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Jim Munroe

Alley Tour Report, Culp/Picastro on Friday

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 26, 2009

Seven of us braved the weather yesterday to go on a guided laneway tour led by cartographer and alleyologist Graeme Parry. We found lots of ideas in the nooks and crannies of the city & took some neat pictures. It was too cold to do the shooting skillshare afterwards so it’s been postponed to Sun, Feb. 15th, 1pm (weather permitting).

There’s another opportunity to meet up with some of the people involved with the lo-fi sci-fi project this Friday. One of the ideas we had to get musicians we know to watch a rough cut of the movie and improv along to it, and use the recording of the jam session as a soundtrack or soundtrack elements. That’s still something we’re curious about, and Jon Culp has a Super 8 screening that might give us a sense of how it could work.

Cutting between faded (“red shifted”) Eastmancolor industrial films, classroom-film curios, and Hollywood imagery old and new, the pictures interlock with the haunting semi-acoustic dissonances of local band Picastro, performing live with the film. Red Shift is a slowly disintegrating nightmare of utilitarian media gone wrong.

It’s a 40 minute non-narrative piece, however, so depending on how you feel about experimental film you might need to bring your patience as well as your $5 to the Trash Palace (89-B Niagara Street, just west of Bathurst). It’s this Friday Jan. 30th, 9pm.

How’s This Working for You?

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 17, 2009

It’s working well for me, but I’d thought I’d check in to see how this site/email combo is working for you. Any suggestions? Requests? Feedback? Too much info, not enough? Leave a comment or hit reply to this email.

The research is going well. I’m slightly concerned it might be too cold to shoot outside at the skillshare a week tomorrow, if this punishing weather continues.

Smart, Generous and… from Hollywood?

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 10, 2009

John August is a guy who’s written a bunch of fantastical big studio scripts, and I just came across his website when he released a webisode he wrote/directed during the strike.

The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

Don’t let the Reservoir Dogs-eque type treatment put you off, it’s 11 minutes of funny lo-fi sci-fi goodness even with the gloss of Hollywood connections giving it a slightly waxy taste. I also quite enjoyed his other lo-fi sci-fi directorial debut The Nines, and especially appreciate his sobering post-mortem on it. It reaffirms my belief that zerobudget is the way to go, as even Sundance-buzzed indie films aren’t making their budget back.

His how-to section is excellent, too.

Edit: Sorry, not Reservoir Dogs, Godfather-esque. Also worth checking out is August’s QandA section.

No to ACTRA, Yes to Releases, Maybe to Cyberhats

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 9, 2009

Dave has been talking to the ACTRA actor’s union about our situation, and while there are some lower rates for indie low-budget productions if you qualify, they didn’t go for our model of deferred, hypothetical money.

My unnamed source who had used ACTRA actors, then was able to clear it once he had a broadcast offer, was a bit of a special case. He started his movie as a workshop/improv kind of thing with a few people who were ACTRA. After the movie was made, he went to ACTRA and explained that he didn’t know he was going to actually make a movie — they watched it, believed him based on the style of movie, and allowed him to pay the actors TIP rates retroactively.

So it looks like we should go non-ACTRA & non-union in general: unions are one of those good things, like organic food, that I continue to feel ambivalent about. On a more practical tack, does this mean I should lean towards script ideas have have lots of smaller acting parts (Play’n) rather than ones with leads that will dominate the screen (Alleyologist)? Input welcome.

Dave was also able to track down some templates for all the releases we need at the Canadian Independent Film & Video Fund (CIFVF). He did it so quickly I suspect he might have Internet access via his frontal lobe. Or at least a hat like the guy at the top of the post.

Errors and Omissions Insurance and Broadcast Sales

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 6, 2009

I’ve just talked to a director who’s sold a movie for broadcast and gotten a theatrical release, and he gave me the off-the-record skinny on some of his experiences and cleared up some other legal things we were discussing here.

Superchannel was interested in purchasing the broadcast rights to his movie, but required them to have Errors and Omissions Insurance. An E&O insurance company protects the broadcaster against getting sued for stuff: say you have a brand name in the shot, a store, or a person in the background. If they see themselves in a movie they don’t like they call up Superchannel or whoever, but Superchannel shuffles them off to the E&O insurance company. They have to settle with the person, or deal with it somehow.

So in this director’s case, they had to submit the movie to the E&O company and they assessed the potential risk and charged them accordingly. There was a brand of a local beer who’s appearance they were able to clear with the beer company since it wasn’t presented in a unpleasant way, which reduced how much they were charged. So every location/extra/music/actor/crew release you have signed is one less risk the E&O company has to take, and thus charge the moviemaker for. He thought companies and individuals were much more likely to be perceived as a risk than public spaces — he’d never heard of people having to produce permits from the city for on-the-fly shots. He imagined the insurance would cost $5-$10,000 but wouldn’t have to be paid until there was a broadcaster offer.

The rights to his movie, which he thought was pretty average or standard, sold for about $50,000 to Superchannel. So, overall, I think it’s worth it to do the paperwork as we go, as it amounts to location/extra/music/actor/crew releases drawn up and signed.

