Welcome to VCAM’s Friday dump of links we found to be of interest in the last week. We hope to bring you a list like this each Friday. These are links that we stumble across during the week that seem relevant to VCAM specifically or community media in general. We tend to post these links to our Facebook and/or Twitter feeds as we find them. We just thought it might be useful (to us here in the office as well as to our members and followers) to collect these in one easy-to-find spot each week. So here goes…
Check out the Open in Vermont booth at the Vermont 3.0 Innovation Jam at the Sheraton on Monday October 26. It’s run by a bunch of Vermonters committed to the free and open source software movement. Stop by and learn more!
There was a lot of buzz this week about tiny Vermont craft brewers, Rock Art Brewery, getting hounded with legal trademark letters from the lawyers at the corporate offices of Monster Energy drinks. The lawyers didn’t like Rock Art’s use of the word “Vermontster” on their recent 10% barley wine release. Green River Pictures (our neighbors!) made a little informational video about the situation featuring an interview with Rock Art owner, Matt Nadeau.
This week the US House Energy and Finance Committee unanimously passed the Local Community Radio Act. Now the bill must go the floor of the House for a vote. Another small victory for LPFM and community media! Contact your representative today to say it’s time to pass the Local Community Radio Act, HR 1147 (VT Rep. Peter Welch is already on board — thank him!).
BHS teen filmmaker Graham Raubvogel has written and directed a short film for the high school filmmaking club that met at VCAM on Fridays during the last school year. We shot the film at VCAM with a cast and crew made up of professional filmmakers and film club students, resulting an a veritable master class in filmmaking. Eat your heart out, Maine Workshops!
On Saturday students in the Burlington High School after school film club shot a short film in the VCAM space. The film is called “Art Lovers” and is the brain child of BHS sophomore (and award-winning filmmaker) Graham Raubvogel. Graham and fellow students Keith LaFountaine, Steven Jaramillo and Michelle Martinek were joined by a team of professional filmmakers, actors and technicians for the production day, which was a hands-on master class in filmmaking.
One of VCAM’s security cameras caught all the action, one frame per second. Below is all 12 hours of shooting — from the minute the first crew walked in the door at 8:00 AM, until the last staff person shut out the lights and left at 8:00 PM — compressed into a single minute of video. Enjoy…
Tomorrow (Friday 11/14) is the night of our annual VCAM Producers’ Recognition Dinner, where we get everyone in a big room, feed them, and thank them for all of the time and effort they put into creating VCAM content.
As with the last few of these events, the evening will be emceed by Seven Days videographer (and VCAM producer) Eva Sollberger. Our keynote speaker will be author, blogger, VPR commentator and UVM prof, Philip Baruth.
These dinners are always a good opportunity to take a look back at some of the accomplishments of our community of media-makers. Here are a few highlights…
Our hostess tomorrow, the afore mentioned Eva Sollberger, recently won first place in her category at the Alliance for Community Media Northeast Regional Video Festival for her Stuck in Vermont series.
VCAM’s own staff took home the first place prize in the “PEG Promo” category in that same festival for the first episode of our rare-but-excellent VCAM VCAST!
In October, two BHS students who are VCAM producers were the only high schoolers to compete in the Vermont International Film Festival’s Student Showcase — and they won awards! Sophomore Graham Raubvogel took home the Best Short award for a film he co-directed called The First Supper, and freshman Keith LaFountaine won an Honorable Mention for his film, If You Can’t Say Anything Nice….
The very same Graham Raubvogel won first place at the Santa Monica Teen Film Festival this summer for his film, Keeping Time.
At the Alliance for Community Media’s national conference this past summer, VCAM took the prize for best access center website, and VCAM production Manager, Bill Simmon, got an Honorable Mention for his short documentary about Vermont blogger, Steve Benen.
That same short documentary, Digital Pamphleteer, screened at several film festivals in 2008 and won the Best Short Documentary award at the Philadelphia Independent Film Festival in July.
I hope I’m not forgetting anyone — if I am, send me a note and I’ll update the post.
Congratulations to all of the award-winners and keep up the great work! And remember, we’re giving out some awards ourselves tomorrow night, so stay tuned for that!
Graham Raubvogel, who won first prize at the Santa Monica Teen Film Festival this past summer, co-directed The First Supper, which won the Best Short award, and Keith LaFountaine got an Honorable Mention for the film he made last year at Edmunds Middle School, If You Can’t Say Anything Nice.
It’s worth noting that Graham and Keith were the only two high school students competing in an otherwise all-college film student competition. Congratulations, Graham and Keith! Keep up the good work!
