Yesterday, I took part in a day long symposium on short film conducted as part of the 3 Rivers Film Festival (3rff.com).  By and large it was pretty successful.  There seemed to emerge a couple main themes in much of the days discussion:

1. Is short film different from feature film in some respect other than length?
2. Everything on you tube sucks.
3. Nobody has figured out how to make money from short film.

These last two themes may seem a bit pessimistic and depressing (if you’re a maker of short films), but somehow the real cynic attitude towards these issues didn’t really find a voice.  Nobody said that the reason people don’t want short films is that there isn’t enough short film worth watching.  That’s not to say that there aren’t lots of good shorts made every year.  It’s just that there isn’t a critical mass of them to generate a market.  The strange inversion of supply and demand in consumer entertainment markets is not to be underestimated.  We are not used to thinking of supply preceding demand but it is actually the case.  I am not usually one to reference Sartre, but he had a good point in Being and Nothingness when he notes that emptiness (demand) requires the possibility, or at least the imagined possibility, of fulfillment.

Is short film fundamentally different in some way other than length?

All art has a kind of economy to it.  It must do more with less.  Otherwise it would have no more value than the physical materials from which it is made.  Short film manifests this economy in duration. Most of the quibbling around this discussion dealt with definitions and guidelines set forth by film festivals and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  This is a shame.  I think the more interesting discussion about what makes short film interesting or different should necessarily address human psychology and the role of duration in understanding.  I am often reminded of Edgar Allen Poe.  He believed that there was a “right” length for a poem, no more than 120 lines or so.  Certainly, the “right” length would differ by poet (I’m not sure if Poe believed this part).  I think the same holds for film and it’s therefore a shame that we get so caught up in these length categories. If your story doesn’t fit in a 20 minutes short, that doesn’t mean it should be a 90 minute feature.

Everything on Youtube sucks

This oft-repeated sentiment was uttered with dismay.  Many folks seemed to feel that Youtube brought a combination of lower standards, negative expectations, and overwhelming noise from which it is too hard to rise above the noise.  The Youtube view count should not be anyone measure of success.  There is a positive note.  The traditional audience for independent short film is almost entirely made up of other filmmakers.  At least with Youtube, there are a lot more filmmakers out there.

Nobody has figured out how to make money from short films

There are plenty of internet ventures out there that will either help you distribute your short film or they will pay you add revenue for your work.   The problem is that none of these are worth getting excited about. The type of video that generates enough traffic to make reasonable advertising revenue is not the kind of video most serious filmmakers want to make.  Self distribution has not really taken off, despite new tools, because the overhead of extra work and tech know-how is prohibitive.  If the internet really is the answer for delivering short film (and I’m not sure it is), we are still waiting for the killer app.  The consensus is, Youtube is not it.

Bonus: Check out this video from the Onion.

I have been an American Cinematographer subscriber for a while now, and though I do enjoy many of the articles, I have a complaint. Here it is.

Enough with the puff pieces.

Sometimes the cinematography is not perfect, even in the big-budget blockbusters. Sometimes, it’s bad. I would love it if just once, an article acknowledged this simple fact.

An example. Last night I saw Get Smart. It was funny and enjoyable but there were a number of shots that looked like really crappy video. Today, I open my mailbox to find a new issue of AC and inside is a lame piece about how much Dean Semler, ASC loves the Panasonic Genesis, and how add +1 (can I get a unit here?) gain and opening the shutter to 360 degrees allows him to shoot in the dark.

The problem with hiding the flaws is that it cuts out 90% of the learning. Tell us about the 10% of the time when you took a risk and it worked, but don’t forget to mention the crashing failures.

Any good complaint should come with some constructive suggestions so here is a list of some questions that might liven up the sometimes monotonous recital of ungodly wattages and film stock codes.

1. What piece of equipment was a total waste of money?
2. What piece of equipment caused the most stress?
3. What was the biggest risk you took on the set that failed?
4. Which shots did you lose the most sleep over before the shoot?
5. Which shots did you lose the most sleep over after the shoot?
6. Where did your reliance on a digital intermediate come back to haunt you?
7. What computer debacle cost the most time and money to fix?
8. What critical shots still look bad to you?
9. What were the biggest ego clashes on set? That is, among the technical crew (who needs more celebrity gossip?).
10. Who did you have to fire?

These are just a couple ideas I had of things that I, personally, would like to see in a future issue of American Cinematographer. Feel free to post more suggestions in the comments.

