Kyle Gilman’s Camera Noise Productions

Today I finally took the plunge into HD TV. I’ve edited two HD movies, one was shot at 1080p24 and edited offline in SD DV, and currently I’m working on a project that was shot on the HVX-200 at 720p24 which I’m actually editing in HD (With absolutely no trouble! Thanks Hackintosh!)

I’ve had progressive-scan “HD” monitors since I was in high school, but those of course were attached to my computer and until recently they were 4:3 CRT monstrosities that reached a peak of 85 lbs. I finally upgraded to a 20″ widescreen Dell LCD for my trip to Berlin and it’s wonderful. I can watch HD trailers and edit DVCPRO HD movies with it, but there’s not a lot of HD content I can watch on my computer. It takes too long to download and I have to watch it at my desk. Movies and TV are for the living room.

For the past 6 years or so my living room has been graced with a 27″ 4:3 CRT that would never be called flat. I’ve always resisted trading up because frankly HD is not quite there yet. My mantra has been, when I can hold an HD movie in my hand, then I’ll buy an HD TV. Well, technically I could go to Target and hold an HD movie in my hand, but I still would have to spend half a grand on a high definition DVD player that could be obsolete in a few years thanks to an ill-advised format war.

So I cheated. I’m desperate for an HD TV, but I still only have one delivery source: my good friends at Time Warner Cable. Considering how much television I’ve been watching lately, and how many channels are broadcasting in HD now, I decided it was time. The question then was what form my new high resolution television would take.

I measured my 27″ CRT and determined that if I wanted the height to stay the same, a 37″ 16:9 would be about the same. So I started my search for a 37″ widescreen HD TV.

As I always do, I did my homework. My first choice was a 16:9 HD CRT, which is generally the cheapest way to go. There is still no better way to look at video than on a CRT. The blacks are black, the colors are accurate. It’s the way we’ve seen TV since cavemen roamed the Earth. But CRTs don’t get very big. Thanks to the limits of physics, they go to the low 30 inches and stop. Even if they could get bigger, you wouldn’t want it to because it would weigh twice as much as you and break your entertainment unit. Even the 30 inchers break 100 lbs.

So I moved on to LCD. They’re light, I already had an LCD monitor, and LCDs can do 1080p! I knew that 1080p is the future of HD material. Some day everything will be 1080p and I didn’t want to be the sucker with a 720p display. So I went up to B&H and looked at their impressive display of HD televisions.

The first thing I noticed was something I couldn’t notice: a difference between a 37″ 1366 x 768 LCD and a 37″ 1920×1080 LCD. Up close I could almost convince myself there was a difference, but from my 6 foot viewing distance I couldn’t see any difference whatsoever.

Something was up here! Was it possible that resolution is not actually the most important determination of quality for me? It turns out there are a lot of things I care about more. It turns out black level and refresh are way more important. And the LCDs I saw at B&H couldn’t cut it. Obviously they’re turned up a bit to provide enough brightness to compete with the lovely fluorescent lighting in the store, but I noticed a TV hiding up by the ceiling that didn’t have any trouble with black levels or refresh rates (which home calibration of the LCDs wouldn’t fix).

But it was a plasma! At a lowly 1024×720 I had originally considered plasma beneath my notice. LCD is the future! But damn was it pretty. And really isn’t that the only important thing? It has to look pretty. And not cost a fortune. It turns out I could get a 37″ version of that Panasonic plasma for $1100. It seemed like a good deal to me.

But then we started having screenings of the movie I was working on at PostWorks. They had a conference room with a large Panasonic plasma mounted on the wall. It looked like my baby, but it didn’t have speakers and it was totally black. We were watching SD 14:1 compressed DV zoomed in to fill the screen, and it looked awesome! So I looked it up and discovered Panasonic’s professional line of plasma “monitors.”

Not only are they better reviewed, but I wouldn’t be paying for things I wouldn’t use like speakers or integrated HDTV tuner. The thing that held me back at first was the question of HDMI input. The consumer model had two HDMI inputs. The professional didn’t come with any. I could buy an expansion card for some extra cash but that still only gave me one HDMI. But then I thought of something.

