Gov's Gone Wild

            There has been a great deal of media attention paid to the sentencing of Illinois Governor Blagojevich who has just been given 14 years in prison for attempting to sell President Obama’s former Senate seat. But, what I find most interesting is that he is being sent to the exact same prison as his predecessor Governor George Ryan who was convicted of fraud and racketeering. They just need a few more Illinois State Governors and they’ll be able to start their own prison gang.

            It may seem cold to make light of such a terrible situation. Perhaps it’s the amount of time that I have spent in the entertainment industry. But, I can’t help thinking that this would make for an amazing reality show. Just imagine the first awkward conversation upon the two former Governors suddenly discovering that they’re going to be cellmates.

            Production costs would be incredibly low since the prison already has the entire building under video surveillance. You could use inmates on work release for crew to save on wages, and craft services could be covered by the prison cafeteria.

            However, there might be an incident when the boom mic operator would be accused of “wearing a wire”. Although that could lead to an entire episode of Three’s Company styled misunderstanding comedy.

            And, just imagine the hilarious Meatballs styled comedy when those wacky Gov’s tried to embezzle from the warden. Oh, how hilarity would ensue.

            All kidding aside, this situation is a truly horrible occurrence that highlights the severity of the corruption problem in America. A situation so wide spread that it has resulted in the creation of several independent citizens groups who try to draw attention to the issue through self-publishing articles such as “Corruption in America”.

            This is upsetting because The main stream media not only ignores many of the issues brought up by the independents, but the media then attacks the individuals for exercising the very First Amendment rights that make the media possible.

            The only conclusion is that the press has fallen under the influence of the corruption that they are meant to prevent by being the eyes and ears of America.

            If we want to solve this problem then we need to start with the press and follow the money back to its’ source.  Only with a truly free media can we ever hope to stop the spread of political and corporate corruption.

Fiscal De-evolution

            There has been a lot of attention in the media recently concerning the large and growing number of executives that are being brought to justice for a wide variety of crimes related to business and finance. This can be seen in articles such as those posted on Natural News or by reviewing cases posted by the IRS concerning compliance and enforcement.

            The problem has become so wide spread that the issue is even drawing attention in humor-based elements of pop culture such as Hello with Cheese.

            The terrifying thing is that this is not a new phenomenon or a sudden outbreak of immoral business tactics.

            Many of the major corporations that are collapsing in the wake of scandals recently were actually started during the depression era. The men who started these companies were able to fight their way up and prosper under extraordinarily harsh economic conditions. And, today these same companies are unable to even turn a mild profit without the executives being hauled away in handcuffs.

            Without insight this situation seems implausible. The thing to remember is that those early businessmen came from a generation where even day laborers hid their money in their mattress. Finding creative and devious methods for controlling one’s finances was a survival tactic, and those who became successful were the best at managing strategies of questionable ethical foundation.

            Today’s executives are the third and fourth generation products of those families. They were raised wealthy and never had to develop the skills for controlling dubious fiscal strategies as a matter of survival. They have simply been raised on stories of previous generations attitudes without the need to develop those skills on their own since they have never experienced a cash shortage or had a need to fight to get ahead.

            This means that executive corruption has always existed. It isn’t a new occurrence. The forensic accountants haven’t gotten better at catching criminals. Society in general has not developed an improved awareness giving them the ability to detect fraud. The simple truth is that today’s executives just aren’t very good at being criminals.

                                                            http://www.dernwerks.com/HWC/?p=278

           

Negotiation

            For my graduate class in Negotiation and Deal Making I was assigned to interview an individual in my field in relation to their thoughts and experience within the scope of practical business negotiations. My first consideration was to seek out what might be termed a “power player”, or someone who routinely deals in the more complex aspects of intense hardline negotiations.

            This did result in a humorous moment when a representative of one specific law firm told me that they would be more than happy to provide me with an interview on the topic. But, I would be required to pay their standard hourly rate for the duration of the interview. In retrospect, perhaps I should have tried to negotiate the price.

