I tried and still try to deviate at times. The romance with documentary film started few years back and has been the longest and most serious affair thus far. It actually includes a lot of writing, at least in my case, proving perhaps that it all comes down to that one conviction I’ve had since the age of about 6.

But today, having watched a little flick called Beginners, especially the scene in which Ewan McGregor pats a butt on an Andrzej Krajewski poster hanging in his film-flat, and finding out a bit more about the director (again, I’m going to be writing about this film), I think I want to be Mike Mills when I grow up.

First of all the not too insolent mix between own experience portrait, mix of reality recreation and recreation of certain outlook. Second of all the thoughts of main character projected onto a dog – “While I understand up to 150 words, I don’t talk”. Thirdly – the graphic work, which is Mills’ own.

That thought that one can be a brilliant graphic designer, make amazing music videos and arrive at an amazing second feature, starring McGregor and Plummer – is very comforting to a 26 year old, who recently thought that maybe it was a big mistake to give up on natural sciences so early on. Maybe I would have been happy as a neuro-psychology researcher…

I’m far from being obsessed with starting early and obsess about a career from the cradle. But it’s tough to be good at things and it takes time. I have wanted – at one stage or the other – to write, to write songs, to be a journalist, to be a graphic designer,a developer, a photographer, an interactive media specialist, to direct films, to produce films… I imagine I’ll be a beginner for ever.

Beginner Mike Mills.

PS. you can actually learn a good few things about promoting an indie feature from the way Focus Features handles Beginners. Please meet – Cosmo the dog.

The documentary is about David’s adventures with meeting his long time idol David Lynch and the TM movement that he’s a member of. But – perhaps even more importantly – it’s a great insight into the process of independent film-making, the worries, the joys, the impact on personal life. “David wants to fly” took 5 years to make and several threats of law suits, as well as an occasional hash smoking with Buddhist monks over 1000 meters above sea level. Here’s the trailer.

The file is 14:18 long, mp3. You might hear some not too delicate cut outs – there was a girl translating the Q&A as it went on and I decided to skip it. Audience was laughing often, however some of it is cut out as she was talking over.

Quality might vary as it was recorded at random from a seat at the film theatre audience. I did my best to make it as clear as possible. Also apologies for slight distortion towards the end. I think the story and anecdotes are worth bearing it.

Enjoy. Any feedback – as always – much appreciated.

We talked about how the idea for a film about the data base state came about, productions, headaches of independent documentary promotion and who dug in David’s trash. There’s also a word from Ashley Jones, film’s producer. Given a chance I would have asked few more geeky questions, but time was limited and magazine readers have their preferences, which I had to cater to.

As you’ll be able to tell this took place in May, so yes, I took time editing the thing together. As usually life happened and I didn’t have as much time as I would want to, but hopefully I’ll have something to show for it in terms of audio too.

So here goes.It should be soon available for subscription on iTunes and few others. If you’d rather subscribe to a standard RSS feed, here it is.

I can’t promise audio content will show up regularly or even what it will be, but there’s few things in the pipes. It all has to do with content, arts, digital, culture – erm, well, binary life.

Audi quality is so-so, but this is Skype recorded via Audio Hijack Pro.

enjoy.

I write this as a journalist documenting events, for the record. So that few years from now I will look back at it and know what this whole business was about.

I remember a young (my age, therefore young) producer telling me that most of the money, really, “is in the speaking gigs”. I remember her as a very nice and helpful lady and I can assure you she wasn’t being a jerk. That was just some realities of media production we were discussing after a session at Sheffield Doc/Fest. I loved Doc/Fest as an experience of being surrounded by fellow geeks, avid content creators and story tellers, pretty conscious of fiscal hopelessness of their endeavors. Second day of the festival there was a session discussing whether you can make a living out of making documentaries, the general consensus being that you cannot.

I remember that because recently I’m constantly finding out about more workshops, panels, discussions, classes about how to deal with the digital age, how to make our film seen, how to distribute, how to produce, how to finance. Except no one yet knows exactly how to finance or distribute. The countless panels seem to consist mostly of reinstating that one has to be able to communicate with different modalities of transmedia landscape or some such sh… and I can’t help but wonder  - is it not a case of one of these short lived advice industries that breed on general confusion and lure with the perspectives of answers it does not provide? The best that comes of it is few extra bucks for more experienced producers and filmmakers. I’m all for them making money, may I add, so as long as people are willing to pay, so it be.

