This afternoon i've expended (not wasted, but, used, when I should have been working) a bunch of time reading tweets and blog posts and news articles all about the case of Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and alleged rapist of 2 Swedish women, and the larger meta-issue of the people standing up to defend Assange and attack his accusers, like filmmaker Michael Moore and MSNBC personality Keith Olbermann. There have been so many great feminist blog posts about this, and tons of backlash on Twitter against Moore using the hashtag #MooreandMe. I won't go into the details myself but will just link to this excellent and concise little summary on the Feminist Frequency blog, which has links to a bunch of other blogs and stories that you can delve into.  The last link there is to another blog that deftly explains at the end where we're at now, specifically for Olbermann and Moore (and I've sort of written the same on Facebook, though not as well), but also in general for anyone who screws up with these kinds of tricky issues that involve opression and power and social conditioning:

They have the opportunity to apologize. Because being a good progressive? Is all about fucking up.
If we’re ever to break the myth of the flawless progressive hero — a myth that is unproductive, a myth that breaks hearts — we need to start learning how to recover from mistakes. Because they happen; casual racism, sexism, rape apologism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, ageism, classism… Those things happen because we were taught to make them happen. Now we need to teach ourselves to stop them. Sure, we need to expect more. But expecting more doesn’t mean expecting perfection, the first time, every time. Expecting more is about making mistakes, being called out, engaging and learning from them. We learned that shit in pre-school.

So Moore and Olbermann should just fess up and say they're sorry. They didn't think it through quite enough. I don't think they went into it wanting to apologize for rapists. They were blinded a little bit by a focus on other issues, and on the fact that they're white men in a patriarchal rape culture society. They made a mistake. They should have said that yesterday. But they can still say it now. I hope they do. I hope when I make more stupid boneheaded white male mistakes, as i surely will at some point, I'll recognize it fast and apologise right away like they should have. Read more>>>

In the last issue of Filmmaker Magazine, there's a section (print edition only) called "Letters To A Young Producer." I'm not a producer, exactly, nor do I want to specialize in that, but there are lots of good bits of advice and stories by several working "indie" producers. The last one, Noah Harlan, says an interesting thing:  basically, if you're producing films with budgets of at least 2 million dollars, that's enough to make a living as a producer, from your fees.  But, in today's funding/investing climate in the filmmaking world, he's unable to pull himself into that bracket.  There are no films being made in that bracket. "The mid-budgeted indie is gone."

Wow.

Is that true? If so it's probably true of directors as well. Possibly it's not true of other roles that are less involved, because they can work on several films a year - grips, camera operators, actors, etc. But producers and directors are kind of sucked into one film at a time for a year or more. Read more>>>

A letter to the editor I just sent to the Tucson Weekly:

 In your November 25th issue you allow Leo Banks to tilt at his same old windmill again. How many more times do we have to be subjected to the same old hyperbolic sob story?  Every one of Banks' articles, which you insist on putting on your cover several times a year, can be summarized quite easily and uniformly: "poor, poor, yet noble, rancher-folk, their lives made so hard and dangerous by the nasty brown people coming over the border and the feds who let them! oh let's wring our hands and shed a tear for the once-beautiful and now ruined cowboy borderlands!"  But these people aren't real cowboys (Ask Chilton, for instance, what his day job is and if he doesn't lie to you, he'll admit he's a banker), and the land has already been largely ruined by the emaciated animals that they insist on grazing there despite the unprofitability of such a hobby.  

Furthermore, ask TPD to draw a map of assaults in the Tucson city limits and you'll no doubt get a bloodier and longer list than you provide for this latest Banks tirade.  And never a mention of the root causes of the phenomenon, that the smugglers and undocumented immigrants (or "illegals" as you so hatefully call them) are out there in the deadly desert and mountains because right-wing politicians put them there with border policies that started in the mid-90s, and with trade policies that started in the 50s or earlier. 

Does it ever occur to you that the credibility of your paper drops every time you print one of Banks' one-sided rants?  The only people that take him seriously are the ignorant, right-wing nutjobs that already believe the alarmist narrative he's pedalling, and i would think that your readership is surely slanted more toward the opposite side of the spectrum.  The young and hip club-goers and artsy folk who actually use your rag (admittedly only to check movie times and read the comics) know that Leo Banks is a racist blowhard, not a real journalist. So why bother with him? I guess because he's a friend of yours, part of the TW old boys' club? And nobody else will give him a job? Oh yes, and because that's a way to get people like me to pick up a copy, get annoyed, and contribute our eyeballs to your theoretical ad impressions count. That's the name of the game, I guess: Controversy, hate, and sensationalism sells.  But take heed - I and all the smart people I know in town are less and less likely to frequent your pages, with every Banks screed we see. Read more>>>

A pilot originally shot for the web has been picked up by CBS for adaptation to a television series. It's a comedy about security at an airport. You can see their trailer on vimeo.
According to Deadline, the budget was $70K, though it's unclear to us if that's just to shoot the above trailer or if there's more to it (actual episodes) that were produced. Read more>>>

For the last couple of months work has been proceeding on color-correction and color-grading.

Using Apple's Color software, the correction is straightforward, simply fixing the minor discrepencies in light and exposure that the different shots occasionally have. Then there's color grading, which is actually creating a "Look" for some of the scenes. In TOTL there are really 3 looks: the news show, behind the scenes at the studio, and scenes in the "outer world". Grading the scenes is a matter of sorting the scenes into these categories and coming up for an interesting, distinct look in terms of color and contrast and brightness.