Screenwriters are constantly reminded that they are not directors.  Their job is not to write camera movements.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways of communicating particular shots without violating this screenwriting taboo.  Over at TriggerStreet, there is a nice article about some great films in which the writers give a clear idea of where a camera might be placed.  The article gives four examples and includes the excerpts from the screenplays: Blade Runner, Dark City, Chinatown, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.

One of my favorite shots that was “written into the script” is in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey.  In one scene, Wilson (Terrance Stamp) is thrown out of a warehouse where he was asking too many questions.  He picks himself up from ground, dusts himself off, and pulls a gun from the back of his pants.  He walks back into the warehouse but the camera stays outside.  We hear gunshots and see muzzle flashes in the distance and then a teenage employee runs away.  Wilson emerges and shouts after the boy, “Tell him I’m coming.” Writer Lem Dobbs and director Steven Soderbergh discuss the relationship between the screenplay and the finished film all througout a great commentary track on The Limey dvd.

Why would you want to do this?

This is an important question to ask.  If you are a writer and not a director, why would you write in a way that implies specific camera movements?  Can’t a real director do a better job?  The answer is yes, and she will, but she’s not the only person you are writing for.  People reading your script will be trying to imagine it on screen.  The kind of visual imagination that can turn the printed words into a concrete image of the scene as it might appear in a movie, is rarer than people think.  Think of this as giving your readers a little help.

Over at Film Sound Daily, there’s a great collection of videos from a panel of the sound mixers and editors for the movie Transformers.  It’s a nice insight into an often overlooked aspect of the filmmaking process.  At some point in the discussion someone points out that “editor” is not really a good word to use for the people doing this work; really, they are “sound artists.”  Here is the link: Transformers Sound Off.

I had dabbled with a program called Processing in the past but didn’t get to into it before other projects took my attention away from it. I was mostly inspired by the beautiful work of Jared Tarbell who created the beautiful images above.

I recently came across the work of another Processing master Robert Hodgin. Below, I’ve embedded some of my favorites. I encourage you to check out his website, Flight404.

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

Tendrils mod from flight404 on Vimeo.

For my day job, I am a computational geometer, so this video of kinetic Voronoi diagrams piqued my interest.

Voronoi from flight404 on Vimeo.

I’ve been looking into alternatives to Youtube for hosting videos to embed in web sites. A couple big players that immediately jump out are MetaCafe and Revver if only for their revenue sharing programs. Both allow you to make money from the videos, but then you have to deal with ads popping up over your videos. I had what I felt was a reasonable wishlist. I wanted

1. High quality video
2. an unobtrusive player
3. a player that easily allows moving back and forth through the video
4. No ads!

Well, it turns out, I can get all those things and more from a great video hosting site called Vimeo. Some of the other great features of Vimeo include

1. Different aspect ratios/sizes for videos
2. HD, yes, HD
3. The player is gorgeous, when you aren’t hovering, it has no frame or controls
4. Commenting is built in to the player so you get this functionality even when using it for embedded videos

Definitely check them out as a better alternative to Youtube.

I was trying to find out a little more about them but their about page contains the following hard to believe statistics.

“We currently have over 7 billion users who have uploaded over 950 trillion videos”

So, unless every human being on the planet (and then some) is a Vimeo user with an average of over 135,000 videos, there are only two possibilities. Either, this is a Vimeo joke or they have really failed in the fight against spammers.

Also, while on the topic of alternative video sharing sites, I’d like to put a plug in for another great niche video site called Video Jug. The idea here is to focus on howto videos. Although, I think many people still go to Youtube first for a video howto, there is a lot of good content there worth checking out.

J.J. Abrams (Lost, Alias, Mission Impossible3, Cloverfield, the upcoming Star Trek, …) gave a talk last March on mystery, special effects, and new possibilities for filmmakers today. My favorite quote from the talk:

“Ten years ago, if we wanted to do that, we’d have to kill a stunt man.”

Here’s a link to the talk: J.J. Abrams at TED.

The talk was part of the TED Talk series. The talks are all ~20 minutes and tend to be very good. I found this particular talk from a post over at Projector Films.

I get the impression that JJ is a really cool guy in addition to his cinematic achievements. Randy Pausch, Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and lifelong Star Trek fan wrote an update on his website that JJ heard about his struggles with cancer and affinity for Star Trek and offered him a small role in the upcoming Star Trek movie. (JJ Abrams on IMDb)

The original title of this post was “HDV Sucks.” Now, I’ve changed the title to something a little less harsh, but have no doubt, this is a contrarian post.

