The United States of America

I’ve been looking over Ted Hope’s blog lately and one thing he keeps returning to is the idea that in order for cinema to be truly free (i.e., liberated), we have to do our part to help film culture. I agree.

That’s part of what this blog has always been about. One of the reasons I began this blog was to champion filmmakers working regionally.

But now I’d like to undertake a concrete project specifically dedicated to spotlighting filmmakers that live around the country. To do that I need your help. Not a lot of help, mind you — just a few minutes.

I’m calling this undertaking 50 States, 50 Filmmakers.

It will probably end up being a series of discussions with filmmakers working around the country. I hope to talk with others about why they live and work where they do, the challenges and opportunities they face, the resources available to them, and how they support their work. Ideally, these discussions will include links that allow you to watch or purchase their work. And I’d like to do one for each state, in case the title didn’t tip you off.

So, to restate, to do this project completely, I need your help.

I want you to tell me who you think is living and making interesting films outside of New York or Los Angeles. The films can be feature films, documentaries, or short experimental works. I don’t care. “Interesting” and “not-New-York-or-Los-Angeles” is all I care about.

If you want to nominate a filmmaking team or filmmaking collective, that’s cool. I’m open to doing a few historical surveys, too, so if you prefer to nominate someone deceased (say, Eagle Pennell of Texas or Colorado’s Stan Brakhage), go for it. I just want some interesting ideas.

So, without further ado, CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY.

Don’t know 50 filmmakers in 50 states? That’s okay. I don’t either. That’s why I’m doing the survey — to fill in some blanks and to get some good ideas for this thing. Just take the survey and give suggestions where you can. You don’t have to provide nominations for all 50 states.

And please pass this along to your friends. I’d like as many people throwing out ideas as possible. I’m going to leave this post up for a couple of weeks, after which I’ll start compiling replies.

Again, here’s the link to the survey.

I recently mentioned that Ashley would be making some posts on SRF to discuss her documentary, For Memories’ Sake. This marks something of a shift in Self-Reliant Film. Though I’ll still be the main voice of the site, I will no longer be the sole blogger here.

In addition to Ashley’s posts, my hope is to invite a couple more filmmakers into the mix in the coming months. The aim in doing this is to cover more of the things happening in cinema today while providing a voice to some interesting filmmakers — especially regional filmmakers — working today.

Anyway, it seemed appropriate to clean up the website design to mark the changes.

While it’s on my mind, here are some notes on the new look:

Though its aim was to tie-in to the imagery of the letterpress chipboard posters that I use for my films, I was never fully satisfied with the “chipboard” version of the site. So I’ve decided to go with a new, cleaner look that will (I hope) allow users to find information more easily.

The top SRF menu consists of static pages, and their “child” pages.

The lower menu features categories of “mega”-tags. Hovering over each one will bring up a category of tags used on the blog. And clicking on one of those will give you all the posts in that area. In some cases (like Films & Filmmakers -> Genres) there is a third layer of categories (in this case, “Experimental” and “Documentary”).

The main idea is to make the content you want more easily findable. Let me know if you like it, or if you don’t.

Oh, and in case you’re interested, this site uses a WordPress template called “Thematic Power Blog” by Ian Stewart.

Check it out, if for no other reason than to get a preview of the Self-Reliant Film redesign that will launch in a few days.

If you’re in L.A. and interested in no-budget filmmaking, this is probably worth a look.

Reader (and former student) Jonathan Poritsky writes in:

I’ve replied to enough “your-dad-said-you-work-in-film-what-should-i-do-now?” e-mails that I got tired of it and decided to write the response to end all responses. It seemed relevant to SRF, and also in part inspired by what you do on your site. So here’s the link, do with it what you will…

I will link to it. Here it is: Starting Out in Film, Now What?

Isolator: I’ve been using this application on and off (literally) for a year. As its creator describes it, Isolator

will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand.

Freedom: James M. Johnston recently tipped me off to this cool little Mac application. According to its website, Freedom

is an application that disables networking on an Apple computer for up to eight hours at a time. Freedom will free you from the distractions of the internet, allowing you time to code, write, or create. At the end of your selected offline period, Freedom re-enables your network, restoring everything as normal.

Now, Eubank has outdone himself with pCAM for iPhone, which combines the pCAM and pCINE applications in a new interface. If you have an iPhone and you shoot film or video, this is a supremely useful tool. At $39.99 it may seem pricey for an iPhone app, but in my opinion it’s well worth the price.

pCAM for iPhone [iTunes store link]

Please note: I do get a few pennies for the click-through if you end up purchasing something. Amazon links are my way of keeping this site advertising-free. And remember: If you’re broke you can always try to find these at your nearest public or university library.

According to the press release, new features include: 

1.  Adapt To – a single click now converts a fully formatted script of one type into a fully formatted script of another – for example a Stageplay to a Screenplay – displaying instantly the multi-media potential of your work.

2.  Comic Book – a new editor to write properly formatted Comic Books, and a common framework for collaboration between writer and artist.

3.  iPhone – now view your Celtx projects from just about anywhere with a display optimized for your iPhone.

4.  Catalogs – a new organization and searchable dashboard view of all your story’s elements and production items.

5.  Sidebar – annotate and break down each scene with notes, media (images, audio, and video clips), and production items through an easy to manage, thoroughly upgraded new sidebar.

6.  Project Scheduling – has been vastly upgraded to fully integrate with the script breakdown and provide a Call Sheet and a host of new shooting reports.

7.  Storyboarding – you can now choose from a variety of ways to view and manage your images, create a storyboard outline based on your script, and add shot descriptions to each image.  

I’ll try to dig into this in the next few weeks and give a report. But first, I’ve got about 500 emails to reply to and some bags to unpack from my European travels.