Why web-only film festivals are retarded

There are a zillion short film festivals out in the world. I just got an advertisement for a Hitchcock-themed contest in my inbox yesterday. That makes about 3-4 that I’ve become aware of this month. Just today I read about the “first ever web-based film festival“. You’d think that a guy like me, publishing bi-weekly shorts online, would be into this sort of thing, but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s because there is so much web-only entertainment out there that I loathe the entire idea of web-based short competitions. It’s the beginning of the end - imagine a future where all film festivals, and therefore all video content, is web-only. Without the social aspects of traditional festivals, the art of filmmaking will be watered down. Winning them would mean nothing and losing means that you’ll just create more to try and win the next one. As creators of web-based video content, aren’t we all competing for attention anyway? Isn’t a formal contest just a little redundant and missing the point?

The people that compete in said web-only film fests are small potatoes, each trying to claw their way out of the fog and into the public eye. Traditionally, venues like Sundance, Cannes, or TromaDance would be the fast track to get their names out there - gain exposure, become a commodity and the ability to make something bigger. With the advent of super-cheap prosumer electronics and an ever-moving Internet audience, you’re looking at millions of content producers that are too low budget to go to a real film fest, but who all have aspirations of making it anyway. These are the people who will apply to web-only festivals. That’s right - by entering, you’re literally competing with that scary guy who uses puppets and somebody’s grandma. Welcome to the Internet - we fight Grandmas here.

Our information culture is rapidly becoming an irony culture, or a remix culture - the biggest memes out there are always trainwrecks - and the bigger the better. With the influx of information pouring into people’s daily lives (i.e. Internet at home, Internet at work, iPhone inbetween), it didn’t take long to turn obscure stories into laugh-fests, and hot news items into entertainment. I just think it’s funny that the cable access of tomorrow (YouTube) is just as enabling to freaks, weirdos, and attention whores as your local college TV station was 10 years ago. The huge difference is that in the last few years, the cable-access personalities of yesteryear have become today’s instant celebrities. Lisa Nova, AVGN - both started out just doing something that they thought was funny - but now with the world watching, their millions of hits translated into fame and DVD sales. 10 years ago they’d still be unknown.

Now with video games adding shared level creation and sharable user experience video, people are communicating in whole new ways. Yup, now there are whole new ways to flip the bird. Isn’t that what people want to see anyway? Aren’t we just dramahogs at our most base? We just want to see some explosions, a pretty girl, an embarrassing sports injury, and some fat kid roll around like an idiot. Welcome to the Internet - aka America’s Funniest Home Videos. Would you like an award with that?

Shooting a PSA indoors w/robots

On Monday we resurrected our go-to filler item for this week’s content, a fun little PSA series about robot safety. After shooting for another producer on Sunday, I was reminded to keep my crew happy and my shoot short - with lots of spare time just in case. ‘Just in case’ time can turn into ‘oh crap’ time very easily.

For this shoot we required a beach scene, so I spent the morning scouring the Astoria coastline for a sandy beach. It turns out there is no place on the water that anyone can actually access without a portable ladder, rope, or extremely long legs. The entire surrounding waterfront is unreachable, with a ten-foot cement wall separating the public from the river, like so many zoo animals. Are we being protected from it, or is it being protected from us? This question sprang out of irritation as I turned around several times, trying to find a way to legally park my car next to a leafy State park area.

I had brought a bucket just in case, and it turned out that I’d need it. If the area failed to provide a good shooting location for a beach, we’d just create one in-house. Steathily, my eyes darting left and right, I crossed the park with the bucket and shovel. I looked hard for anything that would pass as beach sand. The river was once again blocked off from the land by a ten-foot drop. Eyeing the sand in the grown-over baseball diamond, I kicked some piles together on my way across the width of the park. On my way back, I quickly bent down as if to tie my shoe, opened the bucket, and scooped in some sand. In the same motion, I kicked in the pile I had previously made. On my way back to my car, I nervously thought of lurking State Park Police people and bad attitudes, maybe how I would explain holding a bucket of baseball diamond sand and a shovel. “This is ridiculous.” was probably my last thought as I stepped into my car and drove off. Free sand is just so hard to come by in the city.

 

By the way, before I continue my tale, you must know that I DID return all of the sand at the end of the day. No blood, no foul. I was just borrowing it, after all.

 

update: I just pulled another 17 hour day for SVU.  Tiiiired.  Have to get up in 4 hours.  I’ll finish this tale, with full video, next week.

=chad

‘Nerdcore for Life!’ or ‘Self-Imploding Music Scene Documentary’

I am a nerdcore fan. I go to Nerdcore shows, listen to chiptune music, even support local collaboration shows like Pulsewave and Blipfest. I love it. It’s one of my things.