Just remember, the prices of admissions might sum up to good part of your next projects budget. Especially when you are the DIY filmmaker, trying to get your story told by all means possible, asking all available favors and sleeping in a tent outside SXSW.

If you need reminding that it’s the compelling story that matters – I will happily give it to you for free. Because I’m confident you know that already.

This isn’t really a film about Banksy. You will gather that from this preview (online hype building – you’re doing it right), it’s also about Thierry Guetta, the filmmaker who set out to make a doc about street art and ended up on Banksy’s… erm doorstep.

The filmmaker in a film is my all time favorite motive, when it’s more than putting them in front of the camera but also making them part of the story or even the vehicle that drives it forward.

So stop whatever you’re doing and watch the preview of this “world’s first street art disaster movie”:

I’m always waiting for the new stuff from Edgar Wright, who by the way can be followed on twitter. Hopefully it’ll also be something different for Michael Cera, whom I somewhat like, but the akwardly-getting-the-girl business is really doing everybody’s head in by now. Though I have to say, judging form the behind this scenes video, he even eats soup awkwardly…

No trailer a of yet – that I could find.

I was too cynical to have any sort of idols when I was a teenager (heck, I was too cynical to like boys… these were the days). I consider my lasting relationship with the works of Witold Gombrowicz closest to that sort of thing, but I’m often fairly critical of them plus I don’t have his photo hanging on the wall, so I don’t think it counts.

Any way, I’m kind of trying to imply here that I gained an idol of sorts and that would be Lena. There is generally few independent filmmakers that I’m immensely impressed with. It’s not that teenage thing, sadly. It’s a feeling akin to watching somebody play the same instrument you play – if they do it well they make it look easy, but you tried and you know how much fecking work went into getting this sound. So based on that sophisticated comparison I will do my John Peel thing and introduce you to my new found idols, starting with Lena, as her film premiers tomorrow at SXSW.

It’s called Tiny Furniture and I posted the trailer some time ago. It’s her second feature, first one being Creative Nonfiction, a film about a college student who eventually writes a script for a film based on her recent experiences. There you go, if you followed this blog you can see where I’m going with this. Self-shot film about creative utilization of life for making a film…

Back then Lena made the Filmmaker Magazine’s list of 25 new talents of indie film to watch. Now, Tiny Furniture is a whole new quality, by the looks of the trailer. From what I figure it was done on canon 7D, too. It really looks pretty and don’t tell me this is not as important as the story. This is film, we’re talking about. You can watch the progress of Lena’s works over at her vimeo page. TF is shot by Jody Lee Lipes, who also did Afterschool (much cannes-hyped flick from 2009 if I’m not mistaken)

TF’s main character, Aura, played by the director, comes home from College to find herself suffering from a familiar case of  post-degree blues (god, I don’t know a single person who didn’t get hit by that). If you’re in your 20s or 30s you can probably indentify with it or memory of it. If you’re above 40 you might want to watch it to understand your kid’s confusion and despair. You’ll figure out, because “Aura would like you to know that she is having a very, very hard time.”

[via the daily what - not to be mistaken with the daily wtf]

voices: Whoopie Goldberg and Christy Scott Cashman

3D Core Team:
Heiko van der Scherm . . . Writer, Director, Design, Modeling
Bernhard Haux . . . . . . . . .Character TD Flower main actors
Goro Fujita . . . . . . . . . . . Supervising Animator
Felix Graf . . . . . . . . . . . . Animator
Holger Schönberger . . . . .Pipeline, Shading, Lighting, Compositing

Time Frame:
Production time (First script to final short) . . . 3 Years
Work time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Full time, 6 days a week
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .0.75 – 1.5 Years per core person

I personally don’t buy into the teory that it’s particularily because they recruit mostly from failed, frustrated filmmakers. It takes work to be acclaimed, so most of these folks probably didn’t even have the time to really try and fail. it takes no work what so ever to self-proclaim, which indicates people who are in for an easy ride. They probably didn’t have the ambition to try in the first place.

