I'm very happy to announce that Amazon.com is now distributing my film, Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan, as a DVD, streaming rental, or streaming purchase!
: $24.99
rental
: $1.99
: $9.99
I'm hoping that using Amazon as a distribution source rather than the standard educational film distribution companies will mean that more people will be able to get access to the film at a lower cost.
One of my colleagues asked for a recommendation for a digital video camera for the field. I recommended against getting a Mini-DV or HV camcorder and instead going all digital with a flash (SDHC) based camcorder:
These days, instead of using tape, I recommend going all digital. That way, you can simply dump the video files to your PC and don't have to bother digitizing them. You will need a large hard drive, but a 500 gigabyte pocket hard drive is cheap and fits in your laptop bag easily.
I recommend these models:
- Canon Vixia HF-10 or HF-100 (this is the one I use)
- Sanyo Xacti (small, handheld, the microphone isn't as good on this, but size is excellent)
Be sure to get a large SD card -- at least 4 gigabytes. Eight or 16 gigabytes is preferable.
Karen
Do you think this was good advice? Please post any suggestions or comments (or questions)!
My friend George sent me this amazing link to a youtube video. It's a Pantene commercial from Thailand featuring a deaf violinist.
One of the best ads that I've ever seen. And their signing isn't that bad either!
Hmmm... seems JCR posted the sushi video to this blog, Linda saw it, posted it to her blog, and I saw her blog before reading my own one, and posted the sushi video back here. Now removed just in case it caused a matter:antimatter reaction and destroyed the universe.
Thanks Linda and Jason!
These days I've been busy editing my new film, titled A Japanese Funeral. A few months into my fieldworkin Japan, one of my informants died. I was given the opportunity to film the entire funeral sequence -- from the moment the body came back from the hospital to the cremation.
Editing it was very difficult emotionally for me. I'm close to the family, which is why I got the permission to film it. But it also means I feel a deep responsibility to make sure my informant's death is remembered properly.
The film is designed to be shown in the classroom. The current rough cut is 10 minutes, but after watching it today I think I cut it a bit too short and might expand it to 15 minutes. I want to screen it to a few more people first, though.
One of the students in my visual anthro class asked about how to capture an iChat video conversation (both sides). She wanted to tape a conversation with one of her informants. A little googling revealed a neat little application called Conference Recorder:
http://www.macworld.com/article/50727/2006/05/conferencerecorder.html
There are also some neat tips in the article, including the use of SnapZ or Garage Band to record iChat (and perhaps Skype) conversations.
As always, let the other person know that you are recording the conversation -- for ethical and legal reasons.
AA sent me this tidbit:
ISEFF INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM FESTIVAL 2008
TWO DAYS OF INTERNATIONAL STUDENT ETHNOGRAPHIC FILM
HOSTED BY GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
Constructing Bonds
The politics of relation in ethnographic representation
The festival focuses particularly upon the difficulties entailed by anthropological film production and dissemination â?? what is the â??useâ?? of ethnographic film? How and for whom is it being produced? We consider notions of the afterlife of the anthropological product â?? is it wrong for ethnographic data to be used as market research? Can other disciplines and areas of society benefit from this material? We encourage a diverse audience of anthropologists and non-anthropologists from academia and public realms, offering a community of discussion framed around a media source. Film screenings shall be accompanied by a panel discussion.
One of my colleagues has produced a documentary film about life in a wheelchair called Rolling. She recently wrote an article for the New England Journal of Medicine about the experience: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/25/2533.
I've uploaded a two minute trailer for Bethel: Community and Schizophrenia in Northern Japan onto a new website I've dedicated for Bethel publicity: http://www.disability.jp/bethel
Please enjoy!
Roland has released a minor firmware update for its Edirol R-09 digital audio recorder: http://www.rolandus.com/ (click on "Downloads)
The new features are:
See my other notes on the Edirol.
I was doing some research last semester for my Visual Anthropology course and came across some excellent online articles on low-budget lighting:
Following on the heels of the Zoom H4 (which apart from not having a time/date stamp would be perfect for me), Samson has announced the Zoom H2 at NAMM 2007. Now this looks perfect except for the lack of XLR inputs! But it does have a time/date stamp. The specs are from the Zoom website:
You can faintly see the SD logo on the prototype photo listed, so I'm assuming it's a SD-based device.
The best thing was the price: $199!!!!!!! It should come out in several months, not a moment too soon in my opinion.
Hi Karen,
My name is Loren and I'm a media grad student and documentary filmmaker in Buffalo, NY who stumbled across your blog some time ago and have been following it for a while now. I have some technical questions about the film you just finished since I know you're working in the HDV format and am currently working on a full length doc in HDV as well.
What I'm wondering, assuming your shooting ratio for the project was relatively high, is what kind of workflow you used to deal with all the material? Could you maybe do a post describing it for your blog?
