Your DVR Sucks

The National Resources Defense Council says your cable set top box and your DVR suck more energy than your refrigerator.

I've noticed that my DVR is always on. This is frustrating. Most of the time I'm not using it. But it is on. I can turn it off, but once it wakes to record something, it stays on. Of course I can't turn it off from the power strip, because it wouldn't be able to record anything. Also, for some reason, it takes over ten minutes for it to download the program guide, which shouldn't be more than 10KB.

At least it takes a moment to spin up its hard drive; I gather American DVR's just leave them spinning.

They calculate an HD DVR at 446 KwH per year. That's about $25 at my rates, which are probably lower than yours because I live in a hydro power utopia. (I pay around 6 cents a KwH. Americans pay 12. New Yorkers pay 20.) What the NRDC report doesn't mention is that your DVR is also heating the house -- all that energy winds up as heat -- so if you're air conditioning during the summer months, you have to spend more to recool. Not a big problem in Montreal, but it must suck extra in Phoenix.

As the NRDC report makes clear, this is easy to fix. European DVRs go into standby when they're not playing video. They use 50% less electricity. My computer sleeps when it's not busy; it can go for a couple of days in standby, on battery. Engineers could obviously solve this problem in a jiff.

This is a classic case for why government should intervene in markets. No one is going to make "standby mode" their number one priority in buying a DVR -- even assuming people have any choice at all, which I, as a Bell Expressvu customer, don't. But if all set top boxes and DVRs had to go into a low-power standby mode after, say, an hour of idle time, we'd all save a lot of money. And, oh yeah, the environment.

Why 3D Won't Work, by Walter Murch

Roger Ebert explains why top editor Walter Murch thinks 3D will never work -- will always be a big headache.

The biggest problem with 3D, though, is the "convergence/focus" issue. A couple of the other issues -- darkness and "smallness" -- are at least theoretically solvable. But the deeper problem is that the audience must focus their eyes at the plane of the screen -- say it is 80 feet away. This is constant no matter what.

But their eyes must converge at perhaps 10 feet away, then 60 feet, then 120 feet, and so on, depending on what the illusion is. So 3D films require us to focus at one distance and converge at another. And 600 million years of evolution has never presented this problem before. All living things with eyes have always focussed and converged at the same point....

We can do this. 3D films would not work if we couldn't. But it is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time: difficult. So the "CPU" of our perceptual brain has to work extra hard, which is why after 20 minutes or so many people get headaches. They are doing something that 600 million years of evolution never prepared them for. This is a deep problem, which no amount of technical tweaking can fix. Nothing will fix it short of producing true "holographic" images.

Now you know. Studios, just cut it out, okay?

Square

My television has four screen width settings: Full, Zoom, Wide Zoom and Normal. Sometimes I can't figure out which is the right one until I see that someone's face is a little too tall or wide. That can get to be a real problem if you're watching a Danny DeVito movie.

It would be really nice if DVDs included a square right before the movie. The square would go from the top of the frame to the bottom, so you could make sure you weren't cutting off anything important. And if you didn't have a square on the screen -- if you had a rectangle -- you'd know you had the wrong width.

Oh, and while I'm running for King, can we get rid of the FBI warnings you have to sit through? I don't they've stopped piracy.

New Internet Toolz

My producer and I are putting together a package for the Telefilm submission for a feature I'm attached to direct. It's very exciting, because if we can get the financing, then it would be my first feature. We're trying to figure out how to do everything on the small budget we'll have, which means trying to find stars we can afford who will also excite the distributors, and locations where we can place more than one scene.

It's nice to now have access to satellite imagery. We have a bunch of art gallery scenes, and a scene on the Lachine Canal. I remembered an old factory, now renovated to condos, offices and studios, right on the Canal, on St. Ambroise. Anton and I were talking, and I ran Google Maps up and down the Lachine Canal looking for the telltale parking lot. There it was. "You know this place, right?" "Oh yeah, a lot of people have production offices there." "We could do both art gallery scenes, and maybe Lucas's apartment, and the Lachine Canal." "Good idea."

It's mad good to have access to satellite imagery.

