HOLLYN-wood (Norman, that is)

Shane Hurlbut is known for more than just being the guy on the other end of the Christian Bale shouting match. He is a DP who has been tirelessly touting the value of shooting high-end films using HDSLRs (High DEf still cameras that can also shoot HD video) like the Canon 5D Mark II. In fact, in a recent fxGuide podcast (podcast #56, about half way through) he makes a passionate case for why these cameras will eventually “kill film.” It’s a thought provoking and (frankly) pretty exciting podcast. For those of us who step back from a headlong rush into something new just because it’s new, this will raise some great issues about what earthly use celluloid film really has.

Shane also has an interesting entry on his blog at Hurlbut Visuals, talking about the digital workflow issues that he and his crew dealt with on a recent Navy Seals film (that he also talks extensively about in the podcast). In it he talks about media management, a skill which is sadly lacking in many crews who shoot file based cameras. There is an illusion that, because it’s easy to keep shooting, and because stopping to reload cards “interrupts the creative process” (as if decades worth of shooting 11 minute loads of 35mm couldn’t create good creative films), that media management is an impediment to creative filmmaking. Hurlbut takes the piss out of that one:

The unique skill set that my Elite Team brings is that they all have a film background and are comfortable with certain rituals that accompany being a motion picture film loader and 2nd assistant cameraman.  These include: managing the truck; keeping  track of the gear and specialty pieces of equipment; creating an inventory and log; assessing how many magazines you have to load and color coding it according to the stock; labeling the magazines with the date, job, film stock and amount loaded on the magazine itself; and writing a camera report with the same information.

When I see students of mine with disorganized editing bins, into which they’ve loaded unlabelled takes digitized from tapes that have not been sub-clipped for easy access, it drives me insane. One of the great advantage of digital editing is that it should make it easy to find anything that I need to create a finely edited sequence. If I have to scroll through a ten minute series of takes in order to find the one that I want, it’s going to stop my creativity much quicker than taking the 20 minutes to subclip and label each one of those takes before I edit them.

by the same token, dumping dozens of takes of unslated, unlabelled takes, into my NLE does nothing to help my creativity. And having to hunt through all of the dailies because the production people didn’t bother to create usable camera and sound reports, or script notes, makes the editing process so much more difficult.

One of the things that encouraged me to write my recent book on editing room procedures (THE FILM EDITING ROOM HANDBOOK) was the awareness that filmmakers were wasting countless hours and brain cells because of lack of organization. And that this organization, which we use quite naturally on higher budget films that have assistant editors by the score, was easily adapted to low budget films with no assistants. A little bit of work at the start, saves a whole boatload of work later. And that work is complicated by the fact that the director will be standing over your shoulder while you’re scrolling through a 25 minute clip, looking for the one 50 second take that has the piece he or she wants to look at. Or that opening and clicking through a dozen badly-named sequences, in order to find the version of the cut that you liked from two months ago, is just a really stupid idea.

There are ways to avoid that nonsense and creative DPs like Shane aren’t afraid of them.

And neither should you.

The Eddie Award Statue (courtesy A.C.E.)

The A.C.E. Eddie Awards were handed out tonight (see the article at The Hollywood Reporter’s site) and, as usual, they are very mainstream but also indicative of what Hollywood is thinking this week, as it revs up for the Oscars (ballots are due something like March 2nd, so it’s getting close). Here, in a nutshell, are the winners:

BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (DRAMATIC): “The Hurt Locker” (Bob Murawski & Chris Innis)
BEST EDITED FEATURE FILM (COMEDY OR MUSICAL): “The Hangover” (Debra Neil-Fisher, A.C.E.)
BEST EDITED ANIMATED FEATURE FILM: “Up” (Kevin Nolting)
BEST EDITED DOCUMENTARY: “The Cove” (Geoffrey Richman)
BEST EDITED HALF-HOUR SERIES FOR TELEVISION: 30 Rock: “Apollo Apollo” (Ken Eluto, A.C.E.)
BEST EDITED ONE-HOUR SERIES FOR COMMERCIAL TELEVISION: Breaking Bad: “ABQ” (Lynne Willingham, A.C.E.)
BEST EDITED ONE-HOUR SERIES FOR NON-COMMERCIAL TELEVISION: Dexter: “Remains to be Seen” (Louis Cioffi)
BEST EDITED MINISERIES OR MOTION PICTURE FOR TELEVISION: Grey Gardens (Alan Heim, A.C.E. & Lee Percy, A.C.E.)
BEST EDITED REALITY SERIES: The Deadliest Catch: “Stay Focused or Die” (Kelly Coskran & Josh Earl)
STUDENT EDITING COMPETITION: Andrew Hellesen, Chapman University
TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE AWARD: Avid

There are a number of things that I could comment on here, including the fact that the reality series winner (the involving “Deadliest Catch”) was edited two editors who aren’t members of ACE. The American Cinema Editors organization (full disclosure here — I became a member last year) is a bunch of really great, but very accomplished editors. Reality television editors are fast becoming a younger breed, who will — of course — not be part of A.C.E. This is a situation which I hope will go away eventually, but that is a discussion for another post.

Let’s talk about the films that won — THE HURT LOCKER, UP and THE HANGOVER.

These were all great films and, as can be expected from this group, were all well edited. THE HANGOVER maintained a great pace and its style all of the way through and Debra Neil-Fisher kept her usual unfailing eye for comedy always open. Kevin Nolting’s work on UP was sure-footed and, considering how involved Pixar editors are with the writing and crafting of the script, his award is not only not surprising but incredibly valued.

But how the hell did THE HURT LOCKER beat out the juggernaut of AVATAR (or the early Oscar favorite UP IN THE AIR)? I don’t mean that in a disparaging way. HURT LOCKER was probably my favorite film of 2009. From the very first scene, it had a sense of tension that more accurately described how the soldiers on the battlefield in Iraq actually feel about being there, than all of the war films since PATHS OF GLORY. In fact, the last time that I can remember feeling that consistently tense was during another Stanley Kubrick film — THE SHINING. That is not an easy thing to do. It requires a perfect combination of performance, camerawork, production design, sound, music and editing — not to mention a script to die for.

THE HURT LOCKER had all of that. And the movie has been a darling among critics as we head down to the Oscars this year.

So it was especially gratifying to see the A.C.E. recognize that consistent, powerful editing, even though there is no doubt that AVATAR had some amazing editors, working in new, uncharted territory, crafting performances from motion captured acting. You could say that it’s the very fact that most of us in A.C.E. are old folks, who go for a more traditional technique. But that’s actually selling the group short. Most of the A.C.E. editors who I’ve spoken to loved AVATAR (as did I). But there is no doubt in my mind that it suffered from the same problems that most other films do — a slowness in the middle, as its characters and plot is redefined.

So, A.C.E. rewarded the more amazingly shaped film. But what does this mean for the Oscars? Well, let’s look at some numbers.

As of the end of 2008. there were 5,829 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the group that votes on the Oscars. Of them, there were 223 editors, about 4%. The largest branch is the Acting Branch, with 1243 members, about 21%. In my opinion, that’s why the Best Picture Oscar usually goes to the same film that’s won the Best Editor. The actors and actresses (along with the 440 executives, the 369 PR members, and the 254 members at large, who together make up another 12%, for a total of one-third of the potential voters) take a look at a film and say “Yeah, I liked that film. So it must have been well edited.”

And, while that’s true, that doesn’t address the realities that we editors deal with every day in our own editing rooms.

So, what do I think is going to happen this year? Do I think that AVATAR has impressed enough actors, executive, PR people and at-large members, to overcome the extraordinary editing of THE HURT LOCKER? I’ll go out on a limb here and say, “No.” Bob Murawski & Chris Innis’s editing was just that good.

And it doesn’t hurt that the actors branch didn’t think any of the actors in Avatar were worth noting.

