3

New demo reel online (already?)

11.16.05 @ 11:03PM Tags

Does nothing in this world last? A scant three days after posting my demo reel, I’m back with a shorter, tighter version that is half as long as the previous one. Forget you ever saw the original. There’s no new material here, just new music–and a bunch of shots left on the cutting room floor. It’s at the same link.

This new version is in response to some constructive criticism I received from the fine frequenters of Creative COW, a forum of media pros (COW stands for Communities Of the World, although if you’re going to capitalize “Of,” to be fair, you should also capitalize “The,” which would make it COTW). The gist of the sentiment there was that my reel was too long, and that my music choice of The Chemical Brothers was questionable. So for this version I decided to buck the really-fast-electronic-music trend, and cut the reel to the O’Jays’ 1975 funk classic “Give The People What They Want,” which I believe is topically hilarious, especially given the current political clime. This new music choice may seem even more questionable than a lyric-free, fast-paced synthesized song–but if someone isn’t going to work with me because of the music on my reel, then it just wasn’t meant to be.

If you do choose to watch this new reel, I hope it’s a more enjoyable minute-and-a-half of your life than the three minutes you may or may not have spent watching the original.

1

Demo Reel online

11.13.05 @ 5:36PM Tags

After six months of writing reactionary blog posts, with nary a video posted to demonstrate my filmmaking prowess, I have finally uploaded my 2005 Demo Reel, which I will now commence shopping around.

This site is named No Film School because it’s supposed to document what’s it like to try to establish yourself as a filmmaker without going to film school. Yet most of my posts here have been about pop culture–not film theory, or career struggles, or really anything relevant. So, finally, a topical post on this site!

The demo reel is meant to demonstrate your abilities as an editor, cinematographer, or animator–or, in my case, all three–and is usually more important than your resume, education, or personality. Often it trumps anything that would typically matter if you were trying to get a normal, non-film job; the exception is connections, which are even more important than the reel, and which I lack above all else. One of the reasons some people go to film school is to make connections, which in my mind is not a good reason to go to any school.

For my reel I stuck fairly closely to the tried-and-true demo reel formula, which goes like this: cut a visual montage of your best material together and set it to a fast-paced song of the electronica variety, lasting about three to four minutes. Alternately, if you have outstanding material, you can choose a more dramatic, slower song, and hope that you stand out from the crowd precisely because you have veered from the established formula. I, however, did not. This time.

The first song is by The Chemical Brothers (I chopped it up a bit) and the second is by M.I.A., whose work also graces the new Honda Civic commercial, as I recently discovered. Because the idea of a reel is to make it as commercial as possible, and because she has a song featured in a mainstream ad right now, I must therefore be commercially viable, right? Even though I’m told that MTV won’t play her video because she mentions the PLO.

Above all else your reel is supposed to demonstrate craft; there’s not a lot of art or meaning in these things. So don’t expect anything other than me trying to show that I’ve done a lot of stuff, especially given my age (or lack thereof) and the budgets I’ve had (or not had). But if you’ve ever wondered if I have any abilities besides writing opinionated reactions to things I’ve seen/read/heard, here’s your chance to actually watch something. More to come.

1

The argument against Freakonomics

11.2.05 @ 5:19PM Tags

I REALLY THOUGHT whoops, caps lock.

I really thought I was going to like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics. Any book which is primarily concerned with looking at things in new ways, and is also focused on race in America, I figured I’d love unconditionally. But I didn’t. I did thoroughly enjoy it, and it’s a very quick and easy read (funny that with a book, that’s a positive attribute; no one ever says, yeah you should see this movie, it’s only 64 minutes long). And yes, I do highly recommend the book, etc. That said, I’ll now spend a few paragraphs issuing some complaints.

First off, I had no problems at all with the first half of the book. But somehow as I got deeper into it, alarms started going off in my head–to the point where I actually jotted down some thoughts as I read. Here’s what I wrote:

No matter how many factors you control for in a regression analysis, there are plenty more out there. Factors have factors, and those factors have factors. Much of the conventional wisdom that the book proves wrong was in fact drawn from some of the same methods used in Freakonomics itself. The book has the benefit of hindsight to say that ten years ago we were wrong about this–but in ten years, what will the next experts have to say about the conclusions drawn in Freakonomics? I’m not sold that Freakonomics has the end-all-be-all answers to all of the questions it raises. Yet, possibly because it’s designed to be a bestseller, it presents its findings as if they were ultimate truths.

