My fascination with shooting with a DSLR is apparently a trend. Nikon was actually a sponsor of SXSW this year, but the canons were the ones you saw everyone carrying and talking about. Coming from a photography background, photographers all love DSLRs because they are slowly adapting video from photography and many photographers can slowly transition over into video. I find kind of the opposite to be true about videographers. Videographers have tons of resources to record, mix and finalize their stuff, they feel comfortable with those cameras and they’ve worked pretty damn well so far. But the thing is that the more photographers with access to these video options are bringing the art form of photography with its shallow depth of field into video, the more directors, artists, and the film community are beginning to love what they are seeing. I love what we are seeing. Its gorgeous film. Its photographyvideo. And its more travelable also…smaller, lighter, more easily tug-a-roundable. And in the age of small budgets, that’s a serious plus. Videographers are looking for that when there is less ease on the travel schedule. This has created a lot of new editing software also. To adapt to the use of card readers and 21 gig transfers with a usb cable, to adapt to audio complications, to adapt to 12 minutes at a time being the limit to film. And this is where it gets tricky for me, despite my obvious love of the look of the DSLR footage. For short form editing, which is what I mainly deal in, I think having a DSLR, and a strong set up around it, is becoming more and more a necessity. But for long form editing, which frankly I don’t know much about, what’s the deal with how different a picture would be when you can only film for 12 minute increments? Remember the great films…some were shot in one long take! That is technologically not possible with the DSLRs and I wonder if as long form movie editing moves toward that more and more, they will start resembling short form editing more. Short cuts to cuts, less cohesive story line verbally, more cohesive story line visually. Again, I’m no genius in this area or any other area, but it begs the question right now. Luckily for me (maybe), technology grows exponentially. I am sure that next year at this time we’ll have a DSLR that shoots film for more than 12 minutes at a time, and the memory cards will house 50-100 gigs at a time, being easily transferable by something not yet invented. I’m personally looking forward to being able to shoot with a canon 5D and not having a mini heart attack about the sound quality of any dialogue. With tech, comes change. With change, comes new abilities to see things. I just wonder if this will more easily allow the art of videography and editing to find its way to a more beautiful craft, or simply a way to make it more visually appealing, but less "videoy"- the difference between photography and video- a traditionally audio based cohesion. This will be resolved with time, as this is the nature of tech. But until we resolve it, I’m curious to see the interim product.

This year i seem like i have no time... I have gone to a lot of narrative films, but mostly panels. The panels this year are completely rocking my world. There are panels on usage of DSLRs, panels on audio production, panels on what defines good production and what sets apart a director. They have all, hilariously enough for a mainly interactive gig, had a LOT of technical issues…the network is taxed by the amount of use or something…3G connection not so hot either. But the speakers have been well versed, well known and good speakers. I feel like I’m at college all over again…completely psyched. I have to run because getting a cab in Austin this time of year is like the most impossible thing and I have one coming after 20 minutes of waiting on the phone. But great job this year on panels…I fully expect to come home having a strong sense of what my department needs to get more versed on for videography and what we need to do that. Which is EXACTLY why i came down here.

jamee sheehy
producer/editorial
W 617.226.9615
mu //en│40 broad street, boston, ma 02109-4308

Happy New Year.

Not a salutation, lack of calendar or how it feels because I drank so much last night. It was the only movie I saw in between panels yesterday. Happy New Year.

After seeing this movie, I went to a really amazing panel on audio in production vs. postproduction. It was so good in fact, I briefly thought about a career change. Then it was quickly followed up by a decision to not pursue that change as their description of directors seemed highly unlikely to jive with my temperament.

Happy New Year.

After that we went to Vivo for dinner and then to the frog design party and then to a series of bars…until 3 in the morning (in fairness, I lost an hour due to time change!) Happy New Year.

And the whole time, while dissecting the first scene of Apocalypse Now sound design in detail, while eating the most delicious tortilla soup, while ordering greyhounds with vodka, that movie ran through my mind, looping like a cd that has a scratch in it. No, that illustration is not valid. It wasn’t an unwanted thing. It just was.

