READ OR DIE! Chad Williams shoots, cuts, and produces weekly video content for PBC-Productions.com, while freelancing as a camera op / editor in the NYC film industry. His ultimate goal for PBC: profitability! As a documentarian (is that a word?), Chad concentrates on capturing his two favorite sub-cultures: video games and puppetry. He hails from Western NY and holds a BFA in Media Arts.
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Daily Blog
October 4, 2008
Yesterday was a bad day. I made a mistake while wrapping a set, and that tiny imperfection grew into a mother of a problem. Without revealing the nature of anything about the people, events, locations, or circumstances (bloggers get fired, remember), it ended with my boss and I having a serious chat about how I need to shape up or ship out. It was emotionally draining, and when the onslaught was over and I could return home, I could think of no better outlet than to watch some web videos and have a good, long laugh.
After the third hour of chuckling at recent memes and political humor come to life, I began to think philosophically. Why did I choose the web for my daily dose of humor? Why does anybody? Who makes these videos, and when? How does anyone have the free time to do these, and what happens those people when they run out of steam? I always seem to come down off of a great laugh with a sobering moment of inward thinking.
More people collectively watched the Evolution of Dance than watched the Superbowl last January. It’s estimated that the modern office worker spends a quarter of their day on sites like on YouTube - which has been serving up 1 million video views every day. Who uploads all that stuff, and why? Why do we, the users, crave all this entertainment - and are never satisfied with just one or two gems? We constantly surf, rate, comment, and move on. If something isn’t worth our time, we simply do not grace it with our precious opinions and praise. Somehow comments and hits have become new Nielson ratings.
Somehow over the last 50 years, we have become a culture obsessed with being distracted. An interview I shot for a documentary on Italian immigrants had a 90 year-old man telling us that today’s kids don’t know how to play. “In their day” they had little to do but run outside and make up their own games. A brief bit of news and some annual festivals were enough to placate his generation - the only people seeking daily distractions were gossiping old ladies. Was it the birth of our new consumer culture that drove the Baby Boomers (and beyond) to constantly seek out new ways of being amused? Are television, videogames, and now the Internet simply an extension of the drive to get new stuff?
Have you seen The Story of Stuff? Great piece. It breaks down exactly how and when America became enslaved to buying new things. The drive to have NEW! took over our lives after WW2, in a time where our economy needed this way of thinking. This idea continued to spiral out of control at such a rapid rate that not only are we craving new things, but now we also need a steady flow of new entertainment. With the rise of television, we saw a decrease in attention spans. Since the advent of Sesame Street and the 60-second commercial, audiences no longer tolerate more than 2 sentences coming out of character’s mouth at any given time. Watch prime time TV lately? Name any show where a character says more than two lines in a row. Three in a row is the new monologue.
Our cuts have become quicker and our scenes shorter. Compare a slow-moving movie from the Hollywood Golden Age to any blockbuster of today. We’re holding down the fast-forward button. Now insert web-entertainment. One of the golden rules of making a viral video is that it has to be 2 minutes in length. I’ve heard this at podcasting seminars, in interviews, and from my fellow producers. Why is this a rule? Is everyone anticipating that audiences have no better sense to know when they’re watching a web video and when they’re being fed a commercial? Or is it that our attention spans are so severely limited that (outside of legitimate theater) we cannot hold our interest for more than 120 seconds? Is this the truth, or are we all being forced into some kind of ADD culture? Is the two-minute standard a Blu-Ray, or is there a real purpose for the change?
Distractions. We all need them. My wife has been reading the Little House on the Prairie book series, and telling me about how the culture back then was completely different from today. Farmers didn’t need movies. They made up their own games and mostly just lived and worked. What changed? The older generation doesn’t watch home-made videos on YouTube. They prefer to watch Law & Order and the evening News, which to their grandparents is just as bad / fast. What will be the next evolution in our sped-up brains? How can our entertainment get any quicker, or be served any faster? Will we all just give up and go back to attending theater? Perhaps the answer is already here.
September 27, 2008
There are a zillion short film festivals out in the world. I just got an advertisement for a Hitchcock-themed contest in my inbox yesterday. That makes about 3-4 that I’ve become aware of this month. Just today I read about the “first ever web-based film festival“. You’d think that a guy like me, publishing bi-weekly shorts online, would be into this sort of thing, but it’s exactly the opposite. It’s because there is so much web-only entertainment out there that I loathe the entire idea of web-based short competitions. It’s the beginning of the end - imagine a future where all film festivals, and therefore all video content, is web-only. Without the social aspects of traditional festivals, the art of filmmaking will be watered down. Winning them would mean nothing and losing means that you’ll just create more to try and win the next one. As creators of web-based video content, aren’t we all competing for attention anyway? Isn’t a formal contest just a little redundant and missing the point?
