Archive for the 'Video' Category

• 06.10.08 The triumph of product integration

  At a USC forum last Saturday, a writer asked whether it was worth considering product integration when writing a script. She said her project would lend itself really well to a major brand like Starbucks.

  I told her that I’d often heard plans of trying to bring advertisers in on the ground floor of a movie, [...]

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• 11.29.07 Strike, day 25

  I nearly went over to Burbank to join colleagues at the Gay Gate (NBC), but decided to stay local at Paramount. Irene, a fixture on the 5:30 a.m. shift, pointed out that the key to passing three hours is to have at least two in-depth conversations. As a group, we never reached consensus on [...]

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• 11.15.07 Not The Daily Show

  But really, quite a bit like it.

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• 11.07.07 The Office is closed  11
• 10.12.07 Script Cops

  Script Cops, Ep 2: McKee Sting

  One of three clips forwarded by David Dean Bottrell. You can see the other two here and here.

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• 10.02.07 The Kingdom opening titles

  The opening title sequence for The Kingdom is spectacular, presenting a heroic amount of backstory.

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• 10.01.07 2007 Insomnia Film Festival

  Apple is sponsoring a 24-hour film festival for high school and college filmmakers. If you fall into this demographic, absolutely do it. You get 24 hours to write, produce, edit, score and deliver a 3-minute short film incorporating specific elements they only announce on the day.

  I’ve had the pleasure of being a judge for [...]

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• 09.26.07 Trailer Competition: The Winners

  We had 57 official entries. That’s a lot, and it’s about the most I could handle without my eyeballs exploding.1 I’m happy to report that many of the entries were quite good, and it was genuinely a pleasure to watch them. Most of them.

  I feel like I should pad this opening bit with [...]

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• 09.25.07 Trailer competition judging in progress

  Wow, that’s a lot of entries. I’ll be announcing the winners tomorrow morning.

  Erik Beeson, who so generously helped with the hosting and torrenting, sent along stats:

  total torrent file downloads for both torrents combined: 808 (includes search engine crawlers) dv torrent: 162 completed downloads mpeg4 torrent: 79 completed downloads mpeg4.zip: 242 (the direct download) total completed (torrents+direct): 483

  Thanks [...]

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• 09.20.07 Trailer competition FAQ

  What should the tone of the trailer be?

  Whatever you prefer. It can be funny, scary, dramatic or simply weird.

  How long should the trailer be?

  Most trailers are between one and three minutes, but if you feel like cutting a 30-second spot, or a half hour masterpiece, go for it. I reserve the right to [...]

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• 09.19.07 Trailer competition details

  Call in sick, ignore your loved ones, and put on a pot of coffee: the trailer competition for The Nines begins today.

  The delay in staging the competition has probably led to some over-thinking: What about people who haven’t seen the movie? What about film school students? What about people who are [...]

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• 09.18.07 Trailer competition, teaser

  Tomorrow, full details of the long-gestating trailer competition will be announced here (and at the lookforthenines site). You’ll have two versions of footage to choose from: DV and MPEG-4. The DV is big and beautiful. The MPEG-4 is small and nimble — and not as bad as you’d think.

  To get ready, Erik Beeson [...]

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• 08.22.07 The Nines trailer, HD

  The super-deluxe HD version of the trailer is now up at Apple. Me like.

  Check it out.

  It’s not showing up on AppleTV yet, for whatever reason. I don’t know what subset makes it through, but I presume it’s coming at some point.

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• 08.22.07 Trailer competition, second update

  Just so you know, the radio silence around the trailer competition is not for lack of interest or intent. Stuff got very crazy, very quickly, and we had a hard enough time getting the real trailer finished up. (Plus there was other stuff going on.)

  We have all the clips ready to go, but we’re [...]

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• 08.02.07 The trailer for The Nines

  It’s up. IGN has an exclusive first look. Stop reading and…

  Click Here

  Then come back and tell us what you thought. Or better yet, check out the Forum at lookforthenines.com.

  Update

  There’s a YouTube version as well. Not as big or sharp, but handier.

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• 07.30.07 Location scouting vs. reality

  Looking through my YouTube account, I realized that I’d actually posted (and blogged about) our location scouting footage more than a year ago, shortly after we’d wrapped shooting.

  I thought I’d go back and grab screencaps from the movie to show you what some of these places looked like as shot. (The following are in [...]

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• 07.27.07 Three from The Nines

  In preparation for the trailer competition, I wanted to see how footage from the movie would hold up when subjected to the Flash compression of YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. So I uploaded three clips in various formats to experiment.

  The results? Two clips look surprisingly great. The third looks like ass.

  The difference [...]

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• 07.19.07 The virtues of technology failure

  I brought my videocamera with me to Malawi, only to discover upon unpacking it that the main sensor was shot: it could record sound, but not video. In retrospect, this was a fortuitous failure.

  Looking at things through a lens–or on a tiny flip-out monitor–creates a layer of distance, of safety. On a subconscious [...]

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• 06.02.07 I talk with my hands

  Back in March, I was a panelist on a Writers Guild Foundation forum about publicity — specifically, how film and television writers should approach promoting themselves and their work through the media. As I wrote at the time, it seemed to go pretty well.

  This afternoon, I was ego-Googling and discovered that clips from the [...]

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• 05.10.07 Hello, Residuals

  When the Apple iPhone commercial began airing, my first thought was that I wanted one. My second thought: How much will I get in residuals for the one-second clip from the first Charlie’s Angels?

  The answer came yesterday in a big green envelope: $86.50.

  UPDATE:

  Because you asked, here’s the original scene as written:

  Her cell phone RINGS. [...]

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• 11.29.06 A Thousand Roads lead to this

  About a year ago, I took a Final Cut Pro class at UCLA Extension. It was a mixed success. I already knew too much for a beginner class, but wasn’t proficient enough for a more advanced session. So I ended up having a lot of extra time to fiddle around with the [...]

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