Why, then? Because it’s so easy to slip into.

I base that theory on rigorous self-observation. Two items in my film RSS feed made me slightly chuckle today. And I was going to write about them in the ‘look at what these idiots are doing’ manner on this blog to share my instant disgus. Fortunately, just in time, i kicked myself on the arse with a good ‘ole ‘who the fuck do you think you are, lady’.

Evidence item no. 1:  The Suicide Girls: Guide to living trailer.

Why it made me chuckle? Because somewhere in the trailer they make the proclamation that suicide girls present an alternative for every chick tired of not fitting into society’s standards of female beauty. This is ridiculous, they are all skinny, and yes they don’t wear a tone of make up, but they have a tone of tattoos and breasts to die for. if you don’t fit into norms, you won’t fit in with them, because they are pretty rigugorous with their own standards.I don’t like Suicide Girls phenomenon also because of the idiotic use of the word suicide (hence no photos of naked tits here, would be hypocritical to bust my readership this way) . BUT – this has nothing to do with the film. I haven’t seen the film. I saw the trailer, which yes, is rather bad, but is this something worth writing about?

Evidence item no. 2: Book of Genesis in 3D, the new enterprise  of Paramount entitled In The Beginning.

Instant thought – Jesus, what the hell? (pun not intended) Of course, after the success of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, every one will be looking left and right, to create a miraculous 3D world and gross over 100 mln on the opening weekend. But the Bible? Seriously? It all has to be garden-themed now? Can’t you come up with anything more creative..? I’m right to feel tiny bit jaded, I think. But, again, is this something worth writing about?

I don’t read community-based film review websites, because most of all I’m jaded with the ‘Kevin Smith is fat and his wife has big ears’ reviews. And I’ll be damned if I contribute to the amount of rubbish floating around internet – disputable, I know, but at least this type of rubbish. There are 3 film blogs I trust and I rarely read even their reviews, because they scarcely review documentaries – and docs are what i watch most.

How to avoid falling into this trap? answer these questions:

1. have you seen the film?

2. do you have any criticism/praise for the film? (and not the subject matter, the filmmaker’s private life or other works etc)

3. is it really worth writing about?

If the answer to any of the above is ‘no’ – restrain yourself. Don’t be a jerk.

OK. I finished writing and then I saw this. It’s about film critics in the slightly different register to what I write about. At least I hope the question number one doesn’t even apply.  If you read, read some of the comments too.

The Hot Blog is, by the way, in my top 3 film blogs.

Yes, I do know I’m late to the party, but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. There are blogs and websites that did it much better and live. If you’re after film news, you’re at the wrong address; this is film whining and over-indulgence underpinned by film-naive-idealism.

Any way. I follow a lot of film-related folk on twitter (aside from occasional jokes from my friends and @shitmydadsays, this is the appeal of twitter for me). No wonder then, that on Sunday night my feed was pretty much taken over by the Oscars. A bit more surprising that it was 90% about the outfits on the red carpet, but then I went to sleep before the actual circus started.

For the record, that I’m not the token indie film snob, who poopoos the Oscars. I don’t poopoo the outfits craze either. I like the idea of bunch of film folk parading in recognizable brands (somehow the Oscars journalists always know what’s Dior and what’s de la Renta??). They are known to borrow the tuxes and the dresses so effectively they are sponsored – like sports people are sponsored to show up in CocaCola or Nike. Way to go.

Now, as you might already know, none of the above, aside from The Hurt Locker, had luck with the awards (full list here). But that’s ok, because most of them still have a good chance to win the golden dude, especially Maggie Gyllenhaal (her and Eva Green, two women which would very likely turn me lesbian within 15 seconds). Not the case with Burma VJs, one of a kind event, but I’m used to the fact that the Academy does not understand what documentary even means. They gave this award to Michael Moore, I rest my case.

As the internets already stated, it’s “pretty badass” to be the first women to win the Oscar for directorial achievement. I imagine this sounds like an outdated sentiment, but had this been the case, Kathryn Bigelow would not be the first woman to win this prize as well as one of the very few women directors in general.