My book sitting quietly in a Barnes and Noble bookshelf

Long time readers of this blog will realize that it has been a long time — since I’ve posted. There are some very good reasons for that, not the least of which is that my new book was being written, rewritten, rewritten again, and published — all of which required a time sucking amount of work.  All of which I’m thrilled about.

This is the fourth edition of my ancient book on editing room workflow, written originally back before anyone knew what the word “workflow” meant. It is a total page one rewrite and, because I’m not an assistant editor any longer, I had to do a ton of research with assistants (those that are left). I learned a tremendous amount about what assistant editors do today and much of that shows up in the new book. I’ll be dropping some of that on you in the weeks ahead.

Of course, I want each and everyone of you to go out and buy 50 copies each of the book.  But that’s not what I’m interested in talking about today. So, let me go on.

Another reason why this latest posting has been inordinately delayed is that I’ve been editing one or two films. One of them is a great comedy road movie that follows a self-destructive screenwriter as he drives across country accompanied by the young kid who’s been assigned by the film producers to babysit the guy . The film is, I think, going to be loads of fun, but what’s really interesting about it for me is that I’m editing it long distance. My co-editor is in Massachusetts and my director is in Rhode Island.

That means that the three of us are going to spend lots of time shooting copies of our Avid bins back and forth to each other so we can see what each of us are doing. This excites me a lot, but that may be because I’m slightly crazy about the future. A conversation I had a little while back, showed me that not everybody shares this mania.

Last summer, when Final Cut Pro 7 (or whatever they’re calling it) came out, I remember enthusiastically talking to a friend about the iChat Theater function, which allows the editor to play out anything in FCP over an iChat video conference, simply by pointing to it. It’s an easy way to play dailies or your sequence to any of your collaborators. It doesn’t have any of the real interactive functions that would make it a true shared editing platform (I’ll be looking at Fuze soon, which promises much more), but it certainly is a start to long distance communication in the editing process and I was telling my friend about it.

He looked at me horrified and said “I’ve got one word for you — outsourcing.” He was worried about his job going overseas.

“But you’ve got to look at it from the other side,” I told him. “You’re an accomplished Hollywood feature and television editor. There will be plenty of people around the world who would love to work with you. But they haven’t been able to because you live here in Los Angeles and they don’t.”

He agreed that this was possible but then said “A lowering tide lowers all boats. Even if I could get those jobs, my salary is going to go down. Way down.”

Hard to disagree with that.  Welcome to the 21st century. With the collapse of television syndication and the advertising market, the days of 10 month guaranteed jobs for tv editors are going away. As Hollywood moves more and more to large tentpole films, the number of mid-range films is also disappearing and, along with them, a sizable number of cushy mid-level jobs. Those of us who live off of these types of projects are going to have to get used to the fact that our incomes are going to go down, unless we adapt to the new markets.

And, miraculously, those markets are all over the world. What my friend, and all of us, are going to have to do, is to learn to juggle multiple jobs across multiple time zones. Some of us are doing that already. It’s really only the larger job markets that haven’t been doing it. No producer is going to share his/her editor’s time with someone across the globe. But if that same producer is hiring his/her editor for a few months, laying them off, bringing them back on again for a month or two, and then laying them off again — well, they’re going to have to get used to sharing them with the rest of the world.

So working long-distance is going to be a smart thing to learn how to do. And somehow I’ve stumbled right into it.

Apple's new iPad

Then, enter the iPad. I’ve been asked endlessly whether I’m ready to rush out and buy one. Honestly, not really. I’ll wait until the device matures a bit more (just like I waited for the iPhone 3G and am thrilled that I did). However, the possibilities that this new device gives us in the vertical market that is filmmaking are thrilling.

Imagine a producer pitching a project to a studio. Right now they send a script and, perhaps, some accompanying materials, to the studio where (if their readers like it) it is sent home with 50 or so executives to be read over the weekend. This is called, in a predictable burst of studio originality, the “weekend read.” Many studios have moved the weekend read from paper to the Kindle, which saves paper but does nothing to brighten the experience for those poor junior executives.

