headbin

Sanctuary - the series

By December, the project wil have undergone a major change in direction. This started off as a pilot for a feature film. Now, given numerous factors but particularly the take-up of cross media in TV-land, we've decided to do an about-face and aim for Sanctuary the Series. No doubt the name will have to change - that real estate has been taken already - but I'm excited about some minor tweaking to the plan that makes a hell of a lot more sense in today's climate - without losing the original idea. Stay tuned...

Release planning

It's been an eventful month. First up, the traditional film community publicly recognised the value of what we've been doing with Sanctuary and other remixable projects by honouring me with a Sydney Film Festival prize, the inaugural Peter Rasmussen Innovation Award (citing Sanctuary)!

Then I got to attend the Open Video Conference (OVC) in NYC. You can read my conference report.

Frustrating as it is to not have the resources to simply complete and release Sanctuary, reality bites. The key learnings I've brought back from the OVC are:

1) Staged delivery - the need to keep releasing is paramount.
2) Collectivism - for remixable films to develop, the community needs more resources.

It is due to the invaluable input and support of remixable media community members over many years that we have got the project to the stage it has reached. Now I see the need to start releasing material regardless of the fact a finished cut has not yet been produced. So I invite discussion on how best to release the Sanctuary asset library and pipeline tools as they stand. I plan to release them by 14 July, so comments before then would be appreciated.

I still intend to finish my cut but it's time to take that milestone off the critical path for the project.

So without further ado, I'm hereby opening up this rather old-fashioned looking blog to the public...

New cut up

After a few false starts, I've uploaded a new cut containing more of Jarrod's Maya work on Blake's space. I've also trimmed the State Registry sequence in response to some feedback. Not much footage to work with considering nearly everything was 1 take but it feels better.

http://modfilms.jellycast.com/

I'm planning a revamp of the blogs here and a bigger shift towards microblogging. Still finding it difficult to keep everyone updated but planning to make increasing use of Twitter as a central alert mechanism monitoring this and other key sources. Follow @teamsanctuary.

Crossroads

Slow news week. It feels as though the project is approaching a crossroads. Content? Web Service? Rich Internet App? My dream of pursuing all three aspects in tandem is proving difficult what with the funding available.

That said, the AIMIA talk I gave last week on Social Media and User-Generate-Content certainly generated some positive feedback. I'll be interviewed on the ABC's Media Report next week to continue the conversation around micro-studios.

At the end of the day, Sanctuary is a film so until I can put that initial (Content) aspect of the project to bed and release it as yet another short film, I'm going to have a few sleepless nights.

Also waiting on a few people in order to make some decisions regarding the completion plan. VFX continue to be the biggest headache. The majority of the work is still what I've cobbled together - not the most satisfying experience. I'm hoping to be able to be able to put aside at least one of the virtual world locations this month.

3D setup trial

Jarrod and I spent a few hours on the weekend getting bv_74 set up for 3D. It was a good reality check. I'm glad it was just the two of us and not an army of post people.

After so long reorganising files on my own I thought things were pretty well set up. Instead we spent most of the afternoon tracking down files and glitches.

Lessons learned:

* get everything off chief onto teamsanctuary. Time to get the asset library up on a fast server
* forget svn for post folder management - stick to what the pros do for now, until there's some budget to explore further. I'm convinced there is value in storing ASCII files (like Shake projects) in a traditional scm but no one does it that way and it's time to get this show on the road (how many years have I been saying that?!)
* Maya likes its own folder structure. Make it happy and stick to the default convention. No more named folders
* Maya doesn't like double dots in filenames
* Description in the shot naming convention isn't option
* You can look at a shot till you're blue in the face and not see something - I hadn't noticed the dragonfly shot didn't actually have the dragonfly in it, so familiar am I with the rushes...

UPDATE - Thank God it's Friday

Or does it make any difference??

DRINKS, INTROS

Not long now till I pack up and shoot off to get things rolling in Aus. Would be great to get some informal get-togethers happening, principally so I can introduce a few more people to each other. This virtual team malarky is definitely working (i.e. things haven't collapsed in a heap over, how many years has it been??) but nothing beats face-to-face...

Any suggestions?

I'm thinking BAFTA in town and 9 Wyndham Street (while we have it!) are the best venues at my disposal for get-togethers and perhaps some regular early evening slots over the next month so that people can drop by on their way to other things.

NANOBAT SHOOT

Tamara is starting to pull this together. Please go through her for stuff on this rather than me, to avoid any nasty Scanners type incidents (you know, the old head exploding thing). I'm kinda overloaded at the moment. Still hoping to just wander onto the prop set and mumble some Lucas-like direction to the nanobats themselves. "That's great. Just like that, only stronger."

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/NanobatShoot

VFX

Paul has started giving CD some funky moves. Thumbnails of the latest renders appear on the homepage of the new VFX tracker

http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/shots

MODFILMS.NET

Work on the trackers is progressing well. I've had lots of feedback from the demos and it's been a mad flurry to try and keep pace with suggestions and bugs. Busy adopting the artist upload capability to cope with the naming convention for renders suggested by the Quadratura guys.

I'm aiming to have a hands-off demo site up and running soon with Sanctuary data. It's almost there but juggling madly and dusting off sysadmin 'skills' I'd happily shelved years ago (email configuration is still a pig).

I spent a day at Molinare helping with their pipeline (backups mainly) which has also shed some welcome light on how the majors are doing things. I'm even more convinced our new media approach has huge benefits to offer every production.

Gave a demo to a Swedish film school and have shook hands on the idea of students working on Sanctuary via modfilms.net as part of the curriculum. Post production training facilities have a hard time acquiring good quality footage so Sanctuary material is perfect. The particulars of the deal still need to be worked out but the broad idea is that MOD Films provides content and some services in return for getting timeconsuming VFX shots completed. Thanks to Soren for doing the legwork on this one.

My notes on this as it evolves:

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/FilmSchool

Yesterday I gave a demo to Stewart Till, Chair of the UK Film Council. He seemed to get the product. and the challenge. "The good news it that it's brilliant" .. "the problem is you're asking people to work in a new way". Heard that before... "... I guess it's not THAT different" he went on to add (after seeing the dailies as podcasts). He offered to do some introductions to established film producers so we'll see where that goes.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Close observers of MOD Films may have noticed that half our online battle has been over the reluctance of people to use wikis or any non-hierarchical information system. The trackers are really all about compensating for this (and still sneaking wiki use in through the backdoor!). I'm including a link to this interesting essay suggesting why people distrust the wisdom of crowds. I.e. why Wikipedia, evolution, re-mixable films.. It's all about psychology after all.

http://karmatics.com/docs/evolution-and-wisdom-of-crowds.html

Demo season

I'm exhausted. Did a two hour demo of the system this morning. That was fine but I haven't been sleeping enough. Up too late last night trying to work out this FTP configuration weirdness. Looking forward to handing a stack of sysadmin issues over to someone else to deal with. Nothing impossible but everything is so time consuming.

The guys from Quadratura seems pretty positive about the demo. Note to self - SMS alerts go down well! It will be great to get their input on the Sanctuary shots and next steps.

I think that's what I will focus on tomorrow, getting the demonstrator up and running, get togther some notes on Sanctuary style wise and then see if I can get the render monitor working on the demonstrator.

Momentary lapse of drive

When did this project start again?

In a way it was 1993 (when the idea of the headbin first came to me as I moved to Canberra and worked on Australia's first websites). In another way it was 1997 when I wrote the treatment for the movie and developed the character of CD. In other ways it was 2003 when I took a good long hard look at the material and decided I couldn't let it lie.

"You wouldn't let it LIE!..!!" - Vic Reeves circa 1990 - perhaps one of the reasons I ventured out to England in the first place. What mad fuckers these Brits were and how funny.

I find it hard to keep a diary, especially when I'm feeling less then 100% focused. Surely I should be doing something post production-related right now instead of navel gaving.

Regardless of when Sanctuary started, I'm going to finish this 07/08. Trying for this year but not having a Character Animator on board is a real drag. I must make more of an effort to advertise but that's the part of the job I find so draining - how many people have passed through this project? Sell sell sell. Without being able to pay proper money for their skills, in the past I've felt like a performing monkey sometimes trying to get people excited about the project. No more. The core team never seemed to need much persuading...

