Liam Ford Band playing at Sonny’s Pizzeria Bar & Grill in Fish Creek, Fall Fest 2011.

Wrapping up the season, I filmed the The Liam Ford Band playing at Sonny’s Pizzeria Bar & Grill in Fish Creek, Wisconsin on Saturday evening, October 15, 2011. Early Thomas describes them as “phychobilly, rockabilly” and they do not disappoint! I was captivated by this band of musicians not only in listening to their songs but also in conversation afterwards. Their deep knowledge and love for traditional rock and roll and the artists who helped to create the songs and rockabilly country tradition was impressive. They were a real treat to watch and listen to as hopefully evidenced in the video!

My Sony pro 3-chip camera was in the repair shop, so I ventured on an experiment using two Kodak Zi8 pocket cameras, just to see what kind of quality could be achieved. I was careful to adjust the sound levels and the light settings in advance and then edited both of the clips into a composite. It was fun to see what can be done on a shoestring budget.

Anticipation builds as “The Tunnel” secures global distribution to BitTorrent’s 100+ million software users.

BitTorrent, Inc. a leading innovator creating advanced technologies to efficiently move large files across the Internet, announced today that “The Tunnel” will be the first Australian film release selected for BitTorrent’s Artist Spotlight program, promising worldwide distribution through the company’s two software products – BitTorrent Mainline and the iconic µTorrent.

“The buzz around this film is astonishing,” says Shahi Ghanem, chief strategist at BitTorrent. “These progressive Australian filmmakers have captured the public’s imagination by funding the project through an entirely new model: the sale of single frames. This affords them the freedom to allow the world to openly enjoy and share the film. We are very excited to be a part of this new chapter in history. We hear only a few frames are left for sale, so we encourage our users to act fast.”

“We are really excited about our partnership with BitTorrent and their ongoing support of independent artists. The BitTorrent technology provides a direct connection to a massive audience all around the globe. It is definitely a new and exciting distribution path for independent filmmakers who have a story that they want people to see,” says co-producers/writers Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvey.

“The Tunnel” will debut on BitTorrent on May 18^th. People may download the film free via BitTorrent’s App Studio, purchase frames, view trailers, read more about the film’s background and connect with the filmmakers on social media. BitTorrent will also promote the film on BitTorrent.com and µTorrent.com, as well as feature the film to new users who download either software product. “The Tunnel” will also be featured on Vodo.net, a UK-based company dedicated to helping independent filmmakers leverage the benefits of the global file sharing community.

“To see movies such as ours welcomed into the BitTorrent ecosystem marks a significant step in the adoption of the technology as a legitimate film distribution platform. And whilst we might be the first Australian film, I have a feeling we certainly won’t be the last,” said executive producer and marketing director, Ahmed Salama of DLSHS.

“The Tunnel” has received significant attention from mainstream media around the world and was a hit at the A Night Of Horror Film Festival in March. It’s a classic horror film set amidst abandoned underground train tunnels beneath Sydney’s CBD. In 2008, chasing rumours of a government cover-up and urban legends surrounding the sudden backflip, investigative journalist Natasha Warner led a crew of four into the underground labyrinth.

They went down into the tunnels looking for a story – until the story found them.

“The Tunnel” chronicles their harrowing ordeal. With unprecedented access to the recently declassified tapes the crew shot in the claustrophobic subway tunnels, as well as a series of candid interviews with the survivors, viewers come face to face with the terrifying truth.

This never before seen footage takes viewers deep inside the tunnels bringing the darkness to life and capturing the raw fear that threatens to tear the crew apart, leaving each one of them fighting for their lives.

“The Tunnel” has already partnered with traditional Australian distributors – with a DVD release through Transmission Films and its world TV premiere on Showtime Premiere, May 18 at 10:35 pm.

About BitTorrent

BitTorrent creates advanced, innovative technologies to efficiently move large files across the Internet. The company’s two main products today include the original BitTorrent software and the tiny-but-mighty µTorrent, which combined boast over 100+ million users. BitTorrent is based in San Francisco, Calif. For more information, visit bittorrent.com, and follow on Twitter @bittorrent, or Facebook.

The Soundworks Collection is a Vimeo channel whish currently includes 65 videos and has 1,164 subscribers

The SoundWorks Collection is dedicated to profiling the greatest and upcoming “sound minds” from around the world providing a look at the art of foley sound enhancement in the film industry. The Collection is produced by Director Michael Coleman of Colemanfilm Media Group in a partnership with MIX Magazine, several audio focused college schools and programs and the support of the online sound community worldwide.

The SoundWorks Collection takes you behind the scenes and straight to the dub stage for a look into audio post-production feature films, video game sound design, and original soundtrack scoring. This exclusive and intimate video series focuses on individuals and teams behind-the-scenes bringing to life some of the worlds most exciting projects. Here’s an example:

The Sound of “Salt” from Michael Coleman on Vimeo.

SoundWorksCollection.com
facebook.com/​SoundWorksCollection
twitter.com/​soundworksvideo

Winnebago Man (2009), an American documentary feature film directed by Ben Steinbauer, is made available by Fandor, a curated service for exceptional independent films on demand.