The movie resonated personally with my life, which is why I had wanted to go see it in the first place. It was a narrative piece about a Marine back from Iraq and was almost two hours long and it was…(sitting here…sitting here…) I’m actually having a hard time explaining what it was. Let’s start with the basics: it was well made, story was extremely well told, sound design was professional (hey- personal application here!) and the actors/actresses were as if they had been those characters their whole lives. But the story itself was a dark subject matter, despondent in its view of that world and throughout the two hours I found myself more in love with the characters and absolutely pained that they can’t resolve anything . It was heartbreaking. There’s the word. It was HEART BREAKING. And I would watch it everyday for a week as it gave me an outlet for something that no one in my life understands. It made me feel sad and afraid, but it also made me feel not alone. The power of a great movie.

If I don’t see another movie here all week (don’t worry), that was worth it to me. I am profoundly grateful to its director, K Lorrel Manning. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

The promise of several days of 80 degree weather has me completely dead to anything else. Bloggy McBloggersons i am not, but...

I was thinking how much over the last year, i have begun to appreciate good TV and movies. Before i started working at the mulls, i was a product of my life when it came to moving pictures of any sort. Raised in a strict home, i wasn't allowed to watch TV for a large majority of my life and movies/theatre were never encouraged. When they were allowed they were only scrutinized for moral acceptability, not artistic integrity. Up until two or three years ago, i never noticed the fine tuned shots of a director of photography or the cuts of an editor...i mainly judged them by whether the story was amusing. (Amusing...i find that word deplorable because its so...amusing. Requires no scrutiny or thought, and though most stories are meant to be an escape, how much more great of one if you don't have to separate it from your intellect or rationalize it's lack of details.) But thanks to the great number of time i spend among people who care greatly for the set up of a shot or the precise colors that show up on screen, i myself have begun to neglect the shoddier rom coms for things like the BBC. Sherlock Holmes, anyone? Or the comedic timing of Modern Family? Or the casual genius of Sophia Coppola? Lets pause there for a moment.

Sophia Coppola. Sophia. Coppola. Let it sit there on your tongue for a minute. If you are not familiar with her movies (ok, people forgive the Godfather 3 already!), let me recommend them. The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette are three of the most unforgivingly brilliant movies one will ever see. They hook you...you watch them with these wide open eyes and they bubble inside your brain for days after. There are these long slow moments where all there is is silence...decisions made so clearly in a camera's eye that you swore you were watching them play out in real life. And yet at the same time, its more permanent than real life. You see that her blues are what blue is like and her yellows are what yellow can be. She, defining the meaning of words we previously used our whole lives. You can taste her movies, feel them like a the smooth inside of a shell. She took sorrow on screen and added to it humanity-her sorrow is not just sorrow. It is what humans truly feel when they feel sorrow, this sorrowjoyrestfulrestlessness. Some people say her movies are boring and slow, they have no explanations and no clear ending. I think those people don't truly grasp what a feat it is to portray the complexity of human life through a bunch of metallic components. Certainly, she casts brilliantly, that helps. She also takes her time to allow the movies to unfold, like life actually does in its actuality. She is patient. Terribly patient. And demands the same of her audience. She explains little. Why explain things without explanation?

i really don't think much of people who watch these movies and don't like them. I frankly wonder what they see in the mirror when they look. Because that is what she does best, shows us mirrors of our own indiscernible hearts. I, and my decisions that remain a mystery to me, truly appreciate the honesty.

jamee sheehy
producer/editorial
W 617.226.9615
mu //en│40 broad street, boston, ma 02109-4308

