Independence from Independents

I’m going to quote two headlines in the Daily Variety today, since they bear out what I’ve been saying about independent films for a few years, even as recently as last week:

“Warner slams door on specialty pix” is the first one and, slightly lower down on the page, “‘Speed’ strikes while ‘Iron’ is hot.”

The first article talks about Warner’s decision to close its two main “independent film” releasing arms and leads off with these paragraphs:

Warner Bros. has discovered a way to deal with the specialty film business — it’s staying away from it.

The flagship studio ended months of speculation Thursday by shuttering both Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures. The closings — which caught Hollywood and many inside each division off-guard — will eliminate more than 70 positions over the next few months.

The second talks about today’s release of SPEED RACER, and leads with this paragraph:

Warner Bros. tentpole “Speed Racer” gets the green light this weekend but may very well finish behind the second week of “Iron Man.”

[I should add that the film review site Rotten Tomatoes notes that only 36% of critics have liked SPEED RACER. And, in a hilarious side note, the article also notes that Fox is "counterprogramming" with WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS, which is sure to make people like me do wheelies and handsprings.]

In a world in which that Ashton Kutcher film is considered counterprogramming, there is really no room at the major studios for real independent voices. The Wall Street Journal today notes that Warner Independent Pictures had high hopes for their 2007 film IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH, but that it came nowhere near to recovering its $35 million negative cost.

$35 million dollars!! That’s what Hollywood considers an independent film!! It’s no wonder that these films aren’t successful — in order to recoup $35 million you need to have so much marketing and distribution that those cost could push the recoupable amounts to $70 million. At that price, of course, you either have to see financing independent films as an act of charity, or you have to water the film down to a more easily digestible mass of… well… pablum. I actually liked VALLEY OF ELAH, though you’d have to admit that it was certainly a very mainstream movie in almost every respect.

Does that mean that companies like 2929 (the theatrical/DVD/download play from, among others, Mark Cuban) have an opportunity, or are they doomed to play in the same arena as everyone else? (And I should, cattily, mention that 2929 is releasing Barry Levinson’s WHAT JUST HAPPENED?, which tanked at this year’s Sundance).

Years ago, I left New York City for Los Angeles because there were only two types of projects there for me to work on — the super high budget ones, and the really low budget ones. I couldn’t get interviewed for the first group, and I could no longer afford to work on the second. That stratification has now spread all over the industry. It’s not “haves” and “have nots” I’m talking about here, it’s “big” and “tiny.” The mid-range is unproduceable.

Once we get behind that, we can start developing enough of a truly low-budget/alternative base that it becomes really profitable. And, once that happens, you’ll see that mid-range start to come back again.

Photos For The Imperfect World

Last month, I talked about how a few years ago, a student of mine graduated and went to work for THE REAL WORLD and how he discovered that the editing there, turned reality into a cruel joke.

It’s a bit in poor taste, but this video advertisement for FotoPrix, shows just how photos and film can lie. Not that we need any real demonstrations of this, but it’s always good to be reminded.

Explaining The Horrifyingly Unexplainable

One of my classes is editing a feature film that is simultaneously being finished by its actual director, producers and editor out in the Real World right now. It’s a really adorable indie film about dating and turning thirty, and before you run for the hills, let me also say that it has (at its core) a really neat, somewhat science fictional, concept that I’d tell you all about if I weren’t sworn to secrecy by the filmmakers.

The problem, though, is that you’ve got to explain the rules of this concept so the audience can go along for the ride.

The class struggled with how to do that — without slowing the movie down and without drowning the audience in details all at once, so the film’s comedy could come through. It was a tough balancing act and one which the actual filmmakers ultimately solved much better than the class did.

Still, the interesting point about all of this is “how do you explain the horrifyingly unexplainable?” Or, to be more precise, the “horrifyingly difficult to explain.” The rule of thumb in feature-length films is that you have about ten minutes to do whatever you want with the audience before they start demanding to know just what kind of movie they’re watching. If you spend too much of that time explaining, that’s what they feel the movie is going to be like the whole way through. And that, in general, is poison.

