CINEGEAR COMPETITION
CINEGEAR is holding a competition for their second annual film series contest. Here’s what they had to say:
Here’s your chance to win some free film stock, camera rental, lighting rentals, and Lab time. DO IT!
BEST POWERPOINT EVER!
More power point presentations should follow this example. It is the excellent protype for a power point presentation. Watch it first, then read my “in depth” analysis.
It has an elegant design in terms of presenting its information.
It uses varied fonts, which correlates to how much info it is representing and how much it wants to grab your attention.
the words jump around however. This keeps your eyes on your toes because you can’t predict where the next set of words are going to be.
It uses lots and lots of pictures to demonstrate its point. The information presented is succinct and efficient and effectively, while not bogging you down with info overload. The key is spreading the info over several slides.
MINT.COM SLIDES
(Note: Cannot embed unless I want my blog out of wack)
1. MINT
By Giordany Orellana
2. FOUNDING FATHER
Aaron Patzer
Princeton and Duke
Former engeneer at IBM
3. COMPETITION
Money 2007
Quicken Delux 2007
4. TIMELINE
November 2005
March 2006
September 2007
5. OVERVIEW
Your Accounts
Your Alerts
Your Financial Health
Your Budget
Your Ways to Save
6. TRANSACTIONS
Rename
Categorize
Label
Search
Notes
7. SPENDING TRENDS
Pie Chart
Timeline
Merchants
8. SPEND SPACE
Compare Categories
Cities
States
USA
9. SECURITY
Email Only
No Info Storage
Yodlee
128 bit encryption
Hacker Safe
10. A FILMMAKER’S FRIEND
Budgets
Notification
Organization
BEEZLEBUB
I was really close to editing the uncyclopedia entry for Chuck Norris, but I realized I could not top the guys who had already written about the mythological man.
So I decided I would draw a comic strip for Bunk Magazine which is now sorta the Los Wikiless Timesepedia. All of the comics there looked too nice and fuzzy, so I decided I needed to make something evil and naughty, so I decided on demons. But what to name it? I remembered the title for that great children’s/family book Lord of the Flies, and how that’s a translation for Beezlebub, hebrew for the Devil. I thought it was a cute name, so I stuck with it, and decided that these demons would be very tech-savy, and would use tech in narfarious ways. Recently, Facebook had just launched Facebook Chat Beta, so I decided I’d talk aobut that.
So, without further ado, check out the strip here.
Meta
PENTAD: MINT.COM
PENTAD: MINT.COM
WHO: Aaron Patzer is the founder and CEO of Mint.com in March of 2006. He is a graduate of Princeton and Duke University, and former engineer at IBM.
WHAT: Mint.com is a free online money management software that regulated and budgets your finances all in one place. It also recommends offers that will benefit you and it sends warnings by email or text whether you running low on money or if a credit card payment is due soon.
WHERE: Mountain View, California
WHY: The anecdote goes that one day Aaron was using Quicken to do his finances but he couldn’t figure out a way to get the stats showing. All he wanted was a pie chart of his spending, but he couldn’t do it. So he decided to create Mint.
WHEN: Aaron thought of making Mint around November 2005, and created it in March of 2006, and it went into public beta in September of 2007.
FILMMAKERS AND THE INTERNENT: A SYMBIOTIC SYSTEM
FILMMAKERS AND THE INTERNET: A SYMBIOTIC SYSTEM
The internet is the new filmmaker’s frontier. It is the new unknown, and it is exciting. Those who dare to engage the internet reap rewards or waste their time because nothing is guaranteed.
About 100 years ago, the first frontier was cinema, then television, and now the Internet. With this new technological medium, there are the luddites who reject it and then there are those who have open arms.
About 60 years ago, television was seen as a threat to Hollywood. More and more people were staying home to watch television instead of going out to a movie theater. Now, almost every studio owns a television network division, and television makes a bulk of the money for studios. [1] With the advent of the internet, Hollwyood again fears this new technology. They have reason to concern because of the grown piracy and downloading of movies.
But there are those who have been able to harness its ever-expanding audience and focus the power of viewer-dom for their benefit. A few have been able to catapult themselves in the limelight for Hollywood to take notice.