It's all about the idea. You either get it or not. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be doing my damnedest to make this look cool and tell a clear story. That's the hard bit. I've compressed way more narrative than usual into the ten minutes and it shows in the blank expressions I'm getting from some viewers. There's way more rounds work to do before I'll be happy with this.

Moving moving...

It's been a funny couple of weeks. There's lots going on at the moment. I'm finding it hard to keep a handle on all the threads but I think my technique is improving. In the past I'd just be staying up longer and getting more frazzled with each day (and cranky). This time I've backed off a bit from the machinations of MOD Films biz and have stayed (reasonably) focused on what can be done while waiting for various folks to get back to us.

Here's a quick round of the houses.

NEW BUSINESS

No word back yet from Film London but working on the e-learning proposal was certainly time well spent. Isn't education and understanding one of our key difficulties in this space after all?

I've been approached by a TV production company to assist their development team understand "360 degree commissioning". A bit of a milestone for me after ten years. Perhaps finally the film/TV world is coming around to the unpleasant reality that they will have to engage with us weird Internet folk for future work.

Nothing to report on further funding either. Preparing to draw a line under the current leads and start afresh with some new ones. It's as much about the chemistry as anything. There is a real buzz in the air at the moment re. all things webby so I'm confident that things will come together. The target investors are getting more up-to-speed on this area everyday. Just picked up a copy of Wired magazine and the Tired/Wired section is looking at video search techniques.

VIRTUAL STUDIO

Plans for reworking the user experience around all the MOD Films sites have taken a back seat at the moment. Just don't have enough hands on deck to do this properly atm. BUT the FIlm London tender exercise did throw up the need for a new homepage.

Considering using Moodle which is an elearning portal system. Torn between that and Plone. Also keen to make more of the combined newsfeed (featured here) so that people can subscribe to one source of MOD Films news if they're in the core team. Ultimately lots of ideas and plans that just have to wait until there's funding to explore them.
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/moodle/

I've been making some good progress on a live re-mixable film RIG for performing. Next up, hacking the Final Cut pro timeline so that an equivalent MIDI sequence can be created (and messed with live).

Nothing much to report on the software development side. Some updates to modfilms.net and the vfxtracker are overdue but in the absence of any other users I'm pressing on with other stuff.

Looking at producing a Facebook app for the modfilms.net database so that peopl e can access and rate MODs without leaving that site.

And lastly, it looks like Blu-Ray isn't going anywhere fast. The decision to let the BD-J spec mature a little longer seems to have been the right one. This may be propaganda by the HD-DVD crowd but still... glad it's not my time being wasted.

Blu-Ray nightmare for early adoptors.

SANCTUARY

Jigesh reckons he'll have the matchmoving complete in the next fortnight, all but one tracking shot seems to be in hand via the amazing boujou software. Can't wait to be able to swap in all the 3D elements and have the camera moves line up.

Steve has just finished another round of audio tracking laying on Sanctuary which we will hopefully join up next week. Aiming to have another DVD cut by Aug 4 in state to send out to a few people. But in the meantime, updates and work-in-progress is going in the Team Sanctuary podcast

http://modfilms.jellycast.com

MOD CULTURE - TROLL WHISPERING

From a cute blog post on Isotoma's web site (one of my favourite suppliers and currently hosting the modfilms.net prototype), I learnt about the term "troll whisperer" - someone who can spot a troll (troublesome online community person) in advance of flamewars and other unpleasantness. Which confirms my suspicions that other organisations are battling with the same issues of "two-way communication with their audience". In particular I'm starting to wonder if Swarm of Angels will ever get anywhere. I haven't seen much use made of my £25 let alone anyone else's in actual film-making terms...

Matchmoving at last

I've spent the last couple of days clawing my way into Maya 8.5. It's not what you would call an easy piece of software but I'm starting to feel like I have some understanding of what's going on. It felt like a real milestone to render out the matchmove camera for scene ds_115_e and comp it into Shake.

And the obligatory Hello World script worked too. Finally all that Boujou can be used for something. There is a bit of a backlog, I've only received one Maya file so far, but at least I feel as if I'm going to be able to comp the result my end.

As for animation, that's a whole nother issue. I really don't want to have to do that but at the moment there's no other options...

Week update

It's been a pretty productive week. Have a good weekend ya'll.

Deadlines

22 May - Assemble work-in-progress into a new internal release. Shoot tests of new nanobat prop.
4 June - Alex is working up a new graphic design for modfilms.net

Comping
I'm slowly getting my head around Shake and got VFX 87 shots in progress (the VFX tracker has a "good" bug because it reckons there's over 100...). Lots of rotoscoping and keying left to do but as of yesterday... no more blue screen!
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/realmedia/sanc/sanc_post_production/sanc_vfx/shot/

Nanobat props
In a barn in northern France there's a nanobat lurking. Chris has been busy developing a prop that can open it's wings. Early footage is looking promising.

Camera tracking
Jigesh has broken the ice on the shots requiring camera tracking which means I'm scouring Maya tutorials trying to work out what to do with the resulting output.
http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/CameraTracking

UI/text
Steve is investigating what our pipeline for working on text for the UI elements should be. We were hoping to use the much vaunted Final Cut Pro - Shake integration but, what would you know, no support for text nodes...
http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/FilmScript

modfilms.net
No progress directly but we're still chasing Molinare for an answer after last month's funding pitch. A stack of useful suggestions and improvements piling up in the trac though. Would be good to finish off the IA work last week soon.
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/trac/sanctuary

Our friends at the Thames Innovation Centre are talking to the London Development Authority about an R&D grant for MOD product development. Julie and I are going to go over the figures once more for this. Wouldn't that be helpful!
http://www.thamesinnovationcentre.com/

We're waiting for first glimpse of Final Cut Pro Server for an idea of what Apple is going to market as "asset managment for production people". I'd like to update the vfxtracker, still the most useful tool out of the project to-date, to suit.
http://trac.modfilms.com:7861/tracker/vfxtracker/

As always keep the suggestions coming and any cool MODs/mixes you come across, please add them to the database.
http://modfilms.net

Postcard from Sydney

More of a report actually. Just spent the last three weeks in Emerald City, taking a break from corporate-think, enjoying the "winter" sun (hot enough thanks!) and doing a bit of research into the potential of MOD'ing Down Under.

Staring at the sea is always a good way to reboot the brain and as a result, lots of new gunk has been flooding in. I thought I'd better get some of it down for my own sake.

Transparency, trust and sustainability

Internet business culture is under the spotlight at the moment. Wired is running an interesting section this month on corporate transparency. Not only is the content relevent to online communities but it's annotated with actual comments from the blog where the author drafted it. "We know about the wisdom of crowds but what do you do when the majority is wrong?" writes an old boo co-worker. Maintaining an element of surprise is discussed - something I've been thinking long and hard about with Sanctuary. Should we have let the audience in more by this stage? Would more of the film been finished or less? And of course there is the question of how many hours in the day can you have a two-way communication with your audience? My natural inclination is to write things down and post, post, post but it's pretty hard to be creating and commentating at the same time. It's been good to take a break from blogging and do some film-making.

Remixing vs stealing

I still haven't posted publically about that other remixable Sanctuary project yet (although I see that Google is managing to index my private headbin blog anyhow!). I want to discuss this some more with the team. Part of me feels this is a very good thing ("sanctuary" is going to have a higher page rank with two productions releasing material) and part of me is just plain pissed that they're using the same name.

Attribution is my main sticking point. It will be interesting to see if the Canadian Sanctuary posse ever acknowledge our existance. So many of "collaborative" projects are operating in a vacuum, genuinely unaware of the wider community or pretending they are the only ones out there. Which is why it can be rewarding to see anti-plagiarists putting the boot in. This week Todd Goldman (of the David & Goliath clothing line) lost his reputation and probably his livelihood through being caught ripping off online artists. Being Slashdot'ed isn't always so cool...

