The Tripod Man

I was going to blog about 3D/Stereoscopic filmmaking today, but I'll save that for later, and instead share an anecdote that happened to me yesterday.

Having gotten an uber-loan for my RED, I'm in the process of actually spending all this money on the equipment that I borrowed the money for in the first place. And let me tell something to all the folks in the "DV Rebel" tier that I'm springboarding from: these ain't your momma's tripods.

I come from a place where cameras weigh, like, 5 pounds on the outside, and you can buy a Bogen tripod and get decent results with it. Though admittedly most of the time you end up going handheld anyway, because you want to move the camera and you can't afford a dolly/jib.

The RED camera body is 10lbs, and that's just the body. By the time you add batteries, rails, lens, mattebox, follow focus, EVF, monitor, and drives, you could be looking at upwards of 40lbs for the camera, at about $1K per pound. You're not going to pop that onto a $300 still-camera tripod and hope it holds.

I also want the camera to get some play in the rental market, and an unspoken evaluation of one's "package" seems to be the quality of your "sticks" (the innuendo is lost on neither of us). But the fact is, if you want professionals to take your camera rental package seriously, you've gotta have serious camera support.

I found a place that has a bundle package specifically designed for owners of the RED camera, based on feedback from RED owners on what they're glad they bought and what they wished they hadn't. The package was under a discounted rate as a bundle, so not only did I happen to get a package which contained EVERYTHING I was already planning to buy, at a discounted rate, but they also threw in carrying cases for the equipment. It's like the carrying cases cost me negative money, because I saved a couple thousand off what I planned to buy and got them on top of it all.¹

I'm buying the O'Connor Ultimate 2060HD Fluid Head with 150mm Ball Mount, on the O'Connor Cine HD aluminum tripod sticks, also with ball mount. Apparently at this level of equipment, you buy the tripod head separately from the tripod legs. The tripod head can then be taken off the sticks and thrown on a dolly, jib, crane, "hi-hat", etc. as necessary.

There are two kinds of mounts.² There are ball mounts, which allow you to rotate the bottom of the tripod and level it on potentially uneven surfaces, and there are Mitchell mounts, which are solid, flat connections that expect a level surface. And it's regarding this choice of mounts that I wanted to tell a little story.

I was at the reseller and putting the package together, and another customer there and I started making conversation. He had been a focus puller for 13 years before making the move to DP, and he asked what kind of mount I was getting on my tripod. I told him I was getting the ball mount, then admitted that I had no idea what the pros and cons were in either direction.

There are two ways someone can respond to that. The amateur version is to roll your eyes and start off with "You DON'T KNOW..." and then launch into a condescending explanation, while all the while giving off an air that you're doing me a favor digging into these totally basic depths of your knowledge.

The professional version is to explain the facts based on one's experience, with a view towards helping someone else understand the same things you do.

This guy was a professional. He spent a good fifteen minutes weighing the pros and cons of the two different tripod mounts for me. He was ultimately a Mitchell man, and said that most of the rented equipment that you'll find on a film set, such as cranes and dollies, will come with Mitchell mounts. So for interoperability and speed of use, he was all about Mitchell. He even went so far as to inquire into whether or not I would have the option to swap the mount, or if my ball mount could be adapted to a Mitchell.³

Two things about the guy struck me. Well, really one, but it manifested in two ways.

First of all, the guy was a focus puller for 13 years. Think about that. For 13 years his main job was to stand next to a film camera and make sure the shot was in focus. And make no mistake, that is a crucial job on a movie set, and requires a hell of a lot of technical know-how and skill, but it's hardly glamorous -- even by the already unglamorous standards of below-the-line film labor. Now, the focus puller is also known as the 1st AC, a more hoity-toity title, but also a more appropriate one, as he is essentially in charge of keeping the camera loaded, clean, and running. The fact that he was a 1st AC for 13 years, and willing to downplay it by saying "focus puller" instead, tells me that what we've got is a man who just loves being in the movies.