Isn’t it amazing that the same little tapes that hold an hour of standard definition DV footage can also hold an hour of HDV footage. It seems like a miracle. It seems too good to be true. We’ll explain how this works.
First, let’s keep the definitions straight. Standard defintion (SD) and high definition (HD) refer to the resolution of the frame, whereas DV and HDV refer to recording formats (or how the video is stored) on tape. There are several flavors of HD and several recording formats for both SD and HD. This article is only concerned with HDV and DV the most popular formats for consumer and prosumer video cameras. Both formats record to miniDv tapes. Though some HDV cameras require special hi-fidelity tapes, they will work either way.

The difference between standard defintion (SD) and high definition (HD) is a matter of pixels. HD video has more of them. We generally use the word “resolution” to describe the number of pixels in an image. For example, the resolution of a frame of SD video is 720×480 and the resolution of a frame of HD video is 1440×1080. You may have seen the term “1080i” thrown around. This refers to the 1080 vertical lines of resolution in the image with interlaced frames.

So, there is a lot more information in a frame of HD than there is in a frame of SD. Yet, somehow they require the same amount of tape. The data rates for both HDv and Dv are around 25 Mbit/sec (or 3.5MB/sec). To put the data rate in context, here are some other data rates worth knowing.

Cables:

• USB 1.0 - 12 Mbit/sec
• Firewire - 400 Mbit/sec
• USB 2.0 - 480 Mbit/sec
• Firewire800 - 800 Mbit/sec

Video Formats:

• DVD video (MPEG-2) - up to 9.8Mbit/sec (average is closer 6.5)
• Dv and DVCPro25 - 25 Mbit/sec
• HDv - 25 Mbit/sec
• DVCPro50 - 50 Mbit/sec
• DVCProHD - 100 Mbit/sec

Compression

The key to getting more pixels into the same amount of space is to use more compression. If you are concerned with image quality, it is important to learn the basics of how compression works in order to understand how it affects the recorded image.  There is a simple way to understand compression.  The encoding of the video is a description of the images that the player needs to put it on the screen.  When the video is compressed, the description is shortened by abbreviating and simplifying repeated sections and small details.  The data rates listed above can be thought of as the length of the description.

As video becomes more and more compressed, you will start to see more and more compression artifacts.  These are the boxy inconsistencies, you see on poorly encoded youtube videos.  Sadly, DVDs that try to pack a lot of extra features onto a single disc, often pay the price by cranking up the compression, sacrificing image quality.  These will often show up most notably in the dark areas of the frame.

MPEG compression, the kind used in DVD and HDV (but not miniDv), compressed the video in three dimensions.  That is, rather than just taking each 2D frame and compressing it by replacing of similar color by a simplified version, MPEG also, compressed in time.  If some area of the frame does not change from one frame to the next, it doesn’t need to described twice in the datastream.  This means, that MPEG compression artifacts can sometimes be more jarring as they jump in time.  A part of the frame may stay unchanged during a slow pan over a detailed area and then jump to catch up.  I have shot a fair amount of HDV and have not found this to be terrible, but it’s not great.

Why capture breaks in HDV

Now that we know something about the compression, we can discuss why there are so many difficulties capturing HDV.  If you have tried to capture HDV to Final Cut Pro, you may have noticed that often, FCP will choke and claim that there is no time code.  Or, the capture will take  a couple tries and produce several extraneous video files.  Recall that HDV is compressed in time as well.  That means, some frames are pieced together from previous frames.  Because of this, it can be hard for the capture to device to be clear about what is in a frame if you start at a random spot.  This is not really an excuse for the software and hardware developers but it at least gives something of a reason.  I have found that with both Sony HDV decks and Sony HDV cameras, the tape will cue up, then drop time code for an instant before sending data over the firewire cable.  This little hiccup immediately causes FCP to throw up a warning and abort.

If anyone know a good workaround for this, leave a comment below.

A few months ago, I edited a few segments for the Smithsonian Institute’s growing collection of online programming. It was a first for me in terms of the technology used to acquire the material, and the workflow there after. By the time it was finished, I was undoubtedly convinced this was the future of filmmaking, and I wanted to be a part of every step. So in addition to editing the pieces, I was given a job on location, that had no official title, as I was sure it was the first time being done.