I’ve spent many weeks in editing rooms trying to get to the script’s inciting incident more quickly, collapsing the first 30 minutes down to 15 or 10 minutes. For some reason, scripts always are written without thinking about that (or, if the writers do think about it — and I’m actually sure they do, I’m just being catty here) and then we get to speed everything up in editing. Sometimes well, and sometimes not so wel..

These thoughts come to mind on reading John August’s blog post yesterday called “A somewhat derivative challenge.” August is a screenwriter and director (of THE NINES) who has been publishing this dynamite blog for a few years, in which he gives a great tour of what it means to be a working filmmaker in Hollywood. Along the way he has published tutorials on screenwriting which are, often, much better than anything McKee or Truby have put in their books (his post on How To Introduce A Character is, in my mind, brilliant).

Yesterday he gave his readers a writing challenge, and it’s a doozy:

Have a character explain derivatives, as used in the financial industry. (The thing that’s like a stock, not the thing that you learned in calculus.)

The speaker should be knowledgeable, and the listener should be a layman, i.e. a proxy for the audience. What are their names? What’s the story? What’s the genre? You decide, to the degree it matters. My suggestion would be to create a scenario in which the term needs to be explained — but only to the degree necessary. Metaphors and similes are powerful tools.

You’re welcome to write as much of the scene as you want, but the focus is on the explanation. The winning entry might be one sentence long.

How many times have you had to sit through a scene in a film where there is a long, boring explanation from a scientist to a reporter about some scientific concept which will become important later in the film. Or watched as the coal miner explained to someone (anyone!) how coal was removed from the earth and how there were plenty of safety measures to make sure that no one got hurt doing it (because you knew that someone was going to get caught in a mine collapse later in the film)?

In short, how do you explain the difficult to explain? And, parenthetically, still make it interesting to watch?

The dealine for his competition is this Thursday, May 8th. So I’ll be interested to see how people solve the problem.

And then I’ll shut up about having to do all of this heavy lifting in the editing room.

Indie Films — The New Way

Yesterday’s issue of THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER (one of the two old-guard industry trade papers) had a round table interview with a number of men (and they were all men) involved in the independent film world: Newsweek film critic David Ansen; Kirk D’Amico, president and CEO of Myriad Pictures, a production and sales company; Cassian Elwes, co-head of William Morris Independent; Mark Gill (pictured at the left), CEO of finance and production company the Film Department; and Avi Lerner, co-chairman and CEO of Nu Image/Millennium Films.

There were a lot of interesting things discussed, but the three things that caught my eye, have to do with distribution realities and how they impact production choices.  The first was from Lerner, who was commenting on how the international film market is getting more selective in what they will buy from indie filmmakers.

What we have done, like most of the big independents, is we moved our target from the straight-to-DVD movie to more theatrical films. Today, with the exception of “event” movies, we are doing the same movies as the studios, just with less money.

Mark Gill then had two comments about the types of movies that get that distribtuion.

So one of the things we looked at as we were raising the money is, where is the market demand? And it occurred to us that, internationally, it is between about $10 million and $45 million. Once it gets over $45 million, the studio should do that. Also, the studios will tell you their return on movies that cost between $50 million and $100 million is 1%, and on the ones over $100 million, it’s about 35%. That’s a kill zone, there in the middle.

and, in response to a question about what different kinds of films Gill is now making:

We realized increasingly the bulk of what we do has to be wide-release and has to fit cleanly within a genre — whether that’s drama or romantic comedy, action or thriller. You have to fit in that box nicely — no “tweeners,” thank you very much. And they all have to be high-concept, because it is getting harder and harder to get attention.

I’ve talked before about how theatrical distribution has backed itself into a corner from which there is no clear escape (see “The Dismal Future of the Film Business” and “The Future of Theatrical Indies“).  I’ve mentioned that seeing theatrical distribution as the Holy Grail of filmmaking is a trap that will sink most independent producers.  Filmmakers like Jesse Cowell, creator of the awesome “Drawn By Pain” have gotten theater play after establishing themselves as vibrant storytellers on the web.

