A couple of weeks ago I shot out the following tweet: "Dear indie producers: I've seen many indieGoGo projects I'd have contributed to were they on on Kickstarter. Just sayin." I actually tweeted this in relief that Riven was trying to be funded through Kickstarter. I'm not saying this to belittle any filmmaker who is funding or trying to fund through indieGoGo - I have friends who have done so and they have my full respect - however a Kickstarter project suggests to me a higher degree of professionalism. I followed that tweet with: "In other words I'd put $100 toward a $1k movie made for $1k before putting $10 toward a $10k movie made for $1k."

Making a movie is a business venture. Once you want to move past, or do something besides, making zero-budget shorts (don't get me wrong, I love independent cinema on all scales), you're talking about investing large sums of money and you need to be serious about not throwing that money away. indieGoGo allows you to set a budget target for a film; but if you don't hit that target, you walk away with the money and can make the movie anyway. As a prospective investor I have a huge problem with this. The $1,000 movie you make isn't the movie I paid to get made - I paid for the $10,000 version of that move (and hopefully something even better). I understand that the contributions aren't exactly investments and that there are incentives for contributors, but let's get real - unless I'm contributing at a high level, I'm not contributing so much to get a signed DVD copy as I am to see a movie I'd like to see and to see something I believe in come to fruition.

On the other hand, if someone has set up to attempt funding through Kickstarter I know that they've given careful thought to what their budget should be. They've had to plan to pay what it takes to get the movie made, not less and not more. Well, maybe less if they're creative with their financing, but you get the point. If you don't hit your target you don't get to use my money to make a half-ass version of the movie. And your target is probably a reasonably low bid at production cost without being too much of a compromise. And, coming back to the topic of incentive packages, you can actually budget for them because you know how much money they will cost IF you need to fulfill them.

I'm sure that Indiegogo has its perks too, and, as I said, I don't want to criticize filmmakers too harshly that go that route. It just seems to me that in order to properly execute a movie you have to have your shit together. Having the confidence to effectively say, "I will not make this movie unless I can get my shit together," will part my cash from my wallet far faster than otherwise. It did with Riven

If you're interested in finding out more about Dave and his work, check out his website over at Dos Moon.

Made for German television in 1973, this film (actually a 2-part mini-series) - despite moments that may seem cheesy or campy in modern context - was ages ahead of its time and an absolute masterpiece. Artfully shot in 16mm reversal by the great Michael Ballhaus, A.S.C. (The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York and many, many others), the cinematography was absolutely stunning as you can see from the trailer.

Welt am Draht tells the story of a virtual reality computer engineer who finds himself caught in an intrigue that goes straight to the top and beyond. Part thriller, part love story, part dystopia, World on a Wire is all good. I want to stay away from too many plot details because it's actually fairly easy to figure out what's going on watching it in the year 2011. It's pretty familiar subject matter yet it doesn't disappoint on any level.

The film was until recently considered a "lost film;" nearly impossible to see except in low-grade versions on the Internet. In 2010 it received a new release after an amazing restoration. There's really only 1 shot in the film that looks severely degraded and the color and tone are just phenomenal. I highly recommend this for any cinema lover or lover of classic science fiction. If you're in New York, it's playing the rest of this week at IFC Center; but being a three and a half hour movie there's only one mid-day showing. Personally, I think it's worth taking a day off work for; or you can wait for the DVD.

(or, if you're a real film nerd and have a Region 2 DVD Player you can get the DVD below). 

Fan-created videos are nothing new. Some people have been doing it for a long time. Some bands have actively encouraged it, going so far as to hold fan video competitions. I think fan-created videos - and I don't mean photo montages or an iPhone recording of a concert - should be a huge part of the musical landscape. I really feel that, if things were right, fan videos would be every bit as important as artist-created videos.

There are a few gotchas with this. The big one is intellectual property (IP), a horrible plague of mindless litigation that does little more than stifle culture (to be clear, I draw a line between copyright - which was originally designed to reasonably protect creators and publishers - and IP which is an unfettered, nebulous concept aimed at protecting wealth at whatever cost). I learned some things about music licensing with the 52 Weeks Project and I'm applying them to my next project - one that combines my loves of film, music, and technology.

In August I'll be unveilng a new website focused on user-generated music video content. There will be more details with the launch, but for now I'll end by asking the question I started this post with in a different way:

If your ability to make a video for your favorite song were set free, what would that video be?

Music has always been an important part of my life and back then it was all about videos. Things went wrong somewhere and MTV became less important for music fans (while Apple Computer became more important - go figure). Videos still exist but they're hardly the promotional vehicles they once were. It's odd to me that with the ubiquity of media today - particularly video - that video is not a huge part of how we experience music anymore. The opposite should be true. Music videos shouldn't just be something played on TV screens in bars or in clothing stores. They shouldn't have to be something you go searching for on YouTube. 

