With a handy bit of php (script furnished by Ryan) I know have my website’s index redirecting here.
I’ll post some of the redesign concepts down the line, but until time allows to convert it to flash I’ll be posting more of my work here.
Once again time passes,
Trent Reznor has put up a guide for new artists in the face of new technology.
How to create depth of field in Photoshop. I may try a 3 way shootout between a lens adapter, After Effects, and Photoshop for Depth of field manipulation. Depending on the results I may put some effort into improving my Letus or just sell the thing.
50 ways to improve your writing skills.
I may have posted this before but MIT has some of its courses in free online format.
I’m slinging still cameras and accessories at the moment and trying to find a D mount to C mount converter for 16mm lenses. If anyone has a spare (or several) lying around let me know.
I spent a fair amount of time with the Shiny Propaganda Machine yesterday tooling around in Adobe encore and trying to optimize a project for flash streaming. Will be doing that and some writing for the next few weeks, otherwise no new news.
It’s been well over a month since last posted, I’ve saved some drafts but not published them. Partially due to other now defunct commitments, a massive hard drive failure (the 2nd such Seagate mechanical failure), and engagement in more fruitful activities. I have however been researching and compiling links. Those that survived the reformatting will be posted shortly.
In essence very few movies make a substantial profit. Studios churn out dozens of movies hoping that the success of one mega hit will surpass the loses of the others. Yes millions will be expended in hiring name actors and engaging in a full on publicity blitz but at the end of the day this model is still vulnerable to audience and market whims. Popular trends in the entertainment business are subject to the cyclical nature that also dictates the course of history. Disaster movies, Vampire Movies, even 3D! (please do not try smell-o-vision again). These wax and wane in popularity but always seem to return to the spotlight. The other downside though is that the financial stability of the current system is also caught up in this tide. The high budget spectacle, reliance on name actors, and banking on current trends has on several occasions severely burnt the industry. With failures such as Citizen Kane, Heaven’s Gate etc sinking careers and sinking those involved. It is in those moments that self financed or outside the box films; Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Clerks, Reservoir Dogs, etc come to ascendancy. The studios then typically react by financing dozens upon dozens of similar movies; low budget, limited appeal, and no names attached and inevitability return to the cycle of blockbusters. For every Star Wars there is a Battlefield Earth, for every Memento a Delgo and the cycle continues. For all of us without the power to greenlight despite how apparent upcoming trends may appear there is the option of self financing.
Financing films remains a tricky proposition. In University we were taught to approach dentists, lawyers, doctors, and other investors who essentially expect a production to lose money and then use it for tax write off purposes. Forward Money has an article on a new method for film investing Indievest. It breaks down to be more of an investment club with buy in options. What makes Indievest something to examine is they also handle marketing, and distribution which in the end of the day proves to be where other “independents” often fall short.
In addition to relying on strangers with candy for money film financing has to come from other sources. The double edged sword that is having household names or at least names attached to your project comes into play selling distribution rights to territories before production has even begun. Then of course one can do in kind deals, product placement (E.T is perhaps the progenitor of this trend in modern movies), or pay with the promises of net or gross points.
How is this going to change in the future? Well the ability to execute viral and niche marketing campaigns via the Internet make it possible for independent features to attract additional eyeballs, since a definitive gate keeping/distribution system has yet to gain a stranglehold online distribution is relatively open. But we are already at the point at least with feature rather than episodic content that viewers are going to start gravitating towards names. The backing or finances needed to get Nathan Fillion on board an online production already provides for a huge advantage over a homegrown feature in the Midwest. It’s very likely that we will be drawn into the same cycle for online productions that has so long dictated traditional features.
The ability for fragmentation though now is unsurpassed. Filmmakers will still have to compete with the big names, with flashy effects, and publicity engines that permeate every crevice of society. The larger content producers will still have to concentrate on maximum potential return of investment leaving content producers who don’t want to rush out a disaster movie every 20 years able, if streamlined enough, to carve out a living in Niche markets. The ability of the Internet to allow for selective targeting of these groups and the existing infrastructure to reach them is perhaps the ultimate promise of the New Media. Rather than have to get 20 million viewers to make broad advertising attractive producers can remain agile and target smaller groups.
Be it a Jane Austin or Tea Party movie for my mother, a documentary on an obscure underwater shrimp for my brother, a road trip movie with vintage motorcycles for my father, or an history piece on 1930s aircraft for my uncle the Internet allows for much more than traditional demographics to focus on.
