Project Steev

Heading to East Coast for WTR

The war tax resistance documentary is taking me out of town again, for 9 whole days. I'll be flying to New York City tomorrow and we'll be shooting Sunday and Monday there, and then heading down to DC for the big anti-war demo there on Wednesday. Activists will be blocking the IRS building that morning, and all sorts of other things will be happening. Later in the week we'll head up to Western Mass. to talk to WTRs there.

I'm kind of tired of travelling so much, and i'm not looking forward to cold and snow out there just when it's starting to really be nice and warm here in Tucson... although a side effect of that is that the pollen count has been crazy high and my sinuses are under assault to an almost intolerable degree.. so in that sense it will be good to get away....

Trip to Bay Area for War Tax Resistance Doc Shoot

I'm up in Berkeley at the moment working on a film about war tax resistance. (I posted a rough first trailer on the Pan Left site the day before I left to come here.) The shooting is going pretty well, given that I have a very minimal crew. I tried to recruit some volunteer skilled help from the ranks of bay area indymedia-connected videoactivists. A few people responded with interest but with questions about schedule, and then begged off. I'm frankly kind of surprised and disappointed. I thought there would be enough activist videographers in the area that I could find sufficient help - why is it so hard? Is it that all those people around here are moving on into trying to do it professionally and so can't be bothered to do something for lunch and a good cause?

I guess when I put the shoe on the other foot and imagine some random activist filmmaker visiting Tucson to do a shoot, I don't think I'd help out for free unless it was a subject I was really really personally interested in - I'm just too busy. So I shouldn't be surprised. But it's a shame, because the concept and logistics of this film make it important to have a crew, and a skilled crew.

Anyway, it was an interesting day yesterday. We went to a workshop in the city about WTR put together by Northern California War Tax Resisters, and then back to the east bay to visit famous activist and war tax resister Julia Butterfly Hill, who happened to be back in town, resting and refusing most interview requests but who had said yes to us since it was about war tax resistance. Then we went across the bay again to talk to David Gross, a WTR who has a blog about the subject and is very knowledgable.

We "wrapped" for the day and the evening led to thai food and drinks in the Mission with an old friend. Being back there, my old hood, made me feel a little wistful - San Francisco is so cool and beautiful. It's changed a lot though, and those memories that bring up that well of emotion are just memories, flowing on.

Today we head up to Sonoma county to meet some WTRs there. Lots of driving but I'm hoping for some beautiful scenery as backdrops.

Preproduction

I'm working on 3 different major (to me), funded video projects right now. Pretty exciting, but all 3 of them are in pre-production, though for one of them I have already shot some preliminary material. This means that I've been spending hours and hours every day for weeks just planning shoots and associated travel and logistics. Calling, emailing, asking for location permissions, poring over maps, looking at calendars, buying plane tickets, renting cars, etc etc etc.

I'm sick of it. This is why, I now viscerally understand, there are producers, as a role separate from directors. I need one, or 2 or 3. I'm exhausted and I haven't even shot anything. Dammit.

Riseup Network TV

Josh Wolf, the Bay Area blogger (and current San Francisco mayoral candidate) who was jailed by a grand jury for not turning over footage he shot at a local protest, is now free and running a 2-hour TV program called RUNtv - RUN standing for Rise Up Network. It airs on Peralta TV, which is evidently a cable channel run by Peralta Community College in Oakland.

For each installment of the show, he includes segments from radical videographers around the country, and then places them online and lets people vote on their favorite. The winners receive cash prizes and a chance to compete in the end of season contest.

The latest episode of the show includes my short doc about Sandhill Cranes. Go check it out and cast your vote.

Dry River Doc

I've been working for the last week on a newish project: a DVD/doc about Dry River.The 2nd anniversary of DR having a physical space is coming up November 3, and i thought it would be fitting to get it done in time for that. I've been recording video and audio of various events, mostly music shows, at the space for 2 years, since it opened. So it seemed a simple process to pull all that together with some stills, add some interviews, and voila, a quick and dirty documentary. But, it's not as quick as I thought. there's so much footage to sift through. and i have keep reminding myself that i said it would be quick and dirty and sloppy. my natural tendency is to labor over edits and get fancy and, maybe even get arty, and in general, well, have some pride in my work.

Anyway, I hope I can resist spending too much time on it because there many other projects i should be spending time on, especially ones that might earn me money. It's just like me to get excited about something that's completely voluntary and unpaid, and neglect other things that might be more lucrative, or even more important to the world.

But for what it's worth, I have uploaded a rough draft of the first 30 seconds or so.

Stop Panning! Stop Zooming!

Lately, for a few reasons I won't go into, I've had occasion, as an editor, to look at a lot of video footage shot by others. Some of it is just atrocious. It is just stunning how badly people handle a camera sometimes.

All it takes is just a few minutes watching TV or a movie to get the basics, and it really is the basics that people seem to be missing (Maybe that's the problem, many activists don't watch TV, so they've forgotten what good camera technique looks like). The boiled down rule of thumb: Hold the shot for awhile. That's all you need to know. Everything else comes from that: Don't pan and tilt around constantly. Don't zoom in and out all the time. Just fricking find a shot and stay on it. Even if it might not be the best, perfect composition, just stick with it for at least 5 seconds, 10 seconds, hell, 30 seconds, and THEN move and find your next shot. If you're worried about missing some action, then pull out and stick with a long shot and stay on it. Just stop waving the damn camera around for god's sake. Just stop. Please!!!

