Stephanie Wang-Breal is fortunate to have a foothold in two worlds. Born in the USA to Chinese speaking parents, she is fluent in English and Mandarin. Nonetheless, she had to interview more than a hundred families before she found the right one to work with. She invested a good deal of her own money to launch the film project but eventually managed to secure significant additional funding to see her film reach completion.

In production, Stephanie found that her role as filmmaker would at times include that of translator and thus, she was reluctantly drawn in as a supporting actor in her own film. As documentaries often do, the project took on a life of its own. Her efforts have resulted in the creation of a remarkable record of the pairing and bonding of Fang Sui Yong, an 8-year-old Chinese orphan girl and the Sadowskys, a Jewish family from Long Island, New York.

Stephanie also touched lightly on another kind of second life that controversial documentary films must now inhabit – the one that is spawned on blogs and in discussion boards across the Web after a film is released. Not all of these “reviews” have been positive, but they fault the subject and not the film. In some ways this too can be seen as a success, exposing the issue to public scrutiny and fostering a passionate debate. Stephanie Wang-Breal is winning awards for her thought-provoking work, including her most recent, “Best Emerging Director in a Documentary Feature” at the Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) in New York.

I’d like to extend a thank-you to the National Association of Latino Independent Producers (NALIP) and to Stephanie Wang-Breal for providing such an unusual opportunity. “Wo Ai Ni, Mommy” will be broadcast on PBS: POV on August 31, 2010.

LINKS:

Wo Ai Ni Mommy Official Website

www.facebook.com/pages/wo-ai-ni-mommy

If that’s not bad enough,  3 of the 26 theaters that planned to screen the film have backed off, canceling their scheduled screenings after threats of violence and intimidation. Japanese nationalists call the film anti-Japanese and claim that foreigners are trying to disrupt a 400-year-old tradition.

But scientists and environmental activists agree that one of the most important issue affecting the Japanese people is not about saving sea mammals. Dolphin and whale meat has been found to be very high in mercury says Tetsuya Endo, a professor at the Health Sciences University of Hokkaido and one of the world’s foremost authorities on mercury levels in dolphins and whales caught off Japan’s coastal waters. He has shown in studies conducted on hair samples taken from residents of  Taiji, Japan who eat the whale and dolphin meat sold in local stores, that they have extremely high concentrations of mercury in their bodies.

The Monday, July 5, 2010 edition of CBC’s As it Happens radio show features an interview with Ric O’Barry who had a lead role in the film and just returned from Japan. He was once the dolphin trainer on TVs “Flipper,” who has become a committed campaigner against dolphin abuse.

The dissolution of boundaries between music, art, theatre, dance and film, underway since the launch of MTV: Music Television in 1981, occasionally spawns elegant short form works of cinematic fine art. I must admit that last month, I scoffed at Time magazine’s inclusion of Ladt Gaga in their recent list of the 100 most influential people of the year… but I now withdraw that opinion. Alejandro, her latest video, fashioned with director and photographer Steven Klein, is crafted in the genre of an early Fritz Lang cinema noir masterpiece and immediately brings to mind scenes from Metropolis.

The latest Gaga video also reminds me of a rule I personally attribute to Ingmar Bergman – that each and every frame of a film should be so well composed that it could be printed as a still photograph and exhibited in a gallery. Allejandro exhibits that kind of attention to detail in Klein’s careful framing, form and placement of everything and everyone. It may be surprising to realize that Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video, also a Klein creation, was released 25 years ago. The comparisons are obvious…

As an ex-Catholic, I have always enjoyed the irreligious subtext in Klein’s work with Madonna and now with Lady Gaga. Alejandro is rich, dark and elegantly erotic. I am glad to be converted at last to just another Gaga worshiper, one of her little monsters.

Doc Lew Childre and Howard Martin, authors of The HeartMath Solution: The Institute of HeartMath’s Revolutionary Program for Engaging the Power of the Heart’s Intelligence have a lot to say on the subject. One Amazon reviewer explains, “The “intelligence” that they focus on refers to both the heart’s “brain,” or the 40,000 neurons found in the heart (the same number in the brain itself), and the intuitive signals the heart sends, including feelings of love, happiness, care, and appreciation.”

This seems to be the same wavelength Debra operates on…

Together we are learning to create a whole new spectrum of “enhanced CDs” – ones that not only include regular music that plays in any standard electronic device, but also an additional collection of multi-media content accessible through a computer. The “Time on Fire” CD will include video e-books, our music videos, lyric sheets and more.

You can find out more about her work, order a copy of “Time on Fire” – and if you act before midnight on December 21, 2009 your name can be listed on the CD jacket as a Sustaining Patron. Details are at her Website: HonorYourTruth.com.

Special thanks to my neighbor, Kevin Nordahl for building and igniting the enormous bonfire featured in the above…

I accidentally discovered the databases at Cinemetrics, where you can look up movie statistical information like Average Shot Length (ASL) to see graphic maps of the data in order to visually understand the flow dynamics of any of 3,295 currently listed films.

Many recent films display an ASL of under five seconds per shot: “The Departed” (3.2 seconds), “Dreamgirls” (2.5 seconds), “Casino Royale” (3.4 seconds), “Sweeney Todd” (4 seconds). On the other hand, some films have notably longer ASLs: “The Darjeeling Limited” (8.2 seconds), “There Will Be Blood” (13.5 seconds), “Paranoid Park” (16.5 seconds).

