News from the world of documentary lawsuits.
Woman Declares Chris Rock's Documentary 'rip-off', Case Dropped
A judge in Los Angeles District Court dismissed a plagiarism lawsuit against Chris Rock that claimed the comedian lifted a woman's ideas when he filmed a documentary about African-American hairstyles.
On Wednesday I'm giving a lecture in one of my classes on editing chase scenes. I've given it a few times before, and it's usually a pretty big hit -- it seems to really help students get a handle on some basic editing concepts.
They may never edit a chase scene, but the bigger point is that they learn to develop a rational plan to make an otherwise complicated and confusing set of shots seem completely coherent, comprehensible, and clear.
We look at clips from about a dozen films, and illustrate the ideas below.
BIG IDEAS OF CHASE EDITING -- AND HOW THEY APPLY TO ALL EDITING
1. IDENTIFICATION
How do we know which character is which? Does one wear a white cowboy hat and the other a black one? Does one have a red car and the other blue? Is the pickup basketball game shirts versus skins?
2. LANDMARKS
If we see the leader pass the big red building, then ten seconds later the other, we know how far apart the characters are. Often, a camera will stay at a landmark position, and pan from one character to another.
3. ADVANTAGE
If a car is chasing a moped, the car has a clear advantage. But when the moped goes into the subway and the car driver follows on foot, now the moped has the advantage.
4. STATUS AND STRENGTH
Is a character gaining or falling behind? A shot where the camera is pulling away, or where the character is catching up to the camera may tell us. A shot with both characters in it might reveal the relative status as well.
5. EMOTIONAL STATE AND ATTENTION
We want to know what the character is thinking, feeling and doing -- so a cut to a shot through the windshield might reveal the character's expression. Or a cut to the foot on the brake might tell us what's happening. Or a closeup on the gear shift. Make careful note of where the character looks -- the next shot might be their "point of view."
6. CAMERA POSITION
A camera can be low in the front of a car, can look out the rear window, can sit in the passenger seat, can look down at the brake pedal -- and all of these shots are useful. It can run alongside the moped as it plunges down the stairs. It can turn to watch the car streak by. It can shake, float, or fly.
7. SCREEN DIRECTION
If a car goes from screen left to screen right, we expect it to keep doing that unless we some change -- a shot where it turns, or where we "move" into the car before coming back out. And we expect the car chasing to also maintain consistent screen direction -- unless we see a change happen.
8. SOUND
If we cut from the big black car to the little red sports car -- should the sound change right on that cut? Or should it change in other ways? Do we want to hear the sound of the car coming toward us, then going away?
9. TAKE A PACING BREATHER
Even in a short chase, all go-go-go action wears thin. It's usually more exciting to have a lot of action, then a tiny pacing "deep breath" before the big finish.
10. CUT TO THE CONSEQUENCES
That tank chasing the laser-guided skateboard just knocked over every fruit stand in aisle 19. Maybe we could cut back to see what happened, and the angry manager shaking her fist at us? Or maybe our wheel can't take much more and is starting to wobble -- maybe a closeup to reveal that?
Is it just me, or is a lot of the current conversation about the future of film distribution very similar to the discussions folks had in the early 90s about the future of the Web?
I have a book about the "future of art" on my shelf, printed just as the World Wide Web came along. Its predictions are completely wrong. I remember all the excitement about media moving to CD-R. That's faded away, though you could certainly do that today easily -- but no one wants to. And I remember many people who were very adamant that they would never read on a computer screen or buy online. Others said they'd never visit a page with advertising.
I streamed a live video conference in 1997, put streaming video online not that long after that, and have made a lot of work for the Web -- so I'm not surprised by the changes that have happened.
What I don't get, the part that is surprising to me, is how flat-footed people in the film production world have been caught by the changes. I think it's being explained in the wrong terms: it's not that you can't make a film, and it's not that you can't distribute a film. Those things are actually easier than ever. The problem is that they no longer make financial sense. The financial system in place works fine at a certain scale, but doesn't work under the new conditions. There's pressure to make Transformers 8 or a YouTube video of your hamster.
The stuff in the middle -- the good stuff -- needs a new model.
Does Wes Anderson's Director of Photography really think he's a butthead, or is this a planned P.R. stunt? Either way, today's Los Angeles Times article on the retro stop-motion process behind The Fantastic Mr. Fox is a very interesting read.