What if some day I want to use this thing to screen a rough cut of a movie I’m editing in my home office? I could get an HD-SDI expansion card for the plasma and for my computer, and run SDI cables from the office. Unlike HDMI, SDI cables have no problem traveling over long distances. That was the clincher. Not only did it make me excited thinking about the flexibility, it also made the whole enterprise more tax deductible.

So today I ordered a Panasonic TH-37PH9UK 37″ Professional Plasma Display from B&H for $950 plus a stand and an HDMI expansion card from Amazon. The TV and stand will arrive tomorrow. I’ll pick up an HD DVR from Time Warner and an HDMI cable from the Apple Store (what a price!) and for now I’ll be running my old interlaced DVD with component output. I’m very curious to see how that turns out. I’m not in the mood to buy a new DVD player when I’m just going to get an HD one in the next year or two.

While we were doing the online edit for Fay Grim, we got word that the sales agent wanted to make a poster for the Toronto Film Festival and it needed to be done like yesterday. Hal and I took half an hour and mocked up something we liked, assuming the people who actually knew how to market films would step in and make a bunch of changes, like adding international superstar Jeff Goldblum’s face to the thing.

Imagine my surprise when 6 months later I see my poster on IMDb, and on the official website. The logos and whatnot have been added, and there’s a bar in the middle that says “Featuring the continuing adventures of Henry Fool” which I love. Other than that, it’s the same thing we threw together in August.

A similar thing happened with The Girl From Monday. While I was singlehandedly distributing the film in well over 5 theaters across the U.S., I made a poster that I liked quite a bit. Then we licensed home video rights to Netflix, who sublicensed the DVD distribution to Hart Sharp. I assumed they knew better than I did how to make a movie poster, but they decided to re-create my design, but slightly differently. Hal and I ended up giving them a new title treatment which they reduced in order to make the lovely Tatiana Abracos more prominent, which was something I definitely couldn’t argue with. The final DVD is definitely an improvement, although I don’t like the uneven space between the top and bottom of the billing block, but that might just be the bleed at the top.

The fictional video blog “Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second” that I made last year (started a few months before that other, more famous, fictional video blog) hit some sort of tipping point recently. The actual site, with monetized Revver videos, still only gets about 50 visitors a day, but YouTube is out of control. It’s getting a few thousand views a day. Pretty soon the combined views on YouTube will pass 200,000. That’s a lot more people than I could ever hope to reach in a short film program at the best film festival. Of course, most of those views are for the webcam sex episode I made specifically for a web audience. And if the YouTube comments are any indication, a large number of those viewers are illiterate, and 15 years old.

But I still think this is great. Among the dozens of useless comments, I’ve been getting some great, insightful emails from people who watch the whole saga from start to finish. I never thought anyone would do that, it’s like sitting down to watch an entire season of a TV show at once. If it’s a British comedy series, you can easily do it in one sitting. I just wish YouTube gave me a taste of the money they’re pulling in. Revver has earned me $14 so far, and that includes revenue from my other shorts.

Artistically, I think it was a good idea to keep 15fps as a limited series. It ended at a logical place, but without explicitly saying whether Penny and Sean broke up. That other, more famous video blog should have ended much earlier. Once the plotty stuff about devil-worshiping cults kicked in I got bored. But the trouble is, it got bad at the peak of its popularity. They couldn’t stop at that point. They would have killed their big ticket to fame and fortune. If I had kept 15 fps going until now I would have run out of ideas because it was a limited concept.

I’m much more interested in limited web series right now. I don’t want to promise too much, but I’m working on something now that I hope will allow me to create several 10-ish episode animated web series, possibly at the pace of one a week. It will be a while before I’ve worked everything out, but if it works it’s really going to rock. Stay tuned.

