Smile Boston Project joins slate of documentaries at Newburyport Documentary Festival

This weekend my short documentary, Smile Boston Project, (which won Best Short Documentary at the Woods Hole Film Festival) joins a slate of wonderful documentaries screening at the Newburyport Documentary Festival. Check out the schedule, if you live in the area, consider a day trip on Saturday or Sunday to catch some of the wonderful documentary films screening this year. On Saturday night the festival is screening Beth Murphy’s Beyond Belief, which won Best Film at the Woods Hole Film Festival. On Sunday afternoon at 1:45pm Smile Boston Project screens along with Steven Delano’s No Bigger Than A Minute, which premiered in October 2006 on PBS. There will be a Q&A following the screening. Then at 4pm Bren Bataclan (the subject of my film) and I will be at a reception at A Hog On Ice Gallery. If you plan to come to any of the screenings, I suggest you purchase tickets in advance, many of the films are expected to sell out, and opening night on Friday is already sold out.

The hidden truth of photographs (or all images, for that matter)

Errol Morris gets philosophical in his post titled “Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?” on the New York Times web site. He begins the post with a T.S. Eliot quote from “The Hidden Men,”

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow…

very interesting reading on the truthfulness of images.

An interview with Christen McArdle on preserving the Ann Arbor Film Festival

This week’s Art Film Talk interview is with Christen McArdle, the Executive Director of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, the oldest festival of its kind in North America showcasing avant-garde, documentary and independent films from around the world. We talk about the festival's fundraising campaign and the censorship controversy the festival has been involved with.

If it’s not on Flickr, did it happen?

I’ve been saying for a while now, I don’t like it when I go to an event and I don’t shoot photos and then experiencing the feeling that, if it’s not on Flickr, it did not happen, this has been troubling me, and now I read “Will You Marry Me? Say Cheese!,” an article in the September 20th New York Times which mentions visual anthropologist Mike Wesch (known for his amazing Web 2.0 video):

Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University who studies the impact of new media on human interaction, said: “I watch students come to the realization that there’s an internal contradiction in their lives. They both want to be famous and they want to be authentic, and yet there’s something in their striving to archive their lives that’s inauthentic.”

One of his former students recently posted his own proposal photographs on Facebook, he noted. That site and others like MySpace “allow them to be their own publicists,” he went on. “Which ties in with the marriage thing. It really is a fascinating phenomenon. It’s almost like if it’s not on Facebook, it didn’t happen.”

I’m starting to wonder if we should produce less media, rather than more?

Jottit is to web tools what haiku is to poetry

I recently discovered Jottit, a minimalist web site creation tool that makes adding content as simple as writing an email. My immediate reaction was that Jottit is to web tools what haiku is to poetry, try it out, it’s the zen alternative to wiki tools, and the instant feedback is sublime (when you use the editor, you can simply enter text, but if you choose to type HTML, what you write on the left is displayed on the right as the browser will render it in real time, a sublime use of Ajax, I presume).

I asked Aaron Swartz about the genesis of Jottit and he explained to me that he had a site called Google Weblog with a submit form for people to submit ideas for posts. And he found that, “people coming to the site through Google kept submitting their stories of their day,” and so on and so forth. Aaron explained that they thought, “it was just the way to post stuff to the internet.” So he thought, “why not just make posting to the internet that simple?” And thus Jottit was born. Code is poetry and Jottit is the latest haiku.

Interview Lighting (handout)

Here’s a handout I cobbled together from various sources while on the train ride back to Boston after attending and presenting at Podcamp Philly. It reviews the examples I discussed in the session and goes into more detail on some of the specific issues.
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Comparison of Camera vs. Boom Microphone

Here’s a quick comparison I did of recording dialog with an MKH60 Shotgun Microphone mounted on a camera vs. mounted on a boom.

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Kino Flo DIVA and Kobold 400W HMI PAR

Here’s a little video I made with Steve Garfield to demonstrate the use of daylight balanced lighting in an outdoor interview situation, using the lighting to help create a better balance between subject and background. The instruments used in the video are the Kobold 400W HMI PAR and the Kino Flo DIVA 400.
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