J. Ewan Van Dijkhorst
It’s been a while since I’ve last updated. The job hunt is all consuming at this point but I found a few links well worth sharing.
Microsoft has unleashed what it means to be a Garage Band killer Songsmith. I’ve yet to test it out but on multiple occasions I’ve had to rely on Window’s Movie Maker to make a last minute adjustment when AVID, Vegas, or Premiere cecided to crash. It won’t be an Pro-Tools killer but at $30 it’s not meant to be. I’ll wait for some reviews from some of my more active Post Sound friends but it may prove a more useful bridge between Audacity and Pro-Tools for those of us who don’t have 64 Channel mixer banks to worry about.
Make Magazine has an excellent post and series of links on free I-phone development guides/tools. I’d like to see the three way war between Apple, Adobe/Flash, and Microsoft’s Silverlight to be a bit closer to resolution before diving into this pond but it’s worth trying and perhaps getting a few toes wet.
As time permits I’ve been playing with encoding. For those of you unfamiliar with some of the more common standards here’s an quick peek at codecs and compression.
MIT maintains some open source lecture materials for some of their prior courses. Their Media Art’s and Sciences department has some very interesting material on well everything. I urge you all to browse through some of the material.
And some more from the I should practice what I preach department. A guide on how to set up a social media cheat sheet on any subject.
I’m digesting this month’s American Cinematographer Magazine, and want to go over the show Sanctuary. One of my former Professors let me know about the show and I’ve been following it on Hulu. I really love vfx and if you’ve been subjected to the Bloody Omaha speech you know how great I think technology is for content producers. I’m going to go into how the series started as a webisode before it was picked up and of course delve into the RED/Post workflow that makes it possible.
I’ve also been doing a lot of reading of memoirs. Writers and Producers mainly. Not much of it deals with the New Media or web content but it would be interesting to hear what Evans, Eszterhas, Goldman, Obst, and the others I’ve been pouring over would say about the topic. If I can fire off emails to the various agents/gatekeepers that keep them squirreled away I’ll be sure to let you know the results.
At some point I’m going to compile a new comers guide to LA and initial advice for making the move here. Several of my friends have left to go back wherever, and though I can’t say that I blame them or haven’t entertained the same notion I’m going to tough it out for at least a few more months. When I’m in a humorous mood I’ll post some photos or videos of my living situation, and maybe even a guide to LA lingo. I’m brushing up on my Byzantine history (The politics seem similar), learning to be Zen about the job hunt, and am already much more savvy/realistic about the industry.
I want to look a bit more at the One Laptop Per Child project, but first need to find out some information about it’s power usage. My Uncle (who really does make Mac Guyver look helpless) used a bike dynamo, a modified model aircraft propeller, and an inverter to generate 70-90+ volts while we were driving in South Africa. I managed to hit my fingers pretty nicely a few times. But it had my thinking that even driving in the middle of wherever one could generate enough power to charge dozens of batteries, maybe even run a live capture/storage setup. I need to build the same thing (with a variable regulator) so I can charge my DVX batteries if say driving in the middle of Mexico without access to a charger. Tangent aside I wonder if a hand or bike driven dynamo could power the 100 dollar laptop.
All for now.
J. Ewan Van Dijkhorst
So it seems for all intents and purposes the election is over. I’m still waiting to see how Missouri voted out of curiosity. At some point I’d like to go into an analysis how technology/convergence changed the way this election played out. I think it’s a fair assessment to say that blogs, camera phone footage, and ready access to a buffet of information played a large role in this election. I’ll go over that and the implications in a few weeks when we’ve all had a brief but much needed respite from election topics. I will say it’s a little harder to get away with election day shenanigans now then it would have been thirty years ago, but by the same token it’s harder to keep policies and internal rifts under wrap as well.
One of my most satisfying papers I wrote while in University was on the history and mechanics of Propaganda. I will adapt portions of it to posts here, as it is a topic I find to be of much interest.
The BBC reports that one of Bin Laden’s video producers was sentenced to life. From a purely analytical stand point the War on terror has been revolutionary in the way ideological messages are propagated. This has largely been because of new technologies and how the flow of information is controlled.
Prior to the American Civil War conflicts had been chronicled in much the same way. Be it Jospehus’s account of the Roman reconquest of Judea and Israel or Jean de Joinville’s Chronicles of Crusade are similar in nature. It can be argued that literacy gradually increased to the point where more and more participants were able to document their experiences and if one is to look at the volumes written about the Second World War the inclination would be to agree. But it is with still photography during the American Civil War that the aftermaths of battles became more than temporary.