            Then, after quite a bit of consideration, I decided to take a different route. It occurred to me that following the exact methods of the usual hardline negotiators would only show me how they perceive themselves. I decided that the best tactic would actually be to interview someone who has a wholly different approach to negotiation techniques and would therefore be able to provide me with an outside view of serious negotiators in a way that they are rarely able to see themselves.

            For this reason I chose to interview a wonderful woman named Linda who is a HR Director for a major retail chain. I have consistently been impressed by the way that she always maintains a positive attitude and can stay friendly and cheerful in the face of any amount of stress. This choice for the interview turned out to be more informative than I expected.

            Much has been said about the power of positive thinking. More importantly everyone can easily see how being around people who have a positive and open attitude lifts their own mood. The interesting thing is that being friendly and cheerful can actually be your most powerful weapon in a hard negotiation.

            Hard line negotiation tactics are about focusing your anger and seeing the other party in the negotiation as your opponent or enemy. However, this becomes incredibly difficult when the person on the other side of the table treats you like a friend and refuses to become flustered by any type of aggression.

            This then eliminates the primary tool that hard line negotiators have to rely on. Without their aggression as a driving force they become flustered and are left off balance. This means that by simply being a good person it is possible to get past the defenses of aggressive hard line negotiators in order to obtain a far more viable agreement.

            This unique point of view is exactly what I was hoping to find by interviewing someone who operates outside of the standard negotiating methodology. And, I have to admit that I am truly happy to find that there is a genuine technique for dealing with difficult negotiations that allows a person to remain cheerful instead of treating every interaction as though they are walking into a bar fight.

Steve Jobs

            I am currently working on a business start-up. So far the main issue I have had is in describing the nature of the business. You see I have created a new service, which inherently means the creation of a new industry. This creates a problem when I am trying to describe what the business does to people who have no frame of reference for comparison. However, that just changed because of Steve Jobs.

            It has recently been announced that the CEO of Apple Steve Jobs has passed away. This is a sad event with wide spread cultural ramifications. The home page of Apple  has a picture of Steve Jobs with his name and the dates 1955-2011. Additionally, they have set up a page with an epitaph on their site. That page also contains information for people to contact the company with personal thoughts and memories of Steve Jobs.

            Additionally, areas outside of the company have been affected. Every social networking site now has pages dedicated to the memory of Steve Jobs. Web comics such as XKCD and Abstruse Goose  have posted memorials. Even sites that are normally satirical such as Some E-cards have included memorial materials on their web site.

            This is the service being offered by Pelicat. The chance to have your final message spread across all of your social media applications in order to give a farewell notification to all of your online friends all over the world. Despite the terrible loss of Steve Jobs he is now my best example to others of what my new service provides.

            While the loss of Steve Jobs is a sad event, I can’t help thinking that it is rather profound that even in his passing he is helping others like myself to push forward with innovative new concepts and services. Hopefully we will all be able to continue following his example of creativity far into the future.

Media medium

            There is a recent article on the entertainment business blog Business Exchange  about a DJ and music producer named Carl Cox. It can be seen at http://blog.allusb.com/2011/08/carl-cox-all-roads-lead-to-the-dancefloor-usb-album-debut/

            This article describes how Carl Cox has just released a new album exclusively in a USB format instead of the more conventional CD. The article goes on to describe other groups who have done the same thing. It also describes some of the numerous advantages including bonus photos, music videos, links to online material, and a memory capacity that can hold a far greater amount of music than the conventional compact disc.

            I find this particularly interesting due to the fact that the music industry tends to lead the film industry in technological advance. Right now most people in the film industry are focused on the film distribution capabilities of the cloud. However, customers have already issued a wide range of dissatisfied criticism against the idea of having all of the media they have purchased kept on a server that they do not personally control. The fears of mass file deletion, selective media censorship, and poor long-term site maintenance are at the top of the list.