What Gill and Lerner seem to be saying in the Hollywood Reporter roundtable is the following:

• foreign distribution is key to raising money for an indie film
• foreign distributors are now requiring domestic distribution as part of their deals
• domestic distributors can only release a very particular film, at a very particular budget
• therefore, indie films need to be of a very particular kind and budget in order to be made

Of course, there will always be the films that sneak under the door — Harmony Korine’s MISTER LONELY looks like one of those and I can’t wait to see it, but the “smart money” (at least as far as theatrical is concerned) looks to be sandboxed into genre pictures, with American stars, at a low budget range (see Lerner’s comment above).

I don’t know how much more evidence filmmakers need before they realize that they need to stop chasing the Holy Grail of Sundance-style theatrical pickups, and start to pioneer real distribution, to real people, using really modern techniques.  It would be great if Apple wanted to go that way with the iTunes store but, as someone told me last night, they’re really just into shoveling as much content through the store as they can, so that they sell more hardware.  Someone is going to have to combine digital distribution and social networking, and add a dollop of indie sensibitlity (Netflix is way too broad-based for that), in order for this to break through.

Perhaps, when enough Drawn By Pain and It’s All In Your Hands (which seems to have moved off iTunes and onto Ning and Hulu) type filmmakers have created enough content and have gotten enough business expertise, they’ll band together and do something together.  What’s needed is a super cool destination site for indie film, and a site that has figured out how to make money off of it.  When that happens, you’ll see filmmakers going the route that indie musicians are increasingly going (thanks to the collapse of the majors) — ignoring major distribution and making it happen outside of the traditional companies.

Multi Clips

Geek Alert!  Geek Alert!!

Tim Leavitt, over on his blog, View From The Cutting Room Floor (that reminds me of my old series of editor interviews in the Editors Guild Magazine, which we used to call The View From The Cutting Room Ceiling) has a posting about how to create bullet-proof multi-group clips in the Avid.

While it’s really inside baseball, it’s one of an increasing number of really good tutorials on the Avid that people are starting to post.  Soon my students will have answers to all of the questions that I can’t answer — at two in the morning!!

Why We Are Doomed To Watch Crap

I love listening to This Week In Media, I really do. I love listening to Alex Lindsay, I love screaming at John Foster to just shut up for a second, I love learning more about media.

But one of the funniest parts of this podcast is listening a group of really educated media creators talk about how they watch media.

A few weeks ago, the group got into a discussion about how their ideal movie theatre wouldn’t allow popcorn chomping, or people getting up and down during the film, or any talking, or anything except movie viewing. While I have to say that there have been times when I’ve yelled at my movie viewing aisle mates to shut up, the TWIM people’s view of moviegoing bears very little resemblance to anything I’ve ever experienced in the real world.

Which got me to thinking about content, presentation and just how good is good enough.

Let me take a little detour here. One of the television shows that has captivated me recently is a homespun cooking show called “Lidia’s Italy” which plays on one of the very local public television stations here in Los Angeles.

The show has about the lowest production values and editing of anything that I’ve ever watched — including cable access. The half hour show is made up of the host, a joyful woman named Lidia Bastianich, who stands behind an immense kitchen counter and prepares Italian food with an occasional visit from an assortment from goofy family members and yes-men employees.

This kitchen material is intercut with footage that was shot in Italy of Lidia and her family visiting vineyards, restaurants, and food making facilities. That material looks like it was shot on the cheap — they’re stretching a week or two of shooting over the course of 26 episodes, often reusing the same shots within the same episode.

The transitions from kitchen to Italy and back are accomplished with flying picture-in-picture effects (often jerkily done) placed over a cheesy design-y background, and accompanied by one of about only five stock music cues.

The kitchen material, likewise, looks like it was edited in a rush. Large blocks of time needed to be lifted (as in any cooking show) and that is accomplished with a cutaway and a (usually) noticeable dialogue cut. The same music cues fade in and out in an attempt to bridge time, but their repetitiveness becomes onerous after a bit. Sometime a cue comes and goes in ten seconds.