Anything from whether you used native HDV or an intermediate codec for editing, software / hardware issues you ran into that were frustrating, and hd delivery format for festivals (if you're using one) to whether you captured / logged your tapes at night during the time you were shooting or left the capturing / logging process entirely until after you had completed filming.
Your blog gives a lot of insight into the tools that you use and I'd love to hear more details about both your experience shooting ethnographic documentary in HDV and your overall production process.
-Loren
In the field, I usually operate as a one-person crew. If I'm lucky, my partner can help me with a second camera and do interviews, but usually I am by myself. Sound is important to me, so I try to use wireless lav mics or use dual-system sound with a digital audio recorder. I shoot everything to HDV and label each cassette with the date, sequence number, and topic, and camera name. For example: 20051221b-BETHEL – Canon is the second tape I shot on December 21st, 2005 at the Bethel Community using my Canon XL-H1.
I write daily fieldnotes and I note the tape numbers in my fieldnotes where possible. Otherwise, I just correlate them later by date and time. I don't otherwise have time to log and review tapes in the field. I also carry a very minimal fieldkit which doesn't include a preview monitor (except the one built-into the camera). This has led to some problems -- noticeably that I have fluorescent flickering in some sequences of Bethel because Hokkaido uses a different power frequency than western Japan. This was not noticed until I went into post.
After the first fieldwork period, I went through the tapes that I knew had core material and I made a rough cut with them in SD mode (standard def using the built-in downconverter on the XL-H1). I sequenced a few shots together in iMovie to get a sense of what the film could be about. This gave me a sense of what I was missing (hospital life, community activities, etc.). When I went back to the field again, I shot those additional sequences.
Back home, I organized and logged all of the tapes. I had about 40 hours of tape for the two shoots in Hokkaido. Since the film is about 60 minutes long, that's a 40:1 shooting ratio. Pretty high, but I'm not very skilled. I captured and logged everything into Final Cut Pro. With each hour of HDV about 8 gigabytes, the 40 hours fit fairly well onto a 500 gibabyte hard drive that I dedicated to this project. Since i was using Final Cut Pro HDV, I stayed with the HDV codec rather than converting to a HD or intermediate codec that would take up much more space on the hard drive. The trade-off was some additional processing time, but the Quad-Core Mac Pro made that less important than it could've been.
Logging all the tape was a major pain and a major project. My partner Hisako helped here too. :-)
From there, we went through the tape logs and highlighted what we thought were key sequences. I storyboarded some of them on the corkboard in my office. And then I made some rough sequences and patched them together.
Right now, I'm outputting and distributing the various rough cuts to standard-def DVDs. I am editing in HDV and only downconverting at the final moment in Compressor. The resolution of the standard def DVDs that I'm burning isn't quite as high as I'd like -- I understand that there is some magic involved in getting Compressor to downconvert HDV into SD properly. In any case, I'm excited that the latest version of Compressor handles burning HD formats to DVD-Rs for playback on HD-DVD drives, so as soon as the prices drop on those, I'll implement that into my output formats.
The long-awaited 6x wide-angle high-def lens arrived for my XL-H1. The new Canon HD Video Lens 6x XL 3.4-20.4mm L has a 35mm equivalent perspective of 24.5 to 147mm, making it ideal for indoor videography, especially in cramped Japanese houses! There's a manual iris control ring, although the focus and zoom are still servo controlled.
First impressions: HOLY SMOKE THIS IS A BIG SUCKER. It's considerably larger and heavier than the standard 20x lens. The lens hood itself is humongous, almost a matte box in itself. It also makes the XL-H1 even more front-heavy than it currently is, so you'll need some sort of brace unless you have forearms of steel. Also, I didn't notice until it arrived but the 6x zoom does not have Image Stabilization in it. You don't really need it for wide angle work, but it would've been nice on the longer end.
The XL-H1 needs to be flashed up to version 1.0.4.0 in order to support the new iris ring (I was very confused at first since I ignored the enclosed SD card in my haste to play with the lens). The flash card is provided and after you've flashed it, you have a nice 16mb card to store your presets. I haven't learned if there are any other new features in the 1.0.4.0 software except the iris support.
The price for the 6x wide is set at MSRP $3000 and most retailers have it at $2700, but I bought it through the Canon educational program at about $2300.
Once I have some test footage shot, I'll post them.
SUPERFEST International Disability Film Festival Calls for Submissions: Your Opportunity to Contribute to Disability Culture Superfest, the world's longest-running juried international disability film festival, is seeking your entry for submission to our 27th film competition. Superfest is the primary international showcase for cutting-edge films that portray disability culture and experience in all its diverse, complex, and empowering facets. NEW FINAL ENTRY DEADLINE: January 15, 2007 (post-marked). Early bird discount if mailed by Jan. 3, 2007. Judging takes place in Spring 2007, and winners will be announced on or around April 1st, 2007. Winners will be screened in the SF Bay Area in June 2007, and all entries will be listed in the festival catalogue. Winners will be asked to provide still production photos and tape copies for publicity purposes. http://www.culturedisabilitytalent.org/