Meanwhile, actors' reels are starting to go up on YouTube. I wanted to show the ridiculously talented and alarming Michael Filipowich to an American showrunner I've been working my metaphysical drama with. He's got his reel up on YouTube. "You see what I'm talking about?"

Department heads, too. If you're a cinematographer, a production designer, a composer: get your stuff up on the Net. If we're looking at two people, and one of them can be checked out on the Net, who do you think we're going to check out first?

And if an actor doesn't have a reel, they often have interviews. One actor we were looking at is famous for her dramatic roles. "But can she do comedy?" We looked at an interview on Tout le monde en parle," a Quebec talk show. (Trans: "Everybody's Talking About It.") Oh, yeah, there's the lightness we were looking for.

... Which, of course, means, you better be on fire every time you give an interview. I was looking at one actor for a role, and she had an interview up which just made her look like a dingbat. Fortunately, she had a TV interview up that made her look perfect. Fortunately, I saw both.

Indie film has been taking a terrible beating lately. It's very hard to get a distributor. Fortunately, in these small ways, it's getting easier to put one together.

PS: For Dog's sake, why do so many of these Canadian films not have a trailer online? Are you kidding me? What is wrong with you people? Ask your intern to UPLOAD YOUR FRAKKING TRAILERS.

You Can't Go Back In Time, Unless You Can

I bought my dad a Time Capsule for Hanukah, and installed it, like a good son would. Wouldn't you know it, my hard drive did a face plant over the holidays. And while that would normally have been fairly catastrophic -- in the past I would have only backed up my user directory, and only just before we left. Instead I was able to put my entire user directory on Lisa's computer immediately, and I'm now erasing my hard disk with a mind to restore everything back onto that. (With a few detours for things I worked on since.) Though it's never fun to have a hard drive face plant, I lost only about half an hour's creative work.

So I highly recommend getting Mac System 10.5, if you don't have it already, and a large storage device (the Time Capsule's great because it's also a wireless router) and hooking yourself up to Time Machine.

Never Upgrade

[Computer tech]

Yesterday, I upgraded from Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) to 10.5 (Leopard). 10.5 has a fabulous automated backup system called Time Machine, and I bought Apple's nifty Time Capsule. It's a combination wireless router and 500 GB hard drive. So any of the computers at home will now automatically back themselves up on an hourly basis over the wireless network.

I was spurred into action by Lisa's hard drive crashing irrecoverably. Lisa is not as good as I am about backing up. Fortunately Gmail never throws anything out, ever, and everything she writes, she emails to me sooner or later. And we had a backup from August. Me, I've been backing up to a flash drive at irregular intervals, and I'm always sending stuff out for notes. Still, the idea of never losing more than an hour's work was pretty attractive.

I forgot the cardinal rule of systems, though: never upgrade. Just buy a new computer with the new system installed. Lisa's MacBook came with 10.5. The first thing the 10.5 upgrade did was lose my home directory. That's right. Every single bit of personal information on my computer, everything except applications, gone.

Which sort of defeats the purpose of getting 10.5.

Well, the home directory wasn't erased, just misplaced, and with help from my brilliant researcher, Webs, I was able to put the home directory where it belonged, and the people at Final Draft made no fuss about giving me another activation. Still, I did spend a good 3 hours recovering.

Probably should not have installed anything until I turned in my final drafts of my pay cable series, eh?

Time Machine looks really cool, though. It saves your computer's entire state hourly for 24 hours, then daily for a week, then weekly until it runs out of space and has to start deleting old backups. I doubt I'll need all its functionality. I tend to make a new script file every day, so I have dozens of old drafts of scripts available in case I want to find out how I did it before. I'll be happy just knowing that I'm safe if my computer dies or runs off with another writer.

Being There

A Friend of the Blog is having trouble parsing an email her would-be producer has sent her about financing. She's unsure how to react.

First of all, if someone is being unclear about whether they are going to be able to pay you or not, you are entitled to ask for a straight answer. If they don't have a straight answer to give you, then the answer is probably "no," and if they are resistant to giving you a straight answer, then the answer is "no" with a topping of "you don't want to work for them."

