Stylish (if a bit overwrought at times) and simple (no sync sound, one character, more or less real situations). Good music. Well-observed visuals.

An idea via a thing via a person. This matryoshka theming is what I, Party Cup could emulate.

So much to learn/steal/emulate here it’s hard to get it all down.

1. Giving graphics and visual “info dumps” an aesthetic dimension, a texture. Embedding them in sensory reality, making them real, i.e. physical. Not just poor-man’s Ken Burns “pan over a JPG” shit. 

2. Eye contact.

3. “Moving still photographs” as b-roll. Friedman is a photographer and his eye for still images is keen. Setting up a “still” like the slow rack focus from Goetz holding up his patent papers to Goetz’s face: simple, stylized, but full of documentary depth, and feels like a scene even though it’s just a “still.” 

4. Wide shots and a sense of detailed space. Goetz isn’t just a disembodied torso in medium closeup. 

5. Narrative atmosphere over explanatory terrain. Goetz tells brief anecdotes to get at the idea of a software patent, but there’s no contrived or over-emphasized “storyline” pulling the film along. Other hints at narrative: the hands that open the laptop at the beginning and close it at the end, with searching/reading in between—there is a sense of seeking, of something storylike “happening”, but it’s just a sense. 

6. Personal interlude. I loved that the film basically stopped, took a hard left to introduce Goetz’s wife (also subtly changed “look” as well: looser, rougher, less stylized), then resumed. Doesn’t make structural sense “on paper” but felt just right. 

7. Leave me wanting more. The film doesn’t try to teach me everything about software patents or about Goetz. It feels whole enough to be satisfying, but not encyclopedic or exhaustive.  

Neat “notemation” (simple animation using Post-Its) from Frog Design. Feels a bit wall-papery (like those lame RSA whiteboard vids, which just visually transcribe what the VO is saying), and I also wish they played more with the physicality of the Post-Its instead of just using them as Powerpoint slides. 

Thoughts: this kind of approach works well for a non-narrative explainer b/c it adds sensory detail to the abstract, intellectualized “idea stream” of the voiceover. But for a piece that is already narrative — something like Storycorps or Story Collider — it may just feel redundant and “flattening”: forcing your mind to see pictures that are less rich and less personal than the ones the narrative VO can conjure up in your head. What role should the visual stream play in those contexts—what work should it do, if not simply slavishly replicating the “word pictures” of the VO? 

CYBORG FOUNDATION | Rafel Duran Torrent

Mix of VO, found footage, and occasional ultra-stylized interludes. Janky but effective.

(Source: vimeo.com)

Stop-motion surfing “documentary”/music video. Process value, brilliant attention to detail in the visual storytelling/framing. 

Ken Burns on Story. Essay + profile = more than both. 

“We all think that an exception is going to be made in our case, and that we will live forever.” 

Kodachrome 2010. Structure, graphic design, music.

A body of inspiration.

Science writer and filmmaker Tom Levenson asked me for my thoughts on the whole Final Cut Pro 7 vs Final Cut Pro X thing, because he was wondering what he should use with students in his filmmaking classes. I wrote my thoughts to him in an email, but figured I might as well share them here too. This was prompted by an app I saw that purports to convert FCP7 project files into FCPX files. If it could also convert them backwards to FCP7 — so you could hot-swap your projects between both editing paradigms — that would be truly awesome.

I’m torn. It seems obvious that Apple is going to have to let FCP7 die at some point. And it also seems clear that they’re distancing themselves from serving pro markets — the Mac Pro tower hasn’t seen a decent upgrade in years. That doesn’t seem to bode well for putting much stock in FCPX as a truly professional-grade postproduction solution.

However…

Just because Apple may be distancing itself from serving the pro market in terms of feature filmmakers, TV producers, and other “big scale” production workflows, doesn’t mean they’re necessarily leaving mixed-media/multimedia producers behind. I’ve heard that FCPX can be pretty powerful for quickly putting together short films for the web shot on DSLRs and other tapeless media that outputs h.264 rushes. And because you can edit any codec natively without transcoding, it sounds great for remixing and collaging footage from the internet. It can also (apparently) run like lightning on a Macbook Air.

So FCPX might be a pretty great teaching tool. Like a sketchbook for short-form editing or experimenting. If I had the money to buy an Air just for the hell of it, I’d put FCPX on it for exactly this purpose. Not as a bulletproof postproduction solution, but as a sandbox for messing around with ideas on the fly, like this (a mix of original DSLR footage and found stuff from the web, cut together in about a day):

Early Morning Scout Patrol (by Avanaut)