Archiculture

I attended the opening night of the “Building China” display at the Center for Architecture and thought I would promote the exhibit. The material “features five unique architectural case studies that were conceived, designed, and recently completed by Chinese architects.” I would recommend checking it out if you find yourself in the city with some time to kill. There are a lot of mind-boggling facts as well as some amazing books to flip through on the mezzanine level. Click here for more information.

As a reaction to some of you asking about the names of our three camcorders from a previous post, I would like to introduce you all to our two big workhorses for this film, Flipper and Zeus. These two cameras have been amazing and they deserve their own recognition. We are shooting in High Definition digital video on these two Panasonic HVX200’s at a 24pN frame rate. We are able to shoot at this “native” frame rate because we are recording on to P2 cards. Native basically means you save recording space because it can save 24 frames per second exactly without adding extra frames to fit within other recording formats. P2 cards are four flash drives arranged in a network, similar to a RAID arrangement. These cards have only been on the market for a couple of years (about when the HVX200 was released) and at first were extremely expensive. Well they are still extremely expensive (the newly released 32GB cards sell for $1,600) but with the ever increasing amount of data that we can fit onto hard state memory flash drives the cost keeps dropping. By comparison think of Apple’s iPod and how the cost to space ratio has played out over each new generation and the introduction of the Nano, Shuffle, etc. The key thing here is that the P2 cards are hard state memory, as opposed to other formats such as tape or hard drives which have moving parts. Moving parts = dropped frames = angry filmmaker. So with our current set up of 48GB of P2 card memory available per camera, we can shoot up to 128 mins of footage each. That is key for us since we are shooting a sort of run and gun style documentary. We have to follow students with a wide array of schedules and need the equipment to keep up. They have taken these cameras up on Mt. Everest people have told me. We are taking them into the architectural studio. They can take an extreme beating and keep recording. The potential is endless for what we may be able to capture on this film or for the future of filmmakers in general.

If any of you would like to learn more about how digital video works, I highly recommend checking out The HVX Book by Barry W. Green. We luckily received this book with each of our cameras and it is phenomenal. It breaks down all the technical jargon into easily digestible content. I would suggest it to anyone looking into video, from newbies to old timers. For the rest of you, sorry for the nerdy camera talk, these will only come periodically. I swear. I would also like to thank Pierce and Henry for requesting/forcing us to shell out the extra finances for these cameras because they are hands down the best camera in this class and the footage shows it.

Not to sure what we have gotten into with this one. Some of you may have noticed we introduced a 24 hour live video feed into our office which has been titled the “flycam.”
I will attempt to retrace our train of thought on this one.
1. Some of the students have started to use the handicams as a means to turn the cameras on the directors. We thought if we always had a camera on us they would lose this desire.
2. Somehow some of our friends still seem to think we have some form of life outside of this film, this is a way to prove the contrary.
3. Our moms complain about never seeing us. This way they can always feel close, hey ma.
4. We thought if our film sucks, we could at least go down as those guys that worked a lot.

With that said, I am still not convinced that it was our wisest purchase, but it does bring up an interesting question. Is removing the presence of the camera the only way to truly document anything? I will be the first one to agree that certain people act differently in front of a camera. At one point we flirted with the idea of placing hidden cameras throughout the studio environment. Although it seemed like an amazing idea, it crossed a line of documentary ethics that we were not willing to cross. We are continuously challenging ourselves to desensitize certain biases that may negatively affect the film, but realize that a film with absolutely no agenda is a boring film. At this point in production, I feel that although we have had to adjust the minor threads of the film, the backbone of the story hasn’t changed since the day the idea popped into my head.

1. (especially of medicine) of disease or anything resembling a disease; attacking or affecting many individuals in a community or a population simultaneously; “an epidemic outbreak of influenza” [ant: endemic, ecdemic]

- “epidemic.” WordNet® 3.0. Princeton University. 15 Feb. 2008. <Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/epidemic>.