Fur flies on 'Mr. Fox'
Not everyone could muster a magnanimous word for Anderson's M.O. -- especially his on-set absence. "I think he's a little sociopathic," cinematographer Oliver said. "I think he's a little O.C.D. Contact with people disturbs him. This way, he can spend an entire day locked inside an empty room with a computer. He's a bit like the Wizard of Oz. Behind the curtain."
Informed of Oliver's discontent, Anderson said: "I would say that kind of crosses the line for what's appropriate for the director of photography to say behind the director's back while he's working on the movie. So I don't even want to respond to it."
A while back -- on April Fool's Day, unfortunately -- I posted about IMDB Web Series Credits. Casey McKinnon had just announced the result of her conversation with Col Needham, IMDb founder and managing director: IMDB would be creating a Web series category.
She's still waiting, and has an update....
I want my… I want my… I want my Web TV!
"How much longer do we need to wait? How much longer must we submit our web series as “TV Series” or (straight to DVD) “Video” titles? I sent Needham an email the other day asking for an update, and just sent an email through the IMDb contact page last night. If you’re a producer with the same concerns, I suggest trying to touch base with them through your own networking channels. Let’s get this pushed through!!!"Of course, maybe IMDB has been busy. They did, after all, add Twitter.
What's the right length for a film? Esquire Magazine makes one argument:
The 90-Minute Movie: Because 80 Minutes Is Too Short, and 100 Is Too Long
They could have cut out the entire China subplot from The Dark Knight — easily 20 of that movie's 152 convoluted minutes — with no effect on your enjoyment or comprehension of the film. And was it me, or did the fifth hour of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button start to drag?Also, the list of films shortlisted in the Academy Awards short documentary category was released this week: almost all of them, as usual, 39 minutes long. Many are really films made for the 52-minute television hour, but cut down to 39 to take a shot at Oscar recognition. No nomination? Put 13 minutes back in, go to cable. (There have been a few exceptions over the years, notably the 17-minute Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story (2006) by Nathaniel Kahn.)
Thirty-seven films were submitted in the short doc category and on Friday the Academy's documentary branch released a list of the eight films that have been short-listed. Three to five of them will be nominated when the nominations are announced on Feb. 2.Above: The Quad, on 13th Street.
Many of the films from the International Documentary Challenge can now be viewed on Snagfilms. Above: Marathon Women, a 5-minute doc made by two friends of this blog for the 2007 competition. Enjoy, and remember you can "snag" the film and embed it anywhere.
With all the talk of documentary distribution, I guess one tried-and-true plan hasn't been discussed enough. That's right: suing the heck out of somebody.
Chris Rock sued over Good Hair film
Kimbell said she screened the film for Rock back in 2007 on the set of Everyone Hates Chris. Like Good Hair, My Nappy Roots traces the business and cultural history of black hair care and interviews celebrities about their hair stories. It has been shown at colleges and film festivals since its completion in 2006.
Today I taught my editing class, emphasizing smart and fast technique. When the students came in, each computer was ready to edit -- but the mouse was hanging off the desk, useless.
"Don't touch it," I told them. "The mouse is for weak-minded people. Today we edit like adults."
Which was true, and by the end of the class even the most hesitant students were able to make subclips and perform insert and overwrite edits with keys-only technique. It was very .... grown up.
Except for one thing: we were editing clips from a Three Stooges movie.
Look, here's the deal: the concept of "persistence of vision" was discredited decades ago. People who write about it and tell me it's a very important concept are dumb. It's not even a coherent idea, which tells me these "writers" are just taking the ideas handed down to them from other people and pretending to understand them -- and then they are "teaching" those ideas as if they were true. Makes one wonder what else they are teaching.
So, in the interest of public service I'm going to start calling people out on it. I'm going to start pointing and laughing at people who write about "persistence of vision" as if it were still a valid idea.
Just so you understand how long this has been discredited as an idea:
THE MYTH OF PERSISTENCE OF VISION REVISITED
That paper was published in the Journal of Film and Video in 1993, and it complains that a previous paper -- published in 1978 -- hasn't put a dent in the constant renewal of this discredited notion. They point out it really has been proved wrong SINCE 1912, yet keeps returning.
So, who's "teaching" about the importance of "persistence of vision" today?
Understanding Video: A Video Primer for Photographers
by The Luminous Landscape.