So only half of my intro to filmmaking class showed up last night and it was the week I was to introduce their documentary filmmaking assignment. I went over the process for making a documentary film that I wanted them to use in class, but because so many students were absent, I wound up writing it all down as a step-by-step process in an email to them. So I figured, as long as I’m typing it out, I might as well share it broadly.
This is by no means how every doc filmmaker makes films — I don’t even follow these steps exactly in my own filmmaking — but it’s a good process that works and is easy to follow for first-timers. Were I to write a longer piece or a book on this, I would include tips about getting good picture and audio and on conducting interviews and on different doc forms and techniques.
This process assumes that the filmmaker has access to a digital video camera and a computer-based editing system. It further assumes the doc you’re making is interview-based. Many documentaries contain no interviews at all. This may not be a very useful process for those films.
RESEARCH – What do you think the story is? What’s the conflict? Who is the main character? Who is the audience for your film? Conduct pre-interviews by phone with potential subjects. Who will you interview on camera? What other visuals or archival materials do you have (photos, video, film, documents, etc.)? If you’re making an argumentative piece, try to understand all sides of the issue as best you can.
SHOOT INITIAL INTERVIEWS – Get your main subjects talking on-camera. Make sure they answer in complete sentences — get them to say the things you want in the way you want them to. Don’t be afraid to ask them to rephrase their answers. Make sure the audio is clean and get all subjects to sign a release (MS Word doc)! Shoot targets of opportunity as you interview the subjects. If you’re interviewing an academic expert, get shots of the degrees on his/her office wall, items on the desk, etc. Does the subject mention items nearby that are easy to shoot? Don’t make yourself have to come back later to pick up missed shots. Also, allow yourself to follow unexpected paths. You may have started out wanting to make a film about an upcoming city council vote, but if you discover evidence of government corruption in your research and interviews, be willing to change the focus of your film.
TRANSCRIBE YOUR INTERVIEWS – Type, type, type. Include timecode information on your transcripts so the words relate to their location on the tape(s). On average, you want at least 3 or 4 references to the TC on each single-spaced page of transcribed interviews. I like to use a two-column table in MS Word with the first column containing the TC and interview questions and the second (larger) column containing the text of the responses.
MAKE A “PAPER EDIT” – sit down with your transcriptions (and a highlighter and a hot cup of cocoa) and select the quotes that support the story you want to tell, then arrange them in the order that best tells that story. You can literally cut them out and arrange them on the floor or you can copy and paste them — but remember to keep the TC info handy for each bit you use. This is how you make the skeleton of your film.
CAPTURE YOUR INTERVIEW FOOTAGE – Focus on capturing the selected parts from your paper edit using the timecode info you wrote down with your transcriptions.
EDIT A ROUGH CUT – Edit together your interview footage in skeletal form, making sure the audio of the interviews is clean and sounds natural — don’t worry about the picture yet. There will be some ugly cuts in your footage that you’re going to cover up with the footage you shoot in the next step. As you edit, consider the form of the finished film. Will you include voice-over narration, titles, music? What’s your hook? Are you using narrative techniques like reveals? How will the pacing work? Feel free to include placeholders for footage you have not acquired yet — usually blank frames with text describing what will go there eventually.
SHOOT “B-ROLL” – Listen to the what the interview subjects are talking about and make a list of “b-roll” footage to go out and shoot. If your subject is talking about the shop where she/he works, go shoot the outside of the shop (an establishing shot) and some footage of the subject doing his/her job. B-roll footage will make up a significant amount of your doc, so shoot lots of it! Make sure it relates to the things your subjects are talking about in the rough edit you made. NOTE: it’s important to shoot your b-roll AFTER you make your rough cut. Before the rough cut, you don’t know which interview bits you’ll use and you may wind up shooting b-roll that is irrelevant to your film.
GATHER YOUR ARCHIVALS – Shoot other targets of opportunity and gather your archival materials. Is your film about an event? Go shoot footage of the event. Are you making a film about the history of zombie culture in VT? Make sure you shoot the Church St. zombie walk tomorrow! Scan any photos or documents that may be relevant. If your subject talks about scoring the winning goal in his high school hockey championship game, does he have a photo of his team? Is there video of the game? You get the idea. Gathering these items can happen at any point in the doc-making process.
EDIT! – Assemble your film. Remember you’re telling a story just like in fictional narrative films. What’s your hook? Where is the conflict? Who are the main characters? Always ask yourself these questions. Does your film succeed at the goals you had when you began making it?