SXSW. And this time, I actually planned out my schedule so that I can
follow it, without overlapping 12 things at once, like last year. Solid
plan. Besides that, I am most looking forward to Jake Gyllenhaal being there.
Shameless and wanton. (Jake, if you are reading this - meet me at the
Lustre Pearl.) He is followed up closely by the animated shorts (which were
the highlight of last year for me), a panel on the DSLR for footage (which
I'm personally obsessed with currently) and the film How To Die in Oregon
(about doctor assisted suicide.) Last year, I completely missed the one
film that made all the buzz after SXSW- Lena Dunham's Tiny Furniture- and
was taunted all year long with mentions of it in every mag/blog/industry
thing I read. But this year, they are screening it again, which I am
thankful for. Of course, I'll probably miss this years audience hit while
watching it, but hey. I've surrendered to not having the personal taste to
coincide with the general film public.

With the exception of Jake Gyllenhaal.

i understand that I cannot subsist without sleep for longer than 5 days, but i am leaving today with the distinct feeling i have not had enough.  i want to see more things, i want to meet more people and i want to harbor more dreams spurred on by the ridiculous idea that i could do anything these people have done.  

i also missed the bats (austin is home to the largest clan of migratory bats and every night they come out in a huge swirl of awesome to see batliness), didn't go to some beloved hotspots and in no way filled my quota of either tacos or cupcakes.  I certainly didn't waste my time, but i don't think i got enough either.  I feel like this every year at this time.  With me i have my journal from last year that proves this in all its large and dramatic handwriting and apparent distress.  

Who wouldn't want to be surrounded by some of the best innovators of this time, who desire to teach you?  Who wouldn't want to experience things that they made sci-fi movies out of 40 years ago?  Who wouldn't want to replace gray with orange, water with margaritas, downtime with stimulating conversation and eat everything with salsa?  Not everyone i guess.  But to me, SXSW is my favorite time of the year.  I've said it once, and i will say it again, every year.   

Home is going to feel....cold.  Excuse me, i meant Cold.  But good.  It's no Austin, but I'd like to think that Boston and Austin share a bond beyond the rhyme of their names.  We both are the next exciting JetBlue cities.  We both have awesome smart people.  We both have a teeming innovation going on.  We both care about our technology providing a better life for people.  

I'd like to say i'm coming home with more purpose, more intelligence and more passion.  I'd like to say i'm going to be a better post producer, going to care about my job more and going to make my work environment a happier, more sustainable and more exciting place to be.  That's what i think the point of coming down here actually was...to translate what i was given to the others, most to my editors who were working too hard to be able to come (and for that, cheers to you both for being the hardest working folk i know!)  I hope i am responsible with the stuff i've learned and the people i met and the friends whom i've made lose ten days off the end of their life.  Editing and post production (and the internets) are exciting things that have come so far and can go so much further.  Its pretty exciting and i'm really blessed to be part of that.  

 *enthusiasm is contagious.  not having enthusiasm is also contagious.  i

Well, first off, the keynote interview was pretty awful. Neither the interviewer, Umair Haque, or the interviewee, Evan Williams, gave the impression that they were interested in talking to one another. On top of that, Evan just kind of stumbled awkwardly into the @anywhere announcement. It was the Reverse Reality Distortion Field. He actually made it seem less exciting than it probably is.

A short video that accompanied the announcement showed two interesting pieces of functionality. The first was the ability to log in to third party websites with your Twitter account. Which already exists as Sign In With Twitter. However, they added a number of very high profile sites that will support this feature, including Amazon, Yahoo, YouTube, NYT, Bing and Digg. This is an interesting development in the portable social identity war that Twitter is waging against Facebook Connect.

So why were they able to get these deals done now with @anywhere, as opposed to months ago with Sign In With Twitter? Well, it's got to do with the second bit of functionality @anywhere provides.

The idea is to connect any content on the web to Twitter profiles it may contain via references to people or brands. Follow the author of an article on  NYT in one click. See that person's profile photo, number of followers, latest tweet, etc., all without leaving the page you're on. Pretty simple stuff, really. From a technology standpoint, it's really not that impressive. But I'd have to guess that what they're trying to do is own conversation across the web. Anywhere there is content that could inspire conversation, Twitter wants to be right there, providing a conduit for that conversation. That's what makes @anywhere potentially exciting.