MOD Sydney

One of the projects on the drawing board last year was MOD London - a podcast series taking snippets of modern London life that you rarely see covered in traditional media and getting them out there, ideally re-mixable. Things stalled somewhat in London after a few shoots but I took the idea up with my partner Mish, who used to produce a grassroots environmental TV show. She expressed an interest in developing a MOD Sydney concept. We're going to develop the idea further and, without forcing the issue, see what the virtual studio can bring to the party.

Software

I'm in a spring cleaning mood, throwing out stuff, and thinking hard about how we're going to release one terabyte of film assets... soon! Probably a good time to look at what stuff should we keep and what should go? What do we replace? Too many software options....

ourmedia07 conference

Ultimately the trip was all about meeting people and that went pretty well, given the Easter break and all.

I gave a (very) short presentation on film MOD'ing at the ourmedia07 conference. The audience was mostly academics and community radio/television types. It wasn't the most successful talk - going over the heads of most people, unfortunately my video vanished (I think a previous speaker deleted it in a moment of panic!) and only one person in a quick audience poll had ever heard of game MOD'ing so I don't think the concept of MOD'ing film and TV really came across. Nevertheless I did get a few emphatic nods from the folks recording the session for Radio National, it was a good exercise trying to describe the whole thing in 15 minutes, and I did meet a couple of happy remix enthusiasts keen to play, as you always do at these things!

Attending other sessions of the conference, it was clear that there is still a decent divide between the traditional and new media folk. Lots of discussions about the community TV "crisis" (no space allocated on digital to replace analogue community channels). In Australia, digital means LESS choice it seems. YouTube, Current TV and other online community channels were barely touched on. I got the sense that for many of the participants, Internet = "email and stuff for the kids", and many opportunites for reaching audiences were underestimated. I sent a Joost invite to one of the local community TV bigwigs who was poo-pooing "internet stuff " as largely irrelevent.

Penny O'Donnell, the journalist hosting my conference session handed me a print-out of this interesting essay, Escaping the Control Loops. I think she got it. The paper dissects the notion of 'control' in and around social communities, talks about whether activists should take a more "amoral" approach to media and generally gives non-profit community media luddites a good kick up the bum. She said afterwards that the virtual studio idea was really thought-provoking but thought the hardest bit would be getting everything web-based. I'm not convinced but then again I am a geek. I still think the hardest bit is getting people to be less precious about their material and share it.

Australian Broadcasting Commission

One of the folks I met at the conference was Monique Potts, Community Development Producer at the ABC (think BBC minus the license fee!). She invited me to come and repeat my talk at the ABC a few days later. The organisation had recently moved all its new media departments into a new division called Innovation (and chucked out their Documentum content management system after 2 years of development, will the Beeb follow?). There doesn't seem to be an awful lot going on at the ABC (a lot of Monique's own talk at ourmedia revolved around BBC projects like the Creative Archive) but they did have one TV show/online service in development with some synergy with MOD. It's called "A Place To Think" and is planned to evolve into a repository for all show-related assets like scripts and user-generated content.

Monique mentioned that the ABC community sites are looking to move from pre-moderating all content to a system where perhaps the first five posts by a user are pre-moderated and then afterwards everything is post-moderated. Something similar is what I've been thinking about for modfilms.net - once we get it right and there is traffic, important not to get stuck with expensive moderator hosts if we can help it.

I also found out that the ABC Archives is busy selecting material for more open release (similar to the BBC Creative Archive project). This is a big step from 2005 when I was haggling with them for bushfire footage freebies. It might be worth going back and requesting material for Sanctuary - there is some gorgeous bushfire footage in their collection which would spice up some shots.

Monique and her Irish film-maker/VJ/activist partner, Enda Murray, also run a local production company Virus Media which has done some interesting community projects with ethnic groups including a Virtual Palestine project (since pulled) which caused a bit of controversy in the early days of online web communities by encouraging virtual rocks to be "thrown". Enda used to work on Undercurrents, the UK video activist network. Monique and Enda are moving to Ireland for a couple of years to do some related research funded by the Australia Council.

Live gigs

Stuart Ridley, a local DJ, old friend and veteran of the local new media scene, thought there was a burgeoning market for re-mixable film disks sold after live performances. "I wanna do what she's doing!" He wants to prove it via some re-mixable gigs with me next year, and is already doing regular gigs around Australia.

Final Cut Pro Server

Sydney may be at the end of the earth as far as London is concerned but there's clearly stuff going on. In one pub I met an actor/video programmer who told me about how friends of his had recently sold their small local business to Apple. He was talking about Proximity which makes the asset management server-side product about to be released as Final Cut Pro Server.

Local production

I also met Jarrod Linton, a VFX supervisor and long-time real-time 3D artist, who is going to sign up to the virtual team. Jarrod is currently helping Post Modern, a local VFX commercials house, do the finishing touches on their first feature (Death Defying Acts) starring Catherine Zeta Jones.

He's also done a stack of pre-viz work on recent Hollywood flicks (Troy, Harry Potter, Sunshine etc...) with a background in product design. His take on MOD was that Sanctuary is a noose (around MY neck) until finished - no argument there - and agreed it has to be finished. He thought the information architectural approach made a lot of sense for future film productions but warned against trying to convince post people of this without a complete example. Jarrod was the web3D guru at dotcom Razorfish so has a good internet background. He has also been keep tabs on VR previz technology being developed in-house for Avatar , the latest James Cameron blockbuster being developed at Weta - home of Peter Jackson and the dream client for all this virtual studio nonsense.

After the worst year for local film production on record, there was definitely some excitement around. The Oscar success of Happy Feet (2006) by local VFX company Animal Logic after four years of development seems to have given local shops a real morale boost. Bruce Carter, the Creative Director there, was very generous lending us equipment for the Sanctuary shoot and is someone I would love to demo the studio service to.

Some film industry tax breaks may be pending to further support the local industry. Good news for producers but unforunately Aussies have never been very supportive of home-grown titles.

Films (re-mix fodder)

I took the opportunity to watch a bunch of new, and older films, most of which have had minimal exposure overseas. Lots of beautifully made material lying around.

Footy Legends (2006) was very much in the Calendar Girls/Full Monty mould. Feel-good tale of battlers winning against the odds. It wasn't a brilliant film but it was funny and charming with good acting (and HEAPS of sport in this sports-mad country). Despite all this, audiences appear to have stayed away in droves. Part of me suspects that deep-down Australia is still too racist a society to warm to local films where the action stays in the suburbs and none of the main characters are white. Anh Do (the Vietnamese Australian star) was incidentally the guy I initially cast as Mark in Sanctuary. He was the only member of the original cast to pull out during the delays caused by the MEAA dispute.

Jindabyne (2007) did pretty well at the box office and Ray Lawrence, the director, has a bit of a following. Pretty grim movie though, revolving around the discovery of a dead Aboriginal woman floating in a beautiful river. I guess the more films that explore the rotten bits of Australian culture the better but it's not pretty.

Australian Rules (2002) was the one of the best Aussie films I've ever seen. Again, the subject matter was probably the cause of its lack of popular success, more black and white conflicts, this time in a small country town but an excellent drama. Most of the young cast have gone on to be fixtures of local stage and screen.

Yolngu Boy (2001) is an interesting one. Shot in Arnham Land, and part financed by the mob behind the band Yothy Yindi (one of the few Aboriginal Australian acts to get airplay overseas), it's a boys-own adventure clearly intended for a local audience (with stern warnings against the dangers of stealing and petrol sniffing). Despite being a little long and almost an educational video at time, it's stuck with me, mainly because some of the shots are absolutely unique. My favourite was of one of the teenager stars hunting, resorting to traditional ways in order to survive on the run from the cops, standing in the midst of burning grassland throwing spears at a goanna (big lizard!).

The Tracker (2002) is a period film set in the Outback of 1920s. This was David Gulpilil's first starring role but he's pretty recognisable as perhaps Australia's most prolific Aboriginal actor. Director Rolf de Heer commissioned a series of paintings by Peter Coad which were done on location and used to distance the viewer from graphic violence in the story. A classic example of film assets that should be preserved.

