Oh My Awesomeness: Week One

  • June 30, 2009 12:52 pm

Each week I’m going to tip my red, straw summer fedora to AV projects I think are awesome. (And in the cooler months it is the tip of a knitted beanie.) This week it’s a hearty “hooray!” for the creative duo Dorothee and Mark at OrganicNation.TV.

Organic Nation Trailer from OrganicNation on Vimeo.

And it’s a good day too: American Express has just set them up with a “Do Something” grant, so they can keep trucking across “America’s sustainable food landscape.” What’s so great about Dorothee in all of her web producing power– she doesn’t wait to make sure her project/show/films are going to be picked up. She makes them with all the fury of a sure thing (paycheck) and the quality is always above and beyond for a girl with a laptop and handheld HD camera.

Organic Nation feels like a friendlier Design E2: The Economies of Being Environmentally Conscious, a PBS series that rolled out in 2006. (Sans the dark classical music score and apocalyptic color treatment coming out of post…) I say friendlier because Dorothee hosts the adventures with the charisma of the Dirty Jobs guy. One week she’s on a tractor in Central Illinois learning about pesticides, the next week she’s surrounded by tomato seedlings clad in muddy cowboy boots.

So take a gander if you will, and support the duo that’s telling you just where your tomato is coming from.

Teva B1-G Air Contest

  • June 29, 2009 6:07 pm

Big Air
So you know that Adventure Film School I keep pimping? I promise you this– the 7 days you spend training with guys and girls who are world class climbers, DPs and go to work everyday at NOVA, National Geographic and Discovery Channel– are TOTALLY WORTH IT. 

And you can go to film school for free if you have the next 24 hours open to shoot something BIG yet small for Teva. (Yes. The shoe company that made your summer camp experience possible growing up.) 

All you need to do is: 

“Submit a video of yourself or that you shot of one of your friends catching some air. Skiing, kayaking, free–riding, snowboarding, rock climbing…whatever human powered sport. Just show us your B1–G AIR by uploading your original video to YouTube and sending us your video link when you sign up. ”

You can even drop footage of yourself jumping off a desk. My submission is here to get everyone going.

Stories from the Olden Times of VHS

  • June 29, 2009 5:33 am

John WeflerSomewhere in the 1990’s my husband John was studying film at Columbia College Chicago after departing a chemistry program at Oberlin. (“I was always protesting apartheid, I couldn’t concentrate,” he would tell me.)       

Over the weekend as I was raking my way through what production contracts look like, and just generally trying to learn the legal and insurance ropes of independent filmmaking– John plunked a giant three ring binder on my lap salvaged from our waterlogged garage. 

The cover listed him as executive producer of a feature length film being produced locally. I start raking through pages of production schedules, lease agreements for locations, actor resumes, point splits, bleeding scripts and vendor lists for Eastman Kodak film stock. 

When I press my husband for details on his film career of yesteryear (he’s a big shot IT consultant now working for the government) he kind of scrunches up his nose and folds his arms. He doesn’t want to talk about it. 

We muse sometimes about the vastly different production methods of 15 years ago, and he tells me I’m spoiled. (Since we’re being honest here, I had to actually admit in an interview I had never loaded a DV tape, or pulled anything from it. Everything I had used up to that point ran on a hard drive. And of course, last week when I was searching video archives and had to ask our director what a beta tape was.) We giggle about VHS and why public access used to be such an asset (it made high cost production goods available for everyone) and has now been replaced by any kid with a cell phone uploading shows to Youtube. I mean, this stuff is cheap. Do you know how cheap it is to make a movie? 

I quote a prophetic Cameron Crowe on this one: “In the future, everybody is going to be a director. Somebody’s got to live a real life so we have something to make a movie about.”

(And cut me some slack, I’m conjuring Pre-Elizabethtown Cameron.) 

So I ask John as I thumb the pages of the production binder, “do you have any advice for me?” 

‘Yeah. Don’t go into film.”