Tiny Furniture premiers at this year’s SXSW narrative competition. The film is written, directed and stars Lena Dunham, who has been one of my favorites since I came across her project Creative Nonfiction. Go Lena!

But how to find them? I have a dream…

Few days back I read this rather interesting post on how to make a screening of your indie flick a festivity of sorts, in order to bring more folks in to see it (by Mike Vogel, maker of The waiting list, guest posting at Truly Free Film). Great ideas and inexpensive. As it happens I like telling people that they have great ideas (and if you don’t you’re a mean, cold fish), so I joined the discussion in the comments. Well, not so much the discussion as general congratulatory thread (nothing wrong with that). And we shortly discussed the following idea.

On a long list of cheap film-promotion activities (more on that soon), I have one which includes cross-promotion with another film via, among other things, trailers. The idea is thus: you pick a sort of sister-film for your film, based on ideas, style, the filmmaker, whatever indicates that people interested in your film could be interested in the other one and vice versus. It’s a basic fundament of all amazons and ebays: “people who bought this book were also interested in…”

Big studios do it too: they chose carefully the films, before which their trailers appear.

The grandest implementation of this idea in terms of art is perhaps last.fm – built, at least originally, to make it easy to find new music based on the music you already listened to and liked, based on what your friends like and a crowd-sourced system of recommendations.

And that’s the dream: last.fm for indie film trailers. It will perhaps remain a dream, although a system of this sort is readily available (it’s called libre.fm, and it’s an open source version of last.fm as well as the answer to the later service going slightly too… proprietary). The costs of hosting of that many film clips would, however, be insane. Youtube is not coming even, so what chances do we have. Actually, it’s pretty much only Apple, who can afford to host consistent catalogue of trailers and we all know where their heart lays when it’s comes to indie vs studio.

So for now I’m just throwing it out here as something to think about.

Ha ha. I might well have to. Yesterday was the sad day B-side, the very innovative and funky film distribution company closed it’s doors. They’ve been around for 5 years. They were doing well too. And click, just like that, off they went.

It’s not sad because they won’t be replaced and we’re all doomed forever, although it feels recently like soon enough the only choice we’ll have in cinemas will be between Avatars and Alices in Wonderlands. It’s sad because I have been researching the alternative funding/distribution methods for a while now and this comes to show how hard it still is to be ahead of the curve. I read Ted Hope at Truly Free Film, I follow the endeavors of the workbook project. And occasionally I get on the happy-go-lucky high from hearing so many voices chanting about the need to think about film differently… Yet so often it feels like at the end of the day the big guys come and stomp on our throats and the party, again, is over.

If you are unaware of the wider context of B-side’s exit this is probably the best article you will read: Why exhibitors should be B-Side themselves by Stephen Saito. Another one I cried over last night is Antony Kaufmans observation from filmmaker magazine – about the never dying dream of traditional distribution purchase. Why? Why, why why?

I’m not up for that. As a matter of fact the premise of the earlier mentioned film is not having a commission, not aiming for a distribution deal, ideally not having any traditional solution in place. DIY baby, all the way. And see where this takes us…

With all the luck we can get, it will be a place big guys hope is hell.

I’ve been insanely busy. The deadlines are looming and about million new ideas per day boil my head to the point of brain-bleed. I’m possibly about to embark on a year-long commitment project an that, as you might imagine, requires careful decision making. Not an easy thing with a breeding brain.

What I now know for sure is that I will be in Liverpool between 30 of April and 2nd of May for the Oggcamp10 shenanigans. This year it’s going to be even bigger, better and more subway sandwiches! Oggcamp is an open software & open culture un-conference (festival?), part barcamp, part piss up, part music gig (we’re kicking off on the 30th with the Rathole Radio CC music night).

If all luck permits we will also be showing the R.I.P Remix Manifesto movie, which is well worth seeing on a big screen with fellow geeks and geekettes. I’ll keep you posted on that matter. I might also share few ideas about open culture and open cinema, time allowing.

That would be it for now. I leave you with this gorgeous trailer for “Exploding Girl”…

…rather hysterical trailer for RSO [Registered Sex Offender]…

…and a link to the very good Kitsune Noir Mixcast no 26, so far my favorite out of the lot.

see ya.