Likewise, his passion for tripod mounts was both amusing and moving. Again, here's a guy who cares so much about something that is both incredibly important (for what we do), and incredibly obscure. A guy who just loves being a part of the art and business of movies, and loves sharing what he knows with others.

I love meeting people like that.

---

1. I won't quote the price here, but the company was Abel Cine Tech. If you're a RED owner or plan to be one soon, call them for bundle pricing and availability. It's still in the many-thousands-of-dollars range, but it's pro equipment for a discounted rate, and the cheapest I found anywhere.↩


2. "Package", "sticks", "mounts", yes. Freud would have a lot to say about tripod terminology. ↩


3. As it turns out, the O'Connor 2060HD comes with a Mitchell mount, to which the ball mount attaches. In purchasing the ball mount version, I am effectively purchasing both, which is the best of both worlds.↩

Fucking Twitter

Alright, I gave in and got a Twitter account because I'm a connectivity whore.

What is Twitter? It's like blog-lite. Any time anything I think even remotely interesting goes down, I can post an update to Twitter and you can see it. As they say on the site:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

As I understand it, either Facebook or Friendster has a similar function available. So it's like Facebook-lite, too. It would seem that there is a Facebook client for Twitter, through which your Twitter updates, and those of your friends, can be followed directly from your Facebook page.

Why did I get a Twitter account? Besides the aforementioned whoredom, it struck me this evening, when I came home a good five hours later than I expected to, that perhaps my roommates might be interested in keeping up with where I am and what I'm doing.

But I imagine when I do something interesting -- such as going to NAB next week, or when I'm on location of a production -- occasional updates might be notable.

You can find my page at twitter.com/DorkmanScott. If you're already a Twitter member, let's "follow" each other. And if you're not, come hop on the bandwagon.

Let's be "Honest"...

A lot of people think I'm a jerk. In fact, probably more than a jerk. A "right prick" as British slang (my favorite type of slang) goes. In particular, the people who know me primarily via the internet.

For a while, especially looking back, I was pretty much a prick. I was young and brash and I was right about EEEEEVERYTHING. Now I'm older and I don't necessarily always feel that way -- I am still usually right, but I'm much more willing to consider the possibility that I'm not.

And now you ask yourself (or maybe you don't, which is part of the issue probably): "Is he being sarcastic, or is he serious?" I'll let you mull it over, because if it's sarcasm it's hardly as funny if I have to say so.

Certainly that's part of it. People who meet me online seem to think I'm a tremendous ass. People who meet me in person generally find me to be very funny and approachable. The problem people have with me, I think, is that I'm honest.

An example:

Recently, a new series came on ABC called Eli Stone. It's about a lawyer with a brain aneurysm who hallucinates musical performances of George Michael songs that also manage to show him the path he's to take in life, and his Chinese-American acupuncturist/spiritual guide has a tendency to insist that Eli may be a prophet. If the description feels cumbersome, then it's captured the show. The description of the show as a male Ally McBeal is about right, if a little less quirky.

We probably wouldn't have wound up watching the show, if not for the fact that Ryan is working on the show as part of the Stargate Digital team. I watched it several weeks late, having a lot to get done and not a lot of time to watch the show. When I watched it, I was struck by one sequence in particular. Eli is up on a mountain in the Himalayas, for reasons that are beyond the point of my story here, and it was SO OBVIOUSLY greenscreen. Like, it was pretty bad overall. But other parts of the show were quite good -- several parts I didn't even know were effects until Ryan told me.

So later that night, Ryan and I were out to dinner and I asked "So, are you involved with the team that does Eli Stone?"

"Yeah, I'm on the show."

"Did you do any of the work on the pilot?"

"Yeah, I did some shots for most of the episodes so far."

"What did you do on the pilot?"

"That stuff where he was up on the mountains."

"Oh...yeah, I thought that stuff was bad."

My other roommates, who were there at the time, were shocked at me. To be fair, it did kind of seem like entrapment where I was getting him to confess to the part I didn't like. But I was honestly hoping that he would say he'd done something else. Someone else might have changed their tune upon finding out what it was. Just veered away with a "Ah, just wondering. Good stuff overall." But that's not what I do. I don't blow smoke up peoples' asses, and at any rate Ryan isn't someone who wants smoke blown up his.