Of course this is sort of par for the course when it comes to experts in any field drawing conclusions about anything–knowledge expands as time passes. After all, the concept of Evolution is only a hundred and fifty years old. And Intelligent Design is brand-spanking new! Well. That’s kind of the opposite of knowledge growing. But regardless, here were some specific complaints I had:

pp. 120: The Stev(ph)ens point out that kids who went to Head Start don’t do any better when they start regular school than kids (presumably of equal income and social standing) who didn’t. They rightly point out that Head Start has been “repeatedly proved ineffectual.”

Instead of spending the day with his own undereducated, overworked mother, the typical Head Start child spends the day with someone else’s undereducated, overworked mother.

Okay. But doesn’t the child’s own mother (who has a statistically high chance of being a single mom) benefit from Head Start by being able to go to work during the day, thus putting food on the table? And isn’t that (food) kind of important? Maybe that’s not one of the goals of Head Start, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the numbers show that mothers with kids in Head Start have no more income than mothers who don’t. Not being an economist or researcher of any kind, I can only speculate. But this is the part where I draw on my own experience as a once-upon-a-time Head Start volunteer (full disclosure: the Head Start program was my choice, but my school at the time required volunteer work). First off, I’m not sure that you would really retain anything you learn at that age–much less ten years later–and so the benefits of the actual education the children received in Head Start are questionable. But I think, or at least I hope (and this could be me just being a liberal idealist, which is at least infinitely better than a conservative idealist), that the program has other benefits, social or otherwise, which aren’t easily measurable by available numbers. Regarding the program I spent time with, one of these benefits was that the kids were safe and productive for the whole day, and that’s worth something.

pp. 172: TV-watching. If you’re gonna say it’s not bad for children, please, at least say something about other potential drawbacks of the pacifying device, whether it be potentially shortened attention-spans, the promotion of consumer lust in youngsters, or just the general proliferation of fatass chip-eating kids in our country.

I’d also like to note–and I have no real knowledge of this, other than the fact that my father is an economist by training and he told me so–that the University of Chicago Economics program (where Levitt is tenured) is historically conservative, infamously so (see the wikipedia entry here). I’m not suggesting that Levitt is conservative–anyone who points out the positive consequences of the legalization of abortion is not likely to be–but I thought it was an interesting connection to point out, to pretend that I have knowledge of such things. I bring this up because one of the things about the book that got on my nerves is the way that various metrics of so-called success–classroom performance, amount of money made later in life–are assumed to be indicative of things like natural intelligence and genuine ability. Certainly there is somewhat of a correlation, but potential squandered by unfortunate life circumstances or events is not measurable by any set of numbers. It would have been nice to look into the phenomenon of rich dumbasses and poor geniuses.

Freakonomics is certainly funny, and I do think it’s a “good” thing that it’s popular–like I said before, I do recommend it, and that’s a pretty huge deal, since my recommendation alone is known to move precisely zero-thousand-and-none units. In the end, it’s a great read, it’ll make you think (do we need to be “made” to think?), and it’s certainly worthy of the praise it’s received. I just had a few reservations.

I had absolutely no reservations, however, about laughing uncontrollably upon finding out in the name-analysis portion of the book that a family had legally named their kid “shithead.”

0

Compare and contrast: no commentary necessary

11.1.05 @ 3:05PM Tags

Black Eyed Peas – “Bringing it Back” (2000, Bridging the Gaps)

I know I’m not the only one that’s filling the void
Creatively hip-hop is being destroyed
A lot of rappers really need to be unemployed
Because the topics that they talk about has got me annoyed
You see I heard it all before, there’s no need to repeat it
The forms I vacated, might as well delete it
Quit your programming and open a new file
You shoulda took your record advance and bought a style
We the only crew that came original
While a lot of other brothers just mimic the power
The power that’s only designed for pop charts
That contradicts thought, thus the reason we brought
It back cause honestly it lacks
Talent and creativity, in fact
These are symptoms to somethin that’s wack
And your system senseless to witness that

Black Eyed Peas – “My Humps” (2005, Monkey Business)

Whatcha gonna do with all that junk
All that junk inside your trunk
I’m gonna get-get-get-get you drunk
Get you love drunk off my hump
My hump
My hump
My hump
My hump
My hump
My hump
My hump
My hump
My lovely lady lumps
Check it out
I drive these brothers crazy
I do it on the daily
They treat me really nicely
They buy me all these ices
Dolce & Gabbana
Fendi and a Donna
Karan they be sharin
All their money got me wearin
Fly gear that I ain’t asking
They say they love my ass in
Seven Jeans, True Religion