I gave it some thought, about 20 seconds worth of it. A 4th generation of that thing might well be laying on my coffee table, waiting for when I feel like reading some RSS feeds, watching some soup.io TV or checking what’s left in my fridge. That’s when I’m a. rich enough to own a coffee table and not rent it with the flat, b. rich enough to splash on a coffee table dedicated Apple device. And that might never happen.

As I’m now fond of illustrating everything, I looked through some related visuals and decided this one fits impossibly well

I hope the author doesn’t mind me reposting it here (usually apologizing later is easier than asking permission up front in instances like this). You should check out the rest of his tumblr and his portfolio, a very elegant affair, so good it can be forgiven for small fonts.

Who cares any way! The grander scheme of things came knocking on our doors. There’s much sadder news in the pipe. JD Salinger has died and from purely egoistic point of view this means the hope of any new book from him is gone for ever. I’m also pretty uptight about the possibility of Catcher in the Rye film getting to be done soon, as the rights usually go flying once the author is no more holding onto them. At the present time I can’t really conceive of a screenwriter + director combination that could make a good job out of this… (any ideas?)

In other obituaries, MiraMax is no more. Fore those of you who have been hiding in a cinematographic cave, MiraMax was the film studio founded by the Weinstein brothers, which pretty much brought us Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith (more in the wikipedia article). Whatever its drawbacks it has induced a new quality into Hollywood film making and, perhaps even more importantly, made a lot of people feel that you can want to be a film maker and get away with it. It also gave the world Pulp Fiction and everybody knows that is priceless.

Oh, the irony – MiraMax is closed by Disney, who bought it nearly 17 years ago for $70 million. This is not the day indie film died, but an era is definitely over. With the Avatar taking most of the major film awards this year one can’t help but wonder where is this circus going… Let this be a motivation for the up and coming indie film makers – if we don’t get there fast enoug, we might one day wake up with our faces painted blue and an obligatory Celine Dion song stuck in our heads. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you I don’t know what will.

The Winsteins have apparently said that they will be aiming at reclaiming the name.

Simon Pegg & Nick Frost, phot. Sarah Dunn

Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, phot. Keith Bernstein

Jack Nicholson phot. Sarah Dunn

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint phot. Matt Hollyoak

OK, admittedly this post is going to be a bit of cheating. I already wrote it in Polish, which took all too long because I was emailing and yp-yapping online at the same time. It’s now almost 6 pm, I have an hour until the Bill Hicks movie screening and I’m running out of the boost 2 XXL cappuccinos gave me. So I’m going to more or less translate it and hope there’s not many people who follow both binarylife and zyciebinarne (as far as I know not many follow either, so I’m not too worried, really).

I have been working as the festival’s minion for past 3 days, but today and tomorrow is indulgence time. Yay! So much for that though; I went to the editing master class with the editor of All tomorrow’s parties, then crawled to the delegate center and been sat here ever since trying to get the wilderness of unattended online life under control. In short then:

There are two things I can easily make out from my chaotic notes (they’re in big lettering and capitals):
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT and
MOVE TO CANADA

Audience engagement is one of these magic phrases of the festival, which everybody is very keen on, but few understand what it means in practice. Perhaps with the exclusion of the Shooting People folk, who ran the digital bootcamp yesterday, about which I’ll write more later. The other magic combination is cross-platform. It had its own summit on Wednesday, rather disappointing when it comes to anything concrete (rather than the statement of good intentions from the BBC North about the Media City etc). But it’s early days. At least Steve Johnson was funny at times. He was talking, among other things, about Twitter changing the way we live. On that occassion we were giving festival goers copies of Times June 15th issue (screw you imdiacy of digital media), in which he wrote about the sam thing. Cover as follows:

We didn’t hesitate to tweet about it too. I believe this is one of them things poetically related to as a mild “mind-fuck”.

The story with Canada is that, from what I can make out, it has the best and biggest funding for documentary filmmakers and cross-platform doers. The rest of the world is less generous.