After that, I discussed with Ryan why I didn't think it worked. For example, the background was too sharp to be strictly "correct" as a composite. But that's what the client wanted ("We paid a lot of money for that shot, we want to see it in focus"). If I had just told him good job and patted him on the back, neither of us would have learned anything. In this case, I was the one who learned a lesson about being a good client and trusting the artisan to know the right thing to do.

I believe in being honest. For one thing, that's the best way to learn. For another, even if it means I'm often critical, it also means that if I'm praising someone for something, they know that I mean it, because I wouldn't say it if I didn't. I don't think that my opinion of something ranks too highly on anyone's scale right now, but I do think that people value it for what it is. If I don't like something, I'll say so, and I'll say why. If I say I like it, I really do like it, and no one ever has to wonder if I was "just being nice", because that's not how I roll.

The other benefit is that I engender the same honesty in return. If I was strongly critical of someone's work, then when I come out with my own work, they're more likely to be critical back at me. If they thought I was particularly harsh in my criticisms, they will themselves be harsh in judging my work. To an extent this can mean that the negative reviews I receive need to be parsed -- what part of this really didn't work, and what part of this is just this guy being an asshole because he doesn't like me? But by the same token as above, I know that the positive comments and reviews I receive are genuine. When someone wants to tear me a new one but has to grudgingly admit that I pulled something off, that has way more value than people who are going to tell me anything I do is great.

Honesty is one of the most important traits, and constructive criticism one of the most important skills, that I think anyone can develop, especially working as an "artist" in some form. Both giving it, and taking it.

Now, there's a difference between honest, constructive criticism, and just being an asshole who tears people down. I think that when I was younger, I was probably on the wrong side of that line. I delved into this a little bit in one of my earliest posts, regarding insecurity and what I called the Better-Than Fallacy.

Acknowledging that someone is good at what they do does not equate to denigrating your own talent, and trying to cut someone down or insult them probably just means that you think they make you look bad. Don't be that guy. If someone is good at what they do, you should be getting to know them. If they're better at it than you are, learn from them! Find out how they do what they do. Trade ideas, build a relationship. You can't do it all yourself anyway.

Likewise, realize that being honest doesn't automatically mean that you're right. One extremely important "spoonful of sugar" when giving criticism of some kind is to make it clear that it is coming from your perspective. "I didn't think this worked," "I didn't understand why the character would do something so stupid," "I don't like the color combination here," "I think it would have been better if you'd let someone else have a pass at the script." Whatever.

You can be as harsh as you need to, as long as you remember two things:

1) It is coming from you. You do not speak for everyone and should never make absolute statements like "You shouldn't break the 180-degree rule, you'll confuse the audience." Rather, it should be "When you jumped over the 180-degree line, it confused me. It may just be a guideline, but I find that outside of action scenes it's generally less distracting if it's followed."

Always remember the difference between "This is how it is" and "This is how I see it."

(You may notice that in my blog I sometimes fail to phrase it like this. For one thing, it's more important to do when your criticisms are addressed TO the person; for another, being that this is a personal blog, I'm just assuming that "this is just my perspective" is a given.)

2) Your criticism should be aimed at helping the other person improve what they're doing, to get better. The saying goes "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." I disagree with that. Instead of "nice", I would amend it to say "If you can't say anything useful..." Many times you may see something that doesn't avail you to say much that's positive at all. But presumably the person has a passion for what they're doing.

If you're better at what you do than they are, then it's your job either to encourage them and help point them in the direction of where they went wrong, or for all our sakes, just keep your fucking mouth shut.

Now, you're going to come across people who don't actually want constructive criticism. They don't want criticism at all. They just want you to tell them how great they are.

I cannot abide these people. You go out of your way to give them a detailed critique, and they just turn around and start insulting you, or accusing you of being a jerk or trying to make them give up.