But I do have some questions. Going into this keynote, the expectation seemed to be that Twitter would announce an ad platform. They didn't. @anywhere appears to have nothing to do with Twitter making any money. I don't see them charging large site publishers to use it. It's just a widget driven by their existing and free API.

When will it be available, and more importantly, will it be limited to large publishers at first? Hopeully not.

This also doesn't seem to be a new "platform". There are no new API calls (that they talked about), it's a few lines of Javascript that publishers add to their pages. Pre-built widget does not equal platform.

Speaking of those few lines of Javascript, I'm most curious about how content will be associated with Twitter profiles. Will this be explicit or implicit? If it's explicit, what form will that take? Including @username in the content? WIll that be awkward as editorial copy in a NYT article? Some kind of microformat? And if it's implicit, how will they parse profiles out of the content? How will they map the natural names of these people and brands to their Twitter usernames?

More questions than answers for now. Hopefully they'll start releasing details soon.

 

 

Nothing worse than waiting in line and not getting in. So I'm here sitting on the sidewalk trying to write this and avoid the people trying to bless my life with free tshirts and zone bars.

I have met so many people my head is swimming. Editor from Ohio, editor for HBO in NY (hello mr swanky), editor from Chicago. I had a life changing dinner with the usuals and two social media officers for the government (#unclesamistrendierthanyou.)

On the shuttle, I overheard an editor talking about her job (yes, her!) but she shocked me a little by saying she thought editing was like fostercare, no matter how much you work and drive, it's never going to be your child. It's the directors baby and you have little to no say in how it turns out. her exact words were "it's not your work, it's never going to be your work." Of course in one way that's true, you are "raising anothers for anothers glory", but she sounded so skeptical and even a little bitter. I know we all feel like that once in awhile, especially in an ad agency where even the creatives feel a little usurped by that, but I was generally discouraged by her view. I remind myself to ask j and m how they feel more often.

I saw "Beijing Taxi" just now and find that subtitles (though necessary) really cramp my style. Two senses to use and they take up one almost 40% of the time. It was a good depiction of three lives, but I didn't love it like I've loved the others. The credits were my favorite part...red and black type, slide, depth, in the picture.

I mentioned yesterday I saw the animated shorts. Did I mention I cried at one? It was called "The Polish Language" and was a poem in animated type and images. It was about/for the polish who died in the holocaust and the end was so well done I just found embarrassing tears welling up. Two lines....

"Robbed of flint
You made fire

From evil
You made live"

They built the live in the last line from taking away each letter from evil. Basic white type on a black background, typing keys as sound.
Very well done, the whole piece. Sound design was complicated but complimented the idea perfectly.

After the short "orange" was about an orange was made God (the best short I've seen in my life) and "the Cow Who Wanted To Be a Hamburger" was the cutest cute cutey.

Ok... so many shmooshers in this line. I love connecting, but please, there is a limit. Be a real person with your smarts and ability to execute them, please.

Sent from jamees iPhone

This is a craptastic post, due to a strong lack of battery power in phone and my laptop has to be plugged in to work (I still love it, kostas, thank you!) so I'm pre-posting.

I'm pulling a lot of night movies tonight, the bigger ones (long lines) and also the title design finalists. I love type in work (which I will wax on about when I have more juice) and when editors and creators of films make it a priority to make titles interesting, it's always such a bonus, especially for those of a who stick around to watch them. They judged a bunch and will be showing the finals tonight. A whole hour worth of credits. :) that's idea bank right there!

Sent from my iPhone

Very cool.  Made a donation using my Amex to Charity Water via the new Square created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.  Tweeted about it and got an RT from Jack himself.  Really cool part, though, is that I did it via an iPhone, signed my signature on the screen, and when I got my receipt it actually had my geo location of where I was when I paid up.  Very cool new use of location, mobile and your stream.