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.

Here’s some great tricks I came across:

http://www.johnhaydon.com/2009/04/create-interactive-facebook-page/

http://www.labnol.org/internet/create-custom-facebook-pages/17957/

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?

This is the question that plagues every sound designer at the final mixdown of a film. But, this time… we have a new approach.

It is extremely difficult to find a post production facility that can mix in 5.1 surround in Oregon, so we went ahead and created our own. Using Yamaha amplifiers, Klipsch loudspeakers and proper callibration, we feel that we have a studio that can bounce between stereo, 2.1 (with sub), and 5.1 Dolby surround.

Interestingly, pro-audio gear doesn’t self calibrate speakers. Their distance, their size, the room size, etc either has to be calibrated by a Dolby certified technician, or they are ‘guessed at’ by using reference pieces in the studio.

With the Yamaha high end home theater systems, they come with aYPAO computerized calibration system and custom microphone that is placed at the listeners location and ear level. Full calibration!

With this new arsenal of sound gear, we output out of our Mac’s with a Matrox MXO2, a high end video and 5.1 surround card that uses the PCIe of either our laptops or our MacPro station. The Yamaha amp has discreet inputs for 6 channels that are calibrated as described above. Using Logic Pro, or Soundtrack Pro (depending on our workflow), we can mix with surround panners.

After the surround mix is complete, we then change it out to 2.1, then stereo… and remix as appropriate. We find the imaging of the sound stage much more accurate this way, and with 3 mixes, we’re ready for anything!

Of course, EQ’ing, compression, noise reduction, etc. are all huge parts of the process of sound design and mixing…. but knowing that your monitors are actually calibrated will allow you to mix with authority.

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.

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.

Why would a maker of history want to write fiction?  Because more than factual historical recordings, great fiction tells an even deeper truth about us which is even more long lasting.   We peer into the soul of the ancient Greek and know him not so much by historical accounts, as by Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and the plays of the tradgeans.  We envision the founding of Rome through Virgil’s Aeneid , the story of India through the Mahabharata, Romeo and Juliet not as historical characters, but through Shakespeare as the fictional symbols of all human love and passion.

Because writing was considered so important to the Romans, the Emperor Caligula felt that good writing should be rewarded and bad writing punished.  Caligula held contests in eloquence wherein the losers not only had to buy the winners their prizes, but also had to make speeches in praise of the winners.  If the speeches were not good enough the artless loser was thrown into the Rhone River.  To the Romans if a writer was deemed intelligent and eloquent enough to articulate the soul, or at least the history, of a people, then worst of all was pretence.  Bad writers according to Caligula needed to be thrown into the river.

Annie Dillard said that the world needs good shoemakers more than good writers.  Jorge Borges said that the world needs good readers more than good writers.  Of course both writers proceed to discuss and praise the craft of writing.  (I recommend Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.)

The fact is, the need to write something arises nearly every day for many people.  But no matter how mundane the task there is always something magical in the act of writing.  Of course most of us are not writing a seminal history or a work of fiction to speak to a generation; but every time we write, we record something, we crystallize a thought or action and bring something new into the world, and there is always magic in this.  Whether our words are recorded for eternity or soon obliterated by the delete button, whether a petition to save a man’s life, or to sell a product, the art of writing carries with it the importance of giving something shape and content and putting into the memory banks of civilization some hopefully worthwhile account of something.  Every written word conjures the spirit of the first poet recording the first hero.

So write well lest ye are thrown into the river.

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/

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.

Another example of a surprising word choice is when a Venezuelan girl said to me, “My leg is dreaming”.  Of course I understood her meaning but what a difference between the words dreaming and sleeping.  The poetic suggestions in her innocent mistake were delightful.

In Morocco I read a sign hanging from the wall of a craftsmen’s shack: “We fix watches at the fast moment of waiting.” We fix watches fast, or while you wait is what my eye wanted to see but the screwed up order of the words forced me to really think.  Fast moment of waiting – I know poets who would be happy to have come up with that line.

The point here is that proper word choice can either make something clear and straightforward by using the appropriate or predictable word, or it can shock us into humor and other avenues of thought.  The element of surprise in your word choice can also alleviate boring writing.  Here is a tip.  Any time you use three adjectives in a row be sure the third one is surprising or charged.  Note the difference between: The happy, playful, curious cat jumped on my lap… and… The happy, playful, predatory cat jumped on my lap.  The word predatory is not expected.  It is the difference between boredom and a living sentence.

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.”

My intent with this series is not to complain but to entertain and give tips for better writing at a variety of levels and for a range of different genres.

• The first two installments, So it is Written, So Shall it be Done and To Write or Not to Write are fun pieces on the history of writing.
• The third blog, Everybody’s Doing It, will be about the modern importance of writing, detailing the basics of good, solid writing. We need to be aware of the fact that from cover letters to resumes to mission statements our written word usually precedes us in this modern world.
• The fourth installment, Write Well or Die, will discuss style and will give advice on how to give your writing a more personal voice and how to put a bit of art into the effort.And the final article, Real Story-Telling, looks to great works by great writers to show us what great writing can be.

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?

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.

Here are a few crucial points to focus on to make your video soar rather than snore:

1. Tension

We want the audience to have moments where they say or think something like, “How the heck is he going to pull that off?” or “That’s interesting, but I don’t see the connection” or “If that’s true, she better explain how so”. The narrative of your story must incite the audience to really want an answer. You wouldn’t be in business if you were not offering an answer to some question. Don’t give them an answer until you have generated a field of tension surrounding the question.

2. Unpredictability

Don’t be predictable. Great filmmakers are always one step ahead of the audience. In Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn there were many moments when I wasn’t immediately sure what I was looking at due to the camera angle, lighting or just an ambiguous subject. Is that an oddly shaped boulder or a deformed monster or a corpse? Oh I see it’s a boulder. If the narration is about a hammer – show a nail. Keep them guessing as to what is coming next. This technique should not be arbitrary or chaotic; there should be a method to the madness. The unpredictability should be full of suggestion, foreshadowing and recall. Not gimmicky shots and tricks, rather the video should be strategically designed to tell a story in a way that is not predictably sequential. We don’t want to confuse the audience; we want them to be slightly unsure of what’s coming next.

3. Personality

The narrator, whether third person or an interviewee does not have to be eloquent or overly graceful, but they should be charming and endearing if not charismatic. Someone to whom we naturally would want to listen. It can be the slickest production in the land, but if the storyteller (narrator) does not have some type of magnetism which draws us to them, the whole thing will lay flat. (The salesperson sells herself before she can sell her product).

With a friend, I recently watched a documentary which presented the esoteric philosophy of a famous physicist.

The film was aimed at the educated lay. My friend, completely unfamiliar with anything even remotely related to the subject matter didn’t understand the physicist’s message. But he liked the film, even recommended it to his friends. I had to ask, “What did you like?” He liked the physicist. The film had a flow and was well put together he said, but above all he liked the physicist and was willing to sit through two hours of something he didn’t understand because he found the narrator/star of the film captivating. So, make sure your narrator/interviewee is someone to whom we want to listen.

If you can implement these three keys to good storytelling:

• tension
• unpredictability
• personality

…along with a technically proficient sound production, your video will soar– not bore!