It would be easy to calculate the average shot length of any film by dividing the running time by the total number of shots but, Cinemetrics goes much further… The Cinemetrics Software Tool is a free, downloadable application or online device created by statistician and computer scientist, Gunars Civjans that lets you analyze, record and submit the sequential scene length of any film to the database – including your own. There are two statistics modes available: the simple mode and the advanced mode. Simple mode only records the frequency of shot changes. The advanced mode allows up to eight buttons to be used to record the different types of shots.

From this data you can study the trendlines of any film. If advanced mode was used to record movie data, a table containing statistical data for each shot type will be displayed.

“Taking shot lengths of a running movie is a manual operation performed in real time, and like any such operation – driving a car or playing a video game – it, too, takes a little practice and patience to master,” explains the author of 10 User tips from Yuri Tsivian.

Cinemetrics has a second database that presents the data created by Barry Salt: “The basic idea behind my methods of statistical style analysis is that the form of films noticeably differ from one to another, and that the variables used to study this should be based on the concepts that film-makers actually use.”

Barry Salt tabulates and analyzes change in camera angle and the variations in depth of shot in the data he provides and in his latest work, Moving Into Pictures, a follow up to his ground-breaking, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. The creation of a film begins to rival the composition of a symphony when approaching the process from an in-depth consideration of the full range of movie dynamics.

The more I use it the more value I am discovering, especially in experimenting with the flow of shots and camera angles. It has limits, but it allows me to begin creating a rough draft, bench testing a screenplay as it takes shape. It’s like using a talking, animated storyboard. Add in the free Celtx project planner andyou are ready to start work on crafting a film, video, a stage play, machinima, an ad, a video game, music video, videocast – whatever method you use to deliver your story.

Now, I am hooked. It only took a brief exposure and I am finding all sorts of reasons to  ante up for the pro version (for $39.95 per year.) The XtraNormal animation system is a great learning environment – one where I can type in the words of a script and then the auto-robots speak the dialogue, inserting pauses and gestures as I require. Lots more features and character choices with the Pro version… Here’s what evolved from my first effort above after I moved up to the Pro version:

This animation, done for my girlfriend Debra, is pushing 500 views in just a few days online at her Braveheart Women blog. So, it will become a regular series.

Dave Kaminski provides an alternative in a video revue of GoAnimate.com in this post. That program is a bit less complex – with the dialogue taking place in text bubbles like in a newspaper cartoon strip. It features repetitive motions rather than synchronized animation – but it’s free and also fun.

This is the final release version of our first music video working together…

It has some flaws, but it represents a whole lot of learning, experimenting, hard work and fun. There will be more to follow and we will continue to grow and test the limits of what we can do with sound and light.

The CD is being pressed by CopyCatsMedia.com also in Minneapolis. Contact Adam Wachter if you want a project quote. Phone: 612.236.9109 (direct) or toll-free: 888-698-8008.
adam.wachter@copycatsmedia.com

She wrote the song, “Be Brave, Have Heart” in 2008 and worked on the studio recording, perfecting it for almost a year, We shot the video in several takes, carrying a Sony laptop PC with speakers as our portable sound source, struggling with the setting sun and trying not to get blowing sand in the keyboard. The zany outtakes might reveal Debra tumbling over a sand dune at Baileys Harbor Beach as I encouraged her to run away from the camera to close a scene… a mini-disaster.

Debra is amazing to work with, having little shyness to act out and embody her songs. You can see more of her zany and yet, thoughtful side at Honor Your Truth, Debra Hadraba’s YouTube Channel.

We discovered a photographic goldmine of imagery and would like to thank everyone at the heart street art pool on Flickr who was kind enough to permit downloads of their heart graffiti photographs.

I am learning to build an enhanced audio CD rather than a DVD, so that Debra’s music can be played on a typical car stereo or portable CD player and the same disc can provide video, pdfs, photos and other extra content when opened in a computer. This method requires including an autorun.inf file to open the extra content on the CD.

I have been struggling with a few issues about lag time between the audio and video tracks, and am most familiar with rendering H.264 for online movies. I only notice the lag when when playing a local copy… a lag that disappears when I post it online. I tried rendering a Quicktime movie for the CD but that wasn’t acceptable either. After talking with Dave at Studio-120 in Minneapolis, I learned that the most dependable and universal format for enhanced CDs is FLV or Flash video. So, I finalized the film as an AVI at 1,116,408 KB and he can pull the FLV from that.

And here’s a note from our sponsor… Amazon’s having a 50% off sale on some classic DVDs and I want a copy of Outlaw Josey Wales for only 6 bucks and change… don’t look!

A director’s cut was screened for an audience of approximately 50 people at the organization’s annual honors dinner on August 25, 2009. After an enthusiastic response, suggestions on improving the audio on some of the outdoor sequences by reducing the natural background sounds were applied, resulting in the current working copy posted above. I am now developing a DVD with interactive menuing for final  delivery.

I created this first draft from the footage I shot on Washington Island. Now, I am assembling a 10-minute video proposal, a short film for Wisconsin Public Television that uses a variety of concert footage on location shots merged with a spot interview with Jim Berkenstock, the co-founder of the organization.

Using effective titles and credits is important – and an art form in itself -  so I am reading and researching more on The Art of the Title. I realize that on some of my test music videos I failed to add links to the artist’s Web sites within the videos, this must not ever be forgotten in the future. For the moment, there’s a Tuesday deadline to meet, so I am back to production.

This dedicated Web site will be a spot where I trace my path and share what I discover with anyone else who has a burning desire to become a filmmaker – at any level.