.Nice Coloured Girls (1987) was an early short film by acclaimed Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt (based in NY). The subtitles and historical references juxtaposing First Fleet (1700's) and 80's Sydney red light scenes would really suit re-mixing. It would be worth finding out more about how the artist clears her work. A few years ago she made one of the best film mash-ups I've ever seen, Love, playing in a gallery (and selling for £250!)

Last but not least, I have to plug The Host (2001). A South Korean monster movie with fantastic visuals, family drama, shocking moments and lots of laughs. Another one of those CG feasts where you don't really notice the VFX. Script and soul from Seoul, monster modelling in Wellington (Weta again!), and the rest of the CG done in LA (The Orphanage). It would be good to see find out how assets were shifted around on this one. A class act that shows what you can do with a US$10Million budget.

TV

I didn't make too much effort to research local TV. The highlights still seemed to be overseas imports (BBC shows on ABC, US ones on the commercial stations), interspersed with cheap local gameshows, some not even hosted by old school ties. Australian comedians have produced some real gems but the only show people mentioned, the supposedly satirical The Chaser, seemed to be coasting badly. The guys behind this did a short-lived series called CNNN which actually was funny.

You really notice how WHITE everything is on Australian TV. That said Australia does have a dedicated "multicultural and multilingual" channel - SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) - which until recently didn't have commercial advertisements. No more.

All in all...

It's not going to be easy relocating to Sydney at the end of the year but no doubt it will be exciting to have new people and projects in the mix. The view from there is pretty fine.

.M.

Another Sanctuary

Piers emails me to point out that a Canadian TV company has just announced its remixable sci-fi TV series called... what for it... Sanctuary. It hasn't hit Google yet, "re-mixable sanctuary" is still all about us. But given that there are Stargate and Battlestar Galactica crew involved in this, no doubt that will change.

There's no such thing as coincidence so I'm guessing some bright spark is looking to capitalise on the ice-breaking we've done to-date. Now if only our Sanctuary pilot could get out the door in time before their pilot. Not looking likely at the moment but more incentive to pull out the stops. Disingenuous or what?

http://sanctuaryforall.com/

Stalker loses fan #1

I was glad to see that Sanctuary didn't make it onto anyone's vapourware list for 2006. It's been a frustrating and hard year putting my little film's post duties aside and focusing on the real effort - working on the generic framework. Only time will tell if I've made the right decision but there have been a lot of people giving the same advice in different ways. I'm not giving up on completing the film but stepping back from it has been the major drama of this year.

For all the interior monologues going on, the world outside isn't waiting for a re-versionable short film, not with YouTube storming away and Warner Brothers embracing BitTorrent (wasn't that the evil enemy a liittle while ago {:-). At some point we will finish the film and then we can brace ourselves for the spotlight. If there is anything I've learnt in the last decade, it's not to underestimate how quickly people move on. There is no point jumping too soon with too little.

I enjoyed reading Wired Magazine's Vapourware awards for 2006 - including the Russian game Stalker - Shadow of Chernobyl. This one had a huge amount of hype (I'm sure I've even played a demo at a tradeshow a year or so back) and has never delivered. It's such a tricky balancing act juggling production and marketing.

Check out the fan site for a textbook example of backlash....

Peter's Stalker stuff

modfilms.net soft launch

Doug @ Isotoma has just pushed modfilms.net to live.

http://www.modfilms.net

I'm off to this conference for the rest of the day but can only see one issue so far. No doubt there will be others.

modfilms.net approaches alpha

Not strictly anything to do with directing the film but I'm getting excited as the launch day for modfilms.net approaches. Once that's up I'll be able to start packaging the Sanctuary asset base for modders far more easily which means in turn that it will be possible to move forward with VFX and sound work. Both are on hold at the moment as I've got no time to manage a guerilla post team. The site should help mightily.

Development diary here - http://thequality.com/projects/mod/previz/

Cut and Run with Philip Noyce

On the publicity trail for "Catch A Fire", I caught up with Philip Noyce this afternoon to show him Sanctuary so far and get some advice on next steps. Of course the DVD and TV in his room caused no end of grief (cutting off part of the screen) but I was feeling so relaxed this time around that I was able to simply laugh it off.

Someone told me recently to listen to the opinion of strangers the most because they have no agendas. The 12 minute cut clearly had less impact, even accounting for the missing VFX, than the comic version. The original idea is so exciting that the energy level doesn't match. Phillip was very encouraging though, honest in pointing out what didn't make sense and that it doesn't mean we have to throw away the linear, only need to think hard about how to present it in the best possible light. He'd clearly had been thinking about the project and had some pointed thoughts on how the performances didn't reflect the dynamism of the original animatic and thought that I should revisit my comic approach which he liked. He thought Blake's personality from the script came out more in the stills than in the performances "which would be a disaster if you were making a feature but you're not!".

"It's a matter of weeks before someone does this". We talked a lot about how to get the thing finished within available budget, about putting the film's best foot forward to attract re-mixing further funding. He had reservations about trying to "fix" the 12 minute cut and seemed far more interested in the idea of inserting it as fragments into the comic book structure (which ultimately is what I've been doing with Arkaos and the RIG). He got quite animated by the idea of dirtying it all up - and mucking about with the pristine print. He said straight out that the image quality of the plates is potentially even working against the project at this stage. It was a good reminder that the original idea was all about a re-mixable graphic novel.... which I have. Somewhere in between the comic and the lnear cut is where this is heading. "You can't market it as it stands as all these different things, you have to pull it all together".

It was a really positive session. Phillip seems to reckon that the idea is revolutionary and went to some pains to say that I've got all the elements now to finish the damn thing (my sentiment, not his!). He poo-poo'ed the suggestion that I needed to go to any expensive post production lengths, saying I had all the tools I needed on my own computer and that's how I should complete it. I didn't protest that none of my graphics cards have Pixel Shader 2.0 (I wanna Intel Mac!) but I take his point. This was always really about about homebrew.

Anyway, it was a good boost and I'm going to cut a new disk to take up to my MELT session in Sheffield on Thursday. "Unlike the Americans in Iraq", Phillip suggested a cut-and-run approach that paid more attention to what is working than trying to compete with regular linear work.

Back to work

First day back after my holiday and we're in discussions with a feature film producer on how to get the ball rolling for their re-mixable release! I'm happy. It's all starting to come together. I'm going to have my head down this next month getting modfilms.net ready for launch.

We are the MODs

What's with all the MOD resumes? I've had two actors post me their details this week. MOD Films, Mod Rockers... Well who knows?!

KATRINA MOCK : RESUME - powered by actorsaccess.com

Grading finished

John finished the grading today. Looking good and a lot more joined up as hoped. Still not totally sure people will get the difference between the real world and the virtual world (I can't even understand Big Brother) but it'll look good on a big screen. Now the tiny detail remaining about who is going to do all the compositing. Take it one day at a time as they say... They said "Don't even think about using real fire!" last year too...

Sony DADC meeting

Gave a presentation to Sony DADC in Austria on Monday. I think it went well. The Blu-Ray group want to set up a working relationship and put resources into "realising your concept". Early days but we've got an official nibble. More details as they get confirmed.

I must record my presentation so that the virtual team get a heads-up on where we are. Pictures and video make such a difference. Too much text!

Grading underway

What a great day. John Kelly just did a blitzkrieg 10 or so hours grading Sanctuary at Molinare on an Avid Symphony and it's looking great. We've got a first pass done of most of the film and pretty much established the look of the real and virtual perspectives. The work to-date has been played out to tape and I'll be taking it to Saltzburg for my Sony DADC presentation (to the Blu-Ray group) on Tues.

My main concerns watching the film for most of the day is that we've got to get blue-screen comps and test animations underway - so much to do. Blade definitely needs to be set up in the Blake's space VFX shots and mucho sound design to be created. But we've got some momentum again which is great.

Conform played out to HDCAM tape

Steve finalised the conform last night at White City and played it back out onto HDCAM tape. It was a late one but went pretty smoothly.

We did most of the conform a while back but not having ready access to an HD video deck meant that there's been a bit of a delay to plugging the few holes and bug-fixing a few things. Funny what a relief it is, in this hard-drive era, to see all the hard work on a plain old tape. I guess I'm just a bit paranoid about failing electronics and dropping things. Now we can move onto grading proper.