Now, imagine if you will, that the producer has loaded the script onto an iPad and that there are embedded links within the script to location photos, audition tapes, CAD drawings of sets, and 3D mockups of the worlds that are only hinted at in the script. That is going to be a clearer, more interesting vision of the story for every single one of those bored-to-tears weekend readers. It’s also going to be more helpful to me, when I read a script before an interview, or to an art director as he/she tries to figure out what’s inside of the director’s mind.

And that’s just one single use for this device. If you take a look at the dozens of applications for filmmakers available on the iPhone (Taz Goldstein has a great list, adapted from his recent Supermeet talk, up at his site Handheld Hollywood and, by the way, the Supermeet was a great event, even if I did have to watch it streamed on Ustream — you should go and look at it right now). There are slates galore, some of which even will help you import your footage into your NLE. There’s a very cool application to allow you to remotely control your f-stop settings on your camera. There are director’s viewfinders, storyboard creators, teleprompters and research tools. And that’s for the iPhone.

Imagine what we’ll be able to get with a 10″ screen.

Here’s my point. For years we’ve been on the cusp of something really new and exciting in the filmmaking world. We’ve gone all digital — from capture through editing. We’ve also seen the world of distribution change — so the need to print film for theaters is fast disappearing, and we will be easily distributing to each of the four screens that people watch their entertainment on (see an earlier post of mine about Four Play).

What’s been missing is the ease of getting from this digital creation, to the digital consumption in any way that resembles a realistic viewing format.

The iPad is more than a hint into that future, it’s the door ajar (not fully open yet, but not closed).

Just found out, thanks to Scott Simmons and the French web site FinalCutMtl, I’ve learned that tomorrow, August 27th, is I Love My Assistant Day.  Awwww.  Go out and hug your assistant.  For those of us who don’t have assistants (I’ve presently copying my media from the transport drive that I was sent from the East Coast yesterday to a backup drive), go out and hug yourself.

Over on my other blog I long-windedly answered a question that someone sent me on my Twitter feed a few weeks ago: “How do you deal with directors who ask you to do stupid things?”

The short version of my answer was that, if each of you are doing your job right, then there really aren’t any stupid requests because each one is a window into what the director really wants, even if he or she isn’t capable of communicating it well.

But that led me to start thinking about two times when I’ve seen editorial collaboration help enormously in the editing room.

I was an assistant editor and assistant music editor on the film HAIR, way back in the Editorial Stone Age. We had two great editors on the film – Lynzee Klingman and Stan Warnow – as well as a director (Milos Forman) who really knew editing. But there was once sequence that none of the three could quite figure out how to edit. It was a song called “Black Boys/White Boys” in which a row of Army medical examiners decided whether a line of inductees were healthy enough to march off to Vietnam. Choreographer Twyla Tharp had designed this clever set of homoerotic dance moves for the two trios of examiners to be intercut with two trios of women who sang and made eyes at the boys around them in Central Park. The idea was that the juxtaposition of these very straight military men, the naked inductees in front of them, and the trios of seductive women in the park would make the entire medical exam seem absurd and somewhat surreal.

It was supposed to be clever and funny and it absolutely didn’t work.

So Milos and the producers hired Alan Heim with the specific goal of having him edit that sequence. Alan had been Bob Fosse’s editor for quite awhile and had cut films like ALL THAT JAZZ (still one of the most amazing biographies in Seventies cinema – and way ahead of its time), LIZA WITH A Z and LENNY. He was hired one day and disappeared, with an assistant, into a room at the Trans Audio Building on 54th Street in New York (above the famed Studio 54) and came out a week or so later with a first pass that blew everyone away. It wasn’t perfect and underwent many changes between then and the final cut of the film. But it so clearly pointed Milos and his other editors in the correct direction, that Alan was convinced to stay on and work on the film in its entirety.

It by no means belittles the editing contribution of Lynzee and Stan to say that the scene could not have been shaped as well without the outside viewpoint that broke the logjam of their preconceived ideas.