I've also just recently read "Everything Is Illuminated", the first novel by young literary wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer. It's a heart-wrenching story of a jewish village in Ukraine utterly destroyed by the Nazis, and a young man 50 years later trying to find traces of his relatives there.

The thing that makes it relevant to TOTL is that the story is in the form of alternating sections, some written by Jonathan, and some written by the Ukrainian translator who he hires to help him find the village. The translator, Alex, writes his sections of the book and letters to Jonathan in which he discusses what he thinks of Jonathan's chapters and the corrections and changes Jonathan asks him to make to his chapters. In one passage he questions some of the poetic license they are taking with reality:

We are being very nomadic with the truth, yes? The both of us? Do you think that this is acceptable when we are writing about things that occurred? If your answer is no, then why do you write about Trachimbrod and your grandfather in the manner that you do, and why do you command me to be untruthful? If your answer is yes, then this creates another question, which is if we are to be such nomads with the truth, why do we not make the story more premium than life? It seems to me that we are making the story even inferior. We often make ourselves appear as though we are foolish people, and we make our voyage, which was an ennobled voyage, appear very normal and second rate. We could give your grandfather two arms, and could make him high-fidelity. We could give Brod what she deserves in the stead of what she gets... it could be perfect and beautiful, and funny, and usefully sad, as you say... I do not think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.

I find this fascinating, especially given that the novel is based on Foer's actual trip to Ukraine, but only very very loosely based - he explains in an interview how unremarkable and unsuccessful the real trip was, and the nonfiction book he attempted to write about the experience just was not working.

I did not intend to write Everything Is Illuminated. I intended to chronicle, in strictly nonfictional terms, a trip that I made to Ukraine as a 22-year-old. Armed with a photograph of the woman who, I was told, had saved my grandfather from the Nazis, I embarked on a journey to Trachimbrod, the shtetl of my family's origins. The comedy of errors lasted five days. I found nothing but nothing, and in that nothing - a landscape of completely realized absence - nothing was to be found.... It took me a week to finish the first sentence. In the remaining month, I wrote 280 pages. What made beginning so difficult, and the remainder so seemingly automatic, was imagination - the initial problem, and ultimate liberation, of imagining. My mind wanted to wander, to invent, to use what I had seen as a canvas, rather than the paints. But, I wondered, is the Holocaust exactly that which cannot be imagined? What are one's responsibilities to "the truth" of a story, and what is "the truth"? Can historical accuracy be replaced with imaginative accuracy? The eye with the mind's eye?

He opted for this more experimental, more... extrapolated form, in order to get at what Werner Herzog calls the Ecstatic Truth. But even so, he did not go past a certain point. He didn't make everything perfect.

The novel's two voices - one "realistic," the other "folkloric" - and their movement toward each other, has to do with this problem of imagination. The Holocaust presents a real moral quandary for the artist. Is one allowed to be funny? Is one allowed to attempt verisimilitude? To forgo it? What are the moral implications of quaintness? Of wit? Of sentimentality? What, if anything, is untouchable?

With the two very different voices, I attempted to show the rift that I experienced when trying to imagine the book. (It is the most explicit of many rifts in the book.) And with their development toward each other, I attempted to heal the rift, or wound.

Read more>>>

It's been awhile since we've posted news of the process of making Truth On The Line. This post is about where the TOTL project is at but also the meta issue of how communication is done between creators and "fans" of work like this.

We like to promote and support other great creative projects. Kickstarter is a great way to do this and we've thrown down a little green toward a small number of worthy efforts - not a lot of money, just enough to say "hey, I care, you're cool, send me a t-shirt". We've been following with great attention the progress of one microbudget film that we helped fund, and were struck by a recent update from the filmmakers:

It is taking longer than we had originally planned, but that's because we are working very hard to make this the best film possible, and that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of commitment. It has slowed down the process, but we feell (sic) like we are producing a much better movie as we take our time with production. But we are close!

What struck us about this? Well, the cynical, old, tired part of us was struck by the sheer innocence and freshness and, frankly, lack of originality of this rather, frankly, cliched justification for production delays. Doesn't everybody know, already, that making "the best film possible" involves "a lot of effort" and "commitment"?

A less jaded part of us, though, respects this honest, though probably incomplete, attempt to keep everyone posted and placated. Read more>>>

The Not On The Wires blog, peopled by a group of young multimedia reporters, comments on the way storytelling in a now-famous music video can inform how modern journalists do their jobs.

when I heard that Gaga’s latest video was directed by a Steven Klein, a leading photojournalist, I couldn’t wait to see how this photojournalistic approach to composition and style would translate into the moving images of a music video.

Alejandro is 8:43 of painstakingly lit shooting. It may not be to your musical tastes, but there’s no denying the magnetic appeal of this carefully composed and considered piece of video: Read more>>>

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• Original article

Truth On The Line Teaser

This is a brief look at some moments from Truth On The Line's pilot episode, which is in post-production and planned for completion this summer. more information at http://truthontheline.tv

Note that in this teaser there are some post-production rough spots, especially the audio and color correction. Thanks for your patience and imagination in filling in the blanks!

Read more>>>

This is a quick update just to briefly note that post-production is still rolling along.
We're in the middle of working on audio and our screen looks something like this most of the time.

We also recently had a plan for a soundtrack composer fall through and are now looking for someone else. If you know an experienced or semi-experienced soundtrack composer who might be right for this project, please contact us.