World War I saw the mobilization of Governments and incredibly draconian and unconstitutional (but perhaps necessary?) impositions on the press by the Wilson administration. Governments were still effectively able to control the flow of information by virtue of control over printing presses.
The Second World War is where the shift started. Digressing again a bit I thought I’d share this.
“The quality of the Arri design is clearly demonstrated by the World War II footage filmed by the German forces with their Arris, which far surpasses the footage shot by the Americans with their unwieldy Mitchell or Bell & Howell cameras. You can view this footage twenty four hours a day on cable TV on the History Channel: “All Nazis – All the Time!” D. Knox in Strike the Baby and Kill the Blonde.
Though Mr. Knox besmirches by Bell and Howell Filmo he’s correct The Major powers quickly realized the value of footage for newsreels, training, and good old fashioned propaganda. You can see some of that footage here.
There are countless thousands hours of footage and innumerable photographs but the flow of information was still rigidly controlled. If one were to look at the frightening casulties during the landings on Peleliu or the oft shifting balance of power on the Eastern front the lack of accurate dissemenation of information to the public is startling.
Vietnam let the proverbial cat out of the bag. TV crews beamed uncensored and often unintended images into millions of sets and as predicted by Ho Chi Min influenced public opinion/the outcome of the war.
Now though almost everyone has access to a video camera, be it soldier or insurgent, government minders or citizen watchdogs. The Internet has made distribution of any content instant, wide reaching, and in most places impossible to fully prohibit. Some nations (who I shall not name) have realized this and have made every effort to control access to said networks but others do not have the infrastructure to do so. Looking at the troubles in Burma last year and despite all regulations, penalties, and other sanctions information leaked to the world. Cell phone cameras are more common than tanks, and the BBC was still able to get field reports (and covered the situation weeks before the press here did).
When I go further into depth on the subject (I assure you the above was merely a brief hint) I may venture into the territory of online propaganda.
IO9 has a few brief quotes on the technology that made the Curious Case of Benjamin Button possible. A friend of a friend (and a good chap to boot) worked on the film in that regard. So I thought it deserved a posting.
Via digg: 25 Free Digital Audio Editors. I’ve been rocking Audacity for a little while now, I don’t do too much sound editing but after a Pro Tools class it is a definite positive to have around. If he is allowed/willing to go further in depth (the article is a bit light on detail) I’ll be sure to post on that.
Down in the valley a former Music equipment manufacture is having a sale. I”m going to swing by and try pick up some vacuum tubes for a project I’m making, and maybe a vintage mic or two.. Heavily dependent on prices of course.
Cheers for now I have some prep for an information session tomorrow night.
Juard Van Dijkhorst
Still job hunting not sure how the possibility of an impending strike and the current economy are affecting things but there are still plenty of positions out there.
Brushing up on my Marketing Concepts and Strategy Planning and might even do some online campaigns for spurious products tied into some of my concepts just for the fun of it. Maybe do a history of adverts through fake products going form the Victorian era to what we’re looking at in the future.
Have the Victorian product orientated method nailed down, as well as the 1950s style “sell” approach. The modern Marketing Concept orientation still needs some ironing out. Will work on writing and the strategy for the approaches soon. Thinking one as a print ad, one as a 50s style TV ad, and the modern as an embed/pop up product reference in something seemingly innocent. Think it should be fun and educational! (I need a web-cam to impart the cheese in those sentences justly.)
Also trying to refine my script writing abilities (or garner some) I’ve not really focused on writing (ever), but find it to be much more important in growing as a content producer and being able to spot worthwhile material to work on. That being the case I’ve been trying to hit a certain page count per day, and have been following a very handy piece of advice… from Jerry Seinfeld via Lifehacker. Basically one sets a goal of a certain amount of pages per day to meet or some such objective then print out a calendar and keep a chain going across it. The longer you do it the less likely you’ll be to let it slip. Takes some willpower but helps. Know it’s old hat but some of my friends haven’t heard of it before so maybe not everyone has heard of it.
and then on to general updates/links/opinions.
Missing tonight’s Sons of Anarchy Episode as I don’t have a tv here yet (Cable hooked up just no tv). Loving the show so far it’s very Hamlet. FX has allowed Hulu to put the first two episodes up which is nice considering, new episodes have an eight day delay before being posted so I believe tomorrow I’ll be able to catch last weeks episode.