As I've always said, if anyone's critique can make you give up on something you supposedly want to do, you probably didn't really have a passion for it anyway, and it's better that you quit anyway. If you DO want to do it, then nothing anyone says will deter you. So don't ever let anyone tell you that you've killed their dream, and don't you DARE be someone who tries to put that shit on someone else.

I just thought of a third thing to keep in mind:

3) You're learning too. Whenever you critique someone, you're articulating why you feel the way you feel about what they've done. It helps you understand your own sensibilities and your own work better when you give an honest, informative critique.

Anyway, I usually like to wrap up my posts better than this, but my writing brain's attention is kind of split between this and the script that I've got to finish in the next seven days, and this wasn't the topic I originally set out to talk about when I started writing this entry. So I'll just say that's all I can think of right now, and if I think of more, I'll write another post about it (questions and comments always help!).

Get your learn on...

For those of you who may have made a New Year's resolution to learn something new, allow me to pimp my latest intellectual ride:

fxphd is a website that hold 10-week "terms", during which you sign up for three courses and take one class a week in each course, consisting of a video about 30-60 minutes in length. There are many different "Tracks". I signed up because they started a production track featuring the RED camera, and I really only wanted the one course but you have to do a minimum of three. So I took a Shake course and a Color course.

I have to say, it's the best value I think I've ever gotten from a training course. I did the whole nine with the college degree and all, 18 years of school from preschool to postgrad, and I've never been so interested in "going to class" as I am with fxphd.

They have the production track, as I mentioned, and they have a motion graphics track, a design track, and many software-specific courses. It's just a great resource and they are very passionate about making sure everyone gets the most out of their courses.

I've signed up for the new term and there's a bunch of very exciting classes that I'm going to have trouble choosing between. If you do sign up, make sure you put my username (DorkmanScott) as a referral. If you do, I get an extra class, and that makes choosing easier.

Next week is "Week 1", you can sign up any time until Week 6 for the term. It's not pocket money for most normal people ($330 for the basic tuition), but it's cheaper than a semester in a trade school and if you're serious about learning post-production skills it's totally worth your while.

The Red-Headed Step-Prequel

So I've been doing a lot of thinking lately with regards to the responsibility of a storyteller. To what extent are they responsible to the story, the audience, and themselves? Where is the balance?

As anyone reading this knows by now, I can take a while to form my argument when it comes to this kind of thing, so I'm going to break it up over a few days so it's more bite-sized. I will also attempt to think of clever titles for each installment so as not to get boring, but no promises.

Anyway, to begin:

George Lucas, and his supporters, like to point out that Star Wars was Lucas' story, and so it is his prerogative to do anything he wants with it.

Greedo shoots first? Done.

Hayden Christensen in Return of the Jedi? It's in.

Midichlorians? Shit, why not.

The fact that the specific reference in my second link is lost in the PAGES of changes listed should finish making my point. If not, see also the pages for A New Hope (which wasn't even originally called that), and The Empire Strikes Back.

In terms of intellectual property, Star Wars belongs to Lucas. He can do whatever he wants to monetize it -- and he does. But as a STORY, as a MYTHOLOGY and a CULTURE, I think it's out of Lucas' hands. Legally he may have the right to alter it in whatever way his whims dictate, but he is violating the purity and the impact of the story every time he does so.

Aside from the fact that George Lucas is a prime example of someone who NEEDS a guy on set to go "George, that's a stupid idea," the story doesn't belong to him anymore. As soon as you make it part of the fabric of culture, part of the language of the zeitgeist, you have to be ready to let it go and find a life of its own.

Storytellers call their stories their "babies", their "children." Star Wars was Lucas' firstborn, and he didn't know quite what to do with it. The "child" wound up getting reared by a huge team of people, producers and executives who all had their input and influence on making it the film it was. They're like the teachers and friends a child makes in school. Then the film went out into the world and took on its own life.

If it were a child, it would be acceptable and expected that George let it go. But what he did, instead, was give up his next two children for adoption. Then he later kidnapped his adult firstborn, medicated it heavily, and then locked it in the attic for good measure. He also invoked his rights as the biological father of the other two to steal them away from the families that REALLY raised them, brought them under his roof against their will and then forced them to live under his rules.

