This is merely intended to be an emblematic example. The dumbness of this film is too deep to contemplate. Seriously. It’s blisteringly stupid. I lost brain cells watching it. It follows a narrative logic than insults anyone over the age of eight. I hate Michael Bay for this. I truly do. Fuck that guy.

Read about how it was made here.

It’s worth mentioning that this blog was the runner-up in the 2010 Seven Days “Daysie” reader’s choice awards again this year. The sisters LeMay took the top prize for the second time in a row. I was shocked to have made the runner-up spot despite the utter lack of any serious blogging around these parts lately. Thanks, if you voted for Candleblog!

I’m a filmmaking fool these days, having just completed the Baruth campaign film (see it in the previous post), and now I’m deep into a short web video for an environmental start-up. Also, the Pants projects are rearing their heads and gaining some slight momentum. I hope to have something good to report on that front soon.

You must now go and vote for my SXSW panel proposal! You have to register to vote and comment, but I swear it’s really quick and easy. My thirst for hanging out with alpha nerds and rock stars must be slaked.

And if you’re not already following Emily’s Tumblr blog, you should go there now and subscribe. It’s a continuous linkdump of cute awesomeness.

And look at this crazy shit!

• Justin Bieber slowed down 800% sounds ethereal and awesome. They should have used this in Inception.
• Wil Wheaton has quit W00tstock in a fabulous way.
• This short film teaches you How to be Alone.

I cut a 30-second spot for a Lt. Governor candidate a few years back, but that had been produced and shot by other people and I was just brought in as the editor. This piece I was involved with from the start. My VCAM cohort Matt Goudey and I shot all the video over the course of the last year — at Philip’s house, at campaign events and house parties and bar-b-ques. I cut the piece a few days ago. It’s an interesting kind of filmmaking — it’s a promotional piece, like a long commercial, but it’s also a documentary. I had to make decisions about how wonky and issue-specific I wanted the film to be, as opposed to hitting on a more general emotional level. I went for the emotions. I still have tons of footage of Philip being smart and wonky — perhaps for use at some later date.

• Clay Shirky has your must-read future-of-media essay for the week: The Collapse of Complex Business Models.
• Speaking of Shirky, he’s one of the respondents to this Pew Research Center survey about the Impact of the Internet on Institutions in the Future.
• Cory Doctorow says he won’t buy an iPad and says why you shouldn’t either.
• Stephen Fry’s take on the device is somewhat less critical.
• American Indy film pioneer Hal Hartley has remastered his 1991 American Playhouse film, Surviving Desire, and is offering it as an mp4 download and as a DVD along with his two excellent early shorts, Ambition and Theory of Achievement. The shorts would be better served living on vimeo or in some other embeddable, linkable format rather than being tacked onto a for-pay download (at an extra charge, no less). As it is, only existing HH fans are going to see them and there’s a potential for a whole new generation of fans out there. You listening, Hal? This is a missed opportunity. (UPDATE: Kyle Gilman from Possible Films commented that “existing licenses with Hal’s sales agent forbid us from distributing Ambition & Theory of Achievement outside of North America. Putting them up on Vimeo or even on our own website would be a violation of that agreement.”)

And here’s a ridiculously awesome hack of the idea. I wish I’d thought of this.

Still, watching the video, made by the folks at the social media marketing online magazine, Social Media Examiner, it occurred to me that one thing I do know a thing or two about is film & video production. This thought occurred to me because I found myself rolling my eyes and making some snarky judgments about the video I was watching. Then it occurred to me that if was so smart I should stop muttering judgmental comments at my monitor and use that energy for an entertaining (doubtful) and useful (hopefully) post about something I actually know about.

So here’s the video:

Darren Rowse Interview from Michael A. Stelzner on Vimeo.

First off, let’s talk about what’s right about the video. Technically speaking, there are two main things that are good about this particular production and they’re both biggies: The picture is clear (decent exposure, in focus, not back-lit, etc.) and the audio is excellent. I tell my students this all the time and even though I’m more of a cinematography nerd than an audiophile it’s true: the secret to good web video is good audio. Viewers will forgive all kinds of bad picture before they’ll suffer through bad, muffled or echo-y audio. The other kind words I have to say about this video are content-related. Social Media Examiner has interviewed some big names in web content and social media, and while I haven’t watched all of their videos, if this one is any indication, the content is actually fairly useful — in other words, they’ve taken Darren Rowse’s advice to heart and are delivering content that their readers and viewers want.

Okay, now onto my nitpicks (and for the Social Media Examiner folks who will inevitably read this post [nobody can trackback like a social media blogger], I intend these remarks to be constructive and useful, not just snark-filled rants filled with invective):

*First off, there’s :34 of lead-in before any content starts. That’s even long for TV these days, let alone the web. Get to the content, we’re busy web surfers out here.

