Site Archive

Sennheiser Evolution G3 100 Series
Written by David Tames on February 18, 2010
Filed Under Featured, Gadgets and Devices, General, Reviews, Sound, Video Production
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If you want to go with a wireless microphone system, and you’re trying to balance between performance and price but don’t want to compromise too much on performance, I would suggest taking a close look at the Sennheiser Evolution G3 Series. I’ve been using the previous G2...  Continue Reading...

The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative
Written by David Tames on February 12, 2010
Filed Under Books, Featured, Narrative, Reviews
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I recently finished reading The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative by H. Porter Abbott (Cambridge University Press, 2nd. edition, 2008). This book is by far the best introduction to narrative currently available, encompassing the range of narrative forms including literature, cinema, and...  Continue Reading...

Transcriva 2
Written by David Tames on January 13, 2010
Filed Under Documentary, Featured, Filmmaking, Reviews, Tools
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Back in August of 2005 I wrote a post, Transcriva makes transcribing (almost) fun, in which I reviewed the first version of Transcriva from Bartas Technologies, a delightful Macintosh application I’ve been using since then for transcribing audio and video interviews. Last year Bartas...  Continue Reading...

Seven RSS feeds of interest to New England documentary filmmakers
Written by David Tames on November 7, 2009
Filed Under Documentary, Featured, General, Web
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Here are seven RSS feeds that I think will be of interest to New England documentary filmmakers. These suggestions come out of the discussion that took place today during theSocial Media Boot Camp for Film Professionals with Sean Fitzroy held at MassArt. There are many good feeds out there,...  Continue Reading...

Flying takes documentary form to new heights
Written by David Tames on August 27, 2009
Filed Under Documentary, Featured, Filmmakers, Filmmaking, Films
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Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman is an amazing six-hour, six-part, documentary of epic proportions by Jennifer Fox in which we follow the filmmaker as she travels around the world asking her women friends how they construct and imagine their lives as she struggles to figure out her own....  Continue Reading...

Using both channels (an audio channel is a terrible thing to waste)
Written by David Tames on August 13, 2009
Filed Under Camera, Documentary, Featured, Filmmaking, Sound, Video
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Practically every camcorder records two channels of audio, which allows you to record in stereo (Left/Right) or two discrete channels (1/2). Lately I’ve been using the Sennheiser Evolution G2 wireless a lot and it started to bother me that I was only recording one channel from the wireless...  Continue Reading...

Metropath(ologies): ecstasy of communication or ambivalence of information?
Written by David Tames on May 23, 2009
Filed Under Art, Featured, New Media, Reviews
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Judith Donath recently spoke at MassArt. In anticipation of her talk I went to see the Connections exhibition of works by Donath and her Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. I was particularly taken by Metropath(ologies), an immersive installation that is at once beguiling and enchanting....  Continue Reading...

A postmodern remake of a futurist classic: Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake
Written by David Tames on March 29, 2009
Filed Under Art, Documentary, Featured, Filmmaking, New Media, Web
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Video artist Perry Bard’s Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory project made with contributions from people around the world who upload video clips interpreting Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera (1929), a film that is still fresh today in surprising...  Continue Reading...

Bard’s work is the kind of machine-assisted participatory filmmaking that brings Vertov’s vision into the new millennium and enabled by computers and the net. I’m sure Vertov would have loved it. Man With A Movie Camera was Vertov’s mechanical vision of a new socialist society with Vertov as auteur, Mikhail Kaufman as the cameraman, and Yelizaveta Svilova as editor, and with Soviet society and the machinery of the industrial age as the protagonists. Bard’s project presents a global social reality in the new millennium. Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, or as I like to think of it, “People with Video Cameras” brings the machine and ordinary people into the process of movie production and delivery, providing a collective vision consistent with Vertov’s futurist masterpiece of the modern era but remade in a postmodern setting with the media and tools of our generation: participation, camcorders, the internet, and computation. The perspectives of multiple contributors is consistent with Vertov’s philosophy, Joseph Schaub wrote in his essay, “Presenting the Cyborg’s Futurist Past: An Analysis of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye“, “Kino-eye, then, is a cyborg construction that contains multiple positions for the production of film meaning.” OK, I’m stretching a little, but ideas are fun to play with, I see them as guides to possible worlds.

Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake provides a crisp example of the first, second, and fourth characteristics that Janet Murray suggests in her book, Hamlet on the Holodeck, make new media a powerful vehicle for literary creation: 1. Procedural, 2. Participatory, 3. Spatial, and 4. Encyclopedic. The site does not make use of the spatial dimension (except for some aspects of the interface, which traditional cinema lacks completely), however, It’s pretty easy to see how the project could become more spatial in an interesting manner by adding geographical information related to the video when it is uploaded to the site, underscoring the truly global nature of the effort. Regardless of being light in the spatial dimension, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is one of the most interesting participatory video projects I’ve had the pleasure to experience and points the way to the future of cinema. While theater owners worry over sagging ticket sales and studio moguls fear the audience’s move to net, as creators and participants we can move beyond the industrial practices of the past and look forward to a re-invented, participatory, global, postmodern, Kino-Eye.

This post is based in part on a post written for my Design Seminar II class at MassArt in response to Scott Kirsner’s Media Tech Tonic presentation, “Inventing the Movies.”

--> Tom Robotham talks about his Blender LED light
Written by David Tames on February 9, 2009
Filed Under Camera, Documentary, Featured, Interviews, Lighting
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LED lighting is changing the way we light, especially run-and-go documentary. There are several units on the market including lights from Zylight, Litepanels, and the new Blender light, designed by Tom Robotham. Several months ago Tom came to visit me at MassArt and brought along his new light....  Continue Reading...

Interview with David Redmon and Ashley Sabin about Intimidad
Written by David Tames on October 18, 2008
Filed Under Distribution, Documentary, Featured, Film Festivals, Filmmaking
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Back on April 25, 2008 I had the opportunity to talk with filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin after the screening of their film Intimidad, at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Their new film presents a beautiful and intimate portrait of a struggling family in Mexico. It observes...  Continue Reading...

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