He said that broadcasters sometimes do presales based on a script, but they expect it to trigger other much bigger investor money (ie. Telefilm, who would be impressed you have a broadcaster); that they often have content input, and while this is not control, one is behooved to take it seriously if one wants to continue the relationship with other projects — a “too many cooks” situation. He threw out $15,000 as a hypothetical presale number, but it’d be based on a small percentage of the budget. Doesn’t sound worth it for the amount of shopping-around effort and potential interference.

Skillshare #2: Shooting Up Alleys

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 5, 2009

We’re having our second skillshare on Jan. 25 at 1pm. Want to improve your camera shooting skills? Do you have some skills you’d be willing to share? I’m thinking it’d be fun to shoot this trailer, though it doesn’t mean that’ll be the concept we’ll be going with. (It’ll give us some footage to edit for February’s editing skillshare.)

At 4pm we’ll have an alley tour with Graeme Parry, who gives tours like the one above and who Sean Lerner suggested when I was talking about making a movie with alleys. It’ll be an hour, and then we’ll go to dinner somewhere.

If you’d like to join us for some or all of the day, add a comment. Location is to be announced.

Time Logging Protocol

Posted by Jim Munroe – January 1, 2009

It’s pretty unlikely that we’ll make any money off of this, but if that happy thing was to happen, wouldn’t it suck if people felt like they didn’t get their fair share? I know that I would feel like shit. This is why I want to make this as transparent and accountable as possible.

As I proposed in this post, and there seemed to be general agreement on, one way to fairly divide our wads of hypothetical money is by logging our hours. So, this being the day of new resolutions, I’d like to encourage people to develop it as a habit that they eventually don’t have to think about. Personally, I’ve been using this dashboard applet for my Linux system and there seem to be various apps to do it with Mac and PC, including this Java crossplatform one (anyone else got a favourite?). But naturally pencil and paper is fine too, whatever works for you. I’ll be asking people for their hours right before we shoot, after we shoot, and after the project’s over.

Many of the people involved have done this to invoice clients, so it shouldn’t be that tough. However, unlike invoicing clients who are reselling your work at a profit, I’d ask people to consider that padding or guesstimating the time you’ve spent is either taking (hypothetical) money away from people that are being accurate, or underestimating the time spent and ripping yourself off.

Anyway: if you have concerns or questions, now is the time to voice them. We’ll work it out. Otherwise, I’ll assume you’re logging your hours!

The Proposed Schedule

Posted by Jim Munroe – December 28, 2008

As people may have noticed, I’ve been coming up with possible story concepts — a couple have just spontaneously occurred to me, and others I’ve sat down and brainstormed up. I’ve got five now, and I’m going to go deeper with them over January — researching the leads people have added in the comments (and hopefully will continue to add), interviewing people with expertise in the subjects, etc. I’ll share what I learn and by the end of the month one will probably feel particularly strong. I’ll then write up a 10 page outline for that one in February, invite people to give feedback, and write the script in March. In Jan, Feb, and March we’ll have monthly events (like the lighting skillshare that went really well yesterday) to meet in person and discuss the movie informally. In April I would like to step it up with weekly meetings that will prepare us for shooting in May and June.

Concerns? Have a particular pre-production thing you’d like to see included? Chime in!

Stack Overflow

Posted by Jim Munroe – December 26, 2008

My favourite talk at Defcon, the Las Vegas hacker convention that flew us out to screen Infest Wisely, was one on social engineering.

The speaker brought up the idea that by asking questions of someone you can increase the chances of getting what you want from them — somewhat similar to opening several applications at once on a computer can crash the system. I came across this idea again on a recent Radiolab piece on Choice:

…again, focusing on the idea that the human brain has limited analytical power. But it also explores the idea that a Vulcan like rationality causes indecision, since there’s no emotional “tilt” one way or the other.

So I’m imagining a duo of scientifically grounded con men (or women) who get what they want by exploiting this limitation of the human platform. As the movie progresses we discover their relationship to an artificial intelligence that needs their emotive decision making ability to function, and who has given them this training as a reward.

Doodlefaces

Posted by Jim Munroe – December 18, 2008

A couple of super-talented illustrators and animators have offered to help with the movie — Michael Cho, a high-school pal Sanford, and Matt Hammill:

Interstitials might be one way to take advantage of this, but what about a low-rent Waking Life treatment? With the artist doodling faces over live actors faces?

I’m thinking the Doodlefaces are from the future — it’s an avatar-type thing for them. But it’s kind of hard to tell. They just start showing up, speaking mostly incomprehensibly, pointing and laughing at totally commonplace things — like we might do if we were dropped a few hundred years back and saw a pirate and started saying “aaarrrrr!” to the pirate’s befuddlement (but our companions hilarity).

“What happens in the 2000s, stays in the 2000s” is their attitude. They treat us like bit players to their starring roles, are totally irresponsible and create paradoxes and chain-reactions to amuse and annoy people back home.