A.O. Scott wrote an uncharacteristically inane piece for The New York Times over the weekend. If you’re reading this after the brief period of free online access, it’s basically about why nobody watches artsy, miserabilist foreign films in U.S. theaters anymore. But it’s based on really shaky ideas, starting with the title: “The World is Watching. Not Americans.” Is that the case? Are we just ignorant Americans being force-fed entertainment like “Superman Returns?” When I was living in Berlin they were playing a LOT of blockbuster American films dubbed into German. Original German-language productions seemed like the exception rather than the rule. Obviously that’s just one example, but I find it hard to believe that downers like “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” outsell “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” in Romania.

The fact is, there is a problem with U.S. film distribution, but The New York Times deserves a fair portion of the blame. A small independent or foreign film has a very large hurdle to overcome if it wants any success in the U.S. theatrical market. It’s a good review in The New York Times. Without that review, you’re out of luck. You might be able to limp through a few screens for a week or two, but without the support of a Roger Ebert (who’s not going to like your movie either) you’re screwed. Nobody’s going to go out during the one or two weekends your movie plays to 1/4 full houses. It’s not fun.

But you know what is fun? Discovering a hidden gem on Netflix or at your local video store, if you still have one. It’s cheap, the soundtrack doesn’t have to compete with the subway (Angelika Theater, I’m looking in your direction) and you don’t feel bad if there’s an empty seat or two in your living room.

Unfortunately for filmmakers and distributors, you can’t skip the theatrical release without looking like a loser. If your film goes straight to video, you can’t get that review in The New York Times because they won’t review it, even if it’s one of A.O. Scott’s fabled brilliant pieces of cinema that distributors are too scared to release. You need a week-long run in New York to get yourself on their sacred pages. A run which is guaranteed to lose money in the short term.

Sure, things might have seemed better in the old days when the only way to see difficult films was at the art house, but Netflix and Amazon (and brave DVD distributors) have made things better than ever. If you live outside of a major metropolitan area, you can actually watch these movies now. And they are inevitably released on DVD in some format, so you can find them even if they don’t get the publicity of a theatrical release. A.O. Scott is really lementing the death of the arthouse, not the diminishing demand for arthouse films. They’re out there A.O., they’re just not at The Film Forum anymore.

Update: Mahnola Dargis wrote an article a few days before A.O. Scott’s that outlines the alternative distribution methods distributors are trying. It’s informative and on the right track. Do the NYT critics read each other’s articles?

We are supposedly living in a new era of the short film. Short films had their place when a night at the movies included shorts, newsreels, and a feature or two. You could make a living with short films. But that hasn’t been the case in several decades. Now a movie is a feature film. In recent memory if you made a short film there was severely limited opportunity to make back the money you spent to produce the film, let alone make enough to live on. And with a few exceptions like Hal Hartley and David Lynch, once you start making features you don’t go back to shorts.

When I started making shorts there was only one place to go: film festivals. But what is a film festival for? As a filmmaker I’ve always believed that the first priority of a film festival should be getting people to watch films that they wouldn’t see otherwise. The ideal festival picks films that they like, and that need the exposure. No matter how good it is, a feature film with major stars and worldwide distribution already secured has no business being selected for a film festival. But if you’ve seen the lineup at any major film festival you know that they’re filled with well-known films made by well-known directors starring well-known actors. And I completely understand this from a programmer’s point of view. How else would they get anyone to come to the festival? There is a certain amount of pandering necessary. Some festivals do it more than others. But the reality is your best chance of getting into a festival is if you’re already an established filmmaker or you managed to convince someone from a popular sitcom to star in your $100,000 film.

And of course nobody watches the shorts except the short filmmakers. I’ve been to Sundance and Toronto and I didn’t see a single short at either one. At festivals like that I barely have the time to see the features I want to see. I’ve only watched shorts at smaller festivals that I also had a short in.

The dream of the festival screening is that someone with access to money will be there and love your short enough to get you money to make a feature. Only in rare cases will the short itself earn you money, because opportunities for short film distribution are severely limited. There are the mythical foreign television outlets which have been known to purchase shorts. And A lucky few get on IFC or Sundance, but a disproportionate number of their live-action short films have indie stars in them.