Second, don't use email as your primary form of communication. Many people these days hide behind email. What email is great for is creating a paper trail. After a creative discussion, write up what you think you understand from it, and send it to the other parties. Same with negotiations.

But if you are trying to find out answers, call. You can't tell tone of voice from an email. Better yet, if you can, drop in. Best of all, go to lunch. The more time you spend in person with people, the more you will develop your relationship with them, and the more you'll know what is up with them. When you are there in person, people are more likely to remember what they needed to say to you.

If you are cultivating a relationship, that goes triple. Never send an email when you can call. Never call when you can visit. Never visit when you can wangle coffee.

When people get emails, they usually try to bat them away as fast as possible. That means they may not give you a full answer. They will feel justified in giving you less than two minutes attention.

On the phone, they will at least try to finish off their thoughts. They will rarely give you less than five minutes of their attention. But they may not remember everything they had to say, and they certainly won't bring up additional projects.

In person, people usually feel obliged to give you at least fifteen minutes of their time. They will bring up additional projects, but they may not try to get to know you as a person.

Over food, people will rarely give you less than half an hour (coffee) or an hour (food). They will actually try to get to know you as a person.

Try to be there as much as possible. At least until you run out of time and you're so busy that you start telling people, "Just shoot me an email and I'll get back to you."

A Short History of the Laugh Track

Read it and giggle. Or if you do not giggle, a giggle will be provided.

S-Video? Component? HDMI?

Checking out my brand new TV, I see there are all sorts of ways to get signal into it. Your regular yellow/red/white RCA cords. Your S-video cable. Your component video cable. HDMI.

I can't tell the difference between my PVR hooked up via RCA jacks and my PVR hooked up via S-Video, and I'm fairly finicky. Can anyone else tell the difference? Is there a difference in the audio?

Can any of you guys tell the difference with component video? I could easily hook up the component video output of my DVD player; I'm just wondering if it's worth the fuss.

I'm assuming that HDMI, being digital, beats all the rest. But I don't have HDMI outputs on anything. I'm going to wait for my next show before I get a new DVD player or an HD PVR.

I've got a small list of semi-big-ticket items I plan to buy "next show"... "Oh Lord, won't ya buy me an HD PVR..."

UPDATE: Oh, and -- can I use any old RCA cables for component cables? They look like ordinary RCA jacks. If I don't care about the colors not matching, can I just grab one of my many, many triplets of cables and hook'em up?

And -- how much improvement can I expect from an up-converting DVD player, given that the Bravia is a mere 720p?

It's Thinner

Lisa never liked the hulking 27" cathode ray tube TV that a friend was kind enough to leave with us, because seen sideways it looked like a bunker, and sideways is the view you see coming in. So that was our excuse to upgrade to a 32" Sony Bravia flat panel LCD TV.

I've been a fan of Sony ever since the Sony TV I had in West LA did a face plant off the table during the 1991 Northridge quake... and survived without a problem. They get the details right. The hardware is well designed (down to, thank you, a headphone jack); the software is brilliant.

We fired up the box of BAND OF BROTHERS (Lisa's Chrismukkah prezzie to me), which I've only seen twice before... and I was blown away by the crispness of the details. I'd always liked the opening credits sequence, made up of old photos of the guys in Easy Company. This time I realized that all the old photos are aged, and scratched, and water-spotted, and folded. I'd seen it on my old TV, I guess, but somehow I hadn't really noticed it. Just wasn't enough detail. The blacks are darker, the pixels are invisible (at least till my eyes get used to 720p)... it's spectacularly pretty.

Of course this means I have to think about getting an HD PVR...

The White Board

We're breaking story today on a rewrite. It's a horror feature, so I'm restructuring it as 7 acts, complete with act outs. Time for the white board.

So in that spirit, here's a household tip. How do you get old dry-erase marks off your white board?

For a few marks, you can always write over it with fresh dry-erase marker, and then erase that. The solvent in the marker is exactly the solvent for the dry markings.

But what about an entire board?

Toothpaste.

A little bit of toothpaste on a rag will nicely remove old dry-erase from a whiteboard, it turns out. Toothpaste contains a very mild abrasive that leaves your whiteboard minty fresh!

Now where's my fifth act out...

