New Media Addict
By Dave Thomas
About David
Dave Thomas is the online editor-in-chief of E-Gear. When he's not tracking online trends he likes to make movies, eat pasta or just sit around watching Doctor Who.Silver's Screen
The GOAL of CEA Line Shows
Jun 24, 2010A roar went up at around 11:45 a.m. Wednesday, emanating directly from one corner of the 11th Floor of...
The Letter Box
The Thin Blu Line
Sep 8, 2009The line between technology and content continues to blur....
SXSW 2009 Part One: "The Film Is Not Enough"
I began my SXSW 2009 experience with a lesson in the history of video journalism. Turns out the whole one guy tooling around with a camera shtick is as old as the 50's, and the same questions they were asking then, they're asking now. David Dunkley Gyimah's panel on IM Video Journalism, explored these questions, looking at the tensions between old and new media. For example, does independent video journalism destroy union jobs? (It kinda does.)
Gyimah's panel was exciting for the real world demonstrations of how he does his thing. Picking out a member of the audience to "interview," he demonstrated how one man with a camera can get what appears to be a three-camera interview with some judicious retakes.
He also showed how the ethic of guerrilla filmmaking (shoot with the edit in mind) mixed with the aesthetic of the French New Wave to create the contemporary news style we are used to seeing online. Not to mention the look of filmmakers like Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Ultimatum) or Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men).
The same ideas differentiating a newspaper story from an online news story are bleeding into the difference between a broadcast news story and online news video. Namely, the interactiveness of it all. As Gyimah says, "The film is not enough." To wit, the IM in the title of the panel stands for "Integrated Media." Audio, video, text, conversation, etc. - watch Gyimah talk about the mesh here.
But television journalism isn't the only kind being questioned by the Web. The Incredible Shrinking (Expanding?) Film Critic Profession panel, moderated veteran print critic Gerard Pearson (whose own doc about film criticism, For the Love of Movies, premiered at the fest) explored the role of the print critic in the world of citizen media by having a couple of print and online film critics sound off. They agreed more than they disagreed.
One of the interesting points brought up, and quickly dismissed, is the idea that the death of the local print film critic is killing the art house film. That without an established film critic's blessing, a limited interested film will die an even quicker death. The panel mostly concurred that this was the excuse of a fairly inept marketer, a notion borne out by the fact that whether in print or online, a particular critic can garner a following and, thus, have some degree of influence. In addition, it would seem that the Web would be better at targeting thin slice audiences than any local paper.
In fact, a pervading myth of the whole Web vs. print argument is that the Web destroys authority. The gatekeeping apparatus of established media helps invest people-as-brands (your Roger Eberts) with credibility, helping them to stand out. On the Web, everyone is a critic, so how can anyone stand out?
Yet the Web has produced a host of mavens. The Kathy Sierras of the world stand out because they're good at what they do and they're good at letting people know this, not because they've passed through some top down gate. Granted, the world of online film criticism hasn't produced a Kathy Sierra analog. Then again, if it does, you might never know, as evidenced by the fact that there's a good chance you don't know who Kathy Sierra is.
What the Web produces, more often than not, is a localized form of maven. If I have a particular, narrow interest like, say, interaction design, the Web is really good and letting me know that a lot of people think I should be paying attention to Kathy Sierra. This does not make her a household name, but it does make her known to the people who are passionate about what she is passionate about.
So, when it comes to horror films, for example, I want to know what Scott Weinberg (who, by the way, was on the panel) has to say. Not because he's read by millions nationwide or tens of thousands in my local paper but because I've been able, via the Web, to quickly establish his tastes and voice and find that they are to my liking.
A panel later in the day got back to the real world applications demonstrated in the Journalism panel, just hella-cooler. Soapbox Spielbergs: Making Hollywood FX on Indie Budgets unleashed a bevy of real world tips for the aspiring filmmaker looking to have decent special effects on a budget. Among a variety of green screen tips, for example...
- short hair is easier to shoot against a green screen than long
- use lots of light
- put some distance between your subject and the green screen to avoid shadows
- you can use a plastic tablecloth as a green screen or paint your own using a color that is actually called "chroma key green"
- although creating a green screen is cheap, getting a camera that can shoot it especially well is expensive.
For fake blood...
- it costs much more to buy than to make it
- mix in some blue and yellow food coloring to round out the red food coloring
- add chocolate syrup
For gunplay...
- guns are dangerous. even fake ones. hire a professional stunt coordinator if you're going to use them.
- you can add a muzzle flash in post, but what really sells a gunshot is the bullet hit. use squibs, and hire a professional to work them.
But for all that, some of the best FX are just good sleight of hand editing. If you want to show a guy getting hit by a car, you don't actually have to hit someone with a car. Shoot the car coming. Shoot the guy reacting. Shoot the driver reacting. Shoot a guy lying on the ground. The audience's mind fills in the rest.
An even sneakier application of this was demonstrated when the panel showed us how to kill a guy with a cleaver. It's quite simple actually. You shoot an argument. Someone raises the cleaver. Then you shoot that person throwing the cleaver and as they throw it, you pan the camera really fast to follow the path of the cleaver. So fast that it's a blur (this is called a whip pan). Then you rig the victim up with a fake cleaver in his chest and whip pan in the same direction as the last whip pan except this time you stop on the victim as he staggers and falls. Cut the two blurry parts together and voila, a person throwing a cleaver into someone else's chest and it. looks. real.
Most of these techniques were demonstrated live in front of us like some sort of FX cooking show. They shot an audience member against a green screen and incorporated him into a Tron parody which they rendered and edited during the panel, showing us the final product at the end. Same with the cleaver job. They named names and told us exactly which pieces of software they were using and some cheaper alternatives. Probably the most practical panel I've attended.