*Secondly, the title of this piece is “How Bloggers Should Use Twitter.” The length of the entire video is 12:27 but it’s minute five before Twitter is even mentioned and minute seven before anything resembling the subject of the title enters the conversation. If this was a written blog post I’d accuse the writer of burying the lede.

The basic problem here is that the interview is simply unedited. It’s a 12-minute talking head without a single cut, which is fine as an archival document of the conversation, but it leaves the work of finding the relevant bits of the interview entirely in the viewers’ hands. Imagine if this was a text post containing the same interview, but written out instead of being a video. You’d expect the writer/editor to provide some context, highlight the relevant parts and get rid of the deadwood — that’s what editors do. You might even expect the questions to be re-ordered so that the really meaty, interesting stuff is up front. There’s a reason video editors and text editors share a verb — they’re very similar jobs.

*Another issue is the on-screen graphics. It’s a good idea to use on-screen graphics to add meta-information to the video you’re making, but in this case, all we get is an occasional standard lower third identifier, telling us who it is we’re looking at. But this information is already available to us. This isn’t TV. There’s a contextualizing web page that the video is embedded in that almost certainly contains the same info in multiple places. In the case of a Vimeo embed like this, it’s right under the video frame! So use the lower third convention to give us useful info at points in the video where it makes sense. For example, when Rowse (finally) talks about getting addicted to Twitter, throw his twitter ID up on the screen! Maybe we want to start following him.

*As long as we’re talking about visual content, I’ll point out that video is a visual medium. I know it seems obvious, but when you produce a video for the web (or anywhere else) it’s a good idea to consider how the content is enhanced by having a picture rather than just being an audio track of someone talking. If all you’re giving us is a talking head for twelve minutes, there’s not much purpose in me continuing to look at the picture. The video frame is a different medium of information into which you can channel all sorts of useful stuff without breaking up the flow of the audio content. Ideally, the picture and sound complement each other — like showing cutaways to images that relate to the content being discussed. Without leveraging the visual part of the medium, all you’ve really done is made a podcast that won’t play very well in iTunes.

Of course, all of these issues take time to correct. Video editing is nothing if not time consuming.

To be fair, Social Media Examiner is not a video blog, per se. The video content is added value to an otherwise list-heavy social media magazine. I’ll also add that the issues I’m discussing here are not unique to SME — they can be found in video all over the web. This just happened to be the video I was watching when I decided to write about web video dos and don’ts (thanks, Darren Rowse!).

Okay, perhaps that’s a bit harsh. I actually liked the film. But seriously, the critics need to get over themselves. This film is fine. It’s cute. Like the films mentioned above, it’s a comedy with a heart. It’s utterly unoffensive. Yawn.

Jason Reitman is only 32. With this, Thank You for Smoking and Juno under his belt already, I think his future is bright. I just wish he’d take a risk or two. I bet he’d be capable of something pretty great if he let himself try.

Somewhere near the middle of James Cameron’s three-hour long sci-fi spectacle, Avatar, I had to pee. The “medium” Diet Pepsi I’d been nursing was making its presence known in my bladder and the matter was just becoming too urgent to ignore. So I waited until I perceived a relative lull in the narrative, took off my 3-D glasses and exited the theater for the men’s room. In the fluorescent glare of the bathroom it occurred to me that I was experiencing a little meta-moment at the movies. The film is in large part about a guy (our hero) who uses fancy technology to enter a different world and experience things unlike the things he’s used to experiencing. In the course of the film he goes into and out of that new world by connecting to or being disconnected from that technology. And here I was, under the bright men’s room light, having been disconnected from my own fantastic world by disconnecting from technology — my 3-D glasses. The real world (while also technically in 3-D) was vastly less exciting and exotic than the one playing out in the room down the hall from me at that moment. After relieving myself, I went back and reconnected myself to the technology and hence to the virtual experience of the film, making a mental note about this insight so I could blog about it later in yet another virtual world.

This insight about the various layers of reality at play in the modern cinema-going experience may be about as deep an analysis as it’s possible to get out of Avatar. For while the film is at heart a morality play with political and moral messages central to its plot, the politics are overly simplistic and the morals are black and white.

Indeed, this is the primary criticism I’ve seen of the film so far — that it’s messages are trite and it’s characters and politics are simplistic. This is true, but so what? Compare the morality play in Avatar to the one at work in, say, Star Wars. Compare Avatar’s political messages to the ones at work in District 9. Does Avatar fare better or worse in those comparisons? Then look at the rest of Cameron’s oeuvre. The Terminator films, Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies, Titanic. We should know what to expect from this guy by now and it’s not deep, meaningful message-films.

Let’s be honest. Cameron isn’t Lars Von Trier. He’s a director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, but of course he’s much more than that too.

I’m reminded of that scene at the end of Die Hard when Holly Gennaro McClane realizes that the “terrorists” were really just in it for the money and she says to Hans Gruber, “you’re nothing but a common thief,” and Gruber crawls over to her and spitefully hisses, “I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane!”