            These are issues that can easily be avoided by following the example of Carl Cox and many others in the music industry. It would also present a number of serious advantages that most movie enthusiasts would enjoy.

             You see, a conventional DVD can only hold 4.7 Gigs of data. The raw digital footage that movies are edited in runs at approximately 1 Gig per minute. This means a full feature film would need a digital storage medium of roughly 90 Gigs for full resolution. This is why Blue Ray is so popular. A Blue Ray disc can hold up to 27 Gigs of memory.

            However, a search on USB drives will bring you to the illustrious Lexar Corporation. Lexar produces USB jump drives that reach storage capacities up to 128 Gigs. That’s roughly 5 times the capacity of a Blue Ray, which in turn has 5 times the capacity of a conventional DVD. In short, a high-end USB drive could hold 27 movies at the standard compression rate of one DVD. Or, it could hold one feature film at the full digital resolution that normally only the editor gets to see.

            Switching film sales to USB would be great for movie enthusiasts who want the best image quality possible. But, it would be even better for production companies that would be able to maintain existing distribution systems for highly lucrative returns with an actual reduction in manufacturing costs and time since USB drives can be loaded faster and cheaper than discs can be burned.

            The question is: will they bother following the logical advance into this medium, or will they just do what they are told by the corporate lobbyist with the most expensive suit?

Deception

I have just viewed an interesting talk on TED.com by Marco Tempest. It can be seen at

http://www.ted.com/talks/marco_tempest_the_magic_of_truth_and_lies_on_ipods.html

In this video the speaker makes some excellent points about the positive uses of deception. It really goes back to the basic concept of suspension of disbelief. This is the psychological technique of temporarily engrossing the attention of the audience to the point where they briefly forget that they are viewing a work of fiction. The deeper the suspension of disbelief becomes, the more enjoyable the audience finds the production.

People will believe what they want to believe. The key to developing a successful strategy for using deception in a positive manner is to provide a nonharmful method of conceptual reorientation that leads people to a conclusion that they would have reached on their own. Or, more specifically, it’s about giving people what they don’t know they want before they realize that they want it.

The concept of using deception tends to have a negative image attached to it. This is only exacerbated by books like The Art of Deception in which Kevin Mitnick describes his use of personal deception to cause damage to individuals and businesses through computer hacking.

The concept gains further notoriety through the expansion of ideas like social engineering as described by Sarah Granger. Social engineering is an specific methodology for following the negative example initially established in The Art of Deception.

This then leads to larger issues of corporate deception such as the clean coal ads described in Dirty Business. This represents the common practice of corporate funded special interest groups that parrot the message that the company itself would like people to accept.

The important thing, however, is that all of these techniques can be used to encourage a positive message rather than a destructive force. By following the message of Marco Tempest it is possible to help people to help themselves in a way that seems to them as a matter of their own volition.

Film Office

            The film office is an invaluable asset to the production community. More importantly it is an asset to the entire area by bringing in jobs and millions of dollars in revenue annually. However, the film office is in a constant war to maintain its’ existence. The terrifying thing is that the enemy that is constantly trying to eliminate the existence of this beneficial service provider is a group who think they are doing the right thing by limiting government spending. The problem is that they are all “early exiters”.

            An “early exiter” is a person who jumps out of their seat at the theater and runs for the door the second the credits start to roll. If you ask them why, they will tell you that the credits are long and boring. That is where we have a problem.

            The people who want to eliminate tax incentives for production companies and cut the budget to the film office always say that providing for the film industry is just a matter of handing tax dollars over to rich movie companies. But, the people who say this are all “early exiters” who have never stayed in the theater long enough to see just how many people are actually employed by an individual film production.

            It’s a bit of juxtaposition. First, they say the list of people employed by a production (the credits) is too long to sit through. Then, they say that film production doesn’t benefit the community. How is this possible? If the industry creates so many jobs that you can’t even sit through the list of people who work on one single project, how can the industry not be financially benefiting the community?