In short, from a technical and editorial view, the show is total crap.

Yet I love it. In fact, I’m addicted to it. I watch it, knowing how horrible the production values are. And it doesn’t make a difference. The content is more interesting than the presentation, and that carries the day.

I’ve been saying for years that digital projection, even in its 1K ugly form, would become predominant as soon as 95% of the public couldn’t tell the difference between it and film. My guess is that that has now happened. We’ve already seen the lo-res music on iTunes become acceptable, even though its quality is far worse than that of CDs and LPs (or Amazon’s unBox). We calmly sit through the crappiest of video compression on DVDs because it’s way more convenient than going to a theater, and “it’s pretty close, isn’t it?”

And don’t even get me started on “HD” television!!

I’m not being a perfectionist here. I don’t insist, like Alex Lindsay and the TWIM folks, that we watch our movies in pristine conditions (though I’ll always insist on making them as perfect as possible) with gags on the mouths of the audience. I’m a bit more of a realist.

But the fact is that content will always outweigh quality of presentation. No one is going to watch a local kids’ AYSO soccer game on television, even if it is in HD (unless their kid is playing). But they’ll watch the Super Bowl, even if it’s on their 15″ ancient television (if that’s all they have). In the equation, compelling content beats out compelling presentation — though I’m going to have to get back to you about how 300 fits into that.

Intellectual Property - Carrot and Stick

A recent article in The Scotsman, entitled “Those Who Can, Create. Those Who Can’t, Copy,” celebrates this Saturday’s World Intellectual Property Day by noting the recent lawsuits filed by J.K. Rowling, against the writer of a Harry Potter encyclopedia written by a fan, a UK ad for Berocca Vitamins which borrows rather heavily from the famous video by Ok Go for “Here It Goes Again,” and a host of other instances of overly zealous “homage”.

Nobody is overly surprised by this, not in a world where YouTube video responses are just as popular as the original videos that inspired them (check out this response, for instance, to the above Ok Go video). When you’ve got Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Steven Ambrose doing the same over in the literary world, it takes a lot to get people to notice videos which rip off fun bands from the early 21st century. Still, when people start losing money over this sort of thing, you can expect the courts to get involved. In this case, there were apparently discussion (according to the article) with Ok Go about using their work but, when they weren’t successful, the ad agency making the Berocca commercial went ahead with their own version of it.

Another case, involving Guiness and the filmmaker Medhi Norowzian, is also discussed:

Norowzian had previously submitted a showreel to [advertising agency] Arks that included the short film “Joy,” which showed a man performing an exuberant dance on a rooftop. Arks submitted a script and storyboard based upon the film to Guinness and Norowzian was approached to direct. Unwilling to “commercialise” an existing idea, he refused and a new director was instructed to create something “with an atmosphere broadly similar to that portrayed in Joy”.

Norowzian lost his appeal against a High Court decision dismissing his copyright infringement claim, because the court decided that the film, not the dance, was the original work and Anticipation’s jump-cut editing made it substantially different.

“The important distinction,” explains Colin Hulme, a partner in the intellectual property and technology team of law firm Burness LLP, “is that copyright only protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself.

But the really interesting example they give is with Apple. English Mac fan Nick Haley created a short commercial on his own for the iPod Touch, which Apple liked. Rather than follow its normal practice of suing the pants off of Haley, Apple actually offered to buy his idea, which they proceeded to reshoot professionally with Haley’s involvement (a New York Times article about the commercial can be found here). Haley describes the logic of that this way:

“That’s the whole point of advertising; it needs to get to the user,” Mr. Haley said. “If you get the user to make the ads, who better?”

[As an aside, the differences between Haley's and Apple's versions of the ad are actually very instructive in terms of the concerns of a big corporation trying to sell its products and itself at the same time.]

Those of us who create media (intellectual property, content, whatever) have a love/hate relationship with copyright laws. Sometimes it makes it harder for us to do our work, but we certainly benefit when someone want to use or abuse our own work. Apple’s admission that not all derivative works are evil seems shockingly enlightened and, to me, the way in which media creators need to work in the new world. Creative Commons, in which content creators can create various levels of allowed public usages) strikes me as a great direction as done Moby’s offer of selected free music for “independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short.”