Well James Cameron isn’t just your common director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films, he’s an exceptional director of big budget, Hollywood action-adventure sci-fi films.

On the level of storytelling, narrative exposition, yarn spinning, whatever you want to all it, Avatar is quite simply a masterpiece. Cameron has built a complete world — the moon of Pandora — and populated it with a dense and deeply interconnected system of flora and fauna and an indigenous culture that seems real (if a pastiche of various tribal Earth-born cultures). He’s also introduced human characters in a sci-fi setting with backstories and a world of their own (a world, it’s worth noting, that seems almost indistinguishable from the one that the Aliens characters inhabited in terms of technology and corporate/military relationships). A lesser filmmaker could not have gotten the audience hooked into the story of the film without a metric ton of clunky exposition and information-dumps. That Cameron was able to get us to care about the characters and stakes and still spend the last act on a giant action set-piece is simply amazing in this light. Leaving Avatar, I had learned a tremendous amount of information about a completely alien world and I never once became awkwardly aware of story exposition.

In hindsight I can see that Cameron took all of the standard expository shortcuts – he told the story of Avatar through the eyes of an untrained n00b so the audience learned about the world along with the main character (both the world of the human science/military project and the world of Pandora). He used voiceover narration in the form of a video log that said n00b was required to keep, thereby allowing Cameron to tell us things about the world rather than having to show us, which takes more time. He used a time-compressing montage during which we understand our hero to be developing his skills as a Na’vi hunter as well as developing his relationship with Neytiri. Again, in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, these tropes would have seemed obvious and clichéd. But Cameron is a master storyteller, and as a result, we audience members don’t even notice the enormous amount of exposition going on constantly throughout the film.

Cameron also lets his actors really inhabit their roles. As stated earlier, the material in Avatar is pretty two-dimensional. The only moral ambiguity present in any of the characters exists in space of their waffling over whether to choose the just and moral path or the craven and evil one. There is no middle road for any of these characters to tread. Some are unambiguously good (Jake, the scientists, and pretty much all of the Na’vi), some are unambiguously evil (Col. Quaritch) and some just need to make up their minds about it (company man Selfridge, marine pilot Chacon). Given such limited constraints on the characters, it’s impressive how real they seem for the most part. Giovanni Ribisi, for example, does a great job of playing the role of the Half Ted company man. Without many lines, he’s able to convey his moral quandary admirably well.

There are a couple of sour notes that are worth noting because they’re just so bad. The mineral that the humans are looking to obtain from Pandora (the mining of which is the cause of the central conflict in Avatar) is called… wait for it… “unobtainium.” Unobtainium is a word historically used “for any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material needed to fulfill a given design for a given application.” Okay, so why not just call it “Macguffinite?” Seriously, why not just make Pandora rich in gold? Why make up a mineral?

And while Avatar is much closer to Aliens than it is to Titanic in form, Cameron decided to use a James Horner-composed theme song (ala My Heart Will Go On from Titanic), crooned by Celine Dion imposter Leona Lewis, for the end credits. The Celine Dion song was easily the worst thing about Titanic but at least it sort of fit the material a bit. Here such a song is totally out of place.

It’s too bad that Cameron needs to reinvent filmmaking and outspend the GDPs of most of the world’s nations in order to come out with a film. He’s quite skilled at making these sci-fi adventures. It would be nice to see him do it more often.

In 1994 I did indeed direct Alex’s Smoke script. I shot the film on 3/4″ U-Matic video in a condo in South Burlington with Jay Boulanger, Steve Fortner and Howie Webster in the lead roles. Given my absolute naivete about the filmmaking process, calling the film a “disaster” is probably too harsh. It taught me a lot about filmmaking (and editing in particular) and was a good example of me practicing what I now preach to filmmaking n00bs — make lots of bad films and get them out of the way so you can start making some good ones.

Meanwhile, Alex was busy completely ignoring my sage advice and proceeding with his own production of Smoke, throwing money and professional talent at the script in order to make his first foray into filmmaking more of a creative success.

Alex shot principal photography for his film in May of 1996 (he’d changed the name to Pitch by then because of Wayne Wang’s contemporary feature called Smoke) and I flew out to San Francisco to help him out as a production assistant on his set. Shot in 16mm film and boasting a sizable crew with actual departments and department heads, it was the first real “film” I ever worked on.

Alex was doing a lot of things right for a first-time filmmaker — getting an experienced DP to collaborate with, casting professional actors, shooting on film — but all of that production value cost him dearly. In fact, the cost of his film was so exorbitantly high, it took him 13 more years to finally put the finishing touches on the film.

So here it is. I’d embed the vimeo player, but the film will look better at the vimeo site rather than squished into a Candleblog post. It contains some “adult” themes and language and some nudity, so I think it’s safe to say it’s NSFW.

Congratulations, Alex, on finally putting this great little film to bed. Naturally, I take all the credit.