(All this advice and more is readily available online, for example at the excellent Video Activist Network site.)

My Hands Are Bananas

WTF?

Ze Frank on Somalia

For the past week or so, since my brother told me about it, I've been starting to get into this super cool video blog called "The Show with Ze Frank." It's an amazingly entertaining daily videocast that consists of mostly just this guy, Ze, camera close-upped on his face, as he rants in this really witty but spastic, tweaker kind of way. like the the smartest funniest speedfreak you'll ever meet.
Friday's episode was a rare political one, mostly about what's been happening in Somalia. He has a great way of mixing the standard news take on something with his own little comedic asides.

I want to do a videoblog sort of like that. A continuation of my so-far still secret series "Meditations on Nature with Esteban Caliente" - it would be sort of mix of Ze Frank, Geraldo Rivera, Nick Broomfield, and.... myself, i guess. yeah.

PEEVE #4785

FWIW, I really hate it when people call documentaries and other films "videos." It bothers me for some reason.

That's all.

Saving The Sandhill Cranes on YouTube

I'm getting more into You Tube. I like it. I hate Myspace (tho i have an account), but I love Flickr and I like You Tube. I think it's a function of 2 things: interface and intention. Myspace's interface just sucks, and also the purpse is nebulous. It's a sort of trendy friendster substitute with no requirement for sharing any creative material. Flickr and YouTube are social sites that involve the sharing of what I think a friend recently called 'tokens of value.' There's a reason you're there besides the networking, schmoozing, macking. Myspace, tho it originally was about bands, is now mostly people just macking. Plus it's owned by Rupert Murdoch.

Anyway, here's my 2nd upload to YouTube, a video I just finished about Arizona Earthfirst!'s response to the hunting of sandhill cranes.

Stretched Too Thin

If my blogging software permitted, this post would be marked not only in the personal category but in every other category that I've defined, and more. That's because this entry is about how many different things I'm involved with and how that's a problem.

But before I get too far into that I will link to a post i just published on another blog that I seldom use, on the delete the border site, relating recent news about arizona border crossing deaths and stuff.

Now I move on into saying this: I'm doing too much and I need to figure out how to jettision some stuff if i intend to feel better about myself and stay sane, because very little of it is getting done in a quality way. Here's the list, or everything i can think of now:

1. dry river
   
2. no more deaths media work
   
3. arizona indymedia
   
4. panleft (i've just agreed to be a board member! argh! what am i thinking!?)
   
5. Root Force
   
6. new Tucson "border radicals" group
   
7. my juarez film - setting up the tour in july
   
8. War Tax Resistance video projects
   
9. editor of Indymedia Newsreal
   
10. bolivia computer project

11. a newish relationship that's very important to me and needs lots of care.
    
12. work, for a new job with lots of annoying bueaucratic obstacles to being paid what i'm supposed to be, not to mention lots of work that requires my creative and thougtful input.

13. green scare - at least this will be over after the event we're having this saturday.
    

The most important things are 2, 7, 11, and 12. A few other things are impossible to get rid of right now. The rest I need to just tell people "sorry, I can't be there." Sigh.

The nice thing, though is that, as usual, just making a list of everything makes it seem like a lot less of a problem. so, yay....

may indymedia newsreal online

I uploaded the newsreal to video.indymedia.org. enjoy.

Newsreal

I don't think I've mentioned here that I was selected about a month ago to be the new editor for Indymedia Newsreal.
It means getting submissions from producers in the mail and assembling from them a 28-minute package that then gets sent off to Free Speech TV and the newsreal dubbers in Seattle, who send out copies to all the subscribers. I may start authoring a DVD also.

The May Newsreal will be my first in this role. I'm excited but it's proving difficult because I've only recieved one 8-minute submission. Now sure what to do. If you're an indymedia videographer and want to submit something at the last minute via Internet, get in touch. gracias.

A Little Something For The Commute

Ok, this totally rocks. a talk show in a car. The latest one is about "belt-sander races."

I'm against driving, but if you have to commute in a car, at least doing something creative like this mitigates things somewhat. Plus, hey, it's car-pooling.

This is already one of my favorite vlogs. not just because of the gimmick, but the guy is really charismatic, and a good interviewer. And a good driver, too, I guess.

(via We Are The Media)

multiclips

Video geek alert. Yesterday I installed Final Cut Pro 5 and one really cool new feature is "multiclips." Basically you can link together multiple clips shot with different cameras of the same thing and then really easily make an edit, clicking back and forth between the different angles like a TV producer doing live Superbowl coverage. (you know: "ready camera 2... camera 2. Camera 3, find me a close up of a ref... ready camera 3... camera 3... ready camera 1.... camera 1...")