Speaking of which most of us have a presence on or are familiar with facebook ( link via digg) I’d recommend checking this out:
Hamlet as a Facebook News Feed.
I’m also catching up on Terminator: the Sarah Conner Chronicles, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and just discovered the now canceled New Amsterdam. How did Highlander get to go on forever and New Amsterdam only last 8 episodes?
There are photos of me as a child Beaming in the 1980′s circa KITT in South Africa (yes we had TV, granted only from 1979 but really!). But I don’t think the newest incarnation of Knight Rider will be around all that long. Mostly impartial polling and gauging online reactions seems to indicate 1. Poor casting for the lead 2. Val Kilmer’s voice acting work is coming across as flat with demographics aged 1-84.. Which to be fair seems to be justified. It’s a shame as the effects are pretty well done, and they have tried to update the storyline to match modern conventions. Luckily NBC Universal still has Hereos, 30-Rock, BSG (For a while), Earl, and Leno to sell advertising. Another seemingly common critique which I’ll defend the show on is the car selection, a 2008 Ford Mustang. Ford is helping make the budget and getting the show made.
Juard Van Dijkhorst
So I promised to talk to you a bit about job hunting as a recent grad.
At the moment I’m sharing a room and still paying more than I did for a two bedroom apartment in Springfield.
First bit of advice have some money stashed away, or if you’re impetuous like myself a credit card with 0% interest before making the move out here. Most everything is more expensive out here, gas is at least 60 cents a gallon more, movie tickets are more expensive. Luckily here in the valley that’s offset a bit.
Tonight marks my third week in LA, it took me about a week and a half to find coordinate a acceptable living arrangement. Acceptable is a loose term, my roommate is a good chap, my landlord shall we say will make for very rich writing material down the line. It took a further week and then some to get Time Warner to set up internet.
Which brings me to point two. Own a laptop. I’m using a desktop, it may be six years old but it can still browse, write, and barely run old editing programs. Regardless for about a week I was getting up early every morning driving from here in Valley Village to an internet café in Glendale and sending out resumes, making lists to write in the evening and repeating the process. It would be much easier to find a coffee house and use their wi-fi.
I’ve pretty much exhausted monster, Craig list (employers provide an email addy the CL file size limit is too small to attach a proper resume), Indeed, Mandy etc. Tomorrow I start calling Studio switchboards, getting production office numbers, and calling each one to find out if they’re crewing. Fun fun.
I’ve easily sent out fifty or 60 resumes and cover letters. I’ve also managed to hear back on very few of them. Most of the positions I’m applying for are Production Assistant gigs. So far response has been muted. I have a few friends out here, and know a few more. Some of them have been kind enough to pass my resume on or offer advice. So to Chris, Molly, and Gloria thanks. . I do need to get out and network a bit more, as that seems to make a huge difference out here.
Third piece of advice. Have a car, I do. And though the 405 and 10 will instill new reference points for traffic you can’t really rely on public transport. Better yet have a motor bike so you can lane split, or if you can afford it a helicopter. The guy in the Lamborghini is just as stuck as I am in my Taurus.
I’ll keep you posted. I’m taking a few walks a day to do my phone calls, get some exercise, and get away from the computer screen. In the near future expect a radical overhaul of Radial Sprite and the blog. I’m not so sure I like the current format.
Juard Van Dijkhorst
So I’m in LA now, I have some stills from the road trip to post (grand canyon at dawn that sort of thing).
Finding housing took longer then I had anticipated but I’m at least for the moment lodging in Studio City/Valley Village. You can’t throw a rock out here without hitting an aspiring actor (bring lots of rocks!). But what strikes me from a producing standpoint is how spraweled out the city is. I don’t want to know how much petrol (yay for $60 fill ups) and time is wasted going from area to area. “Hollywood” is actually not situated in Hollywood or any one area and traffic here does not lend itself to ease of transit.
I have some posts prepared on ARGs (Alternate Reality Game) and general New Media topics, but having to drive to Glendale for internet access and then having my 16 page job listing die/need replacing has put that on the back burner for a bit. I may also cover some video game topics, specifially in terms of promotion.
I’ve had my first comment spam spree, you can imagine how excited I was with a login yielding six comments… all spam. Time to put some filters in I suppose.
Cheers for now
Juard Van Dijkhrost