The people that compete in said web-only film fests are small potatoes, each trying to claw their way out of the fog and into the public eye. Traditionally, venues like Sundance, Cannes, or TromaDance would be the fast track to get their names out there - gain exposure, become a commodity and the ability to make something bigger. With the advent of super-cheap prosumer electronics and an ever-moving Internet audience, you’re looking at millions of content producers that are too low budget to go to a real film fest, but who all have aspirations of making it anyway. These are the people who will apply to web-only festivals. That’s right - by entering, you’re literally competing with that scary guy who uses puppets and somebody’s grandma. Welcome to the Internet - we fight Grandmas here.
Our information culture is rapidly becoming an irony culture, or a remix culture - the biggest memes out there are always trainwrecks - and the bigger the better. With the influx of information pouring into people’s daily lives (i.e. Internet at home, Internet at work, iPhone inbetween), it didn’t take long to turn obscure stories into laugh-fests, and hot news items into entertainment. I just think it’s funny that the cable access of tomorrow (YouTube) is just as enabling to freaks, weirdos, and attention whores as your local college TV station was 10 years ago. The huge difference is that in the last few years, the cable-access personalities of yesteryear have become today’s instant celebrities. Lisa Nova, AVGN - both started out just doing something that they thought was funny - but now with the world watching, their millions of hits translated into fame and DVD sales. 10 years ago they’d still be unknown.
Now with video games adding shared level creation and sharable user experience video, people are communicating in whole new ways. Yup, now there are whole new ways to flip the bird. Isn’t that what people want to see anyway? Aren’t we just dramahogs at our most base? We just want to see some explosions, a pretty girl, an embarrassing sports injury, and some fat kid roll around like an idiot. Welcome to the Internet - aka America’s Funniest Home Videos. Would you like an award with that?
September 18, 2008
On Monday we resurrected our go-to filler item for this week’s content, a fun little PSA series about robot safety. After shooting for another producer on Sunday, I was reminded to keep my crew happy and my shoot short - with lots of spare time just in case. ‘Just in case’ time can turn into ‘oh crap’ time very easily.
For this shoot we required a beach scene, so I spent the morning scouring the Astoria coastline for a sandy beach. It turns out there is no place on the water that anyone can actually access without a portable ladder, rope, or extremely long legs. The entire surrounding waterfront is unreachable, with a ten-foot cement wall separating the public from the river, like so many zoo animals. Are we being protected from it, or is it being protected from us? This question sprang out of irritation as I turned around several times, trying to find a way to legally park my car next to a leafy State park area.
I had brought a bucket just in case, and it turned out that I’d need it. If the area failed to provide a good shooting location for a beach, we’d just create one in-house. Steathily, my eyes darting left and right, I crossed the park with the bucket and shovel. I looked hard for anything that would pass as beach sand. The river was once again blocked off from the land by a ten-foot drop. Eyeing the sand in the grown-over baseball diamond, I kicked some piles together on my way across the width of the park. On my way back, I quickly bent down as if to tie my shoe, opened the bucket, and scooped in some sand. In the same motion, I kicked in the pile I had previously made. On my way back to my car, I nervously thought of lurking State Park Police people and bad attitudes, maybe how I would explain holding a bucket of baseball diamond sand and a shovel. “This is ridiculous.” was probably my last thought as I stepped into my car and drove off. Free sand is just so hard to come by in the city.
By the way, before I continue my tale, you must know that I DID return all of the sand at the end of the day. No blood, no foul. I was just borrowing it, after all.
update: I just pulled another 17 hour day for SVU. Tiiiired. Have to get up in 4 hours. I’ll finish this tale, with full video, next week.
=chad
September 12, 2008
I am a nerdcore fan. I go to Nerdcore shows, listen to chiptune music, even support local collaboration shows like Pulsewave and Blipfest. I love it. It’s one of my things.
There’s been quite a few docs done specifically on ‘music with an 8-bit influence’ since it began to show up on the radar a few years back. There’s Nerdcore for Life, Nerdcore Rising, Reformat the Planet, 8-Bit Philosophy, and a few that are YouTube-only. You may have seen an article or two about it. Mainstream media seemed to pick it up for a week, as if it was some disposable news story, and it hasn’t really been covered since.
Through a mutal friend, I wound up speaking to Dan Lamerieux, the mastermind behind Nerdcore For Life, a documentary covering the scene for two years. I saw him at Shael Riley show taping a performance for the film. Dan would later tap me to do some shooting in NYC for the movie.
Soon after we exchanged emails, I signed up to shoot an interview with MC Lars, one of the featured artists in the documentary, at an apartment in Park Slope. Z asked the questions (brilliantly). Lars, a great guy and an intelligent interviewee, had some pretty interesting things to say about the scene. Short story: at this stage, all that existed of the film was this trailer in 4:3. It was surprising at first, but then everything seemed to be shot on prosumer video, so I guessed it made some sort of sense. Problem was that I accidentally left on the settings I would normally use our HVX: 16:9, letterbox + squeeze, 24p. After sending Dan my DV tapes of the Lars interview, I re-watched the trailer, cringed at my mistake, and asked him if 16:9 would be alright. “We’ll figure something out” was the gist of what I got back. Whups.