Jack Rebney is the most famous man you’ve never heard of: an RV salesman whose hilarious, foul-mouthed outbursts circulated on VHS tapes in the 90s before turning into a full-blown Internet phenomenon in 2005, seen by 20 million people worldwide. Filmmaker Ben Steinbauer goes in search of Rebney and finds him living alone on a mountain top, unaware of his fame. Winnebago Man is a laugh-out-loud look at viral culture and an unexpectedly poignant tale of one man’s response to unintended celebrity.

Originally intended as an inside joke, the video spread across the globe earning the salesman the title of “The Angriest Man in the World“. The documentary explores the story of the clip’s origin and how, two decades later, it affects the man who never even knew it existed.

The film premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas on March 14, 2009 and opened theatrically on July 9, 2010 at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in New York, before expanding nationally.

ABOUT FANDOR:
As a Fandor syndication partner we are able to provide a unique collection of streaming Pay Per View Films that are unavailable elsewhere. Once the rental is purchased, it can be viewed here or on the Fandor site. Once your payment for a film has been processed, Fandor will send an email to the email address you provided containing a URL link to the film you have selected. You may either watch the film here or at the URL provided in the email. When you rent a film, you have 30 days from the date your payment is authorized and processed to start watching the film. Once you have started watching a film, you have 48 hours to complete your viewing. Problems must be reported immediately by emailing support@fandor.com outlining the nature of the error and the title of the film you were trying to view.

A screening of “Wo Ai Ni (I Love You), Mommy” followed by a discussion with the film’s director, Stephanie Wang-Breal kicks off 3-day NALIP Workshop,

Stephanie Wang-Breal is fortunate to have a foothold in two worlds. Born in the USA to Chinese speaking parents, she is fluent in English and Mandarin. Nonetheless, she had to interview more than a hundred families before she found the right one to work with. She invested a good deal of her own money to launch the film project but eventually managed to secure significant additional funding to see her film reach completion.

In production, Stephanie found that her role as filmmaker would at times include that of translator and thus, she was reluctantly drawn in as a supporting actor in her own film. As documentaries often do, the project took on a life of its own. Her efforts have resulted in the creation of a remarkable record of the pairing and bonding of Fang Sui Yong, an 8-year-old Chinese orphan girl and the Sadowskys, a Jewish family from Long Island, New York.

Stephanie also touched lightly on another kind of second life that controversial documentary films must now inhabit – the one that is spawned on blogs and in discussion boards across the Web after a film is released. Not all of these “reviews” have been positive, but they fault the subject and not the film. In some ways this too can be seen as a success, exposing the issue to public scrutiny and fostering a passionate debate. Stephanie Wang-Breal is winning awards for her thought-provoking work, including her most recent, “Best Emerging Director in a Documentary Feature” at the Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) in New York.

I’d like to extend a thank-you to the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) and to Stephanie Wang-Breal for providing such an unusual opportunity. “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy” will be broadcast on PBS: POV on August 31, 2010.

LINKS:

Wo Ai Ni Mommy Official Website

www.facebook.com/pages/wo-ai-ni-mommy

The Oscar-winning documentary film has been edited by Japanese distributor Unplugged, blurring out faces of fishermen and police, inserting tickers that express opposing points of view in parts where opinions differ.

If that’s not bad enough,  3 of the 26 theaters that planned to screen the film have backed off, canceling their scheduled screenings after threats of violence and intimidation. Japanese nationalists call the film anti-Japanese and claim that foreigners are trying to disrupt a 400-year-old tradition.

But scientists and environmental activists agree that one of the most important issue affecting the Japanese people is not about saving sea mammals. Dolphin and whale meat has been found to be very high in mercury says Tetsuya Endo, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido and one of the world’s foremost authorities on mercury levels in dolphins and whales caught off Japan’s coastal waters. He has shown in studies conducted on hair samples taken from residents of  Taiji, Japan who eat the whale and dolphin meat sold in local stores, that they have extremely high concentrations of mercury in their bodies.

The Monday, July 5, 2010 edition of CBC’s As it Happens radio show features an interview with Ric O’Barry who had a lead role in the film and just returned from Japan. He was once the dolphin trainer on TVs “Flipper,” who has become a committed campaigner against dolphin abuse.

“Alejandro is on the radio. Fuck it sounds so good, we did it little monsters,” – tweets Lady Gaga.

The dissolution of boundaries between music, art, theatre, dance and film, underway since the launch of MTV: Music Television in 1981, occasionally spawns elegant short form works of cinematic fine art. I must admit that last month, I scoffed at Time magazine’s inclusion of Ladt Gaga in their recent list of the 100 most influential people of the year… but I now withdraw that opinion. Alejandro, her latest video, fashioned with director and photographer Steven Klein, is crafted in the genre of an early Fritz Lang cinema noir masterpiece and immediately brings to mind scenes from Metropolis.