And then 30 years later, he had three more kids, but THIS time he sheltered and homeschooled them to make sure that they had all the values and beliefs he wanted. I think we've all met the weird homeschooled kid. (Don't get me wrong, there are cool homeschooled kids too, but they're pretty rare and typically not strictly "homeschooled" so much as privately schooled by a group of parents.)

If George Lucas did to his real kids what he did to the original trilogy, child services would SO have had his ass. And there's nothing to be done for the prequels but to shake your head, just like when you meet the socially maladjusted homeschooled kids. "It's not their fault," you say, "their parents made them that way. They probably would have been cool if they'd been let out to play once in a while."

Now, don't get me wrong. There is NO question that legally, Star Wars is George Lucas' property, and I and many of my colleagues owe him gratitude for being progressive, and not suing the bloodstained zombie Christ out of us for playing in his backyard. But that doesn't mean I have to be okay with the way he mistreated his films.

Just because you created something, doesn't mean you control it forever. A storyteller should treat his "babies" like his babies. You have to have responsibility without demanding control.

More in my next post.

Insecurity, Part 3: Question Yourself

My apologies to any regular readers I may have who were disappointed that I didn't finish the "series" yesterday. I have no excuse, it just didn't happen. I hope today makes up for it.

Anyway, back to it.

I believe that when it comes to creativity (I hesitate to say "art" just because of the hoity-toity connotations), there is a good insecurity and a bad insecurity. On Tuesday I talked about the bad insecurity, where you try to gain validation for yourself or your talents by way of comparison with others. Today, as I hinted at the end of that entry, I want to talk about the good insecurity, where you seek to always improve yourself or your talents by way of comparison with yourself.

It's possible that insecurity isn't the right word for it. A better, less loaded-sounding word might be "introspection". Whatever you want to call it, what it boils down to is the question "Is what I'm doing the best I can do?"

I'm going to pick on M. Night Shyamalan one more time, since that's become a theme here. I think MNS has lost a sense of introspection (yes, you COULD call it a "sixth sense", but you shouldn't, because I will slap you). I think he was successful with his first film, and he has decided he can do no wrong, and just throws his first ideas onto the page and onto the screen.

I could make the same comments about the Wachowskis, or George Lucas. Success becomes laziness when you decide that anything you touch is gold.

I mean, in the case of George Lucas, it's sadly true. As I've often said, Lucas could have shit on a blanket, filmed it decomposing for 2 and a half hours, called it Revenge of the Sith, and would still have broken box office records with it.

(Some would argue that that's kind of what he did, but I digress.)

(It still would have been better than Episodes I and II. Okay, I'm done now.)

Now, on the other hand, you have a filmmaker like Spielberg. I know I keep bringing him up but if nothing else, everyone knows who the hell he is so it's an easy example. Plus, whether you love him, hate him, or are indifferent, I really do think he's the single most influential director the American movie industry has ever known, second perhaps to Georges Méliès (but some of you had to check Wikipedia to find out who that was, didn't you? So you see my point).

Even though Spielberg's name will instantly make a movie successful, I don't think he's resting on his laurels. It seems like he's always trying something new, always trying to make the best movie he can. He asks others for their thoughts, he allows the input of others to inform his decisions. He doesn't surround himself with yes-men.

If you are a filmmaker, it is important that you are capable of looking at what you are doing, stepping to the side for a moment and asking yourself "Is what I'm doing the best I can do?" Not only that, but I think it's important that you have at least one person on your team that you can trust to ask you that question if you don't ask it first.

I mean, if ONE person George Lucas respected had stood up and said "Now hold on here, George. Where are you going with this midichlorian thing?" and forced Lucas to explain it to him, it would have accomplished one of two things. Either Lucas would have realized that there was a better way to accomplish what he was trying to get at, and changed it, or he would have thought it through and made the midichlorian thing important to the story. Instead, he just kind of dropped it after the middle of Phantom Menace and hoped no one would notice.