1 day till Cannes

The panic attack has subsided. The demo reel is getting reasonably good feedback. It still doesn't stand up on its own but with an intro pitch verbally it seems to work. Most encouragingly people look quite excited by it which is always a good thing.

Had a good session with Christine re. sound. We're in reasonable shape to start sorting out the licensing agreements and the latest from Nicholas is that he's started working on the music for the film. Yay!

Looking forward to dropping my bags off and hitting the Crosiette. Four meetings set up, ironically the first one is with the UK Film Council, and I'm starting to feel that this trip may be worth it. *fingers crossed*

Time to pack... do I take my Twisted O'Reilly book or is that way too geeky? Decisions decisions...

.

2 days to Cannes

Too much to do this week. I'm feeling overwhelmed by everything there is to do particularly around VFX. It wouldn't be so hard if there was some continuity but volunteers come and go, the old crew are all busy on other projects. It's one of those days.

http://modfilms.com/twiki/bin/view/Sanctuary/FilmSchedule

Cannes-bound

Yesterday I finally got my Cannes accreditation. This supposedly means I've been deemed a professional film industry creature. Hah! If only they knew. Perhaps they simply lost my documentation, as I suspect, and google'd me. Which puts me in a far more favourable light obviously. Us web folk have an advantage when it comes to online marketing. Either way, I've jumped through the final hoop and off to France for a few days to talk re-mixable film-making with the industry. One sour note, my room buddy didn't get his accreditation, so I'll be out there on me own after all.

The more things change

I forgot one of my earliest post production lessons this month. After a week or so of looking for the best solution for auto-generating thumbnails from all the conform files and not finding any particularly elegant solutions I decided to just do it manually. Not only did it not take that long but I got a good morale boost looking at each and every shot. Something that the ILM crowd pointed out in the first ever VFX talk I went to - they just hired armies of people to do menial tasks.

Cannes-bound

Lost most of the week to data recovery business. The LAN server is toast. Ordered a new box to get things up and running again as soon as possible. Early feedback on the Cannes trailer video is promising. I want to spend much of the next fortnight improving the package.

I had a dream last night probably influenced by the round of test screenings I conducted at the NFT bar on Friday night.

I was in a cavernous amphitheatre high up in the stalls being introduced to George Lucas. After a round of pleasantries he asked me what I did so I invited him to look at the Sanctuary trailer I happened to have in my handbag on Sony PSP. He accepted but then things went pear-shaped. As I mashed the PSP buttons to start the video in record time I found myself ploughing through configuration settings for a different operating system. Somehow I'd managed to switch the device to freak-out mode and the video player wasn't having any of it. George looked on patiently but after five minutes of frantic and increasingly jittery button presses, he politely excused himself and moved on. Given that you have to jump through a few hoops simply to playback a non-UMD video on the PSP I woke up thinking that was an interesting omen. We'll see...

Hacked!

What an awful day yesterday was. First meeting of the day was to take receipt of a CDROM that didn't play. Then I discovered that a Romanian computer had hacked blade. Found I couldn't log in again to server. Then in the evening I got a puncture on my bike.

At least we didn't lose any data that I can see, just functionality like errr.. login, the VFX tracker, the source control system. What a royal pain in the arse. Thanks to speedy reponses from Lewis and Doug it looks like we'll have a new system built asap and temporary hosting for the tracker.

That's twice I've been hacked now in the last 12 years. Leaving my account logged on at uni doesn't count! First time it was some user in Brazil setting up an IRC server on my box. I don't know what yesterday's effort was all about but checking the logs, there had been a brute force ssh password guessing programme running over the machine for some time. I noticed because a DLT tape was ejected from the server (something none of my mob has been able to work out how to do for years!), then noticed "jonathan" user logged on. Just goes to show you what happens when you don't have your own security department and accidentally leave a door open. In this case, it was my fault, I'd hastily set up a 'common name' account for my flat-mate a week ago and left password set to same name. That plus opening the firewall to ssh did the trick.

Sanctuary video blog entries back online

I am always loathe to rely on LAN servers for Internet projects but given the state of the project's finances I thought I'd break another golden rule. Here's hoping the hard drive doesn't max out and die with too many accesses. However, since I'm not convinced there's ever more than 3 people in the virtual team actually looking at the externet I'm going to take the risk.

Bringing on a fair few people after yesterday's mailout - so good to hear from them - so need all the induction materials available.

Good day today. Feeling some movement once again. Gotta finish this thing!

Guys with beards

Reading Droidworks, a history of Lucasfilm and there's a photo on almost every page of guys with beards. OK, not so many beards around but making sci-fi is SUCH a guy's world. Proud to say that there's been different women involved in every stage of Sanctuary and I think i has helped bring out Blake's world.

Picture lock!

I'm at BBC White City in a edit suite with Steve Parkinson doing the HD conform. That process locks the base visuals for the film. We've wangled a day as "training" to get the HD master onto hard drive along with the plates needed for VFX (341Gb). The pictures look beautiful on an HD monitor even though our master source material is not the 35mm film negative.

Disappointed

Got a rejection letter from the London Film and Video Development Agency today. No completion funds. Not enough information provided in this criteria I'm told.

a) We define artists' film and video as relating to artists working in the context of contemporary fine art moving image practice and producing work intended for exhibition in galleries, festivals, specialist venues and as site specific installations.

What a waste of time it is dealing with the establishment. I could have made a short for the amount of effort that goes into these funding proposals.

Of course, same evening I get a request from an Italian university

Dear Michela Ledwige,
Your name was provided as a strong and important reference in the framework of collaboration programs that see our University active in the fields of scientific visualization, digital art and movie production....

Can't win.... is this art or not? I don't care, I just want to complete the project as intended and move on.

This is going to make it so much harder to complete VFX and pretty much blows our chances of getting something to Cannes by April 5th. So disappointing but that's the game. Those who do, make stuff. Those who don't, sit on funding panels.

There you go. I feel better now. My moment of self-pity has passed. Tomorrow we're going to try and get a 3D scan of a nanobat! {:-)

Tired and grumpy

I'm feeling time and grumpy today and it's because I can't give Sanctuary the attention it deserves at the moment during the day. Looking forward to completing my Beeb contract in a few weeks and knuckling down to what needs to be sorted. Getting daily downloads from stevep on the fine cut edit and it's encouraging to see Blake's character coming more to the foreground.

Basecamp

I've opened a Basecamp account to see if using project management software will help things along.

http://modfilms.updatelog.com

I would have installed trac by now on blade but there is some gremlin preventing a straightforward OS upgrade and so that's been deprioritised due to funds. It's working well at the Beeb for software though.

At first glance, Basecamp looks more friendly for non techies but not as useful.

modfilms-general list

The modfilms-general list has been updated to be a discussion list now that people are starting to talk to each other more. It's still very low traffic over and above the weekly mail-out. Will shift any longer threads to the web discussion forums if necessary.

Feedback from Wired

I'm chuffed with the feedback we've been getting from Wired readers. It wasn't a huge piece but there has been positive feedback in my mailbox everyday since it hit the stands. Quite a few letters from teachers wanting to get hold of the assets for their classes.

What's more, we've just received our second DONATION via the Paypal link on the site. People have been signing up via the site for re-mixing access everyday. I'm not giving up my dayjob just yet but it's nice to read about other people getting exciting by the concept (who I haven't cornered in the flesh!) When you're telling a story it's not always that straightforward to differentiate people interested in the idea or just how it's being told. In this case, does it matter?

Playback

Events of the week are rather modest but as always, the signs of encouragement are out there. Listened to the Head of BBC New Media, Ashley Highfield today explain that a) video over Internet b) search and c) user-generated content are the three principal strategic areas for the BBC going forwards. And they haven't really begun to think about breaking shows apart yet.

Had a good drink with one of our "non-technical" team this evening, chuffed to hear some of the old arguments for more open access to mainstream films being replayed in layman's terms. We're getting there. A lot of what's been discussed in this blog over the last two years is now fairly common knowledge which means it's probably time to open it up!

