The digital state of things - what you want or what they want.

I missed my Thursday blog due to the ongoing conflicts between my Mac computer and Final Cut Pro,  an editing software that cost around $1200 and was intended as an upstart "affordable" software to do battle with the gorilla in the room, namely Avid, which has been a standard in digital editing for years.

I started editing on FCP about ten years ago and it took me a good 2 years to really become comfortable with it. You might ask why film editing for a writer and sometimes director and/or producer?

I started out in editing, got a job at a TV station and I cut in 16mm commercials into the late movies for the station. In addition I worked in TV news, first as a soundman and then later as a news cameraman on the streets. I also edited news stories.

Somewhere afterwards I began to write, produce and direct commercials and corporate films and finally filmed, along with my partner Phil Borsos,  a short film called Cooperage, about a barrel factory that won several international awards and was a finalist for the 1976 Academy Awards.

Then came my first feature, Ghostkeeper, followed by my moving to USA in 1990 and a reasonably good list of screenwriting credits.

And then, with digital video, came home editing and this changed my life once again. I didn't care for the amateur systems and since I got comp classes at UCLA while I taught extension classes there, I took several FCP classes with DV (digital video).

What it gave me was a whole new world of creativity, because now I could shoot and edit a complete documentary or short film all by myself. Gone were film costs, lab costs, post production costs.  I could do it all on a Mac. (Incidentally 90% of what I do is on PC). As I write this I am finishing a documentary I shot on Highway 50 in Nevada, dubbed the "loneliest highway in America". In fact the highway image at the top of the blog is a still from my Hwy 50 doc. 


I also shot and edited a 45 minute doc on my home town's 100th anniversary and sold over 200 copies at $20 each.

Then came High Definition.

I held out for years but in the last 3 weeks, I was dragged into the HD world whether I wanted to or not. Which brings me to the title of this blog.

The digital world gives sharp and clear pictures. But getting something finished isn't always easy. It's a world of codecs and formats and conflicts between the edit system and the information found in HD. There are a hell of a lot more 1's & O's than DV and a lot more problems.

Going back to flatbed film edit systems, all that you needed to know was that you flipped a switch ahead or back and the film would go in that direction. The only technical part came if the machines broke down. Which they rarely if ever did.

Not so with digital. I am finishing the "extras" for the Ghostkeeper 1980 re-release and had footage from two places, Calgary and Vancouver, with interviews of one of the actresses and the DP.

The actress footage, about 47 minutes, was done with the Canon 5D slr, in other words a still camera that has suddenly become hot for filmmakers as it's chip is equal to the size of a 35mm film frame. That means a better picture.

However the sound was done on a separate recorder. Which meant that I had to sync up the sound with the picture. In film it was done with the help of a tuning fork in both the film camera and the recording player. Now you would think that would be easy in digital as film is so "analog".

But no, you sync digital video and audio manually with a slate or "Hand Clap". Why digital doesn't have a more sophisticated system is a mystery. Film cameras had it for maybe 50 years or so.

Problems started at the outset, and continued, the colors were wrong, the sync wouldn't sync and on and on. And the other footage wasn't very sharp and had dropouts. Now remember this is all the wonderful digital age system.

Thankfully, I had Shirley. You remember her from Travel Day, the film that Shirley and I attempted to make, and the title of my entire blog. Not only is she a genius at FCP, she also knows codecs and all that stuff.

But another sync problem happened over the wk-end and I'm back, to some point, at the beginning. I spoke to the distributor Friday and he's okay with it but will contact the dvd duplicator later this week.

So I have another 48 hours or so, and I still have to edit the now fixed-up footage of the DP.

This is why I go on mini-vacations.

And yeah, that guy with the hair and the beard is me a million years ago.

Dog Days - a lesson in movie history

Okay, here's where I sink low and resort to a dog picture.  Looking for money is not always exciting. Most of my time now is spent sitting at my desk in my little home office, surfing the web, looking for potential investors, emailing people I've emailed several times,  telling them I have someone who's ready to match my funds,  if  I can find them. 

Then I stare at nothing and wonder why I'm even trying.  It's sometimes boring as hell as I wait for people to get back to me and mostly say no. So I decided to give you a history lesson on independent movies. Or "indies" as they're called in the industry. 

