15 minutes of cartoon mayhem, perpetrated by Kip’s Big Boy, Ronald McDonald, the Michelin Man and Ronald McDonald:

Oscar Nominated Short Logorama from Peter Dedene on Vimeo.

Alan Spearman, photojournalist for the Memphis Commercial Appeal, documentarian, and cinematographer for my recent Snowglobe Video is in Haiti right now, covering a group of Memphis Doctors who are there providing post-earthquake relief. His tweets are the kind of tweets that remind you that the internet isn’t just for stupid bullshit. They’re poetic, moving and scary.

ALAN SPEARMAN’S TWITTER FEED IS HERE. FOLLOW HIM @hotelmemphis

Some samples from Alan Spearman’s tweets from Haiti:

diplomats check out the crumbled national palace as naked women give themselves bucket baths and dogs eat trash across the street. queasy.
about 10 hours ago from OpenBeak

they have to improvise a lot here. three eagle scouts are on the team. crile is definitely corporal radar o’reilly. temp. just above hell.
about 15 hours ago from OpenBeak

way hot in O.R. team jokes they could maintain sterilization by operating in the nude. pulling on this man’s junk. ouch! joking 2 maintain.
about 15 hours ago from OpenBeak

p.s. thanks “sunny” for the cipro hookup. god knows what we inhaled today.
8:20 PM Feb 10th from OpenBeak

So, when I posted a link to an article on “Zombie Porn in Art History“, all of a sudden the #1 google search term for this website was “Zombie Porn” and the number one referring city was Berlin.

Perhaps I have Bruce LaBruce to thank. His new gay zombie porno arthouse/filmfest movie “L.A. Zombie” is now at a (gallery? artspace?) called Peres Projects in Berlin.

I have to say, when I read:

“All of my work has been about that line. You can situate yourself on either side of the line without really altering the work itself. I could take a picture for Honcho magazine, but can take the same image and put it in a frame in an art gallery, and it becomes art. For me that speaks to the arbitrary nature of those labels.” A soft-core version of L.A. Zombie will tour film festivals this year. You can expect to find the hard-core DVD gracing the shelves of your favourite sex shop in the spring.

(which comes via Sex Blogs via Salon)

I’m expecting a trailer that at least hints to a core (hard, soft, horror, gay, whatever) more than this one does:

LaBruce’s other gay Zombie movie has a better trailer… And can be streamed instantly on Netflix.

Via: http://offthemountain.tumblr.com/post/363896052/via-mothmilk

When you believe in a product, you model it yourself. I’m glad people are still making these styles of hats.

(Scroll down to skip my rambling and see the trailer for Spike Jonze’s new short.)

If you believe a Wired Magazine article about a crazy-expensive web series you never saw – the future of media is product placement (as laid out in the hilariously titled “Hollywood Has Finally Figured Out How to Make Web Video Pay“).

I kind of don’t buy this for two reasons:

1. People aren’t stupid. Or, at least there’s a threshold to our stupidity. Product placement in a context that’s not overly disruptive to an entertainment experience is deemed to be a worthwhile exchange (for example Mood/L’Oreal/Bluefly as integral parts of every episode of Project Runway – a show about an artform that can’t be separated from commodities.) But, web series as prolonged commercials? Maybe. Maybe, if those commercials are super-fucking-entertaining. But how many cellphone inserts do you think I’ll watch before I click elsewhere? Even if I like a “branded content” webseries – am I going to forward it to a friend?

It all feels a little too much like getting recruited into selling Amway, Tupperware or Avon.

Besides, the stuff of fun entertainment is the stuff that makes advertisers squirm. In the last two weeks, I’ve heard about branded content people having to pull a shot of a girl in a sports bra (a la Brandi Chastain) in a non-sexual context and a shot of a squirt gun that looked like it might be real in a few shots.

So, not only am I supposed to sacrifice the entertainment experience to watch a commercial, I’m supposed to accept that the entertainment will be ludicrously watered-down? Hmmm…

2. Even if you get around people not being stupid – where are you going to distribute your awesome branded content? YouTube is the wild west – maybe you’ll blow out your web series, maybe not. You can hire all kinds of shady click-brokers to get you numbers, but are you going to actually hit the national/international zeitgeist? Most video platforms can only guarantee pretty modest impressions online anyway… So you’re hoping for a windfall, but how do you budget for “hoping for a windfall”?