MOD Films archived

The National Library of Australia contacted us this week to seek permission to archive the MOD Films website in its PANDORA Archive. Better get around to launching this thing!

-----Original Message-----
From: Digital Archiving Section [mailto:webarchive@nla.gov.au]
Sent: 07 November 2005 02:24
To: reception@modfilms.com
Cc: lucyvoloi@hotmail.com
Subject: National Library of Australia seeking permission to archive MOD Films website

Michela Ledwige
MOD Films

7 November 2005

Dear Ms Ledwige

Request for permission to archive the
MOD Films website
at
http://modfilms.com

The National Library of Australia aims to build a comprehensive
collection of Australian publications to ensure that Australians have
access to their documentary heritage now and in the future. The Library
has traditionally collected items in print, but it is also committed to
preserving electronic publications of lasting cultural value.

PANDORA, Australia's Web Archive, was set up by the Library in 1996 to
enable the archiving and provision of long-term access to online
Australian publications. Since then we have been identifying online
publications and archiving those that we consider have national
significance. Additional information about PANDORA can be found on the
Library's server at: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/index.html

We would like to include the MOD Films website in the PANDORA Archive
and I would be grateful if you would let me know whether you are willing
to permit us to do so, that is, grant us a licence under the Copyright
Act 1968, to copy the publication into the Archive and to provide public
online access to it via the Internet. This means that you would grant
the Library permission to retain the publication in the Archive and to
provide public access to it in perpetuity.

If you are willing to grant us such a licence, please complete the short
form at the end of this message and return it to me.

There are some benefits to you as a publisher in having the publication
archived by the Library. If you grant us a copyright licence, the
Library will take the necessary preservation action to keep the
publication accessible as hardware and software changes over time. The
Library will catalogue the publication and add the record to the
National Bibliographic Database (a database of catalogue records shared
by over 1,100 Australian libraries), as well as to our own online
catalogue. This will increase awareness of the publication among
researchers using libraries.

If you have any queries please do not hesitate to contact me, Edgar
Crook, by telephone on 02 6262 1618 or by email ecrook@nla.gov.au.
Should you find me difficult to contact for any reason, Paul Koerbin
would also be happy to assist you. His phone number is 02 6262 1411 and
his email address is pkoerbin@nla.gov.au.

Yours sincerely

Edgar Crook

Librarian
Digital Archiving Section
National Library of Australia
Canberra ACT 2600

PH. +61 2 6262 1618
Fax +61 2 6273 4322
Email ecrook@nla.gov.au

*******************************************************************
I/We grant the National Library of Australia a licence under the
Copyright Act 1968 to copy the publications of the MOD Films website
into the PANDORA Archive. I understand that this licence permits the
Library to retain and provide public online access to it in perpetuity
and that the Library may make reproductions or communications of my
publication as are reasonably necessary to preserve it and make it
available to the public.

NAME:
ORGANISATION:
PHONE:
EMAIL:
*******************************************************************

Big thanks to Julien

Thanks to Julien Masson for his hard work doing animation for CD. Received a bunch of animation tests over the last couple of months and the masters in the post this week. Without this kind of volunteer support this project wouldn't have got this far.

http://modfilms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=41

HD stills

Thanks to Richard Gillespie and NATS Post Production, we've got some stills captured off the HD tape ready for press duties.

http://modfilms.thaumagen.com/pics/a1/stills.tar.gz (21Mb)

Influences of the week

Howard Hughes bio-pic "The Aviator", Hollywood lies, and film trailer MODs all went into the mix this week as the quest to distill the re-mixable film experience continues. Just Doing It vs The Business continues...

Scorcese's film depicts Hughes' obsessive compulsive behavior pursuing a multitude of dreams. The Spruce Goose, the world's largest plane, eventually makes it off the ground but nothing could to lift Hughes out of his downward spiral into madness. Another casualty of Being First syndrome? Or the proud instigator of adventure while it lasted? Either way, good to be reminded that even the world's richest man had money problems finishing his inventions.

Elliot Grove spells out film biz wisdom, and flogs film courses, via his Hollywood lies column for an LA trade magazine.

And PS260 alternative film trailers for The Shining, Cabin Fever, West Side Story, and Titanic illustrate the point that re-mixable films are out there already.

Open Business

The Open Business blog has been launched. I'm trying to write a blurb for MOD Films. There are some very interesting comparative models already up including the Brazillian Techno Brega music scene.

Good time to digest the past and re-write the Project Definition

Sim and Christine

Today started so good. I finally felt like I was coming to grips with the codebase. Funny how you spend years writing a spec for a system and then by the time it's half-written, you finally get a chance to look at it. Lucky python was chosen because I counted about three comments.

I spent the afternoon and most of the evening trying to reconnect my laptop, sim to the LAN. After an incredibly painful dive into the ugliness of Samba config I managed to get the thing up again. Learning lots about pdbedit database backends in the process. None of which helps with the organic development of cinema. Or does it?

Watched the end of Christine just now. Watched a machine trash itself and its owner was a lot more visual than a hundred or so Windows boot screens. But just as horrific. We're missing something with all this IT shit. I sat back down at my machines for one last crack at the problem. Which means that this crash course in python is paying off. I'm getting my head around the tech again. Midnight on a steamy Friday night and I'm back at the box. But I got in. Which reminded me why I'm doing this project in the first place. Trying to tell a story about dodgy boxes and dodgy people using them hasn't been told from the programmer's perspective before. Anyone can break a computer. Breaking the Net is more interesting and on the cards. The systems are constantly getting in the way of the story, the whole story, and I guess it's time to put that in perspective. This project was always going to be about going uphill and it's time for a pitstop. Time to start documenting the code and let CD out of the box.

DRM from the folks who stole the revolution

It's probably not news to the nerds out there but why does this come as such a surprise? I guess because along with half the Net I succumb to the marketing messages being put on DRM. But then again I had no idea that the whole history of Microsoft was so blatantly based on ripped-off software code. I wonder when gag orders expire?

1982: Digital Research sued Microsoft and IBM over copyright infringement. Gary Kildall sat down at a fresh IBM PC, typed a few keystrokes and poped up a Digital Research copyright notice. This impressed the Judge. DR won the case, monetary damages, and the right to clone MS-DOS. Microsoft won a gag order to make sure the public never heard about this case.

More:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100258/categories/faceTheMusic/

You have to find it ironic, that the entire Bill Gates empire is based on one thing: Intellectual Property theft.

You may have heard the story of how Gary Kidall's ex-wife, and business partner threw out the IBM suits over their request that she sign a (then rare, now common) non-disclosure agreement. IBM went back to Bill Gates and asked him if he had an OS they could use, he said yes even though he didn't (you have to love the audacity of Gates to lie to IBM). So Bill went off and bought QDOS from Seattle Computer Products. Where did SCP get the software from? They claimed that one of their employees, Tim Paterson, wrote it. In six weeks...

That's pretty amazing considering that it took Kidall three years to write CP/M! For proof of the fact that Peterson stole the code look no further then the fact that the first 36 DOS system calls mirror the original CP/M calls EXACTLY. Nearly 20 years after the fact, Caldera (the last owner of CP/M) won an out of court settlement from Microsoft over that theft, too little, too late.

"Ask Bill (Gates) why the string in function 9 (in DOS) is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that".
-- Gary Kildall (1942-1994)

Kidall died in a seedy bar on July 8, 1994 of a massive heart attack. He died a broken man, still believing that his ex-wife and Gates had denied him his destiny..

Post planning

I was described today as "motoring on" with the project. I had to smile. Motor running a little slower at the moment after the strain of sorting out cashflow problems. All ended well but it's been a tough month. I'm a lot clearer now about what I want this business to be doing in five years time - still making revenue from Sanctuary. For that to happen, I'm going to making some changes to the way the project is run. More business and production support and personally, a greater focus on what's necessary to keep the funding and experience rolling in. There is no point in doing a half-baked job on the film and now the challenges is to complete things as soon as possible but not at the expense of MOD Films and its as-yet original idea.