The second example came the second time I worked with director Michael Lehmann. We had previously worked on the film HEATHERS together and it was a fantastic experience for me. When he asked me to move onto his next film, MEET THE APPLEGATES (a satirical farce starring Ed Begley Jr, Stockard Channing and Dabney Coleman, about large Brazilian bugs who get sick of humans destroying their habitat and turn into humans and move to Ohio to blow up a nuclear power plant terrorist-style) I jumped at the chance.

The film came together relatively easily, considering its low budget nature and high ambitions, but it still didn’t feel like the movie that we wanted to make in places.  There were areas that weren’t funny enough. Other scenes had great moments, but didn’t propel the story forward enough.

So we brought in a mutual friend, editor Barry Malkin, to look at the areas of the film that most concerned us (and any others that he wanted to work at).  We put Barry, who had worked with on THE COTTON CLUB and had been an editor with Francis Coppola for years, in a room with a Moviola, an assistant and a ton of film. In a few days he did two things. The first was, he told us that he understood perfectly why we had edited the individual scenes the way we did. He would have done it the same way. But he had some ideas on rethinking scenes in ways that we hadn’t really thought about. We let him go back into the room and, a few days later, he started showing us a few scenes that had been subtly or greatly revamped.

Like on HAIR, the changes weren’t perfect, and they went through many changes before we locked the film a little while later. But they opened up thought processes and brain synapses that we hadn’t used before. It helped to bring us out of our mindset. (Barry got a credit as “Editorial Consultant”.  He should have been credited as “Logjam Breaker”)

Every project needs a place where its creators can step back and re-evaluate what they’ve been doing. Most of the time, there’s neither the time nor the money to do that. What is most painful is when you could do it, but don’t because you’re locked into a conception of your project that can’t move.

The Greeks, I’m told, talk about it this way. Every idea (a “thesis”) needs to meet up with a second different idea (the “antithesis”). When they are allowed to work off of each other, they create a third, usually better, idea (the “synthesis”). The key to making this work in both HAIR and APPLEGATES was to allow the new editor to actually sit and work the material, as opposed to simply giving notes. Sometimes great ideas can come from a comment, but often those ideas just don’t work when they’re exposed to the light of day. You can’t find a character’s smile, or there is no close-up when you’d need one. But with enough time and freedom, a good editor will work towards that alternative goal.

The goal of good collaboration is to allow good new ideas to bubble to the surface without distracting the leader from the overall spine of the project. It’s not easy sifting through thousands of ideas over the course of the day-to-day work on a film. But that is what distinguishes a good director from a mad or mediocre one.

… but you have to be over 40 to know it.

Shane Ross, over at his fantastic blog Little Frog In Hi-Def, has posted an old video in which Orson Welles talks about editing.  It’s an incredibly wise, and short, piece in which, standing over a 16mm flatbed, Welles talks about the musicality of editing and how being in an editing room is “home” for a filmmaker.

“A Moviola is as important as a camera… This is the last stop between the dream in the filmmaker’s head and the public.”

But there’s one big mistake which makes me realize just how divorced he was from the actual mechanics of editing. See if you can spot it.

This does raise the issue of the difference in involvement from the great editors of the past and today, but we’ll talk about that when I see what sort of response I get to this challenge.

For the two or three of you who don’t know yet, Apple released its updates to its suite of video applications today.  Final Cut Suite 3, has updates and new enhancements to nearly all of the parts of the suite, including some cool title manipulation tools in Motion, voice level matching in Soundtrack Pro (a boon to quick and easy temp mixing), cooler markers and more flavors of ProRes in Final Cut, and more. Some of the features, like a floating timecode window and global transitions, are attempts to catch up with Avid’s Media Composer which has had that for a very long time. (Apple’s list of new features can be found on this page on their website.)

That, by the way, is a great advantage of competition.

