Topic: digital filmmaking
Lensing Laos: Malcolm Murray and Michael Meyer prepare a shot in a village north of Luang Prabang for "Camera, Camera." (Photo by Sonephet Keosouvan)
Tourists Show, Tell For Murray’s Laotian ‘Camera’
When Laos revised its visa structure to allow visitors to stay for more than one week, Westerners with digital cameras surged over the border. Sensing that the pervasive pocket technology affected their travel experience, Malcolm Murray embarked on an unusual documentary that sees the country through tourists’ eyes. “I wanted to talk to people about what kind of picture they were taking, and look through the lens of amateur travel photography,” he says. “Using a macro lens, we shot the screen of people’s cameras. We have a mic on them, and they feel anonymous because we don’t see their face. But we see their photographs, in a sense. People opened up really quickly and revealed things they didn’t even mean to reveal.”
topics: digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, documentary film
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Lone stars: Noise Pop Film Festival opened Wednesday with Nathan Christ's documentary on Austin's music scene. (Photo courtesy Noise Pop)
Getting Behind the Music at Noise Pop Film Festival
Jimi Hendrix is not playing San Francisco’s 18th annual Noise Pop festival this year, but—along with Drive-By Truckers, George Clinton, Lou Barlow and Tool—he is making an appearance in the event’s Film Festival component, which runs February 24-28 at a variety of S.F. venues. It’s a disparate program ranging from portraits-of-an-artist to historical flashbacks, philosophical musings on music itself—and a couple items only tangentially about the auditory art form.
topics: cult cinema, digital filmmaking, directors, diy, documentary, music
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Chat It Up: Livestream, UStream and Justin.tv
Just over a year ago we witnessed an historic event when President Barack Obama took office. But in the virtual world another—albeit less monumental—breakthrough was happening. CNN took the event live online, alongside a Facebook Live Stream Box, allowing viewers to chat with friends and strangers, their conversation appearing next to the video. CNN reported 21.3 million streams by mid-afternoon, breaking all records. To Facebook, 600,000 updates were posted, with 4,000 updates per minute during the broadcast. Several months later the Jonas brothers came along and utterly shattered that record: 23,000 posts per minute. Long ago we dismissed chat rooms as dark holes filled with unpleasant people and noise. But with live steaming services surviving and event-based communication growing, has this become a case of, The Chat Room is Dead, Long Live the Chat Room?
topics: digital filmmaking, diy, internet
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Best Length for Documentary Films
How long should your documentary be? I get this question a lot in my work as an editor and story consultant. Frankly, I think the majority of documentaries that were not shaped by experienced editor, story consultant or a supervising executive at a broadcast outlet such as HBO or Showtime are too long. And the problem with "too long," of course, is that your audience begins to glaze over or feel restless, and you, my dear director, have lost the opportunity to leave them wanting more.
topics: authors, bay area, digital filmmaking, diy
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The hills have eyes: "Beautifully Done" by Miles Zimmerman, Campolindo High, plays Screenagers at the Pacific Film Archive. (Photo courtesy filmmaker)
Pacific Film Archive Hosts Young Filmmakers on the Big Screen
In the YouTube-Facebook-viral video era, it’s hard to remember the time when youth-made media was rare. Now in its 10th year, “Screenagers,” playing at the Pacific Film Archive this weekend, is a film series that began before the eyes of the world turned to under-21s and before that demographic’s camera phones became the eyes of the world.
topics: activism, bay area, digital filmmaking, directors, youth
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Chat It Up: Livestream, UStream and Justin.tv
Just over a year ago we witnessed an historic event when President Barack Obama took office. But in the virtual world another—albeit less monumental—breakthrough was happening. CNN took the event live online, alongside a Facebook Live Stream Box, allowing viewers to chat with friends and strangers, their conversation appearing next to the video. CNN reported 21.3 million streams by mid-afternoon, breaking all records. To Facebook, 600,000 updates were posted, with 4,000 updates per minute during the broadcast. Several months later the Jonas brothers came along and utterly shattered that record: 23,000 posts per minute. Long ago we dismissed chat rooms as dark holes filled with unpleasant people and noise. But with live steaming services surviving and event-based communication growing, has this become a case of, The Chat Room is Dead, Long Live the Chat Room?
topics: digital filmmaking, diy, internet
more
Field's day: To mark the 20th anniversary of Mandela’s release, special or festival screenings of "Have You Heard from Johannesburg?" will take place Feb. 11 in Boston, Sydney, London, Amsterdam (possibly), Johannesburg and Cape Town. (Photo courtesy Clarity Films.)
Connie Field readies magnum opus on anti-apartheid movement
By any measure, the long-awaited release of Have You Heard from Johannesburg? shapes up to be one of the major documentary events of 2010. Connie Field’s massive eight-and-a-half-hour series about the global human rights campaign that impelled South Africa to abolish apartheid in the early ’90s is beyond ambitious, encompassing 135 interviews spanning five continents and acres of archival footage from a vast array of sources. Now, maybe every doc maker has a crisis of confidence somewhere in the course of his or her project, but Field set herself up for a double scoop of nail-biting moments. “I would wake up in the middle of the night asking myself, ‘Why the hell am I doing this?’” the East Bay filmmaker confides. I believe that is what is called a rhetorical question.
topics: activism, african cinema, bay area, cinematography, digital filmmaking, directors, distribution, diy, documentary
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