To sort things out, this film-maker is contemplating going back to the project management drawing board. The biggest mistake to-date has to not lock down a realistic post budget for the film. Here we are in Aug and the film is still far from finished. This week I have to decide whether the best way forward is to take a job offer at the BBC Interative Drama dept, cutting overheads down further, while business planning and design continues. I'd been holding out for a part-time or consulting gig but one thing is for certain. We don't have the right team in place at the moment to move forward without further planning. We can't afford to lurch from one week to the next. The edit, sound, and motion graphics elements all require some further work before they can be simply handed over to a post house for finishing.

Putting some time in at the Beeb might also be an opportunity to get a feel for what other interactive crews are up to and make sure we're developing something that will be of use.

Postcard from London

What a week. I arrive back in London (after SEVEN months away) with 13Kg of film negative, about 85% of an offline edit, a stack of DV tapes, miscellaneous props including some very grenade-like nanobats and one hell of a backlog of admin. *groan*

Then on Sunday some bastard stole my handbag which was full of gear...

We tried really hard to complete everything in Aus neatly but it wasn't to be. The state of the post industry combined with the hefty list of VFX shots was never going to be easy . I've brought everything back (bar the wooden Sanctuary signs!), take a breather and regroup.

Thanks to everyone who's chipped in and really helped to-date. We could use more. The funding is fast running out.

Volunteers, here's a list of the most pressing tasks ahead.

General

* Get-together. Enuff of this virtual team blarney. You're invited to drinks at Control Secret Headquarters (9 Wyndham Street) next Friday the 12th at 6pm.

* More gigs. Every cent and penny of the project funding that not spent on what goes onscreen at this point is a waste of money. Help us cover overheads and eat by sending in job leads. The prototype lab is crying out to be used by other projects.

Film

* Pre-viz elements for the edit (the offline needs some additional infographics elements for the narrative - I need some help with this)
* Looking for new editor to help me finalise offline. Requirement is for Avid (or FCP HD with Automatic Duck plugin so we can import Video OMFs to my suite)
* VFX - the gig is still up for grabs. We need to lock this down and finish the film.
* Sound design/composer - any recommendations?

Console

* Test -> Revise -> Review -> Test... We have a number of different demos now. Now they need to be pulled together into a coherent package. Delays to the film have exacerbated the difficulties here but the Shakespeare app is getting some good feedback.

Community

* Roger B has unveiled an exciting new VJ app he's working on and we're exploring how this could be coupled with the Switch MOD.

XMedialab powerpoint

Yesterday I gave a sneak preview of Sanctuary at the XMediaLab - Singapore. We weren't ready with our Crystalspace-powered demo so I used Arkaos to re-mix the rushes. The project got a good reception and the VJ demo seemed to make all the difference in terms of explaining what the scope of re-mixing is all about.

One of the biggest challenges we're facing on the project is keeping the whole virtual team informed as to what we're doing. Volumes of text have been written now on the subject but nothing quite gets the subject across like a live demo. We must arrange more inward-facing ones.

PDF

Powerpoint

Slow going

Another false-start today. Our dubs for editing weren't ready for us. There seems to be some problem at Cutting Edge with Superman and their machines are working around the clock. Told "if it's any consolation, Superman didn't get their dailies today". It wasn't really. Tim Steel, our new editor, is booked to do a TV show at the end of the month. We can't afford to slip anymore. Made several calls to arrange for emergency dubbing in the morning. Let's hope things get sorted overnight anyhow.

Spent the rest of the day working on the business plan for re-mixable DVDs, doing an pre-recorded interview for SBS Radio, and messing about in Arkaos VJ. My poor old Dell can't handle the latest 3D effects in the software but it still manages to scrub reasonably happily through 3x12Gb's worth of mini-DV rushes. Going to go and play on my brother-in-law's gaming beast of a machine and do some test renders with some of these real-time effects.

Congrats messages still filtering in from people who saw the article in the paper today and think we're all done. Hah!

Under pressure... as always

Amazing how much rosy things look when you've a) had sleep and b) are not sick. First day back in the right headspace for a week and things are looking up. To start the day off, tuned into ABC Radio National to hear The Law Report interviews on Sanctuary. They introduced my segment with "Under pressure" (Queen, smiles all round) and then segued nicely into "Ice Ice Baby" (Vanilla Ice)... ouch!

Finished a new set of animatics for the rig UI. There's no getting away from it, it isn't going to be entirely clear to anyone except me until this thing is built but it's getting clearer all the time!

Hope to have editing underway within days. It's about time.

Who cares

While Google announces a video upload facility, and sites like current.tv and ourmedia.org emerge to promote audience-contributed channels, the MEAA is busy slamming us for trying to raise the aesthetic and dramatic stakes. Sitting here in my mother-in-law's spare room, the fact that this is a storm in a teacup is some consolation.

Massive: MEAA rages on about CC

And time to find out who cares about this project. I'm not going to rise to the bait and "go to war" on MEAA as some suggest. Life's too short. I'm going to just make my movie and then get onto making another one. But some more public shows of support would be nice.

http://modfilms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=517#517

Original shooting dates slip by as team regroups

As the stormy weather hit Sydney the last few days, I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering how we would have managed if we had been out somewhere in the bush as planned for Mon/Tue. Everything happens for a reason and here we are back in development with a tighter leaner script, a bit more funding and a wad more experience under our collective belts.

The next step is to get us back on track with a revised shooting schedule and a revised cast/crew line-up for early May.

Once we've received written confirmation from the AFC there will be another public announcement. I was told "two weeks" on the 17th.

Quotable quotes

What a fortnight. Almost two weeks to the day when our shoot got buggered up by bureaucracy and bush-less-ness. We're back and soon to be on track. I'll press the green light once we lock the cast in for May 1 to 8 this week.

Some quotable quotes amidst the good vibes and well wishes around the place follow...

The script definitely works...so all that has to be done is to.... make it on a shoe string. So make it!

Jack Feldstein, film-maker (email)

Thanks for being so cool...these sort of projects are definitely the way of the future. Who would have thought DJing would get so popular? And that's what you are...Film DJs.

Calvin Lawson (email)

I had good luck casting non-actors with my last (CC) feature. A lot of
people are naturals once you get them relaxed. And lawyers for some
reason seem to make pretty good actors.

Brian Flemming, open source film-maker (email)

These are people who are prepared to “go the extra mile” when it comes to organising creative opportunities and it would seem that you are not prepared to meet them... I don't think this project is fundamentally different in scope to any number of "stock footage" projects.

mfallu, CC website producer (submission to MEAA)

This is unfortunately typical. They should be called the ostrich corporation! I too had a movie stopped by them.

Gordon Williams, film-maker (web contact form)

Unless the production company reserves all rights, they feel they will lose money. No lawsuits over unauthorzed translations, no lawsuits over non-commercial copying and viewing, etc....

vandon (Slashdot)

And the award for burying their head in the sand and hoping that reality goes away goes to ... MEAA.

rhysweatherley (Slashdot)

Great work MEAA, you bunch of f****** retarded ludites.

Pirate (zgeek)

OMG...how lame is this. Apparently SHARING is not something the Screen Actors Guild nows how to do. Should we blame their mothers?

Calvin (rights.apc.org.au)

Let time and experience decide which licensing models are more beneficial to actors... Allow your members to participate in this future, or risk becoming an obsolete artifact of an earlier age.

Rob (rights.apc.org.au)

If they want to move it all to California, let me know - I have a book full of non-union actors who would _jump_ at the chance to tackle this sort of project...

Chris Tann, film-maker (rights.apc.org.au)

I hope one of these groups blinks soon and the filming goes ahead; the frustration you and the rest of the MOD Films' crew are experiencing must be immense!

Mia Garlick, CC US General Counsel (email)

A problem can not be solved with the same consciousness that created it.

A Einstein, genius (email)

Don't believe everything you read online. But this last quote is strangely appropriate. The "traditional film" approach to managing the live shoot dimension of this project didn't work. Round two I'm going to be more confident about managing it the new media way.