But it is in the aspects of ease-of-use and collaboration that Apple has shown that it is paying attention to what it’s core market really wants. Despite the high-end videos of Francis Coppola and Walter Murch on TETRO, Final Cut’s appeal has always been to people on the lower-priced end of the market — the students, the low-budge indies, the people putting together their own shops. The entire suite concept caters to them — if your market is made up of people who can’t afford to hire separate title designers and sound editors, then the idea of charging people separate amounts for separate applications is a non-starter. For the indie filmmakers and podcasters who are creating their own soundtracks and flushing them out to the web in record time, buying ProTools and Media Composer is just too expensive. Even if Soundtrack Pro is way inferior to ProTools, it just simply doesn’t matter to that market. Having everything in a box (with round-tripping between the apps) is The Way To Go.

I’ll talk about the coolest indicator in a minute, but let me also say that the ease of use factor is also huge for this market. If I’m doing my own lower thirds, and I’m not a visual effects guru like Mark Christiansen, then I want easy-to-use templates that provide me with a great default setting.  I’ll change the look and feel if I want, but the fact that I don’t need to program in a motion effect, with a glow, and time everything out from scratch, means that I can get things done much more efficiently (even at the expense of greater individuality).

So, starting with something much higher than Ground Zero, appeals to many of the filmmakers that Apple is targeting as their market.

But here’s the cooler thing for me.

As many of you know, I’ve been harping on the idea of long distance collaboration for several years. It’s clear that more and more of us are working with people who we don’t see every day. Two years ago, I co-edited a small horror film called JACK IN THE BOX. It’s director and my co-editor were both on the East Coast, while I sat in Los Angeles editing. We exchanged files and projects via the net. It was a successful collaboration, but a bit frustrating because of the lack of face-to-face contact. This month I’m starting a new film where the director will be in Rhode Island, my co-editor in Massachusetts and me — still in California.

My point is that this is becoming more of the norm, rather than a rare instance. Commercials, corporate films, sponsored videos, and more, are fast being done by the People Who You Want To Hire, even if they’re in another city. But the tools just aren’t there yet to help re-create the face-to-face experience. We’ll be experimenting with some newer techniques on this one and I’ll report back, but the struggle is always to help all of us to feel like we’re in the same room.

Now Apple has introduced iChat Theatre, which allows the editor to play back his or her timeline right over iChat. If I read the tutorials properly, you no longer need to create a Quicktime export and then upload/FTP it. In fact, you no longer even need to create a Quicktime at all. This feature of Final Cut allows others on the iChat to look directly into a Viewer (or Canvas) on the editor’s machine. That’s it.

Now, it doesn’t have the real interactivity that I’d love — to have my iChat buddy be able to use his or her mouse to stop and scroll the cursor around on the timeline  (like Syncvue, for instance, does), and I don’t know if you can have more than two people on the iChat, but you can video chat with each other while you’re scrolling around. Mike Curtis says that you can show the timecode window as well, and that will be great for more precise discussion. But you certainly can’t take a mouse or Wacom tablet pen, and circle items on the screen (which would be handy for discussion visual effects) like you can on some services. It would also be cool if you could attach comments/markers to particular places on the timeline — so you could easily accumulate notes. But, using a screen grab tool like Snapz Pro X, you could record a notes session for later playback.

Very cool. Since one of the biggest issues in distance collaboration (as well as in any notes meeting, now that I think about it) is misinterpretation of notes.

My point, however, is that Apple has once again identified a growing need in their core market. Many of us working in lower budget ranges need to work with people across great distances. They haven’t given us any real groundbreaking tools to do that, but it is clear that they are thinking about it, and slowly introducing early versions of the tools that we will all need very very soon. These tools are very basic, and don’t really do much more than take ideas that have been floating around elsewhere for a while, and bring them into the suite. But the real takeaway here, is that they’ve now brought these things into their own tool and made them easy to use and integrate with their other tools. And that is going to be very appealing to this market.

Another aspect to this distance collaboration is their Easy Export feature which, on first glance, looks like an easy way to upload to YouTube, MobileMe and more (including BluRay — cool; direct export to DVDs from the timeline).

Oh, and one final point. They’ve made both the price of the suite and the upgrade price incredibly low. The upgrade for someone who already has a purchased copy is $299. That means that they are essentially telling the community that they’ve be idiotic not to upgrade. No one who has the money to make a video project of any kind, doesn’t have $300. (The full price, for those people who don’t have access to an educational discount or their own copy already, is $999.). Once again, Apple is saying to the indie and low budget community — this is for you.