The art and business of music videos deserves more attention. But in order to do that the art and business of music videos have to do some catching up with the 21st Century. I've got some ideas about how to do that and in the coming weeks I'll be revealing them and talking about what I'm personally doing about it.

Stay tuned people.

I'm honestly not horribly keen on most digital black and white photos and I'm certainly not for converting just for the sake of making an image more interesting than it was in color; but sometimes it makes sense. The subject here was too fun - this guy was just out on Elizabeth Street practicing very short drives with half pint milk cartons (I think they were filled with socks for weight) - and deserved some attention, but the image wasn't really coming alive in color. 

Monday we went to the American Museum of Natural History and visited the Brain exhibit. No brain-based exhibit would be complete without a bit on the senses, and, as a visual artist I was interested to see the portion relating to vision. It was quite attention-grabbing and planted the idea for this post so I went for my phone and grabbed a few sloppy frames as reminders (really, please forgive the quality).

The picure on thel far left is a display where a bunch of lined-up spools of thread form a simple mosaic, but viewed through an orb (like the eye) the inverted image becomes a hazy Mona Lisa. The following panels describe how the brain interprets visual information and resolves it to something clear and familiar. Another display showcased blurred images of easily recognizable celebrities to illustrate how memory can be called upon to intepret even unclear images which increases the processing efficiency of the brain. Where things became really interesting to me was the caption on the above display.

"In the visual cortex at the back of the brain, Some [sic] [neurons] react to specific visual cues, like shapes and colors. Others pick up the signals and put the parts together to sense the whole. the entire process can happen in 1/50 of a second."

The figure of 1/50 of a second grabbed my attention because it's awfully close to the 1/48 sec standard shutter speed of a cinema camera. It seemed interesting how the standard duration of creating an image is so similar in a camera to what it is in the brain. The human visual system is more complicated than that though and it would be inexact to say that the visual cortex processes 50 images per second, but let's use that figure and, for simplicity's sake, think of the brain as having a frame rate. Since the standard frame rate of cinema is 24 frames per second our brains can be thought of as receiving movie images at about half the speed that they can process them.

I understand that the 24fps standard was created for technical reasons but it has, through decades of use, become part of cinematic grammar. To me, higher frame rates - such as 60 or even 30fps - are unattractive in cinematic conditions but perfectly fine while watching sports or broadcast television. Why the difference? I've heard it stated that 24 frames is more in tune with the rhythms of the mind and that watching movies at this rate in a darkened theater creates a dreamlike state. I'm not sure how accurate that is but it's certainly plausible.

All of this got me thinking about the Uncanny Valley, a concept used both in animation and in robotics to describe how the mind is repulsed by objects that look close to being real but not to things that look unreal. For instance, you can accept that Fred Flinstone is a human and you can accept that Fred Sanford is a human; however it's hard to accept, say, the 3D models from Beowulf as human. The mind just rejects it and it's a little creepy. Interestingly, there's a disparity in this effect between moving and still images.

What if the same holds true not just for objects and images approximating a realistic appearance, but also with images approximating realistic motion? Is it possible that motion pictures appear better when the intermitent motion is slower - fast enough for the brain to stitch images together and interpret them as motion but not so fast as to confuse the brain that it is actual reality? It's an interesting thought. What if I'm not put off by high-framerate sports because my brain accepts the subject matter as real whereas it expects fantasy from a movie? If the uncanny valley as it is applied to real-world objects is a defense mechanism then perhaps the same is true when it is applied to viewing motion photography. Is it easier for my brain to accept that the oncoming truck on the screen is not going to actually harm me because it interprets the slower signals as non-reality? Another thing: perhaps we feel this less in our living rooms & on a smaller screen - an environment where reality is more "present" than in a theater. While we may be intellectually aware of the difference in frame rates on a movie broadcast than one projected, it is less uncanny to us in our home. In the theater, though, everything is enlarged and the world around it is dark and my experience of reality is limited to what's going on on the screen. How we experience visual stimulus is conditional and may mitigate or exacerbate the effects of the uncanny valley, but I think the phenomenon may hold true for our experience of movies.

The point of this isn't really to bring up the frame rate debate. I just saw this exhibit and became interested in what it meant. I think it tells us as filmmakers that we should be deliberate and mindful of how we present our work and perhaps that it behooves us to know something about the brain beyond psychology.

I do have another interesting thought though. A couple of big name filmmakers are moving to shoot their 3D movies at 48fps and it's a contentious topic, but after writing this post I'm not so sure it's a big deal. If each eye receives 24 signals a second, the brain will receive 48 "incomplete" (in that each image lacks the stereoscopic dimensionality that the brain is used to) images per second. So, the question (in terms of my uncanny valley hypothesis) is, will 48 "incomplete" images seem as uncanny as 48 (or 60 or 30) "complete" ones and is it significantly worse than 24? If the objective of the visual cortex is to separate presented reality from expected reality then there may not be an issue. If that's the case then Mr. Jackson and Mr. Cameron are probably correct: the smoother presentation of stereoscopic footage at 48fps may indeed present a more canny 3D image.