Letter to film crew

Dear all,

Luke and Zoe are leaving the project at this point so there is a handover in progress. Please bear with me while we sort out the state of play and get a clearer view of what has been produced to-date so that loose ends can be tied up and the production can move forward. If you have other commitments we should know about, or you are no longer available at all, please let me know by Wednesday 9am.

The meeting with the AFC went well today. A decision will probably be made tomorrow in Melbourne by the head of Film Development as to whether or not the AFC invests in the project.

The press release has been picked up by a few places (e.g. if magazine, rights.apc.org.au) and ironically many of today’s callers have been sympathetic MEAA members…

Our Casting issue has progressed so stay tuned on that one. One of the options we have is to simply ignore the MEAA ruling and press ahead with contracting the actors. The MEAA stance on this issue has generated so much ill feeling amongst MEAA members that this may yet prove to be the best way forward. However I should point out that anyone else in the crew, who are professional members of organizations associated with the MEAA, should consider any ramifications that this may bring. This project is not without controversy. Speaking for myself, I will not take it the wrong way if any of you choose not to proceed on that basis but I also feel that there is growing support for what I’m trying to do here and that this set-back may yet prove to be an opportunity to make the best possible film.

Feel free to call me for any more information but you can help me by passing on to Luke all the work completed or in progress to-date so that we can take stock of where we’re at and move forward.

Best,
.M.

MEAA final round

I don't know what it's like to be punched in the guts but today was a little like that I imagine. This was D-Day, the day the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance Board decided what they were going to do, or not do, for Sanctuary.

Not do, as it turned out. We've been to and fro-ing with Simon Whipp, the Alliance Chief Lawyer, since early February and while it was clear that no position would be forthcoming easily we did expect to be able to negotiate.

That was denied. I rang up at 4:30 and was told "The board has decided not to grant the dispensations you seek". I asked what the reason for this decision was. "The board felt that they would not be appropriate." For a re-mixable film ostensiby... I then asked what opportunities for negotiation had been put on the table. "None."

So you're shutting down our shoot? No response. Simon is good that way. A master of the say-little and give prickly silence brigade. I hang up, the only thought running through my head is that two year's of work has arrived at yet another wall and that I've now got a stack of people to ring up and disappoint.

A few hours later and the mood has lifted. Yes, the overall project is in jeapordy. Yes, the chances of hitting our shoot dates are remote. No, we're not giving up just yet. And as for the MEAA... fuck 'em. As the Internet was designed to operate, we'll just have to route around the problem.

A break from the project

After a hard slog we put in an AFC funding proposal on Fri and started planning out milestone 2 of the demo based on the testing so far.

The weekend was supposed to be a rest, well away from the project, but it was impossible to escape the irony on Sunday as TJ Hickey's memorial was covered in the evening news.

Demo Milestone 001

Some less than unusual events in parallel this month with demo testing alongside casting. It's been a relief to be able to

Testing the first code milestone got off to a shaky start when it emerged that the RIG was not responding to keypresses on certain machines. It was a reminder not to take anything for granted and that we can't cut corners on testing.

http://modfilms.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=102

Surveillance Central

Random soundbite in (the movie trailer guy) deep voice while waiting for a train at Central Station, Sydney.

"For your safety, surveillance cameras continually monitor THIS station."

Flights booked

After several months of heads-down lets-get-on-with-admin it's time to leave the nest, push myself out of my comfort zone and fly back to Sydney. Don't get me wrong. Sydney is the best home town in the entire world BUT I'm a Londoner these days. Rarely leaving zone 1, working in my flat, it's not the easiest move to have to suddenly pack up and go. But that's what has to happen.

We're shooting in Aus and now it's time to pull the team together. Internet comms are working smoothly. We're getting more and more support coming out of the woodwork. All we need now is a film to play with!

It's only been four months or so since the project started but it feels like a lot longer. It's easy to forget that this is only a ten minute film. The volume of concept art alone is making this seem like a far larger enterprise. I guess that's the key to it and has been all along. If we can get a wider community to invest in the story, dabble in the materials and leave their trace on modfilms.net then we're much closer along the path to demonstrating a new way of film-making and the interest in this film world. Time to get more Aussies in the mix!

Running in circles and loving it

The challenge of this project is to keep three totally distinct beasts moving forward. It's only when I force myself to get out and get some fresh air that I realise that we've actually come quite a long way since July. And I'm relieved at how fun today was. It's not every day that you get to jump from software design to script writing to video editing and back again, and more of that to come.

It's been an exciting week with the arrival of our first developers and Jan 7th identified as our first milestone code drop. I'm hoping that by then we will have a rudimentary system for MODDing Shakespeare and a much clearer sense of what a re-mixable film looks like under the hood.

We've also had an invitation to bid for a game fund and distribute another short film that's in development. All good signs that people are taking notice of the project and that there'll be eyeballs on whatever pops out.

I'm feeling exhausted. Gearing up for moving back to Sydney for pre-prod means making sure that things are all chugging along this end and it's a long ride if you forget something.

Thanks to everyone who's chipped in the love and attention to life that's keeping me sane (honest!) The bubble's got a lot bigger.

Meeting with Phillip Noyce

Notes from my first meeting with Phillip Noyce, nearly three hours worth.

- He didn't understand the concept of re-mixable film
- His principle reservation was that directors like himself have been fighting a losing battle to prevent 3rd parties modifying and distributing their work (e.g. "family values" edited Hollywood films from cleanflicks.com). The Republican party in the US has threatened legislation to protect censorship-based businesses.
- He successfully sued a TV production company under moral rights for buying Clean and Present Danger rushes then re-assembling them to mimic the released film's final cut as part of a TV show.
- He thought it was an interesting idea
- He wanted to understand where you could make money from this model, saying he simply sells off all his rights (for a given period of exploitation) because it is simple to do this (i.e. MOD Films have to offer a very simple alternative)
- He didn't understand the script until seeing the boards. Dad being an activist wasn't clear to him.
- Said it sounded like "you have everything under control" and "don't need a producer"!
- Recommended shooting out of Sydney to keep budget down
- Recommended focus on getting a line producer
- Recommended getting down to Sydney asap and spending solid time networking to source the best cast/crew from whoever is around
- Recommended guerilla post network rather than established production houses
- Indicated that he could be a mentor but his availability is severely restricted (busy in South Africa until end 2005) so he can't make any commitments and would have to think about it. Didn't know about the NESTA mentor agreement
- Said my explanation of the story was more eloquent than the script.
- Wants a copy of my films on DVD to give feedback on
- Said not to lose sight of the film being more about post than production, only one adult dramatic role
- Said it is not worth bothering to try and get name actors involved
- He got the virtual world aspect by saying "Don't worry about continuity between short and feature, Blake can look like anything"

Day Something

I'm not good with numbers and I really don't care what day of the project it is. All I know is that today has been a good day to take stock of where things are at. Positive discussions across the three areas, cinema, console and community, great developments like the first draft of the storyboards, interesting new faces like the tool developer applicants, a good half day, personally, thinking about nothing but the characters and what they're doing mucking about onscreen.

There's a real tendency on this project to forget about the story and get absorbed by the mechanics of putting the production together. Mechanics of the world, the props, the re-mixable film player, the licensing scheme, the patent opportunities.... It's crazy. The only point of doing this thing is story. That was the idea. The film is no use without it being a believable experience. Otherwise it's a badly funded corporate video. Only time will tell if this mix of sysadmin/directing and other stuff is truly useful or a distraction from "the process". Reminder to get a brief from someone who went to film school.

I really need to watch My Dinner with Andre, a feature film of two men sharing a meal at the dinner table. No FX, no virtual world interfaces to design, no confusion between avatars and their owners. Shit... what am I doing?

There is something so exciting about having got to this point and to realise that there is no FILM funding at risk here and no COMPUTER GAME funding at risk either. We've got license to make something new with nothing to lose except a business model. And yet storytelling is as old as the hills. It can't really be a new storytelling process. Can it?

Anyway, the business side is the least of my worries. Balancing an online community and a self-serving individual approach to story-telling is more the challenge. Maybe there will be a fundamental conflict being a company director and a film director at the same time. Fortunately, the story is all about people falling foul of corporate interests. So any horrible incidents *touch wood* will have to work as inspiration.