A Word About Windows Vista

Periodically my parents ask me to solve problems on their Windows computers. It's a job I hate with a passion because (a) I don't use Windows (b) it's a lousy, buggy, insecure operating system (which is why (a)).

Right now I'm trying to help a friend of my parents install iTunes on her new Windows Vista laptop. Wow, is it slow. Like, 15 minutes to reboot slow. (If it were fast, I wouldn't have time to write this post.) A brand new computer shouldn't be this horribly slow on any OS. (It's a Sony Viao.)

It's come to this: for Chrismukkah, I'm buying my dad a Mac.

Why You Shouldn't Just Use the RSS

I almost always wind up editing my posts after I've posted them. The RSS feed, though, comes from the first draft of the post. So if you've got a feed hooked up to this site, then I recommend you actually click though to the blog entry. That way you'll see the current edition of the post, with any corrections, clarifications or updates. If you don't, you might be missing something.

Of course it's your own trip, so be my guest, but please be aware that there is a warning on that one.

Mobisodes

At the Just for Pitching event, the Comedy Central guy mentioned that they're looking for 2-minute segments suitable for viewing on a cell phone or iPod's two inch screen, to release as "mobile content."

I've been hearing about mobile content for several years now. I wasted a bit of time with a producer who wanted an animated series of 90 second cartoons; it turned out that he didn't actually envision paying anyone until (or if) he sold the show somewhere. Since then other producers have asked if I'd like to "partner up" with them, i.e. I come up with a series concept and write a few short scripts for free, and then they'll see if anyone's interested. No one has explained to me yet where the payday is, though they're all convinced there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The only success story I can point to is Têtes à Claques, the web-based Québecois animation phenomenon: if you're a Bell cell phone subscriber you can watch the episodes on your cell phone a week before they come out on the Web. But that was a phenomenon before Bell bought in.

Mobisodes are a fundamentally new medium. The screen is ridiculously small. You can really only have one thing in a frame that size. If you're having an explosion, the explosion fills the frame. If you're having a conversation, it's all closeups, no wide shot. How does that affect the kind of stories you can tell?

But it's not just the size of the frame.

The audience is also downloading whenever the episode is ready. Should that be on a regular or an irregular basis?

Do all episodes have to be the same length? Why should they be?

But my big question gets back to: how do I get paid? How do the actors get paid? Am I paid per download? Or is the platform (the cell phone service provider, or iTunes) producing a lot of content that they're paying for up front, and everyone's paid a reasonable advance against royalties? Or do they buy the show outright?

And how do you get paid for providing mobisode content when YouTube is giving content away for free? Or as Sam Goldwyn once said about B movies, why would people pay to see bad movies in a theater when they can watch bad movies on TV for free?

It's the Wild West out there. But has anyone struck silver yet?

Does anyone have more info on successful mobisode productions?

UPDATE: See Bill Cunningham's comment for links to two articles about downloadable content. Japanese kids are buying manga to read on their handsets, which is a big step forward in e-book technology. (The concept of spraying ink on paper, and then physically shipping it to someone who will read it once and then throw it away seems so, well, 20th Century.) And 24 has a sideline series of 24 one-minute episodes.

Note that manga-by-email is not a new medium -- it's just a new method of delivering the old medium of the graphic novel. Meanwhile the 24 mobisodes are a promotional item for the series. They're not making money off them directly; and even if they were charging for downloads, the mobisodes rely on the enormous promotional boost of the hot TV series. I'm still waiting to hear about a series that was created for, and paid for by, the mobile screen.

Blue is for Boys...

Hollywood movie and TV producers seem to consistently use
blue pages for 1st revision and pink for 2nd.

Canadian producers seem to do the reverse (i.e., pink for 1st
and blue for 2nd). Is there a reason for it?

Has anyone else noticed this? I don't really pay attention, 'cause the script coordinator does that, but it would be an odd discrepancy...

Is 3D Back?

Before I left for the City, and then the Country, I attended an industry screening of a 3D short of a local spectacle which is a sort of Cirque du Soleil with spectacularly trained horses and riders.

After the showing, we all talked about 3D, and the producer who invited me said all the studios are shooting in 3D now. Which was something I had not heard before. (Have you?)