Let me explain the gig, and how it was being produced. We were taping a full day of events including a live awards show for the Cooper Hewit Museum. We had three cameras scattered around the venue, shooting masters, close ups etc., the entire setup was relatively standard and uninteresting. However, the format we were shooting is what makes this article worth reading. Each camera was shooting on Panasonic’s AG-HVX200 3-CCD P2/DVCPRO HD camcorder.
It’s extremely robust, and gives the user a variety of different shooting options, including recording to the memory sticks known as P2 cards.

You either love em or hate em, as they come with limitations, the most note worthy being price and recording time. (A 16gb card, which was the largest at the time of shooting will get you 1 hour at DVCPro, 30 minutes at DVCPro 50 ((the format we were shooting) and a pretty tame 16 minutes at DVCPro HD), all that for about $1,000 bucks. We were determined to shoot tapeless, however, for a variety of reasons, but mainly for the sheer thrill with imminent disaster larking in every corner. We needed a way to shoot the main 2 hour event without missing a beat. Enter Focus Enhancements FS-100 firestore.

This 100 GB hardrive is known as a “direct-to-edit” digital video recorder, having the ability to record up to 100 minutes of DVCPRO HD footage, and an array of different formats including your standard DVCPRO and DVCPRO 50. And with a slew of additional features and a price tag of only $1,700 bucks (I use the term “only” loosely in comparison to the high cost of P2 cards), this was unquestionably the way to go for our shoot. In addition to the longer record times, the “direct-to-edit” feature of recording in standard MXF files and importing them into my avid without the need to digitize was very appealing. (with our finishing format being the internet, there is no need for an expensive deck, just plug in the firestore via firewire, and start cutting. more on this process later). the FS-100 is rugged and able to withstand the typical wear and tear of field recording. It is however, slightly bulky, at about the size of an old game boy, but does clip in well to a belt, or a variety of accessories that allow the hard drive to sit under the camcorder. (a popular example is the jimmy box) a creation of Jim ODonnell, who was actually one of the camera men shooting the event with us.

Another great feature is the ability for the unit to plug into a device equipped with a firewire port, and playback video like a deck. This feature gave birth to my on location duty of collecting the drives when they were full, plugging them into a DVCPRO deck, making the client a tape backup, then connecting the drive to my laptop, transferring the material onto a 1TB external LaCie drive, and finally deleting the footage allowing the camera to go and shoot additional material.

At the end of the day, the client left with a safe tape submaster. I had a drive all ready to plug in and start editing, and to top it off, some pretty great looking footage coming off an excellent camera. The whole process (with a bit of practice before hand) was safe, reliable and fast. There is no question, in a short period of time, true HD shooting and editing will be readily available to all filmmakers with a price tag way out of proportion to the quality achieved. Much like the ridiculous high quality of 8 mega pixils standard on all consumer still cameras today, tapeless HD will soon do the same.

Several years ago, I made a fun little documentary about college students and procrastination. The story centered on Princeton University, where the university has an official deadline for all written work at the end of each semester. The deadline is known as “Dean’s Date” because only a dean can grant an extension past that date. Many students gather in a courtyard between the dorms and the academic buildings to watch their classmates run to get their papers in on time. Over the years, this informal gathering has turned into a big spectacle. The marching band shows up and parades around the throngs of students enjoying free ice cream and popcorn. The documentary was generally well received and has screened many times…in my living room.

That’s probably as far as it will go. Why? Although I got permission from the students I interviewed, the marching band played a number of Disney classics. Acquiring the rights for music is more trouble than I want to deal with. The makers of hoop dreams got smacked for $15,000 because they filmed a scene at a birthday party and somebody owns the copyright to the song “Happy Birthday.”

This has always seemed a bit ridiculous to me. I recently came across an article about this problem of The Anti-Commons in Filmmaking. The title refers to an idea called the “Anti-Commons” where the difficulties and costs associated with acquiring permissions stifle creativity and innovation. The article gives some other examples and points a dead link at a study by two American University professors who did a thorough study of the problem. I hunted down the actual study. A PDF can be found here:

Untold Stories: Creative Consequences of Rights Clearance Culture for Documentary Filmmakers

All of these copyright issues can seem terribly confusing. I highly recommend the book, The Independent Film Producer’s Survival Guide: A Business and Legal Sourcebook, by Erickson, Tulchin, and Halloran. In addition to covering issues of licensing rights and permissions, this book is a great source for a ton of other legal questions that come up for indie filmmakers. Amazon is selling it for less than 17 bucks, definitely worth it.