Not everything needs to be free or open for copying, but allowing the artist to determine the fate of his or her own art strikes me as a great acknowledgment of the power of 21st century technology, while also realizing the need of artists to control the fate and the income from their own work.

Cell Phone Content Creation

Tomorrow morning, I’m off to Atlanta to take part in a very very cool project with Nokia, Verizon and the Center For Disease Control (CDC) and it makes me think of Robert Scoble.

Whoa, let me explain.

At this year’s World Economic Conference in Davos, Robert Scoble took his Nokia N95 camera and combined it with qik.com software to create a live Web stream that could be seen by anyone on the web. In a discussion with John C. Dvorak on Tech5 on January 31, 2008, Scoble talks about how streaming the interviews that he did there live, at a remarkably low cost, enabled him to field questions from his web viewers that he could turn around and ask his own interviewees. He wasn’t breaking news live (though it would have been possible) but he was certainly creating more democratized interaction between the attendees at Davos and Scoble’s own viewers/listeners

That’s actually one small use for the technology. What I’m doing in Atlanta is more akin to news gathering.

I’ll be working as a remote producer with a group of students who will be out in the streets of Atlanta, creating content for a PSA (Public Service Announcement) for AIDS Awareness Day. The three students in my team (there will be five teams altogether) will have spent Tuesday in an all-day session with representatives from the CDC, as well develop a few PSAs for them to shoot on Wednesday. Then, as they shoot them, they will send them back to me and a student editor, who will begin editing them together. By 7pm that night, the hope is to have 2-3 PSAs from each of the five teams, that will be complete and ready to put onto Verizon’s network, so everyone in all of the groups can see them.

We’re calling them Personal PSAs (PPSAs) because of the intimate nature of their capture and their cell phone distribution mechanism.

And reality shows are… edited!!! Fake News at 11!

In a news story that should surprise absolutely no one, the Hollywood Reporter notes that this past week’s premiere of Discovery Channel’s “Deadliest Catch” is in hot water (insert comment on terrible jokes here) for editing two pieces of film together!!

Well, of course, it’s not that simple, and the details lead us into a complex discussion of how editorial manipulation works. The show, which is called a “documentary” by the Channel and not a “reality show” (we’re trying to parse the difference here, without success), edited two shots of a storm wave and a flooded room that were shot on different days, to give the illusion that they happened together. As the Reporter explains:

Mammoth waves smash an Alaskan crab fishing boat called the Wizard, sending large swells crashing over its deck. Inside, alarmed crew members discover that their stateroom is flooding with incoming seawater.The sequence suggests that the fishermen are in danger of sinking as a violent tempest tosses huge waves against the boat.

But here’s the not-so-deadliest catch:

The boat flooded in September.

The huge storm waves were from October.

Several years ago, an ex-student of mine sent me an e-mail talking about a job he was working on — one of the MTV Real World seasons. In shocked tones he talked about a scene in which two of the contestants traded insults while using workout equipment in a gym. The thing was — the two of them had been filmed on different days. They had never been in the gym together.

Frankly, I was shocked that he was shocked (he was an editing student, after all), but the way in which footage can be manipulated for effect is quite powerful and, sometimes, surprising.

It’s an axiom that one of the things we editors do, is to create realities for the audience. We manipulate them in order to understand the feelings that the story needs to engender in them. There’s nothing terrible or evil about this manipulation usually. It’s what we need to do in order to best tell the story. (This implies that we have a story that we need to tell — though that’s a different post, one I’ll get to when we talk about The Lean Forward Moment).

In a documentary, of course, we have a responsibility to not lie to the audience about what it is they’re seeing, but the word “lie” is sometimes a tricky thing to pinpoint. We’re making choices as soon as we point the camera in one direction as opposed to another. We’re making choices as soon as we show someone’s reaction to another person’s actions or statements, and we are further refining that decision when we choose to show the reaction immediately after the line, or wait twelve more frames. We manipulate the audience as soon as we put a line of dialog or a voice over over one particular shot, as opposed to another.

