Vanessa and I were hipped to this “video essay” by editor Louise Ford. Thanks Lou! And you’ve got to dig Jesus Lizard (although I’ve only licensed them once, in Hal Hartley’s AMATEUR).
Pure from Jacob Bricca on Vimeo.
Month: June 2010
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It’s A Fact
TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.
Update 6/6/10: PROPRIETOR is another word that can be spelled using only the last row of the keyboard and it is the same length as TYPEWRITER.
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Help Keep NJ’s Film Tax Credit
I received the following letter from Joseph Guerriero of Tax Credits LLC. Film tax credits are job stimuli. As tough times as these are, it is foolish for any state to dis-incentivize films, and all the money they bring, from shooting in their state.
Follow Joseph’s advice, and write to the representatives and urge it’s passage.
Senator Paul A. Sarlo, Chairman of the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committee, has called a special public Committee hearing to discuss the future of New Jersey’s Film and Digital Media Tax Credit Program. The Hearing will take place on Wednesday, June 9th, from 11:00 am – 1:00 pm at NBC/Universal’s “Mercy” Studio,10 Enterprise Avenue North in Secaucus (just off Meadowlands Parkway).
Introduced last November, the Garden State Film and Digital Media Jobs Act,(Senate, No.3002), which was co-sponsored by Senators Paul Sarlo and Thomas Kean Jr, seeks to enhance the current tax credit program for filmmakers…to attract even more films to the state, stimulate local business and create more jobs. Unfortunately, the new administration has proposed suspending the current program altogether for Fiscal Year 2011 (which begins on July 1, 2010).
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Keep It Simple
Last month, Clay Shirkey had a most interesting post entitled “The Collapse Of Complex Business Models“. Shirkey calls attention to Joseph Tainter who in his book “The Collapse of Complex Societies” pointed out that “under a situation of declining marginal returns collapse may be the most appropriate response”.
Shirkey explains that in Tainter’s view, complex societies don’t collapse despite their cultural sophistication, they’d collapsed because of it.
Subject to violent compression, Tainter’s story goes like this: a group of people, through a combination of social organization and environmental luck, finds itself with a surplus of resources. Managing this surplus makes society more complex—agriculture rewards mathematical skill, granaries require new forms of construction, and so on.
Early on, the marginal value of this complexity is positive—each additional bit of complexity more than pays for itself in improved output—but over time, the law of diminishing returns reduces the marginal value, until it disappears completely. At this point, any additional complexity is pure cost.
Tainter’s thesis is that when society’s elite members add one layer of bureaucracy or demand one tribute too many, they end up extracting all the value from their environment it is possible to extract and then some.
The ‘and them some’ is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.
Hmmm…. sounds a lot like the time we are living in now, doesn’t it?
As one can expect, Shirkey provides great examples and greater understanding. It’s a must read.
Thanks to Couper Samuleson for making sure I did not miss this!
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Audiences: Made, Not Born
Today’s guest post is from screenwriter Jeremy Pikser.
When we say, “know your audience,” what do we mean, exactly? What defines the characteristics of an audience? Is an “audience” identical to a “market?”
Is the audience, as Hollywood (and, really, the entire ideology of market consumerism) would have us believe, a natural expression of human nature, the zeitgeist, or what people “want now?” To think so would be to ignore the domination of our sense of what all these are by exactly the cultural forces who are selling us what we “want.”
The creation of desire is a well worn concept, but it’s worth keeping in mind when we think about the “audience” for art. The requirement, for instance, of virtually every popular story to have somewhere in it a hot chick, a beautiful woman, a fair maiden isn’t, obviously, something that’s been created by Hollywood out of whole cloth. It has a long tradition in popular (and not so popular) art. But the entertainment industry has cultivated this notion into a much more powerful and self perpetuating “necessity.”
Part two about where the new jobs may come from…
Some Job Opportunities in Independent Film with Ted Hope (part 2) from Hope for Film on Vimeo.
If you missed Part One, you can watch it here.
And if you want to get ahead to Parts Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, & Eight, g’head.
Special thanks to Chris Stetson for shooting, editing, & posting this.
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PGA’s Producer Code Of Credits
The PGA announced that they are close to getting the Studios to adopt their Producers Code Of Credits as the determining factor in who gets credited as producer on a project.
If you haven’t read these requirements, you must — whether you are a producer, filmmaker, financier, or crew person. Hell, you should if you are an audience member too.