Last week I popped in a prerelease copy of the doc and found that the tail had wagged the dog. The entire film had been letterboxed to match our Lars interview. Maybe that’s a bit presumptuous. Everything was widescreen now- that’s a better way of putting it. It’s probably more festival-friendly this way. While watching, I forgot about the initial resolution until this interview popped up - the taller rapper’s head was pretty much cut off near the eyes. Outside of this shot, the rest of the film feels like it was meant to be 16:9.
What is Nerdcore? The overall piece is a mashup of people, facts, opinions, throw-downs and throw-ups. Watching this film was very much like NERDCORE THE MONSTER just barfed its guts all over Toyko. An ugly yet intimate view of the scene from 2004-2006 is bared for all to see. There’s a lot of drama that erupted during the doc’s years of filming, including random beef between artists, but also between the artists and the genre itself. Without spoiling some great / viscous moments in the film, there’s hope and hate for the very word ‘nerdcore’ by and from the musicians that are considered thus.
Another signature to this doc is the style of the visuals. Mirroring the DIY spirit of the scene, multiple cameras / resolutions / lighting styles were used to piece the film together. My understanding from receiving instruction from Dan was that alot of the interviews were done in a way to maximize the comfortableness of each interviewee (one Q&A was done in a hot tub). While this multi-camera, sometimes good lighting - sometimes bad lighting aesthetic isn’t really pleasing to watch, it gives the film a ‘guerrilla’ feel. All the sub-sections have meaning and tie-in to give you, the non-nerdcore audience, a glimpse into the short history of the music and the people who make it. You get the feeling that many different cameramen contributed to this piece, that the entire work itself might just be a labor of love.
I have yet to see the rival documentary (yes! there is a rival film), but I know that it won’t come close to the heart-felt detail that N4L discloses throughout its hour-and-change runtime. At one point, we are guided through the history of the scene by the most well-known Nerdcore artists: names like Beefy, mcchris, YTCracker, MC Router, Shael Riley and others. Not only is their reverence (and loathing) for the scene exposed, but their love/hate relationship with each other is also highlighted. That’s something that I wasn’t quite expecting: Nerdcore is an explosive medium with a lot of giant egos, infighting, and name calling by a bunch of mediocre rappers that are sometimes eclipsed by one or two geniuses. N4L, despite its apparent love for the artists and music, doesn’t pull any punches on this subject. In their own words, the artists admit that the best and worst thing about Nerdcore is that anyone can do it. Anyone can make a track in their parents’ basement, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Towards the end of the film, I found myself questioning if the scene would last another 5 years.
Overall, I enjoyed the perspective of the film and would recommend it to anyone who has no idea what Nerdcore is and needs a crash course on the history, drama, beef, and love/hate within the community. Also, it’s a historical document for people in the scene to look back upon fondly years into the future.
=chad
I’ve been pulling alot of days doing prep / wrap for SVU and Gossip Girl this week, and through all of it I’ve been thinking about finally getting on the iPhone boat. There’s alot of downtime where everyone literally sits around and twiddles their thumbs (this morning the riggers and I waiting two hours for a truck to return) and I literally got bored with reading books, my normal go-to boredom killer. Hurry up and wait, they say. Ah well.
August 29, 2008
I’ve spent the better half of this week developing a new web series for GoodGame. I had promised to shoot the pilot in April, but due to the sensitive nature of some of the props, it never materialized. Fates conspired over the summer and once again I’m looking at another go at the pilot - this time in late September. All my time up until then is organizing crew, scheduling auditions, and writing the damn thing.
Z and I had an interesting revelation today. Well, maybe it was ‘more of the same’ for her, revelation for me. Girls are always thinking ahead like that. What we came up with was something like “If you want something done AT ALL, you’d better tell someone to do it, or just do it yourself.” If it’s just your hobby or you’re clawing your way up the devil’s esophagus (aka getting recognized on the web), you might as well just invest your own time to make it great. Otherwise, who’ll get it done? There’s a ton of product out there, buried in a sea of regenerating crap. For the gems to rise up, they either have to be train-wreck or super special. The latter is my goal for the new web series.
I’ve been researching intros since Sunday - movies, videogames, even books. There’s a study somewhere that backs up my gut feeling, that if you can’t win someone over in the first 30 seconds, your audience is surfing somewhere else. Hell, on YouTube if you can’t show them potential in 2 seconds, they go elsewhere. So I got the idea to create a super-strong intro; something that is both beautiful, unique, and a trainwreck all in one. I latched onto the catchiest intros I could find, mashed them together, added a sprinkle of originality, and four days later, I have 1/2 of it done. Will the pilot go over? Does our creative team have what it takes to steal the attention of the Internet? These answers and more, as the blog marches on…