I'm not saying you should have a no-man, either. But you need at least one person that you know is looking out for the story. That should be you, but for when you get all caught up in the excitement of a new idea, you need someone else to pull you down to earth and ask "Where are you going with this?"

If it really is the best idea possible, then you should have little trouble explaining why and convincing them. But listen to their objections, because answering them will only make your idea more solid.

Question yourself. Answer yourself. And if you wouldn't accept the answer from someone else, don't accept it from yourself. There's a better idea. Keep looking.

One last thing about insecurity, and this one is mainly directed at the...er...directors.

A common mistake a lot of beginning directors make is thinking that a movie has to be 100% "their vision". They have to come up with ALL the ideas no matter what and it has to be theirs theirs theirs. This again is all a kind of insecurity.

What you have to realize is that you're the director, not the dictator. You have to be able to make a decision about everything if no one else has any ideas, but you should also be open to hearing the ideas of others if they DO have them.

Basically, as the director, you decide the destination, and you make sure you keep going in the right direction to get there. That's where the name comes from.

What is the movie you want the audience to see? That's what is meant by having the vision. You don't have to have all the ideas, but you do have to decide whether or not the ideas presented to you will get you to the destination as well as, or hopefully better than, your own ideas. And most of the ideas you hear WILL be better than yours. There's no reason to insist on going down Avenue A when Avenue B goes in the same direction and will get you to your destination just as well or better.

If it won't work as well, be able to articulate why. Don't just say "Nah, we're going to do it my way." Explain. Explain to yourself as much as you're explaining to them, because being a director isn't about HAVING the best ideas, it's about KNOWING the best ideas when you hear them. If you're open to your cast and crew, they will help you make a better movie than you could make alone, and everybody wins when you do that.

One of the comments to the first post in the "series" brought up a good issue with humility. I'll touch on that in my next post.

On Insecurity, Part 1

As of this writing, I am 24 years old. That's not that old, but it's fascinating to me to look back even from here. It should go without saying that I'm a much different person than I was when I was 14, and I was different at 16 than at 14, and different at 18 than at 16, etc. What amazes me, though, is how different I am at 24 (about halfway to 25 at the moment) than I was at 23. How much different I am likely to be at 26 than I am now. And I can't even fathom who I might be at 30.

The older readers of my blog (if I ever have any) will be thinking "Well, duh." The younger readers of my blog may not believe me. I know when you're younger it seems like at a certain age you get it "figured out", and you don't HAVE to change because life is smooth sailing. Whether or not that's the case, you change. Every experience you have changes you.

The main thing that changes -- at least, hopefully -- is insecurity. Now, this is not to say that you will never be insecure. As a filmmaker (and therefore an "artist" in some sense) you will probably always be insecure. And, I will argue in this "series" of posts, you SHOULD be insecure to an extent, because security leads to laziness and laziness leads to the death of your art. What's important is not eliminating your insecurities, but channelling them.

Now, first a little bit about where I'm coming from on this:

Where filmmaking is concerned, at least in terms of this generation, I'm what you might call a "late bloomer". Most of my generation started shooting with their family's VHS camera when they were 10 years old, or younger (Ryan made his first short film -- which he refuses to show me -- at the age of 9).

M. Night Shyamalan likes to put his crappy childhood films as special features on the DVDs to his crappy adult films. I could bore you with a list but I won't. The point is, the fact that it didn't actively occur to me to make a film until I was about 17, makes me a relatively "late bloomer".

Looking back, it seems the obvious choice, and it seems like it was "destiny." I never picked up a camera, but I would put on little skits with my siblings, and I always thought of them as "movies", not plays. I always loved movies, and especially visual effects fascinated the bejeezus out of me. I started "directing" my family's Christmas videos when I was two years old ("Okay, so you record the door, and I'm going to burst out going 'It's Christmas!' and run for the presents!"). So it all makes sense to come to this.

Now, also among my generation, there's a common bit of hubris. The phrase is "the next Spielberg". Usually said in the first person. People say it to each other sometimes, I've had it said to me. I don't know that it's true, but it sure would be nice.