In 2006, David Lehre released “Myspace: The Movie” a short film about several interactions involving the culture of Myspace.com. Segments include relationships, and meeting strangers and having parties. The video went viral and has reached over 30 millions views. The video was mentioned in the Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times, with an Interview with the Washington Post here. The Hollywood doors have opened for him, and he was courted by Fox studios to produce a pilot. What puts Lehre apart from other young filmmakers is that he strategically decided to use the Internet to enhance his chances of becoming noticed. This is what he had to say in his interview:
He succeeded in his goal, and was rewarded handsomely. However, it has been over two years, and David Lehre is not exactly a household name. Sustaining success through the internet takes time. Lighting struck once, but it has been hard for Lehre to repeat his success. He recently released a short online series titled Turbo Girls, a campy series about spy girls ala Charlie’s Angels. The videos are viewable here. It has garnered relative views, but nothing near the success of “Myspace: The Movie.”
He has finished directing the pilot for Fox, which seems to be a variety/sketch comedy show that will soon be released June 2008. He has posted six behind-the-scenes shorts showing the process. You can watch them here. However, they were all released one year ago. Currently, he is producing a music video, a series of commercials, and several online contest commercial entries, and a new film.
LisaNova, real name Lisa Donovan, is one of the premier creators on Youtube, being the 9th most subscribed director. Why not talk about the first director? Well, that title belongs to Smosh, which we will get to shortly. The other top seven creators are: five video blogs, Universal Music group, and the last belongs to Lonelygirl15, which we will also talk about later.
Lisa Donovan currently resides in Venice, CA and works in a field related to the Industry (not sure, she never stays or writes it anywhere). She came to Los Angeles five years ago to become an actor, but as she soon realized, it was hard to break in. She also auditioned for a role on “Mad TV” but they turned her down. However, two years ago, she discovered Youtube and decided to post videos as LisaNova. She rose to fame by mocking the PuffDaddy (P-diddy?) video he made promoting Burger King. Her video is viewable here.
She started to grow her fanbase, so much so, that one of the people who watched her videos passed it on to Nicole Garcia, casting director for “Mad TV.”
They then called Lisa in to audition again, and she got a featured role on the show last year. However, they did not sign her up for another season. But that’s okay, LisaNova is far from over. She has over 92 thousand subscribers, with me being one of them. Her videos get over 100,000 views easy; her lowest viewed movie is around 58,000 and her highest is over 3 million.
Currently, she is sharing revenue with YouTube as one of the few paid content creators, or “partners,” on there, and she has just started her own video blog where she just talks as herself, and not as any of her characters.
Much has already been written about the phenomenon that became Lonelygirl15 last year, so I’ll briefly go over it. It started as a video blog on YouTube about a little 16-year-old girl who had very religious and restrictive parents. However, fans became suspicious and they soon discovered that it was all a methodically thought-out fictional series created by a group of young men. This paragraph comes from the New York Times articles that sums up an introduction:
The goal for them was to capture the attention of Hollywood and they succeeded by being signed up by CAA, one of the biggest agencies in Hollywood. Also, Jessica Lee Rose went on a promoting spree to several talk shows, garnering more attention and exposure than any young actress would get at her age.
Without the advent of the internet, specifically video sharing sites like YouTube, none of this would have happened, and these guys would probably not be signed up with CAA right now.
Currently, the guys over at LG15 Studios have created the spin-off show KateModern, that takes place in the same universe as the original Lonelygirl15. It’s about a young girl who has a secret that the audience needs to solve (watch). Nevertheless, what is unique about it is the product placement marketing and the interaction the show has with its audience, creating alternate reality games to coincide with the show.
Finally, we have Smosh, created by Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox, two young men from Northern California. They came to YouTube fame when they uploaded their viral hit Pokemon, where they lip-sync to the famous kiddie song. Before the video was pulled by a copyright claim by Shogakukan, the video received over 24 million views. They’re basically the number 1 at everything on YouTube, no.1 director, no.1 subscribed, and no.1 partner.
However, their main goal is unclear. Is their goal to attract tons of views? Is it to get people to go to their website (Which is just an extension of their channel)? Is it to make lots of money? If their main goal is to succeed at many goals, then they’ve succeeded. Yet, I am surprised we haven’t heard of studio execs courting the Smosh bros. for any pilot or ideas.
Currently, their Crybaby video has over 700k views in just two days, and the video before that Smosh Sued for $20 million (their April Fool’s video) has garnered over 2 million views in two weeks.
Conway is a graduate of Masters program for the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Last year, he entered the as one of the 50 semi-finalist for the “On The Lot” competition as one of the contestants that appeared on the show. Unfortunately, he did not make it into the finalists; however, he was interviewed extensively by the Filmnut here. He was competing for a chance to win a million dollar development deal with Dreamworks, but that honor went to Will Bigham.