The past day has reminded me of my time spent in the Houck dormitory during my freshman year at Ohio State. There was one point where Strep Throat spread through our small dormitory so fast that one of the kids said it was at quarantine levels. This made me think of the shear volume of humans which lived in such amazing small living quarters all packed into a 1960’s CMU block building. A social flashback to the Second Industrial Revolution when such dense urban living stemmed the affluent population to flee to the green pastures of the fringe, now known as the Suburbs, to cleanse the body with fresh air. I apologize for the tangent. This is all relating to the fact that I’ve grown sick and my mind is stumbling. This illness is immediately following David’s past 24 hours of sickness. Hopefully Pierce’s minutes of health and strength are not ticking. This is also after finding out from the students that “something” has been going around the school the past week. Well hopefully consuming massive amounts of cheap 10% orange juice and vitamin supplements will nurse use all back to normalcy. The film can not afford one of us to go down for a few days. For now I attempt to get some rest for tomorrow’s Archicast shooting and intern interviews.

Night.

I couldn’t help but share this beautiful photograph of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake.  Please go to the original site to get a glimpse of the resolution of this image.

photo taken by: Geo. R. Lawrence Co.

- image provided by Answers.com

Some of us grew up watching Huey, Dewey and Louie in the newspaper, on Disney, in DuckTales or QuackPack. No matter what era of these three brothers you have been exposed, we would like to present a new interpretation of the identical siblings. In an attempt to provide tangible rewards for those who have donated their hard earned cash to the project, we have created direct donor contributions. One example of this, is our three camcorders shown below. These new HV20 camcorders by Canon shoot in a brilliantly colorful HiDef format, while also matching the 24 frame rate per second our two Panasonic HVX200’s capture. This makes working with footage in the editing timeline much easier, and will enable the footage caught to seamlessly interweave with our higher quality shots. These three cameras, Huey, Dewey and Louie (starting at the bottom running clockwise) where made possible with a gracious donation from the office of Anshen + Allen. We have been handing these cameras out to the students over the past few weeks to provide them the ability to generate first person content for the film. The great part about this is that we are able to give our supporters direct contributions to the film. In this case they are enabling a critical part of the story to be captured from the individual students. Moments that we, David, Pierce and myself, would not be able to film with our larger cameras. We hope this gives the students a personal directorial experience and voice in this project, which will add depth and honesty to the film. We even imagine some of the students editing their own short videos of their captured content into the Extras DVD.

For now we have kept Huey around to capture extremely closeup footage of the intricately detailed models and to prepare for either Dewey or Louie getting smashed by the students. For a great example of how we imagine using the camcorders on the students’ architectural models, check out this beautiful music video for The Acorns.

Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

-Werner Herzog

I went into this posting knowing, needing almost, that I wanted to include something from a filmmaker I respect. Reading over numerous quotes from him, as I do when things get stressful, I hope that as I continue my body of work that I can boundlessly appreciate why Werner Herzog speaks on the subject of film the way that he does.

Many of his thoughts, while I fully agree with them based on my own understanding, would likely open a wider range of debate than I want to get into here. I chose this one because it really hits a nerve that I’ve been riding pretty hard.

The natural growth on a project, especially a documentary, seems only second nature. If you fight it, you just throw up barriers for yourself, but if you let it roam free, you’ll never get it under control. Terms like “guidance” and “development” are preferred ways of sailing the ship. While force is sometimes unavoidable, delegation and teamwork from a Captain or leading pair, no matter how stern, will always win over your crew. In turn, experience yields necessary results from those in charge, but innovation from other team members will only help your project. Be open to it.

Ideally this is just preaching to the choir, maybe I’m preaching to myself, but I know it always helps to refresh these ideas in the context of your current project.

-Keeping this one short. Think on it.

How different is creating a documentary from creating a feature film?  My first thought was similar to that of Steve James, the director of Hoop Dreams who explains that, “features are about creating a story that’s been preplanned and scripted in advance” and “documentaries are about discovering the story as it unfolds.”  I can only attest to the latter half of the quote since this is my first true film, but have found myself wondering if producing a feature requires any less hurdles than that of a documentary.

However, after reading a recent interview with Jeffrey Blitz, the creator of Spellbound and Rocket Science, I must reexamine my initial inclination. Blitz answered the question in an interview with MovieMaker by saying, “It’s a funny thing, how close fiction filmmaking is to documentary filmmaking. I think there’s a misconception that in fiction film you exert control over every last part of the process and in documentary you don’t exert any control. In my experience, the reality is gray.”  After reading this response, I could not help but compare the two to the experience I had at my former job. One day I would work on a rural residential floorplan and the next day on a high density urban development.   Although the two were very different in location, scale, and programming, the process was generally the same.   Honestly, it all boils down to having an idea, communicating the idea, and implementing the idea through problem solving.  I guess the only way for me to truly answer the question is to follow this film with a feature.