This is my first attempt at an HDR photograph. I know a lot of folks aren't in to HDR and think it's kind of visually offensive; however I think a lot of that perception comes from  the more extreme examples of HDR images, which tend to look very surreal. On top of impossible color and shading resulting from crazy tone mapping, a lot of these are taken with extreme wide angle lenses that further the abstract appearance. HDR has matured quite a bit though and, as can be seen with the above photo, HDRs can be fairly naturalistic. This photo, a 7-exposure HDR taken at Bethesda Fountain in Central Park was processed with Nik HDR Efex Pro, which I chose to get my feet wet with based mainly on the fact that Nik offers a 15 day full-featured trial; rather than use Photomatix which watermarks trial version images. I've played with a few images now and I'm really enjoying using this software. It comes as a plugin to Lightroom and Photoshop, though so far I've done all my HDR processing right inside of Lightroom and used Photoshop mainly to clean up the image. This was a 7-shot image with people moving through the frame so there was a lot of ghosting artifacts in the processed image. I had to take do some masking with one of the original stills to get the mostly clean image you see above. I have to give thanks to one of my favorite photographers, Trey Ratcliff, whose amazing photography really got me interested in HDR work and whose online tutorial really helped me with the technique. I'm looking forward to creating more of these in the near future.

First thing's first: let's get the 3D chat out of the way. I've written before about how I'm not bothered by stereography. Whether it's a gimmick or not is irrelevant to me so much as the filmmaker's reasons for applying it and how it's used to tell the story. I do not think the idea here was "come for the 3D, stay for the anthropology;" but even if it was, is that such a bad thing if the end result is a little enlightenment? I was interested to see how a serious filmmaker would apply stereo to his story and I wasn't disappointed. Yes, the element of spectacle is ever-present but spectacle and wonderment are at the heart of this documentary. In my opinion the 3D was elemental to this story, which is rooted in cave paintings found in the Chauvet Caves in France - the oldest cave paintings ever discovered and the first examples of human art. I say that 3D is elemental because these paintings are not applied to a flat surface but follow the contours of the cave walls and how you see them is very dependent upon the angle and depth at which you view them. I recall a painting of lions that seems entirely natural at the beginning of a shot but elongates as the camera tracks around the curved wall to reveal a different view which seems natural in its own way. In short, the feeling of presence and sensitivity to the grandeur of the cave was enhanced by the 3D.

It's difficult to say whether Herzog understood the movie he was making or not. The story, such as it is, is told in terms of repetition. We spend quite a bit of time staring at cave paintings, often returning to the most spectacular examples again and again. I think the intention is that each time we return with new eyes. At first we are lured into the overwhelming sense of wonder that one feels when first seeing the cave. It's all about astonishment. The second time we come, we do so as intellectuals - we've met the scientists studying the caves and they've begun to explain the importance of the paintings. We have an armchair anthropologist's comprehension of what the artists were and what world they lived in. From here we start to venture out into the world outside the caves so that we can be given a bit of context. We see demonstrations of how these people might have hunted, how they made music. We see their fascination with sex in the fetishization of the female form. We even get hints of religion and spirituality. We essentially begin to relate to the people who lived here 35,000 years ago. Now properly initiated, we can enter the cave one last time as the film crescendoes into a 10+ minute stereographic montoge set to an intense but simple and exotic score and we can experience the caves as our ancestors did.

Or at least I think that's the idea. Opinions may vary as to whether Mr. Herzong pulls it off or not. I think it's mostly effective and I quite enjoyed the journey. I could see the argument that the film goes on too long and that there's more movie than the subject requires. Even if that is the case, the filmmaker should be applauded for delving deeper into the subject than his medium might be able to support. His thesis is that this may be the very place where the modern human soul was born. I think this is probably true, or at least this is an example of the sort of thing that was happening during this time frame. Neandertahls were roaming Europe at this time and this is certainly where our species began its dominance. It is these primitive - though remarkably elegant - abstractions that began to make us Human. Creativity, self-realization, the recognition of the world around us as something more than just a habitat - Art - through this film Herzog seems to be telling me that it is Art that makes us human and I am glad to share his awe at this opportunity to reach back through time and stand among the first artists.

A moment that might be described as goofy or hokey shows an experimental archaeologist recreating a paleolithic lifestyle for himself. He wears furs as the prehistoric men would have at a time when all of this was under a glacier and he plays for us on a replica of an early flute. Though it seems a bit funny, this is the moment that for me - a music lover and long time musician - has the deepest impact. A flute from over thirty millenia ago is tuned to pentatonics! The song that he plays for us? The Star Spangled Banner. An instrument from a time long before civilization can be used to play the anthem of one of the most advanced nations on the planet now. Nothing can further demonstrate more to me that we today are echoes of the people who drew lions, horses, and bison on the caves of France so many ages ago.