Here's the thing. I don't do the false humility bit and I don't like it when others do, either. I know that I am very talented, and very passionate, at what I do. I make no bones about that. But am I the BEST at what I do? Or will I be, when my skills are sufficiently developed? I don't know, and honestly, I don't really think so. I think I can make good films, I hope I can make great films, but no one bats 1000, and even Spielberg takes the occasional misstep.

Still, as I say, I am aware that I am talented, and have been since I was young. And when you're young, knowing you're talented tends to make you a dick. When I was younger, and first starting out in filmmaking, I was a dick about it (some will say I still am, but I'll address that later).

Why? Insecurity.

See, at that stage you still rely on the validation of others to define you (no matter how much you say you don't). So even though you know you're talented, it means nothing to you unless the REST of the world knows you're talented. And this leads to the Better-Than fallacy.

This entry is really freaking long already and I've barely even gotten to my point. Still, I don't want to bore your pants off (at least not unless I'm paying for dinner) so I'll stop here, and we'll pick up tomorrow with the Better-Than fallacy.

The Tracey Fragments

So, I just became aware of this film called The Tracey Fragments. It's an independent Canadian production starring Ellen Page (Hard Candy, X-Men 3) as a girl telling the story of how she came to find herself as we find her at the beginning of the film: naked beneath a shower curtain at the back of a bus, looking for her little brother, who thinks he's a dog. Though I haven't seen the film as of yet, it is apparently shot and cut in a "multi-pane" format sort of like Ang Lee's Hulk.

By now you're surely thinking "Social thread", and I would normally agree, but for one fascinating initiative. If you go to the film's website there is a "tab" labelled "Re-Fragmented". If you go to this tab, you will find the entirety of the raw footage for the film, everything that was shot (approximately 20GB), available for free.

That's 100% free, no strings, non-commercial download. They expect, and in fact encourage, other filmmakers to edit music videos, trailers, or even an entirely new cut of the film. They have also made the film's score available for free under the Creative Commons license.

Also included in the bundle is the Final Cut Pro project files for the filmmakers' version of the film. So if you have Final Cut, you can examine just how the film was ultimately constructed by the filmmakers.

This is, of course, a big deal. Imagine if other filmmakers jumped on this kind of share-and-share-alike bandwagon. Imagine what YOU can do in a creative community like this. And if nothing else, imagine what you could learn. Want to be an editor? Here's an exercise for you to practice with: Download the files and the script, but do NOT watch the final film. Instead, use the footage and the script to create the version you, as an editor, conceive. Then compare it to the final project. Find out what you like better than their way, and what you think they did better than you did.

There's also a contest, the best UGC (user-generated content) entry will win a Final Cut Pro package. I'm not entirely sure what value that is when the people getting the most mileage out of the files already use Final Cut, and only Canadian residents are eligible, but there you go.

I know nothing about the film or its content besides what I've already told you, and the film has not been rated by the MPAA. So there's a chance there will be offensive or inappropriate material in the film. Almost certainly there's language, and from the trailer it appears that there is some sexual content as well. Be aware of that possibility going in. I'm not endorsing the film itself, but I definitely endorse the initiative and possibilities the film represents. They follow directly on from yesterday's post regarding the democratization of content and the rebirth of the read-write culture.

On Content and Copyright

I'm going to have a lot more to say on this subject in the future. My father is an attorney who quite literally wrote the book on copyright law in the digital realm. I personally have made my "fame" (if not my fortune) piggybacking on the success and love of fans for their favorite franchise. So this is a big deal and it won't go untouched-upon.

But for now, let me just link you a video, a TED-Talk. TED is a fascinating concept -- it stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and is an annual meeting in Monterey, California where 1000 luminaries, from those three worlds, come together to share ideas.

That's the main goal: sharing ideas.

I'll undoubtedly post more TED-Talks in the future, as well, but for now, I was pointed to this one and it's extremely significant. I've never attended a TED conference and will probably never be invited to do so. But I'm with them, and believe in what they're aiming to achieve. And so, I share these ideas with you.

EDIT: Tried to post a video, but their embed code is faulty. A link will have to do.

Check out the rest of their site while you're at it.