The latest Gaga video also reminds me of a rule I personally attribute to Ingmar Bergman – that each and every frame of a film should be so well composed that it could be printed as a still photograph and exhibited in a gallery. Allejandro exhibits that kind of attention to detail in Klein’s careful framing, form and placement of everything and everyone. It may be surprising to realize that Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video, also a Klein creation, was released 25 years ago. The comparisons are obvious…

As an ex-Catholic, I have always enjoyed the irreligious subtext in Klein’s work with Madonna and now with Lady Gaga. Alejandro is rich, dark and elegantly erotic. I am glad to be converted at last to just another Gaga worshiper, one of her little monsters.

Working with Debra Hadraba is an effortless “task” thanks to her innate capacity to spontaneously animate her songs. She calls it “working from the heart.” There has been much written about the heart-mind connection. Lots of it covers all of the negative emotions and their effect on health and well being. But there is another school of thinking that delves into “heart-smartness.”

Doc Lew Childre and Howard Martin, authors of The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath’s Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart’s Intelligence have a lot to say on the subject. One Amazon reviewer explains, “The “intelligence” that they focus on refers to both the heart’s “brain,” or the 40,000 neurons found in the heart (the same number in the brain itself), and the intuitive signals the heart sends, including feelings of love, happiness, care, and appreciation.”

This seems to be the same wavelength Debra operates on…

Together we are learning to create a whole new spectrum of “enhanced CDs” – ones that not only include regular music that plays in any standard electronic device, but also an additional collection of multi-media content accessible through a computer. The “Time on Fire” CD will include video e-books, our music videos, lyric sheets and more.

You can find out more about her work, order a copy of “Time on Fire” – and if you act before midnight on December 21, 2009 your name can be listed on the CD jacket as a Sustaining Patron. Details are at her Website: HonorYourTruth.com.

Special thanks to my neighbor, Kevin Nordahl for building and igniting the enormous bonfire featured in the above…

“In verse studies, scholars count syllables, feet and stresses; in film studies, we time shots.”

I accidentally discovered the databases at Cinemetrics, where you can look up movie statistical information like Average Shot Length (ASL) to see graphic maps of the data in order to visually understand the flow dynamics of any of 3,295 currently listed films.

Many recent films display an ASL of under five seconds per shot: “The Departed” (3.2 seconds), “Dreamgirls” (2.5 seconds), “Casino Royale” (3.4 seconds), “Sweeney Todd” (4 seconds). On the other hand, some films have notably longer ASLs: “The Darjeeling Limited” (8.2 seconds), “There Will Be Blood” (13.5 seconds), “Paranoid Park” (16.5 seconds).

It would be easy to calculate the average shot length of any film by dividing the running time by the total number of shots but, Cinemetrics goes much further… The Cinemetrics Software Tool is a free, downloadable application or online device created by statistician and computer scientist, Gunars Civjans that lets you analyze, record and submit the sequential scene length of any film to the database – including your own. There are two statistics modes available: the simple mode and the advanced mode. Simple mode only records the frequency of shot changes. The advanced mode allows up to eight buttons to be used to record the different types of shots.

From this data you can study the trendlines of any film. If advanced mode was used to record movie data, a table containing statistical data for each shot type will be displayed.

“Taking shot lengths of a running movie is a manual operation performed in real time, and like any such operation – driving a car or playing a video game – it, too, takes a little practice and patience to master,” explains the author of 10 User tips from Yuri Tsivian.

Cinemetrics has a second database that presents the data created by Barry Salt: “The basic idea behind my methods of statistical style analysis is that the form of films noticeably differ from one to another, and that the variables used to study this should be based on the concepts that film-makers actually use.”

Barry Salt tabulates and analyzes change in camera angle and the variations in depth of shot in the data he provides and in his latest work, Moving Into Pictures, a follow up to his ground-breaking, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. The creation of a film begins to rival the composition of a symphony when approaching the process from an in-depth consideration of the full range of movie dynamics.

I just discovered the free version of XtraNormal and could not resist creating a short anime… 3 hours later:

The more I use it the more value I am discovering, especially in experimenting with the flow of shots and camera angles. It has limits, but it allows me to begin creating a rough draft, bench testing a screenplay as it takes shape. It’s like using a talking, animated storyboard. Add in the free Celtx project planner andyou are ready to start work on crafting a film, video, a stage play, machinima, an ad, a video game, music video, videocast – whatever method you use to deliver your story.

Now, I am hooked. It only took a brief exposure and I am finding all sorts of reasons to  ante up for the pro version (for $39.95 per year.) The XtraNormal animation system is a great learning environment – one where I can type in the words of a script and then the auto-robots speak the dialogue, inserting pauses and gestures as I require. Lots more features and character choices with the Pro version… Here’s what evolved from my first effort above after I moved up to the Pro version:

This animation, done for my girlfriend Debra, is pushing 500 views in just a few days online at her Braveheart Women blog. So, it will become a regular series.

Dave Kaminski provides an alternative in a video revue of GoAnimate.com in this post. That program is a bit less complex – with the dialogue taking place in text bubbles like in a newspaper cartoon strip. It features repetitive motions rather than synchronized animation – but it’s free and also fun.