Posts Tagged ‘movies’

Jane Austen’s Fight Club

Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Last Saturday, us LA Mormonites held our 11th annual SM3/LA1 church film festival. An acquaintance of mine by the name of Emily Card wrote and directed this gem of a fake trailer, “Jane Austen’s Fight Club“. It won the festival grand prize hands down, and deservedly so.

I loved the piece so much that I felt it necessary to blast it to the world now that it’s finally on-line (and partly because I want to call attention to the folks who made it and the amount of effort that went in to producing it – I believe everyone involved deserves some real kudos!) My buddy Jeff Dickson spent some long nights toiling away at After Effects and Premiere to give this trailer the polished look it possesses, and I believe it was shot on a Canon 7D (take note of the clear influence of things like Kill Bill, the original trailer for this year’s Kick-Ass, and, of course, the original trailer for Fight Club itself).  Gotta love it! Three cheers to video DSLR filmmaking and digital storytelling mashups!

Jane Austen's Fight Club

Direct link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2PM0om2El8

(via TwoTurnTablesNMic on YouTube)

 
 

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Posted in storytelling, web video | View Comments

Piracy is just another word for “Quality Control”

Monday, November 23rd, 2009

Today, my video, “The Internet is Unstoppable“, was posted to my program’s official blog by my professor, Kathy Gill. She seemed to like it enough to want to show it to her undergraduate students in another class even.  Well, I shared this news on Facebook, where an independent filmmaker friend of mine commented that the idea was great, but that “free” hurts the little guys.  I don’t know to what extent piracy endangers content producers on the slim side of the media scale, but I responded with this:

Hey, I don’t condone piracy or content theft of any variety – I’m just discussing what’s already happening. Copyright is a broken concept. You see, as long as the cost of reproducing content is basically zero, then you look pretty foolhardy trying to protect your right to sell an individual media item when it doesn’t cost you anything to create that individual SKU beyond its initial production. And for the little guys who have very limited production costs, they look even more foolish trying to sell digital product for net gain! Why on Earth would you expect people to gullibly contribute to your net profits when they KNOW, right or wrong, how to reproduce it and that it doesn’t cost a dime to do so?

So, by now you’re asking: Well, how do I recapture my production costs, in the least? (more…)

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Posted in digital media, film | View Comments

Inspiration: storytelling and the importance of old media

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Though we exist in a time of great media upheaval, where the Internet has made available so much story for so little effort, millions are still drawn to long-form traditional narratives.  We still go to the cinema, the bookstore, the concert, the play, the big game, the event.  Though so much power can be packed into a media snack – a tweet, a blog post, a text message, a sentence, a word, or even an acronym (LMAO anyone?) – we still sit down for super-sized media meals.  Something must be inspiring us to pull up that chair and sup from the old media table.  Inspiration seems to be the answer.  What is the importance of inspiration to storytelling?  In our digital world – full of bombardment from massive narrative abstraction and fragmentation, where so much story content is being communicated in so many bits and bytes and packets like bullets from a fiber-optic Gatling gun – we still find time to stick the old media morphine drip in.  This happens when we do something so archaic as watch an hour-long drama on network television, spend nine innings at the baseball stadium, or, gasp, read an entire Harry Potter book cover-to-cover. (more…)

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Posted in entertainment, old media | View Comments

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