Currently he’s finishing the final touches of his thesis film, TURBO, futuristic sci-punk video game influenced short film shot on the RED ONE. One interesting fact is that David Lehre is one of the main characters playing the villain in the short.
Adrian Picardi is a young man from Pasadena who graduated from the LA film school in 2006. He entered his thesis short film into the Film2Music contest in late 2006 and it won the Grand Prize, and a trip to Sundance in 2007. The short is viewable here. A couple of months later, he won the Grand Prize for the PSAID contest. He then entered several more contests that year, the largest ones were True to John Woo and the Assassin’s Creed Contest. In both, he made it to the top ten finalists, but alas, in both someone else became the Grand Prize winner.
Because he has won several contests, the LA time writer Alana Semeuls contacted him and mentioned him in the article she wrote on how the companies that sponsor the video contests win every time because the contestants go to great lengths to acquire views and votes:
Even though he may not win every contest, he gets a lot of exposure by get close to winning them, and of course, when he does win, then it is a boost in the recognition. Several independent production houses have contact him in order to sign him up to director several indie pictures, but Picardi has declined because their story quality is not exactly what he’s going for, meaning a lot of the script he gets suck.
Currently, Picardi is on the cusp of something big: The first ever known action online web series titled The Resistance. It’s a action-packed, story driven series that will run for eight episodes and see where it goes from there. Right now, there are four teaser trailers posted on the YouTube site, but production on episodes is already underway. They have already finished shooting one episode, and it has a planned release of May/June.
To all three fellow filmmakers, Picardi, Lehre, Conway, I sent out a small questionnaire about the internet and filmmakers. Unfortunately, Lehre and Conway haven’t responded to me yet. I almost didn’t get Picardi to respond, I had to call him and he said because he was super busy and stressed out, he didn’t much time for full responses which is very understandable because “The Resistance” is a super low budget production, with most of the resources coming from friends and family and favors.
PICARDI (SHORT) INTERVIEW
What’s your ultimate goal as a filmmaker?
To Make entertaining movies
Has the internet shaped the way you make films?
Not really.
There are several benefits to putting your films online but have you encountered any negatives to putting your films online?
Not really.
Do you believe filmmakers can acquire wealth from the internet alone?
No. It’ll just open up more opportunities and more doors.
Do you think one day the internet will come to bypass and replace studios? Meaning, there will be no need for studios in the future for making films and distributing them.
No, definitely not.
Overall, Picardi, through the great exposure he receives from winning these online video contests, gets closer to knocking on Hollywood’s door, and hopefully The Resistance becomes an internet success. Conway was given a great opportunity at winning a development deal but maybe it wasn’t time just yet. Smosh, even though their goal does not seem to be geared towards Hollywood just yet, they may one day choose to collaborate with the industry because their viewership on YouTube has entitled them to some form of recognition. Lonelygirl15 was the perfect internet success story that made winners of all those involved. It gave Jessica Rose early fame and it guaranteed work for the three filmmakers in the industry they wanted to break into. Lisanova also tasted fame for that moment she was on television, but it seems as though the internet beckons her more, and she it, because she cannot creatively control anything on television yet, whereas she is the master of her channel on YouTube. David Lehre strategically enhanced his exposure by creating the Myspace movie, but time will tell if he can sustain the internet success he was first baptized with. Without the internet, none of these creators/filmmakers mentioned here could have arrived to where they are now, and yet, the internet would not, could not be what it is today without creators and filmmakers like these, and that is why it is a symbiotic system.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
[1] Flint, Joe. “On The Air”. Entertainment Weekly. Posted Nov 18, 1998. Published in issue #458. <http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,285736,00.html>
[2] Goo, Sara Kehaulani. “Filmmaker David Lehre Interview.” Washington Post. Posted Monday, May 1, 2006; 12:00 AM
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042800682.html?sub=AR>
[3] Wallenstein, Andrew. “How YouTube Helped LisaNova’s Start Her Career.” The New York Times. Published: April 29, 2007.
[4] Heffernan, Virginia; Zeller, Tom. “”Lonely Girl’ (and Friends) Just Wanted a Movie Deal.” The New York Times. Published: September 12, 2006
[5] Semeuls, Alana. “Sponsors are Winners In Online Contests.” Los Angeles Times. August 25th, 2007
<http://www.commercialalert.org/news/archive/2007/08/sponsors-are-winners-in-online-contests>
NOTE: Link to the source LA Times article has been lost or broken.