Also, if your video DOES blow up – as an advertiser – does this mean it’s going to expire (if you’ve bought X number of impressions) or that you’re going to be nickle-and-dimed by a video outlet that underestimated their potential?

What about releasing the files themselves and letting the movie go where it will?

I think this is interesting… Absolut Vodka hired Spike Jonze to make a short film. I’ve found it on Vimeo, and YouTube and even Absolut’s gorgeously designed microsite.

Will it be any good? I don’t know. I’m a huge Spike Jonze fan, and am anti-the anti-hipster backlash against Where the Wild Things Are, etc. It looks interesting. It looks like a real film. It looks like it’s worth half an hour. Will the computer-headed characters sip on Absolut and tonics? Maybe if it’s at a party or bar it’s fine. If not it’s not.

I hope Absolut allows this to be downloaded everywhere. I appreciate that they’re sponsoring a filmmaker that I care about. I like their brand because they have a history of supporting artists in a lot of media. Does it influence my Vodka purchasing decisions? Shit, I don’t know – I don’t buy that much Vodka. I’ve got a bottle of Tito’s in my freezer. But, if I was going to buy Vodka at the Von’s – I’d be game.

Here’s the trailer from YouTube – (Absolut loses points for not letting this be embeded on Vimeo.)

* Making grand proclamations = eating crow. I still think Craig did brilliant work on structure across the short-form/long-form hybrid, but my optimism at “Why $5 Cover will Change Webisodes” is a little embarrassing.

Okay, so I’m two three days late on my indie-film-per-month-in-theater resolution, but last night I saw “Fish Tank” by Andrea Arnold:

It’s brilliant. It’s naturalistic, but has a structured, novel-like complexity that doesn’t come easy to film. The main character, Mia, is a complete badass (less than 5 minutes in, she head-butts another teen in the head and breaks her nose) but contends with a family and an environment that’s so tragic and so bleak you want to rescue her from the movie. It’s a film about characters obsessed with music, and dancing and the lifestyle that comes with the limelight, but when the music comes through Mia’s shitty little speakers you can feel the distance between her and the power of the songs she loves – and how deep she is in the shadows of the dreams she and her sister make out of watching music videos.

The movie has such a light touch, it feels like there was no crew there at all – just a camera floating into the Mia’s life (and her head). I’m a huge fan. If you’re in LA, it’s playing at the Laemmle Sunset 5.

There’s a better blog review here from Ray Pride:

Where’s the novelty in Andrea Arnold’s storytelling?
It’s everywhere, is where it is. The odd critiques of “Red Road” and “Fish Tank” that have asserted Arnold tells familiar stories with familiar characters are off the mark. The live-through-this intensity of her storytelling is charged and fresh.

Next up: TERRIBLY HAPPY

The theme of this post is “compromise”…

#7 Uncompromising is for closers…

(A monologue that bears repeating from Glengarry Glen Ross)

Some time into post on Savage County I was walking out of MTV and saw this poster in somebody’s office:

It reads “THE UNCOMPROMISING DIRECTOR / WHO CREATED FILMS / THAT DEFINED GENERATIONS.”

I think this was at the end of a long day of trying out editorial suggestions I wasn’t that into and I got really, really hung up on the word “uncompromising”. Because, face it – starting out – being uncompromising isn’t a trait that anyone’s going to praise. In fact, they won’t even consider that you deserve to have it. Case in point – discussing Avatar with my boss I mentioned that I was jealous of the kind of control James Cameron had over every frame of the film. He said “Yeah, well – there aren’t a lot of James Cameron’s out there.”

But, James Cameron wasn’t exactly James Cameron back when he was shooting Piranha II: The Spawning (remember? the one where the Piranhas fly?) A lot of people have made a lot of compromises to get to a level at which they’re allowed to be uncompromising.

Making a $250K horror movie means that you’re making a movie out of compromise more than almost any other raw material. I can’t figure out any way to resist this that doesn’t make you seem like a problem to your betters or earn mutiny from your crew (because you’re a dick.)

Which leads to:

#8 So, if you have to compromise, make each compromise an improvement.

Obviously, this is only maybe 75% possible, but it was my mantra on Savage County: “Changes are going to be forced on you… Make them changes for the better.” Which is on the one hand, kind of a uselessly self-help-y platitude, but on the other hand, something that helped to keep me sane and keep me from making complaints that would fall on deaf ears.