Is 3D back? It was big in the 50's for a few years when studios were trying to figure out what they could offer the audience that TV couldn't. Unlike Techniscope and Cinemascope, 3D didn't stick. It came back in the '70's and 80's (Jaws 3D!) but it has never stuck.

Now the studios are worried about DVDs and illegal downloading. What can they offer that viewers can't get at home? 3D rears its head again. (See this post about Disney offering Meet the Robinsons in 3D for a premium price.)

I thought this show was interesting because one of the problems of watching acrobats in a recorded medium is that we're so used to seeing spectacular things on the screen. To see an actor or horse rider perform something astounding in person is breathtaking, but on screen it becomes just another stunt. I wondered if the 3D experience might help convince the audience of the reality of what they're seeing; at least until we get used to seeing Die Hard movies in 3D, that is.

I did notice that the 3D effect was similar to the Imax effect in that the very short film seemed satisfying in its length. A 40 minute Imax film doesn't seem too short, because of the awesome amount of information on the screen.

I was not completely convinced, in the end. Movies don't feel flat to me; I'm used to interpreting them as visions of 3D worlds anyway. Even without stereoscopic vision, I have perspective to rely on, and depth of field, and occasionally smoke and fog. I know how far away things are.

On the other hand my mom told me that when she saw black and white films as a girl, she felt she saw them in color. She was used to adding the color back in, just as I'm used to adding the depth back in. Now that we're used to color, we don't add the color back into black and white. If we got used to seeing movies in 3D, would we lose the muscle that adds the third dimension to our viewing experience.

I'm not sure what the third dimension adds. Color really does add more information, and makes what we're seeing seem more real. Watching a movie in 3D just felt odd.

Maybe the problem is technical. Depending on where you are in the cinema, you'll experience a different degree of stereo separation. There is one spot in the cinema that gives a "normal" stereo view -- I'm told it is as far from the screen as the diagonal drawn from corner to corner of the screen. Everything else is out of kilter a bit. You might wind up with too much stereo separation, which makes everyone onscreen look fake, like a doll rather than a person. The only way to solve that would be to give every viewer VR goggles to view the movie in, and that's prohibitively expensive as yet.

But maybe the problem is that we really don't need 3D that much when we're sitting watching something. Sure, when we're catching a ball, we need stereo vision. But watching a story unfold -- I just don't know what it gives us. Probably someone will come up with some clever unexpected way to trick our stereoscopic vision for some artistic effect. But will anything solid and lasting come of it?

What do you think?

We All Scream for iScript

There's nothing as effective as hearing your dialog read out loud for telling where it's not working. Reading it yourself is helpful, but you won't really find out how they sound to someone reading them on the page, without the benefit of your brain.

The best way to hear your script is read aloud in person by actors. If you have good actors, and especially if you know enough actors well enough to cast them right for the parts, some of the magic of the movie will happen in your living room -- or not.

Of course, you may not know actors. Most people don't.

Another way to hear the script read is through TriggerStreet. Writers gang up over a free Skype line to read each other's scripts. Writers are not as good at reading as actors are. But then you can pay them back by reading their scripts. As opposed to feeding your actor friends and feeling guilty you're not paying them union rates.

Now, there's a new service. The good people at iScript will read your script out loud, and send you an mp3 of the recording, for $175. They were kind enough to do one for me. The reader was clear as a bell, and beautifully articulate. She put enough performance into the dialog to get the lines across, without getting heavy into "acting," which might have overwhelmed the reading. She didn't flub her lines, either, which is more than I could manage myself; they go through the recording to edit out any flubs. You can choose a man or a woman as your primary reader.

I was pleased to hear that the dialog worked -- the lines read the way I want them to, even when there are no stage directions.

Now bear in mind, you're not getting a dozen people performing your script as if it were a radio play. The same reader is reading the girl and the guy and all the stage directions. The service is reading your script out loud, not producing it.

The iScript people suggest that you can also offer the mp3 of your script to someone who might want to read it. That way they can "read" it in their car. I'm not sure how well this would work in practice. My script ran 97 minutes. (Pretty much exactly its page count, by the way.) Most studio execs are chatting on their cell phones all the way home. Would they listen to your script in the car instead of calling? Or in the bath? While cleaning? I don't know.

