Is that thing loaded?

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, and editor of Wired Magazine, wrote a terrific article on how shooting digitally affects the performance of actors.

Big-name directors that Anderson spoke with, such as Tony Bill (Flyboys, Untamed Heart) explained that shooting digitally eliminates the actors' fear that every take was costing hundreds or thousands of dollars of film, and thus put the actor more at ease.

Photo by Larry Furnace

It also allowed directors to eliminate rehearsals and roll on every take:

It's "the difference between pointing a loaded gun at someone and a toy gun. You point a loaded gun at them and they're going to act different. A film camera is a loaded gun. Digital is not."
--Tony Bill

Having shot on both multi-camera 35mm sets and indie digital sets of various sizes, I have to disagree just a bit. It is true that film is expensive. For an indie filmmaker with a nano-budget, shooting even 16mm is often prohibitive. Robert Rodriguez' book Rebel without a Crew explains this well.

However, there are usually other factors at work that are even more prohibitive than the cost of film, such as crew costs, limited location availability, daylight, and the number of takes an actor (or director) has in them. Actors are like racehorses who wait, wait, wait, in their stalls, while the crew dresses a set, makes up the actors, rigs the lighting, sets the props, and grabs focus. By the time the director yells "Action!", the actors are often emotionally spent. It's like war: hours of boredom punctuated by minutes of sheer terror.

In the still shot above, for example, I am freezing my nips off on a 40' F morning, with a 30' wind chill, while pretending that it is 90' outside. [Photo by professional set photog, industrial videographer, and all-around mechanical genius Larry Furnace.]  But when director Kat Candler called action, we all had to be ready to go, knowing that we had limited time and resources for getting this shoot wrapped.

Even in my former life as a musician, digital media did not change the economics of hourly studio rental and producer fees.  When we rolled, uh, RAM... it was much the same as rolling expensive 2" tape:  time is money.  Time is always money.  Maybe not yours, but somebody's.  And if you are a professional, you appreciate other people's time, and do not waste it.

Digital definitely allows long tail movie-making. But it does not preclude common sense and pre-planning in the process.

Happy Thanksgiving- we're on strike?

Looks like SAG president Alan Rosenberg (pictured) is pushing for an actor's strike authorization. The threat of a work stoppage from one of the major artistic groups has put a crimp in productions for the last nine months, causing networks and studios to rush-release the properties they already have developed, and to hold off launching into any new productions.

A friend of mine is a 30-year veteran Hollywood costume and set designer, and has been suffering through the squeeze this past year by taking on jobs for Ringling Bros. and other clients. But his bread-and-butter business of TV and film costuming has been hurt by AMPTP fears that, once pilots and films are in the middle of production, actors will walk off the set, and have the producers by the short hairs.

I am not yet a SAG member; merely SAG-eligible. Living in Texas and shooting indies, it has not made sense to me to join SAG until I move to Hollywood.

Looks like we picked a good time to postpone our L.A. trip.

Bambino #2 on the way

Mary is pregnant!! Yea!!!

We were really hoping for two kids, but felt so blessed just to get one beautiful baby, Danielle, that we thought we were really pushing it to hope for two. We are thrilled. Danielle will make a great big sister, I know.

As for L.A., well... we are going to wait for another year. Again! Kind of ironic, since having a baby was what stalled our plans the first time. But not going enabled me to be here in Austin when I landed the Living and Dying and Prison Break roles (and a shot at a good role in Microwave Park), so, nobody knows anything, really. We are just happy to have another bambino on the way.

Currently scrambling to find a house and set up shop. We'll keep y'all posted!

Starz exec Rob Markovich reception

The Austin Screenwriters Group held a pretty swanky reception tonight for Rob Markovich, Director of Original Programming for the Starz movie channel network. Rob has been the driving force behind such Starz series as Crash, Head Case, and Hollywood Residential.

At the ASG meeting, he talked about where his network, and the industry in general are heading (episodic TV, not movies), and how aspiring writers could get their scripts read. He was a great guest, very informative and gracious with his time, and I really appreciate him speaking to ASG.

I pitched Rob some of my own TV and film ideas, and he liked them. Hopefully we can discuss them more when I'm in L.A. In the meantime, I'm going to try and connect him with my friend Mike Alvarez, who might have an animation co-production deal that Rob would like.