            This then leads to the second problem. Those who fail to see the benefits for the community then try to eliminate the office all together. That’s where you end up with situations such as what happened to Lisa Strout. 

            Lisa Strout was the Director of the New Mexico Film Office for seven years until she was let go

during an administrative shake up where the “early exiters” decided the film office wasn’t needed. Fortunately, she was then hired as the Director of the Boston Film Office where they obviously have a better grasp of the benefits that can be provided to the community.

            In the end, the only suggestion I can think of is this: Anytime a politician suggests tampering with their local film office they should be required to sit through the credits from every movie ever shot in their area. Seriously, the only thing that brings in more money is tourism. Getting rid of the film office is like destroying everything in you neighborhood that the tourists might want to see. It is nothing more than an ill informed attempt to shoot yourself and your neighbor both in the foot.

            If you are unsure where your local film office is check this link HERE. And, don't hesitate to send them an email just to show your support. The more people there are in the community who show support for the film office, then the more support the film office will be able to provide for that community.

Multi Tasking

            With the never ending stream of projects and oddities that I seem to be perpetually swimming in, I have decided that it would make more sense to cover everything I do in this blog rather than just the one specific project.

            The scooter documentary will still receive full coverage as it progresses. But, I will now be covering every other facet of my preoccupation at the same time. This should lead to a far more entertaining experience for everyone. It will also provide a deeper look into the weirdness that effects everything I work on.

Road Rash

They say an image is worth a thousand words.

Yeah. That pretty much speaks for itself. And, what is says is,"ouch".

    But, far be it from me to complain about a little bit of road rash. This may slow down my typing for a little while, but it won't slow down my life. It's not my camera hand. That's all that really matters.                                                       

Budgeting

            Accounting is an art form entirely in it’s own right. Most people in the creative fields approach it with a mixture of fear and awe. This is why the people who know how to create and maintain a budget are generally the highest paid people in a production company.

            However, if you are working on your own independent production it becomes your responsibility to draw up the budget proposal before anything else can begin to happen. Sadly, that’s where a lot of otherwise good ideas fall apart.

            The good news is that there are a variety of services and products that can help. Obviously the best method is to simply hire an accountant. But, if you’re working on an independent production that might be too expensive. Your second option is to research products specifically designed to help you. One of the best I’ve seen is Movie Magic Budgeting. You can find it at http://www.entertainmentpartners.com/Content/Products/Budgeting.aspx

            Your third (and cheapest) option is to do everything on your own. For a producer who has never dealt with accounting before that can be worrying. Have no fear! You are not alone.

            There are some amazing resources available to people with the determination to teach themselves how to cover all the bases. Of these, the best resource I have found is provided by Dependent Films. On their page titled Tools & Utilities for Filmmakers the have provided templates for almost every possible piece of documentation you will need during your production.

            As it just so happens, I have replaced several of my own templates with ones that I found on their site. And, as for this particular documentary, I just need to polish off a few final details and my budget proposal is complete. Hooray! One step closer to actually picking up my camera.

Crew

            The people who work for you are like kids riding in the back of your car. Sometimes they’ll make you question their sanity. But, no matter how good or bad they are it’s still your job to get them where they’re going, because you’re the one in the drivers’ seat.

            It is a well-known fact that hiring the best people is the way to make the best product. But, hiring is still an area where the well-known rules tend to slip by.

            The two biggest issues are hiring your friends and hiring talented people who think that they are too good for the job. The issues with both of these problems are covered extremely well in an article on Wild Sound that can be seen HERE.

            The problem with talented people working a low budget production is that they tend to forget that they are still employees, even if they are working below scale. The best way of dealing with this group is to make sure that you don’t coddle them at the very beginning. If you treat them like they are doing you a favor by showing up they will exploit you at every opportunity.