I do know that I probably read a script in 20-30 minutes, so 97 minutes is a long time for me to spend reading. But I know other people who spend 2 hours reading a script. So this might be ideal for them.

Check it out!

Rough Cut

I saw my rough cut last night. I was pretty sure the film would hold together, because I knew the script did. I was not too worried about whether it would all cut together because I had coverage for all but one scene, and a framing device I could always go back to it. My big question was running time. I had a 7 1/2 page script and a hard 6 minute limit from BravoFACT! I did my best during the shoot to keep the actors from getting pause-y, and 45 seconds a page is not unreasonable if you keep a sense of urgency in the scenes.

I was really happy in the event to see that the rough cut came in at 6 minutes exactly. We'll be trimming from there, so we won't be in the awkward position of wanting to do a 6 minute cut for Bravo and a longer, funnier festival cut.

Simon Webb, our editor, one of the best in Quebec, did a really great job. Not only does the cut move well. He also introduced some freeze frames and wipes that really add to the rhythm and tell the story more clearly. My notes were on the order of "hold on his reaction a hair longer" and "I think there might have been a take where Nick did this really funny thing..." and "trim the second sentence there, we don't need it." It's such a pleasure to work with crafty professionals.

I'm looking forward to seeing anothe cut this evening. I just couldn't be happier with the film. The actors are just brilliant -- human and real and even touching while saying some utterly ludicrous things.

Okay, I do have one quibble. The Red Rock M2 depth of field adapter threw anything that was not in the middle of the frame into soft focus. My fault for being too nervous to watch the dailies until the end of Day 2. (I did ask various people to check, and they told me everything was fine. As Ronald Reagan said, "Trust, but verify.") Either we put it on wrong, or it's crap. I don't think the softness will hurt the piece -- our exteriors look fine, and for the last day I yanked the adapter. It's only really annoying to me in two shots, and I doubt the audience will care.

But that is a quibble. I am thrilled with the results, and I hope you'll get to see the finished film at a festival near you some time this year.

Ellen Sandler, Partito Quarto

CS: Do you think YouTube is a threat to broadcast TV?
ES: I think it's both a threat and a developmental tool, the way sound was, or color, or TV itself.
CS: But if the market is heading toward YouTube, then will TV shows will be forced to head towards shows that are more YouTube-like, the way pay cable has pulled TV in a direction of being more serial, darker, fouler-mouthed? Or will TV shows be forced to move in the opposite direction, the way movies moved to widescreen and 3D to give the audience something they couldn't get on TV?
ES: I think it's a little early to tell what impact it will have, because the marketing model doesn't exist yet. How does anyone make money with YouTube? That paradigm has not come down.

CS: Do you watch/are you aware of Canadian TV? Do you think the broadcast audience will tolerate shows set outside the US?
ES: I definitely think they'd tolerate them, but I don't know how they get sold in the marketplace. I think audiences would love to see shows about other places. I have consulted on a few Canadian shows. I've had some clients with shows on the CBC. They do seem to have slightly different concerns -- they're more focused on character and story than on marketing. I find that refreshing. They also seem to be more interested in getting the writer's perspective rather than telling the writer how to fix it. But I guess their shows are financed differently.
CS: The CBC is the pubcaster, so they're less about the advertisers. On the other hand there's a mandate to have shows with a million viewers. And in a country of 22 million anglophones that's swamped with American TV shows, getting a million viewers is pretty hard. So they are audience driven. But they probably care more about the number of eyeballs than the demographics of that audience.
ES: That explains it, because story and character appeals to an audience driven show, not a marketing driven show. Look at cable. Cable shows are about the number of subscribers. So you see stronger characters and story lines. The shows are less about spectacle and more about story. Broadcast TV in the US is market driven, not audience driven. It's a distinction that has powerful consequences.

More Kerblooey

Q. I can’t get your blog to load (in Firefox, I can see the “borders” of the page, where you have the header on top and the links down the left side, but the blog area stays blank.)

Anyone else having this problem? In particular, anyone from the Paramount lot having problems (or not) with this blog?