So far the best movie I’ve seen was Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, thing about, well, yeah – muslim punk rockers. Again, I will write more, for now watch the trailer:

I will also be looking for an ocassion/excuse to have this screened in Poland. Should you have any ideas (even vague ones) – email please ana(at)abnarylife(dot)com

I will attempt writing about these and other things in more detail once I’m back in Warsaw. There is about 1 to 3 odds that I will make my plane, judging from previous achievements. I don’t have a video camera on me – this is how it is, kids, you either film it or you live it and I’m rather selfish. I’ve got a photo camera, which works on 35 mm film (shock! horror!), so the photos will take a while to come out. I might shoot a bit tomorrow with my famous G1 phone. I might not. So for now no rich multimedia coverage. I suggest you do, however, follow my witty ‘live’ coverage here or others’ updates tagged #dfsheffdocfest (isn’t this the most awkward official tag.. erm, ever?)

So details in few days. Really, I write this now just so that you’re jealous.

I am pleased to say that my list is not far off the list compiled from opinions of the experts. This is probably as close to an ‘expert’ as I will ever get too:

1. Trainspotting (imdb)

2. This is England (imdb)

3. Withnail and I (imdb)

4. Boy A – I still feel the 2007 production went relatively unnoticed. It’s a gripping film, about as ruthless to the viewers well being as Hunger… The poster is great in its own right. (imdb)

5. Control – and this is not only because I have a version of teenage crush on Sam Riley! I was close to doing one of my major researches about importance of biopics based on this film, but actually found it too heavy to watch over so many times. (imbd)

6. My Summer of Love – not only because I have a crush on Emily Blunt. Don’t know what Pawlikowski has been doing since this last production in 2004, but unfortunately it wasn’t movies. Shame. (imbd)

7. Nil by mouth – this is a movie one of my English friends, a visual artist, told me to watch if I want to know shit about shit. (imdb)

8. Shaun of the Dead – credit where it’s due, that is to Edgard Wright. If I could, I would put in ‘Spaced’. I actually watched this while still in Poland. Also ended up living close to the original pub where it was shot, which unfortunately is no more. I have spent better part of my time in London in my local and I’m pretty positive I run into many a relationship  trouble because of it. (imdb)

9. 24 hours party people – yes, this has taught me (imdb)

10.  Human Traffic – and I stick by it! And you would understand if you were there many a nights when we were celebrating our heritage as party goers. Also +10 points for one of the best movie titles in history. (imdb)

honorary mention: Rain in my heart – which is a documentary, but hands down one of the British best – ever.

honorary mention 2: Moon – I saw Moon lured in solely by its amazing poster – yes I have a thing for movie posters. It wouldn’t maybe make this list, but I consider it to be the best of the future of British film-making. (imdb)

I will certainly follow the blog for more updates and I wish the guys all the best of luck with the madness bound to come once official distribution is in place.

I don’t tend to blog about films much, as it’s a subject really too close to home. Suffice to say that documentaries I really hold dear I have seen probably about 20 or so times each. But this is a special occasion as my memory of John Hughes’ films ties in with my affection for Kevin Smith (more the public person than the films, to be honest, but there you go), who’s Q&A in London is approaching fast. We’re going to hit the Indigo2 at the O2 arena in London, so if you’re around on October 10th, or better yet going to the event, drop me a line!

This all comes at the time when I’m seriously working on some writing of my own and is a great inspiration. One of Smith quotes I think about often is that “if you have an idea for a flick go make it, because sooner or later some one else is going to do it”.

I have discovered today that swurl.com is no more. Sad day it is as I liked the service, but life is cruel and fast, especially if it’s the on-line life. With a typical promiscuity of a new media user I swiftly moved on to a new, shiny application. 

Introducing: soup.io, a tublr-like service (I parted with tumblr in a very teary, i-can’t-do-this-any-more way some time ago) concentrated on re-posting. Something for Internet recycling age, when there’s so much content we mainly keep repeating ourselves or others – handy to share with these remaining 2 friends who don’t use google reader.

As I realized I mainly like to share funny things and exciting film news (I’m a film news junkie and self-indulgently I assume others are too), therefore meet my new pet  Film + Funny.

Hope you enjoy x

Krzysztof Kieślowski “About Myself”, 1997

Character is everything. Without a strong, complex, engaging character you don’t have a film in my opinion. But finding them is a fucking nightmare. I spend more time looking for them than filming them.

Sean MacAllister “Documentaries…”