            I rarely recommend taking the dominant male monkey approach, but when you are dealing with a huge ego holding up your production the only way to get back on schedule is to put them in their place. Either establish the nature of the working relationship up front, or be prepared to fire them. They need to know that they are NOT indispensable.

            As far as your friends go, don’t do it. They may be talented and hardworking, but that will end the second you have them on the payroll. Friends are never afraid of getting fired. And worse, when your friends are on set it makes it incredibly difficult for you to maintain a professional attitude. You can’t play boss to someone who saw you drunk that one time in school when you got dumped. You can’t fire the person who drove you home after your car broke down.

            You can never maintain any serious level of authority over your friends. They just know too much about you.

            With all of that in mind, I am now attempting to put together a crew roster containing people that I have never worked with before, and have no solid references for outside of their portfolios. This, again, is something that you should avoid. But, hey. This blog would get pretty of boring if I didn’t take a few risks.

Viability

     I just read an article by William Gazecki posted on DVFormat.com. The article can be seen here. In this article Mr. Gazecki claims that documentaries don’t make money. But, they are a good way for filmmakers to practice and stay active.

     I couldn’t disagree more. Even if you discount the vast number of pure documentaries that turn a profit and can be found on sites like The Documentary Blog, there are still the “common” documentaries.

     By “common” I am referring to the made for television documentaries that can be found on The Discovery Channel or the BBC. These productions are absolutely required to turn a profit, or they do not get made at all.

     Going a step further we can even include Reality Television. While it may be abhorred by the artistic elements of the industry the fact remains that Reality Television is, in it’s essence, a form of documentary production. And, more importantly, it makes a lot of money while turning its subjects into celebrities.

     Mr. Gazecki made his error in reducing the entire medium into a single concept. The truth of his statement would only exist if it were rephrased, “Documentaries don’t make money unless they are entertaining”.

     This is the case with my current production. This documentary is founded on the idea of entertainment, and will be completed for the purpose of profit.

     If you can give the audience something they want to watch then you will have no problem turning a profit.

Fear

The hardest thing about production work is that the 10% of the population who want to be in front of a camera are the few people that you don't want anywhere near your production. The other 90% of the people who would make for an amazing production are terrified of having a camera aimed at them.
That's what directors are for, and why they get paid so much. A directors' main job is to help get talented people past their fear of the camera lens so that they can put forth a quality performance.
The biggest challenge for the producer is trying to get those people in front of the camera in the first place so that the director can do his job.
That is now the biggest challenge facing this documentary. Trying to get people to set foot in front of a camera. It seems most people would rather deal with hand to hand combat rather than face the small piece of glass we call a lens.
But, as all things, this too shall be overcome. That is what a production is all about. Defying the odds, and making things happen.

Working Title

A working title is what you call your project until you have secured every possible form of legal ownership over the final title. The working title for this documentary is "Attitude not Required".
The purpose is to focus on the people and culture of modern scooter clubs in America such as Three Mile Island Scooter Club, Rabble Rouser Scooter Club, and the Harrisburg Hooligans.
With the expanding popularity of scooters it seems a timely project with a rapidly growing audience among those who are just beginning to ride.

Money

When you go looking for investors for your production you should always have a comprehensive budget prepared in advance, as well as a complete production book that will explain to potential investors exactly what kind of product you intend to sell.
That being said...
I have an impromptu meeting with a potential investor lined up on short notice. And, I have nothing prepared to show them. This is going to be me flying by the seat of my pants. I'm not expecting much, but it should be interesting to see how far I can go with nothing more than a verbal description of my initial concept.

Research

This documentary is beginning with the usual quest for information. Before a project can even enter the definitive pre-production phase it is essential to do initial background research to determine if the project itself is truly feasible. So far it looks promising. I've made a number of contacts within the targeted community, and have contact information for a number of related groups. Within the next week I should be able to start the pre-production documentation. Of course, that is assuming that nothing goes hideously wrong before that point.