PAGEFLAKES ROUND 2
In my Pageflakes, under the Hollyn-Wood blog, I saw the post for Avid 1.0. He had a link to the commercial video put out of the original Avid non linear editing system. Avid is the industry standard for editing, and those who edit professionally have worked on or know about Avid. For film geeks, it’s a must. Check out the video here.
I’ve been using Avid since I was in High school from 2002 up till today. At first, I hated it. There’s a huge learning curve, especially for those who’ve never edited in their entire life. It was my first experience with editing anything, and it took me a couple of weeks to learn without having to ask for too much help.
Anyway, in the summer of 2002, I took a film workshop that taught me the Avid, and after that summer ended, I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker. So I bought my Canon ZR-50 camera, and I bought a cheap editing system, “Dazzle something” I think, and it was crap. I longed to use Avid again.
Christmas 2005, I got my wish. Soon, it’ll be time to upgrade to Media Composer, but until I can afford the 500 dollar upgrade, I’ll be fine with my old version for now.
Tropic Thunder Strikes!
The Film Blogs of gone asunder over the up coming film TROPIC THUNDER. Everyone from Aint it Cool, Gizmodo, Slash Film are wetting their pants over this movie that seems to have come out of nowhere.
The movie stars Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. playing actors receiving training for a “Apocolypse Now-esque” movie.
The blurb at the movie site is that these actors:
“…lead an assemble cast in “Tropic Thunder,” an action comedy about a group of self-absorbed actors who set out to make the most expensive war film ever. After ballooning costs force the studio to cancel the movie, the fustrated director refuses to stop, leading the cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they end up knee deep in the shit.”
Jack Black plays an albino, and Downing plays a Australian method actor who decides to have surgery to become black to play the main role, that was meant for a black person, thus this picture. Also, theyhave Tom Cruise cameo where he plays a fat guy here.
There are several reasons why this film will be awesome:
- It’s a comedy about making a war movie.
- It’s a self-reflexive movie (A movie about making movies that knows it’s a movie, just the type of movie I like!).
- Robert playing an Australian actor playing a black man.
- Jack Black as an albino.
- And it’s an R rated comedy. Awesomeness.
All they need is Samuel L. Jackness, and this movie is box office GOLD! Trailer for Tropic Thunder below.
My Bookmarking Hero!
I have found the best bookmark soul mate ever. His Del.icio.us user name is rickangelo. He has 600 bookmark items, and he’s a pretty frequent bookmarker.
His tags are pretty simple. He uses very general tags next to specific tags, i.e. filmmaking distribution or filmmaking music free or software freeware free. However, there are some tags that are undecipherable, such as the tag ts. It is probably an acronym for something, but for what, I do not know.
Just from reading his tags, I am able to deduct a lot about this person. I would say he’s male and he’s young, mid 20s to early 30s. He is a forum junkie, with the top tag belonging to forum with 125 entries. I can safely say he’s a computer and web specialist, working in I.T. His second largest tag is for programming. He’s also probably an actor on the side, with the third largest tag belonging to acting. He plays the guitar (36 tags) and he’s looking forward to becoming an entrepreneur. He also has a lot of tags for Los Angeles, and I’m going to take a wild guess and deduct he lives in LA.
Here are some resources I found through rickangelo, which I consider very useful for me and my blog.
Mindomo – a web based brainstorming, mindmapping software that’s free. Awesome.
Neulio – A website in beta that shows how-to videos on a variety of topics such as how to take a good photo, and video capture techniques.
Ehow – another how-to website.
Grouptivity – a “free social marketing tool” with several ways of boosting traffic to your site.
Screencastcentral – a tutorial library of many how-to’s on improving your computer abilities. Unfortunately, you have to pay for membership.
Filmmakers.com and filmstew.com, two websites devoted everything film related.
QuickOnlineTips - Tips….online….that are quick!
Successforyourblog - How to make a succesful blog!
mybloglog - A Yahoo service that makes you look up other blogs and bookmarks. I was actually able to find RickAngelo’s profile, and he’s actually older than I thought. Man, stalking is sooo easy with the web these days.
But the online gem that I found was an article on the the San Fernando Valley, considered the center of the adult entertainment industry, here. It’s a great article and a great read broken down into parts and interviews. An interesting fact I found out was that one of the most expensive (but one of the highest grossing) adult films ever made, Pirates, was directed by a USC alum. To be honest, I’m not surprised 