I am not wired to be an optimist. I kind of revel in doom and gloom. That’s a slippery slope when you don’t have enough resources – it’s pretty much a formula for negative self-fulfilling prophecy. So, I took each news of “we don’t have X or Y” or “this or that went wrong” or “there’s not enough money to _______” as a chance to revisit my thinking about whatever we were shooting. It sound Pollyanna-ish, but just reminding myself, with each new problem: “This is a chance to make the movie better” was helpful. And, when lots goes wrong, you get a lot of opportunities to re-think.

#9 Compromise can be an opportunity to get the best from your collaborators.

This is obvious, but: everyone working on a film set is a filmmaker (not necessarily a director). It was as true for Savage County as anything. Occasionally, this manifested itself in armchair directing, which I didn’t usually find to be helpful. What was helpful (and what saved the day) is when I could cede control of things that maybe in a perfect Stanley Kubrick/James Cameron world have been fun to take control of to everybody else working on the film.

The lowbrow version of this is to simply prioritize and delegate. But, along with my mantra about change being forced upon me was some sub-mantra about getting the best that people can offer rather than exactly what I want.

This is, after all, the benefit of having a great team – that you can kick challenges to the people you work with (in my case, particularly the DP – Paul DeLumen and Production Designer – Darian Corley) so you’re not stuck in the prioritize/delegate mentality. Why wouldn’t you want to be? You might be on week 3 of not sleeping and maybe you don’t have a brilliant answer to the highest priority problem (“How the fuck am I going to cover this scene in 20 minutes?”).

I guess this is just outsourcing Lesson #9 – with the difference being – sometimes the surprise compromise forced me to challenge myself to do not what I wanted to do, but improvise with something better. Other times, a surprise compromise ended up in me saying “I have no idea how to solve this problem – please help and just be awesome.” And, people were awesome. Both meant I didn’t get to claim the virtue of uncompromising-ness, but both kept things going.

#10 – Not having a release date sucks.

I’m going to guess that I duck the question “when’s Savage County coming out?” three to six times a day. I don’t know. It’s the question that’s supplanted “how do you make money on internet content?” The two questions are interrelated, and because the answer to the second question is “you figure it out as you go… you try stuff… you try other stuff…” the answer to the “when does it come out?” is impossible to answer.

Releasing stuff on the internet means that you’re reinventing the distribution system every time you distribute something. It’s not as simple as throwing stuff up on YouTube or Vimeo, because you spent $250K on it and you need to make the money back.

So, you shuffle your feet and say “well, I know we said February or March, but it most likely won’t be… which isn’t to say I know when it will be…”

#11 – Suck it up and buy a huge-ass hard drive up front.

Dear Drobo: please sponsor me. I will whore myself six ways from Sunday for your fine product.

We’ve been cutting Savage County on a MacPro and 2 Macbook Pros. This means that my big LaCie SATA RAID won’t work on 2 out of our 3 computers. For everything else, we’ve got 2tb LaCie and Gtech hard drives – always duplicates – so 2 drives for all the media. But renders are big and FCP autosaves are big, so there end up being “transpo” drives and “additional media” drives. And if you add up the tabs for all these fucking drives, we would have been better off buying RAIDS (even in duplicate) up front to cut on.

#12 – Before you shoot in Memphis in the summer – buy 30 pairs of these for yourself and your crew:

Snowglobe – Teenage Queen from holycowboy on Vimeo.

UPDATE (2/21/2010): Here’s the YouTube version of the video in Magnet Magazine’s blog.

When I was in Memphis doing ADR for Savage County, I took two days to shoot two videos for Snowglobe – a band introduced to me by Craig Brewer when I was working on his series $5 Cover.

I love Snowglobe. They make smart, sad, funny, catchy music and they’re great guys to boot. Making a music video for a band that I’m really into was one of the things that made making movies seem like a good idea when I first started trying to make movies.

We shot this in 6 hours on a Saturday. It was a joint effort between me, Kate Crowder (another $5 Cover star and lead singer of the band Two-Way Radio), Alan Spearman (filmmaker and photojournalist), and an ARMY of Moms.

We shot it on a rented Canon EOS 5D Mark II (feel free to buy me one if you read this and you’re rich and crazy). We used the lights in the school cafeteria. Savage County editor (and friend and filmmaker) Gabriel Noguez edited it here in LA.

If you like the song, please: FRIEND SNOWGLOBE ON FACEBOOK and, if you really like the song, please buy NO NEED TO LIGHT A NIGHT LIGHT ON A NIGHT LIKE TONIGHT on iTunes or AMAZON
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