Is there anyone out there who honestly believes that any filmmaking can be without choices or manipulation? If so, let me know — I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

In the case of “Deadliest Catch” the implication (as the article mentions) is that the waves caused the flooding in the stateroom. Here would be my question to the producers — was the flood caused by a storm, or was it caused by some idiot forgetting to shut a valve (for instance)? Was the water in the stateroom put there because of a storm? Because, according to the news story, that was the implication that was clear from the edit, correct?

You can see where I’m going with this, though it certainly is a slippery slope. Among other things, one of questions that we should ask ourselves when thinking about this puzzle is “How close is the implication to the truth?” What is the storytelling manipulation and how great is it? (As a side note, I’ve done expert witness testimony about a similar topic — how editing creates implied feelings and perceived facts) At the core of this, for me, is the question of just how much and what sort of choices are made in the editing.

Editing has the power to make us feel. No doubt about that. Anyone who has edited has seen that. And that is both the power and the responsibility that we have.

Avid — Negotiating Corners

== And, Maybe, Turning Them

It’s really too early to tell, but I’m incredibly encouraged by what I’ve seen from Avid in the last several weeks, as they’ve pre-announced, and announced a lot of things in the weeks leading up to the NAB show, just now finishing up in Las Vegas.

There have been oodles of press coverage in the last week and a half on the latest announcements from Avid, regarding their new hardware and software. See the pieces by Phil Hodgetts and Steve Cohen, as well as this press release from Avid. I have been studiously avoiding chiming in about this, waiting for the people who know much more about this I do, to weigh in first.

But I must say that, after a few years in which Avid has forgotten how to innovate, it seems as if they are finally thinking of the future.

Let me explain a little bit about what I mean by the future.

Sure there was new hardware announced. There are a line of DX processor boxes which don’t connect through the bottleneck we’ve come to know as Firewire. For any editor who has pressed the PLAY or STOP button on the Avid and waited an excruciatingly long two seconds for the machine to respond, this is really great news. In fact, the audience at the April 8th Avid event at Universal Studios in Los Angeles cheered when Matt Feury (who does the awesome Avid filmmaker interview/podcasts) jokingly announced this as a major upgrade. To us, it is.

They also announced huge price cuts and the banishment of the Xpress Pro product line to the great NLE graveyard in the sky. To those of us who felt that Xpress Pro was, simply, Media Composer bowdlerized for profit, this is also great news.

[As an aside, this follows on Avid's earlier announcement of a new website, forums and -- best for me -- a commitment to expand their efforts in educating their users.]

In fact, the greatest news about all of this is not the hardware, but the fact that the new management team seems to be paying attention to its user base again. They’re meeting with us on a regular basis, talking about bug fixes, enhancements and release plans in a way that I haven’t seen in years.

Here’s an example that, in my geeky little way, I’m pretty excited about. FilmScribe is Avid’s ancient tool to create various output lists — EDLs, Film Cut Lists, Optical Pull Lists, etc. It’s always been an amazingly effective, but amazingly clunky, tool.

Now, you can drag and drop a sequence that you’ve created onto any number of template files (in the Mac OS Finder window — and, I presume, on the PC as well). If you drop it onto an EDL template, it will create an EDL for you. If you drop a metadata file onto a template for, let’s say, an XDCAM I assume that it will create an Avid ALE file automatically.

In other words, the Avid is finally becoming modular — in the way that Final Cut is, and has been for a very long time. That means that, as new camera formats keep coming out, Avid will be able to accommodate them much faster. The lengthy wait for P2 and EX-1 card compatibility was excruciatingly difficult for users and certainly hurt Avid — as customers could much more quickly get those cameras to work in FCP.

So, yeah, I love being able to drag stacks of video tracks around on the timeline (who wouldn’t? FCP users have been doing it for years.), but what I really like about Avid’s announcements is that is bodes well for their ability to make really great future announcements.