The definition of indies is somewhat vague, but mainly it means movies made outside of the bigtime movie industry. This means that Paramount, Warners, and all the others are not involved in indie movies.  In fact, the money they pay for catering lunch is probably more than most indie movies cost.  Indies are the labors of love for most people, the stories that a general audience wouldn't really care to see as they don't have car crashes, super heroes or incredible effects. 

But once in a while, an indie sneaks through and experiences huge success.  The rules for indies are quite clear, but they have been getting muddy in the last few years.  Take movies like Blair Witch Project, made for well under $25,000, but made well over $100,000, 000.  Yes, one hundred million dollars.  Or take Juno, a hybrid indie, which caught on and made money and an Academy award for the screenwriter.

But these are anomolies, or "non-recurring phenomenons" as the studios like to call them. In other words, they don't really know why those movies succeeded and don't know how to copy them.

Independent movies started back in the late 195o's when John Cassavettes, a solid actor, wasn't able to get into a prestigious acting school and decided to start his own acting school.  And the first thing he did is get all his actors together and with money he begged, borrowed from others, went out and made a movie that cost almost nothing.   

What happened after that changed the way movies were made forever.  Cassavettes did something different, he took his camera out on the streets.  The movie, called SHADOWS,  is about a young interracial couple in 1950's Manhattan, shot on 16mm film and mostly improvised. The film surprisingly got good reviews, Leonard Maltin said it was "a watershed in the birth of American Cinema".  Remember this was the time of big studio movies like Ben Hur and My Fair Lady. 

Shadows didn't play to big audiences but it played to enough audiences that it begat a lot of imitators.  All of a sudden, small personal movies about subjects a writer or director was passionate about, were being made.  One of my favorite movies is Cassavette's HUSBANDS, with him, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, as three buddies who, after a friend dies in his 40's, decide to go out on a bender.  Cassavettes would star in big Hollywood movies like ROSEMARY'S BABY and DIRTY DOZEN and then use much of his money to make more personal films.

Independent movies.  Indies.

And this continues to today, whenever you see a little movie, low budget, personal story, it's the product of Cassavette's work.  Recent indies include WENDY AND LUCY,  ONCE,  AWAY FROM HER, LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, PIECES OF APRIL, FROZEN RIVER (the last two had Academy nominees in them).  Chances are most of you haven't seen these movies as they mostly play in bigger cities like New York, LA,  Chicago and Toronto.  But they are all released on DVD.  And cable networks like Sundance and Independent Film Channel show many of them and even more obscure ones.

What remains unchanged since Shadows, is the financing of these movies. They are often funded by family money, credit cards, friends and sometimes studios.  The common denominator is that they usually don't cost a lot, and that they are the kind of stories that play arthouses, not usually commercial and not usually profitable unless they are made for little money.  Like TRAVEL DAY. 

One interesting aspect of indie movies is that Hollywood has finally discovered them. Smelling money, the big boys opened their own "boutique Indie department" and started buying up every one they could. This lasted a few years until they realized that most indie movies don't make millions and millions of dollars and they closed down their "boutique" operations and stayed with IRONMAN, TRANSFORMERS and Adam Sandler comedies.

Also, a lot of Hollywood stars began to notice the amount of Academy nominees that came out of indie movies, and pretty soon each star wanted her or his own indie film.  After all TRANSFORMERS didn't get Academy nominations, but FROZEN RIVER did. 

So they created a "hybrid indie" in that a small personal movie was made with a "humble Hollywood star" who normally got millions of dollars for a movie but whose heart was really in movies that cost less than their Ferrari.  Since these weren't really true indie movies, and with bigger budgets, they were generally scorned by the starving filmmakers who did real independent films.  LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE was a hybrid as it cost around $8 million (ten times Travel Day's budget) and had Greg Kinear and Alan Arkin, both Hollywood stars. 

And what changed the indie business again was something nobody saw coming.

Digital cameras.

Now it became possible to make complete films for barely anything.  Your neighbor is probably making one now.  Digital cameras and editing systems, all of which could cost under a thousand dollars brought movie making to everybody on this planet. Take my friend Randy, who did 2 movies for $10,000.  That alone would be the cost of lunch on a Hollywood film. 

However,  having the equipment to make a movie isn't necessarily good.  Not everyone has a great story to tell. The saying in Hollywood is this:

The good news is that everyone can make a movie, the bad news is that everyone can make a movie.