"Because of something called the "persistence of vision" (the human eye hangs onto what it sees for a small while) these two fields merge in our brains. Incidentally, it's this persistence of vision that allows us to see a 24 frame per second movie as continuous motion rather than a series of flickering still images."That's simply not true. Stop it, please. Ask yourself: why do I think this is true? Has anyone ever shown me that it's true? Or have I just heard it or read it somewhere -- and believed it? If you can't verify it, why are you teaching it? What do you mean by images "merging" in our brain? How do you know that? What evidence do you have for it? If there's none, please stop publishing it.
One swallow does not make a summer, but two documentaries on USB flash drives? I think that marks a trend.
Mann releases mushroom doc on USB stick
Canadian director Ron Mann is testing a new method of movie distribution, releasing his documentary Know Your Mushrooms on a customized USB stick. The Toronto-based filmmaker was in the U.S. promoting his new doc — which follows mushroom-hunting gurus and explores mushroom culture — when he discovered a company that creates these flash drives in different shapes, including that of a mushroom.Limited Editions and Blu-ray Disc!
We’re pleased to announce two limited-edition versions of Objectified designed by our friends over at Build, and the Blu-ray disc edition of the film. Available for pre-order now! USB Limited Edition: Fixed media? Meh. We’ve put a digital copy of the DVD on a tiny, custom-printed 16gb USB drive. Copy the file to your hard drive, watch the movie, and then use the nice little USB stick for all the things you normally use a USB stick.
indieWIRE has more on an incident that will surely appear in future textbooks on documentary ethics: what happens when the subject of your film says they lied?
“Desired” Director Zenovich Responds To Polanski Prosecutor’s “Lies”
Zenovich said that the day she filmed Mr. Wells at the Malibu Courthouse, he gave her a one-hour interview. “He signed a release like all my other interviewees, giving me permission to use his interview in the documentary worldwide,” she said. “At no time did I tell him that the film would not air in the United States.”
She went on to say she is “astonished” that Wells has changed his story. “Mr. Wells was always friendly and open with me,” she said. “At no point in the four years since our interview has he ever raised any issues about its content. In fact, in a July 2008 story in The New York Times, Mr. Wells corroborated the account of events that he gave in my film… It is a sad day for documentary filmmakers when something like this happens.”
A little documentary ethics question: if you make a documentary, and many people cite it as evidence in an international legal battle, and then your interview subject admits that he lied about a key piece of information that became central to the film -- just made up the story -- what's the next step?
I ask this hypothetically, of course.
On my other blog, some ranting about the news.
Above: a much less unpleasant snapshot from a subway station. You guess which one.
So Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, and Pentax all have useable HD modes in their DSLRs now.
All have problems, the Panasonic GH1 being the smartest of the bunch so far -- and the closest to useable for documentary video. (The Canon 7D is also creating a lot of excitement among doc makers -- but the Panasonic still has the best implementation to date. It's just that people love their Canons, and associate it with "professional" and Panasonic with "consumer" cameras -- even though Panasonic has done wonderful things in video camcorders.)
Yet Sony -- which has pushed forward some very smart, very price-savvy products very quickly in its DSLR offerings but not gotten the respect it deserves -- says they won't implement video until it is fully cooked.
That's fine, just get cooking soon, Sony.
Above: an iPhone snap from last night's class.
My current train reading -- read in 20 minute bursts via my iPhone -- is Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction by Patricia Aufderheide. I'll write something on it when I'm finished. That will take a few more train rides.
A new round of geniuses. Don't have to put that in quotes, really.
For MacArthur Grants, Another Set of ‘Geniuses’
...other winners in the arts who have received public recognition are the documentary maker James Longley, 37, who explores Middle East conflicts with portraits of communities under stress;...
Today was the last day teaching linear editing. We're moving on to those newfangled computer thingies. Now the real fun begins.
One of the most common questions my students ask is about rates for video production. I tell them it can vary greatly, depending on many factors.
For example, are you sleeping with a presidential candidate?
For John Edwards, the Drama Builds Toward a Denouement
"The prosecutors are also examining some $114,000 paid by the Edwards campaign to Ms. Hunter for a series of short campaign videos she produced. About $14,000 of that money was paid to her well after the videos were produced, some through transfers from accounts and listed as for furniture purchases."Maybe it really is A Golden Age For Shorts