 

There’s been quite a few docs done specifically on ‘music with an 8-bit influence’ since it began to show up on the radar a few years back. There’s Nerdcore for Life, Nerdcore Rising, Reformat the Planet, 8-Bit Philosophy, and a few that are YouTube-only.  You may have seen an article or two about it.  Mainstream media seemed to pick it up for a week, as if it was some disposable news story, and it hasn’t really been covered since.

Through a mutal friend, I wound up speaking to Dan Lamerieux, the mastermind behind Nerdcore For Life, a documentary covering the scene for two years. I saw him at Shael Riley show taping a performance for the film. Dan would later tap me to do some shooting in NYC for the movie.

Soon after we exchanged emails, I signed up to shoot an interview with MC Lars, one of the featured artists in the documentary, at an apartment in Park Slope.  Z asked the questions (brilliantly). Lars, a great guy and an intelligent interviewee, had some pretty interesting things to say about the scene. Short story: at this stage, all that existed of the film was this trailer in 4:3. It was surprising at first, but then everything seemed to be shot on prosumer video, so I guessed it made some sort of sense. Problem was that I accidentally left on the settings I would normally use our HVX: 16:9, letterbox + squeeze, 24p. After sending Dan my DV tapes of the Lars interview, I re-watched the trailer, cringed at my mistake, and asked him if 16:9 would be alright. “We’ll figure something out” was the gist of what I got back. Whups.

Last week I popped in a prerelease copy of the doc and found that the tail had wagged the dog. The entire film had been letterboxed to match our Lars interview. Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous. Everything was widescreen now- that’s a better way of putting it. It’s probably more festival-friendly this way. While watching, I forgot about the initial resolution until this interview popped up - the taller rapper’s head was pretty much cut off near the eyes. Outside of this shot, the rest of the film feels like it was meant to be 16:9.

What is Nerdcore?  The overall piece is a mashup of people, facts, opinions, throw-downs and throw-ups. Watching this film was very much like NERDCORE THE MONSTER just barfed its guts all over Toyko. An ugly yet intimate view of the scene from 2004-2006 is bared for all to see. There’s a lot of drama that erupted during the doc’s years of filming, including random beef between artists, but also between the artists and the genre itself. Without spoiling some great / viscous moments in the film, there’s hope and hate for the very word ‘nerdcore’ by and from the musicians that are considered thus.

Another signature to this doc is the style of the visuals. Mirroring the DIY spirit of the scene, multiple cameras / resolutions / lighting styles were used to piece the film together.  My understanding from receiving instruction from Dan was that alot of the interviews were done in a way to maximize the comfortableness of each interviewee (one Q&A was done in a hot tub). While this multi-camera, sometimes good lighting - sometimes bad lighting aesthetic isn’t really pleasing to watch, it gives the film a ‘guerrilla’ feel.  All the sub-sections have meaning and tie-in to give you, the non-nerdcore audience, a glimpse into the short history of the music and the people who make it.  You get the feeling that many different cameramen contributed to this piece, that the entire work itself might just be a labor of love.

 

I have yet to see the rival documentary (yes! there is a rival film), but I know that it won’t come close to the heart-felt detail that N4L discloses throughout its hour-and-change runtime.  At one point, we are guided through the history of the scene by the most well-known Nerdcore artists: names like Beefy, mcchris, YTCracker, MC Router, Shael Riley and others.  Not only is their reverence (and loathing) for the scene exposed, but their love/hate relationship with each other is also highlighted.  That’s something that I wasn’t quite expecting: Nerdcore is an explosive medium with a lot of giant egos, infighting, and name calling by a bunch of mediocre rappers that are sometimes eclipsed by one or two geniuses.  N4L, despite its apparent love for the artists and music, doesn’t pull any punches on this subject.  In their own words, the artists admit that the best and worst thing about Nerdcore is that anyone can do it.  Anyone can make a track in their parents’ basement, and that’s not necessarily a good thing.  Towards the end of the film, I found myself questioning if the scene would last another 5 years.

Overall, I enjoyed the perspective of the film and would recommend it to anyone who has no idea what Nerdcore is and needs a crash course on the history, drama, beef, and love/hate within the community.  Also, it’s a historical document for people in the scene to look back upon fondly years into the future.

 

=chad

 

I’ve been pulling alot of days doing prep / wrap for SVU and Gossip Girl this week, and through all of it I’ve been thinking about finally getting on the iPhone boat. There’s alot of downtime where everyone literally sits around and twiddles their thumbs (this morning the riggers and I waiting two hours for a truck to return) and I literally got bored with reading books, my normal go-to boredom killer.  Hurry up and wait, they say.  Ah well.