign Mistakes
We can learn a lot about the importance of proper word choice from the mistakes of foreigners.
I was in a Chinese restaurant in Spain and as if their troubled translation of the menu into Spanish wasn’t bad enough, they had also translated it into English. Next to some of the menu items there were asterisks. I looked to the bottom of the menu were the asterisks were explained and expecting to see the word spicy or vegetarian I read this: “These dishes are no longer in existence”.
Ok I’ll admit there’s nothing really wrong with the grammar here. It’s just so outlandish. What is most compelling to me (nothing to do with writing) is that these people reprinted their menu and rather than take the items off, they chose to memorialize them. If the phrase had read, “these dishes are no longer served” it would have been very pedestrian, very normal. But “existence” balls us over; it elevates the phrase to the level of poetry.
As writers we should employ strategy in the use of our words. There are times to be very clear even predictable and other times when it is nice to surprise or shock. The element at work in the phrase on the menu is surprise and the effect is humor. What makes the word “existence” so powerful is the context. If it had been in a speech about lost lives the word would have been merely factual. But existence for a menu item – it’s hilarious.
Writing: An Introduction
I want to help people to write better.
My desire to write this 5 part blog on WRITING comes from an awareness that despite our highly technical and visually oriented culture things still seem to pivot on the written word. Even for something non-literary like a TV show someone has to write the script or cue cards; someone has to write the advertisement and promos, the legal contracts, the emails, the memos etc.
When needing to communicate with a prospective partner, a high tech software company is reduced to making sure there are no sentence fragments, or dangling participles in their mission statement. In the legal world I recently read a quote stating that, “more litigation results from bad drafting than you can imagine.”
Another reason for this blog is the need to address a shocking barrage of mediocre and incompetent writing in supposedly professional forums. With regularity I have seen run-on sentences and fragments in the London Times and I have seen just about everything on the internet. The prose on the blogosphere, as one feisty blogger puts it, tends to be “slapdash, fragmented and drearily prolix.”
Reviews of DSLR rigs
They’ve done a great job over at the Cinema 5d forums on a shootout on shoulder and tripod rigs for the DSLR filmmaker. These cameras are incredible, but ergonomic they are not! This review will help you find your way in this new world.
Seems that Redrock’s rig didn’t do too well on their review, in fact… before Redrock had them pull it, they had the brief opportunity to let us all know how poorly designed their rig was. I remember that it would sit on their follow focus, and the weight distribution was so far off it wouldn’t sit on your shoulder.
Statement by Brian Valente from Redrock Micro:
“For concerns too numerous to list here, Redrock has requested that our participation in the cinema5D rig review be removed. Redrock will provide an additional detailed statement at a later point. While we cannot support the methods and resulting conclusions of this isolated review, we continue to be supportive of the cinema5D community.”
It must have been a really bad review! I am really surprised that RedRock would take such a hard stance in a public forum where word travels fast. I have used quite a bit of RedRock stuff on our prior JVC HD100, such as their DOF adapter, follow focus, rail system & whips. I thought their workmanship good, albeit I did have to have them replace the FF gear before it was usable. I found the DOF adapter to be a major pain in the field, and shooting docs, it just wasn’t worth the effort. Now using DSLR’s, we have all the DOF we could ever want.
Personally, we’re using the “not ready for primetime” Zacuto knockoffs Magic Spider is creating, and having great luck with them! Sorry Zacuto, but how can you expect independent film makers to afford your stuff?
Three Keys to Good StoryTelling
Stories, stories, stories.
In the end it is all we have, in truth, it is what we crave.
The venue or genre is not important; whether we are writing a book, making a movie, talking to a friend or making a corporate video – we are telling stories.
After reading blogs and talking to people in the corporate video industry, I am under the impression that most are aware of the need to bring storytelling to their video in order to keep it from becoming boring.
Then why, I ask, are so many corporate videos boring?
The answer is that storytelling is a craft, and the reality is that there is good storytelling and bad storytelling.