The one place I seek out short films is online. People watch shorts online. They pretty much only watch shorts online. I wouldn’t like to watch a feature online. I have a nice television and a couch for that purpose. And that’s why we’re told that short films are actually going to make money these days. There’s an audience out there. But I can tell you one thing I’ve never done. I’ve never paid money to watch a short film online. I’m not going to do it. And I can’t imagine a situation in which someone else would pay any amount of money to watch one of my short films, no matter how good I happen to think they are. The only solution I can see is advertising. And I’m sorry to say, I don’t see how it’s going to work for me.

I’ve recently “Revverized” all the videos I have online. I uploaded QuickTimes to Revver.com and Revver converted them to Flash (in sync, unlike some other websites I can think of) and added advertisements to the end of the files. If a viewer clicks on the ad at the end of the video I get a small amount of money. I have no objection to adding advertisements to my videos. In fact, you could stick them at the head and I’d be happier about it. I put credit sequences at the end of most of my movies, so a viewer will have to watch all the way to the end of the credits in order to get to the part where I make any money. So far I’ve made about $9.

I also have Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second Revverized, and I see that as being more likely to generate cash than the longer movies. They’re each a few minutes long and there are not credits at the end, so viewers are more likely to make it to the ads. And honestly, if I hadn’t made it myself, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t watch Camera Noise all the way through if I came across it online. It’s 29 minutes long! It’s too long for a short film program, let alone the Internet. But some people do watch it, which is nice because it means the movie hasn’t disappeared forever.

And that is really the reason to make shorts. It’s to have people watch and enjoy what you make. Not everyone enjoys them, but the YouTube and MySpace messages I get every once in a while are positive feedback from people people who wouldn’t have had a chance of seeing my movies just a few years ago. Things are changing, but if I want to make some cash I need to make something shorter and less intentionally off-putting.

Got all the videos up on YouTube this evening, and they have these great playlists. You can watch all my videos within this one post. It’s pretty neat, although there are definite sync problems with some or all of the clips.

Unfortunately these things don’t always load right, so if you just see white, use this link.

I’ve been in what Tony Snow might call a pre-9/11 mindset lately, what with my finally getting together the Obey Saget project. To go along with my nostalgia trip I’ve also put all of Rev. Tim McIntire and the Temple of Comedy online. It was my first solo project, and I still like parts of it. Whether the movie’s good or not, there are some very funny comedians in it. And some rather unfunny ones. You can watch it here, or on YouTube if you prefer out-of-sync flash videos. And if you enjoy Mr. McIntire, I suggest you buy his new album.

My various web ventures continue to proliferate:

• Obey Saget, a project I’ve wanted to get off the ground for about 5 years, is finally ready to go. I made this graphic to promote Bob Saget’s appearance in The BJ Show at Harvard in 2001, and we made up a small batch of shirts. I still wear mine all the time and when people ask where they can get one of their own I used to have to tell them that we ran out. But now there is an unlimited supply available through Spreadshirt.
  
  And it’s not just t-shirts. I have all kinds of products. You can even get a messenger bag.
  
• Some serious drama went down over at Truth @ 15 Frames Per Second today. Penny found out Sean was recording their webcam conversations and posting them on the Internet, including their horrifying attempt at webcam sex. She was not very happy.
• Tifaux, the TV blog I started with Maggie, is going strong. We’re developing our style and growing a regular audience of TV addicts.

I’ve recovered kylegilman.net from a disappearing web host. Believe it or not, there are disreputable hosts out there, and sometimes their servers go down with no warning and they don’t answer their emails. You get what you pay for I guess. Anyway, never use Plughost.com because I’m fairly certain they stopped paying their bills a long time ago, but they continue to take orders on their website. Shady.

I’m not much of a programmer, but I was developing this website recently and I ran into a problem with the way it created enclosures for podcasting and I got so upset I went out and wrote this plugin. If you do any podcasting using Wordpress I think you’ll enjoy it.