Now it’s time for Avid and Adobe to decide if this is a market that each of them want, and then go for it.

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By the way, some other bloggers are beginning to post their own thoughts on this. Steve Cohen, over at Splice Here, is one of them. Richard Harrington, at the Pro Video Coalition, and Mike Curtis are two others who you should check out.

Larry Jordan’s latest issue of Final Cut Studio Newsletter has this interesting flashback tip for those people who are printing to tape. I’m still used to seeing this for delivery to networks, but file-based workflows may make some of this obsolete.

In any case, this about what a video leader should look like. Perhaps the most useful bit in here is a description of what should be on the tape delivery slate. I was actually doing something similar to this for the new edition of my FILM EDITING ROOM HANDBOOK, which should be out early in 2010. Until then, Larry’s site is a must-see for this kind of cool information.

Hell, even after my book comes out, his site will be must-see.

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Most final deliveries for high-end productions are output to video tape, either HDCAM or HDCAM SR and not delivered as a file. When outputting to tape, you need to allow room for leader material which the engineering types use to make sure the tape playback matches the spec of when the tape was recorded.

Traditionally, this leader material is:

Timecode	Content
00:58:30:00	Bars and tone
00:59:30:00	Black audio and video
00:59:40:00	Program slate
00:59:50:00	Black audio and video
01:00:00:00	Program start

A program slate consists of:

• Program Title Producer / Director / Agency responsible
• Date output to tape
• Running time (Never include frames and always round up)
• Audio mix format (stereo, mono, multi-track)
• Timecode format (Drop-frame or non-drop-frame)

To create these leader materials in Final Cut you can either use File > Print to Video, or build them yourself in the Timeline. If you create them in the Timeline, go to Sequence > Settings > Timeline tab and change the sequence timecode to 58:30.

That way, the timecode of your sequence will match the timecode on your tape. Note, to make sure all your program times are correct, use File > Edit to Tape to record to video tape.

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Okay, that title is more than pompous, but just follow me for a second.

Debra Kaufman writes in her blog “Mobilized TV” about an application for filmmakers that she found at last weekend’s Cinegear.  Called Helios, it is ideal for cinematographers — it shows “a graphical representation of the sun’s position on a compass dial (azimuth) for any time of day, showing the sun’s elevation and proportional length of shadow an object would cast.”

What I’m interested in seeing, now that the new iPhones and the new operating system is all about to hit the street, is how developers start to create niche applications that they can really make some money out of. There are several advances that Apple is giving there that can make all of the difference.

The first is that the hardware interface will be opened up — so people can start to sell gizmos that hook into the iPhone and interact with it. Think of engineering firms that can input directly into an app on the phone. Think of medical instruments being able to hook directly into this tiny phone/iPod touch and interact with an application inside that gives real time feedback in both directions.

And then think of how your iPhone can hook directly into your Red One or a script supervisor’s keyboard and then broadcast timecode data, along with subsets of any necessary metadata back to a post house or the editing room. It’s going to make the set, the editing room, the producers’ office, the lab/post house, and all of the other pieces of the film chain much more integrated. At very low cost.

So, for now, go read Debra’s review and start imagining.

I’m going to talking about a few personal appearances I’m going to be making at the bottom of this post. Stay tuned if you’d like to see me talk about storytelling techniques that I use in my book THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT.

A few years ago, there was a great graphic novel series called MAUS: A Survivor’s Tale. It was an allegorical tale, set in Nazi Germany and World War II, which described Art Spiegelman’s father’s struggle to survive in Poland during that war, and Spiegelman’s attempts to connect with his father though that recounting. It was a fantastic novel and one of the many observations made about the piece was that it drew its horrific power from the fact that it was a WWII story told with animals (in this case, mice and rats) playing the parts, rather than humans.