So I tested it out with some footage I already had captured of an Earth First demonstration. It was super cool. Something that would have taken a day to piece together took about about 30 minutes. The results are not perfect, and I purposely cut back and forth too often just to demonstrate how easy it is. But it works, and it's a fun little clip; about 5 minutes and 11 MB.

DIY Dumpstering 101

About 2 years ago the Portland Indymedia video collective made a really cool and funny little video about dumpster-diving. The group has made a lot of cool videos, but right now the only way to get them online is using bit torrent and other peer-to-peer technology, and though I have always liked these methods in principle and in theory, sometimes it's a pain. The good thing about them is that you can save on bandwidth, and users get a fast download, because the download gets split up amongst a bunch of people who have the file.

The bad news is that as time passes, less people are sharing the file, until there might be zero peers that have it, or maybe just 1, if you have a reliable tracker/seeder that keeps offering the file. So then you have real slow downloads. There ought to be alternatives. We should be making better use of resources like archive.org, and we should, after an initial wave of popularity for new stuff, be offering stuff as regular http downloads.

Right now on my hosting service I have more drive space and bandwidth than I know what to do with, so as an experiment I'm going to offer DIY Dumpstering 101 right now as a good ol' http download. We'll see how my bandwidth usage goes up and if it's not crazygonuts then maybe I'll procede with more of the old pdx stuff. I also want to gather and upload a bunch of my older stuff too.

note that the file is huge (about 100 megs) and it's in DIVX format. For more information about how to play such files, see the page on portland indymedia about that. Also see more about the video on the portland indymedia site.

Probot vs. Postal Service

Here's my second (or third if you count the little test clip) video piece included, embedded, enclosed, in this blog. It's not a vlog, it's a blog that can, does, and will include media, and you'll be able to look at it with iTunes or FireAnt or that sorta thing.

Anyway, this little piece is called "Probot vs. The Postal Service." - it's basically a mashup, a juxtaposition of a video with a a different song than what original went with it. Probot is a sort of metal supergroup that includes Lemmy from Motorhead and Dave Grolsch of Nirvana. The original video also includes local Portland softporn legends The Suicide Girls and the original song was called "Shake Your Blood," I think. It's typical cockrock bullshit. I couldn't stand it, and even though the imagery raised my blood pressure, I also just got angry every time I saw it. So I got the idea of layering a totally different sort of song over it, as an experiment in detournement. The song - well, you'll see. I think it worked pretty well and it's pretty funny. I didn't change the audio at all, and I only changed the video by altering the speed in about 5 places in order to make some things sync up for more humorous effect.

I was just about to post this and then decided maybe it needs more explanation. Why did I do this? Aren't I just replacing one pop song with another and by using the visuals as-is just perpetuating the sexism in the original? I think to think that one would have to not really pay attention to the lyrics and feel of the new song. The Postal Service song is a great example of "Emo", which, in case you haven't heard, is a sort of sub-genre of independent pop music that is well-known for the open, honest display of feelings. It's antithetical to the sort of macho, chauvinist posturing that bands like Probot, and so much other rock music, display all the time, especially the medium of music videos, depending on objectification of women and a front of power and domination. So just the idea of Lemmy mouthing lines like "when I'm missing you to death" is really funny and thought-provoking, making a critique of the sexist fantasy in the original video just by drawing attention to the contast.

So, there you go, that's why I did it.

By the way, a technical note - I haven't had very many complaints about being able to play these files; I've been encoding them in mpeg-4 format, which is supposedly a standard, but, somehow mpeg-4s made on a Mac are different than those made on Windoze. So some windoze users have trouble, especially if they don't have a recent installation of Quicktime. Other (free) cross-platform players that should work are VLC and mPlayer.

Music Come Upon By Accident

I should have been continuing to wrap up my Juarez doc, but I spent a couple hours last night and today doing a little video that I've been planning to do for a week or so, made from clips I've shot with my digital still camera (which can take little videos) over the last few months.

I call it "Incidental Music."


It's all music that I just sort of accidentally experienced, and was able to whip out my camera to capture.

All of the bits are from Portland except for the first one, which is from Mexico, on the way from Mexico City to the ruins of Teotihuancan. The second is shot from the east bank of the Williamette River, looking across the water towards downtown and hearing, all that way, the Violent Femmes play at the Bite of Oregon festival. Then there's the bike/dance troupe called The Sprockettes, and then some members of The Trash Mountain Boys, and other musicians, doing a little improv bicyclized version of La Bamba - "Zoo Bomba" at a brunch a couple weekends ago, and finally some footage of The Golden Greats, some friends that started a pretty entertaining funk band while I was out of town. I got to see them play at a party I was at.

This is one of the only videos I have edited completely outside of the world of DV. So it was kind of weird. I'm not too happy with the crunchiness of the titles as they turned out on the encoded-for-interweb file. But the whole thing is pretty lo-fi. my still cam shoots in some AVI photojpeg codec, 15 fps, half-res, mono 8-bit audio. but despite these specs it sounds and looks okay in its original form. and not even that bad here. I just with the titles were a little sharper. oh well.

anyway, enjoy. This represents slices of some of the really fun times I've had this summer, symbolized and epitomized by live musical serendipity. There's almost nothing better than just stumbliing across great music.