There is much to be said for this analysis. Obviously, these aren’t real mice or real rats — they act and speak just as their human counterparts acted and spoke. And the same goes for films as well.  On its simplest level, Mickey Mouse and say and act in ways that humans never would. And the film FRITZ THE CAT, which put a cat in the 60’s/70’s in the middle of the sexual revolution that many people only wished they could experience, is very different example of that. And the upcoming WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE allows filmmaker Spike Jonze to talk about the fears and desire for adventure that fairy tales are full of, but that we rarely experience in our normal lives. Hell, nearly every Pixar film (and that would be every single one of them).
Now, courtesy of photographer Lou O’Bedlam’s (Luciana Noble) blog, I’ve been fortunate enough to see a trailer for the unfortunately (but humorously) named Japanese film CATSHITONE. It appears to tell the story of some foot soldiers in Iraq (or some nameless Middle Eastern country, I can’t tell from the trailer because I don’t speak Japanese) who are played by rabbits.  That’s right, rabbits.

You can find the trailer to this film on YouTube.

There appear to be two rabbits, trapped in combat alongside a bunch of other alien-looking creatures, as they move through the war-torn Middle Eastern landscape. They watch as a group of alien-looking creatures beat and kill a bunch of other rabbits. So, like MAUS, the two sides of the conflict are clear — there is Them (the rats or the creatures) and there is Us (mice or rabbits).

One of the challenges of any film or project is to get the audience to somehow project themselves into your story and to feel what the characters who you want them to care about are also feeling. On HEATHERS we spend several cuts manipulating the story so that the audience empathized with Veronica, who was doing some pretty heinous things. But the audience was never going to enjoy our film if they couldn’t make that connection.

If only we had made her a rabbit.

My point here is that projects are successful when audiences get involved in them. Normally that is done by having characters in the films/projects that the audience can empathize with. And that means that they have to get them. Often, this is made more difficult by an actor’s persona. If they’re prettier than we are, we’re not going to feel the same way about them. If they look more scholarly than we are, we’re not going to feel the same way about them.

But we all can feel pretty much the same about a rabbit or a mouse. We know we’re not like them, so we can project our own feeling onto them. They are the proverbial “empty vessel” and, though the filmmakers of all of the above-mentioned films work hard to give the characters emotions that we can resonate with (think Marlin in FINDING NEMO, or Bambi in BAMBI) we can more easily do that when the characters start off without any of our preconceived notions.

As for me, I’m looking forward to CATSHITONE. It will probably resonate more with me than WATCHMEN did.

The Lean Forward Moment

I mentioned at the top of this post that I’ve got a few talks coming up. On Saturday, April 4th, at 1pm, I’ll be speaking at the San Francisco Apple Store about “How To Tell Better Stories”, using the shaping story techniques I talk about in my book THE LEAN FORWARD MOMENT.  The event will cost you either one zillion dollars or will be free — your choice. If you’re interested, come on by at 1 Stockton Street downtown.  Afterwards, come on up to me and let me know that you read the blog.  I’d love to meet you.

I’m also going to be at the annual NAB conference in Las Vegas.  NAB is a collection of people and companies from all over the entertainment and broadcast industries, who go to panels and visit exhibitions of the latest sound, camera, editing, broadcasting and assorted other gear. It’s where we learn about who’s making what, and get to talk about whose using what. And, aside from the fact that it’s in Las Vegas (a city I’ve never particularly loved), it’s a great experience. I’ll be doing a book signing at 2pm on Monday, April 20, a talk about Storytelling at 11am at the Final Cut Pro Users Group booth on Wednesday, April 22nd, and a few talks at the Avid Booth on Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning (I’m an equal opportunity speaker). Times to be announced later.

For those of you who don’t want to pay to get into the exhibition space, you can usually pick up free tickets from great and generous vendors. One place that’s being especially generous is Tuvel Communications.  If you go to the NAB site and type in the Exhibits Passport Code TP01, you’ll get a free ticket to both the exhibits area and to the opening keynote by Gary Arlen, president of Arlen Communications.

And, please, if you get down there and find me at one of the events, tell me that you read the blog.  I’ll get a thrill out of it.