I always approach internships with worst-case scenarios lodged in my head. I convince myself that I will have to pull out all the stops to make sure my attire is as sharp and as business classy as I can muster, that I should expect to make endless amounts of coffee, and prepare myself for an onslaught of menial labor. And while I have been lucky to avoid such an internship position so far, I continue to be surprised by the actual work and work environment I find myself in, and 911 Media Arts Center was no exception. Instead of cardigans and pencil skirts, I was able to wear clothes that I was comfortable in, clothes I could imagine doing real work in. I’ve always felt like a dress code inhibits and confines a person, and is a silly exterior way to judge the merits of a workspace. 911 is comprised of amazingly intelligent and hardworking people wearing shorts and flip-flops, and I really couldn’t imagine it any other way. And while 911 Media Arts Center does indeed run on caffeine, they respect my dislike for coffee and have never asked me to make them some, though I expect they’ve picked up on the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do. The menial work in particular is one aspect of internships I fully expect, but once again I was both excited and comforted by the fact that all the work I did and continue to do, regardless of its initial importance, has always served to help the center. Non-profit work is by no means glamorous, but is certainly rewarding in many exciting ways. I have been able to take part in the Seattle International Film Fest, watching films and posting reviews on 911’s social network, meet an amazingly diverse and intelligent group of people working within the realm of media arts, get a first hand perspective on the Seattle arts community, get some valuable first-hand experience in running a non-profit, and watch as 911 adapts, celebrates, and works within the community. This has been the most amazing summer in my college career to date, and I have gained so much respect and admiration for the work that 911 Media Arts Center does, and its place within the amazing city of Seattle.

After having interned at 911 Media Arts Center for almost three months now, I can think of no other place that better serves the Seattle community. To me, 911 Media Arts Center is the ideal non-profit, consistently catering to the communities various media needs, fostering creativity in the arts, and enabling people to come together to build upon each others experiences. 911 is a secondary home and community center, a place to feel comfortable enough throw around thoughts and ideas that might even manifest themselves in ways you never thought possible. In my three months here, I have never felt stretched beyond my means, but have been challenged day to day in trying to understand that with a small amount of resources themselves, they are still able to be an amazing resource for others. I hope to take that and apply it to my own life, and serve as a resource within the Bryn Mawr community. I have made friends here and gained some very practical knowledge that will continue to influence me when I return to school, and even on through my future career. 911 Media Arts Center is a place I will most certainly return in the future, and a community and internship I will undoubtedly miss when I return to school.

More than he loves music and media, however, D.A. loves cars, and it was his love of cars that brought him into the hot rod latent realm of Kustom Kulture. “It’s a real artistic scene,” Sebasstion admits, “but it has a real 50s, late 50s, early 60s kind of a slant.”

D.A. defines Kustom Kulture as, “a loose terminology for pin-ups. It includes pin-up models, burlesque models, hot rods, custom cars…..A lot of rockabilly, pyschobilly music, but also some blues stuff. A lot of pin strip artist are involved, and a lot of older style art like, Rat Fink kind of art styles, and kind of late 50s, early 60s art style. It’s kind of all put together loosely by the term ‘Kustom Kulture’.”

The most common congregation place for members of Kustom Kulture is the car show. D.A. explains, “when you go to a car show, if it’s like, an old rat rod, Kustom Kulture style car show, you’ll see pin-up models walking around in front of a lot of these old hot rods. They’ll be trying to look like Bettie Page or something.”

A few years ago, D.A. had a public access television show called, Go-Kustom TV. “That’s where I really got into seeing what was going on within the whole Kustom Kulture car show culture crowd, and I really liked what I saw,” he recalls. “Some of these guys build cars out of junk, but it looks bad ass when they’re done…..it’s like drivable art work, and to me that was just like, ‘wow this is cool.’”

D.A. was happy to find that Kustom Kulture allowed the ‘gearhead’ and the artist in him to merge and find support in a like minded community. “It’s like they’re taking their artistic side and putting it on these cars, but they’re making them look kind of industrial almost, and that’s kind of what I like about a lot of the traditional hotrods.”

Kustom Kulture is not strictly about hot rods and pin-ups. “A lot of guys who also are into tattoos and stuff like that will also have a chopper or a hot rod,” Sabasstion says. “So they’ll do stuff centered around their tattoo shop as well…..You go to certain tattoo shops, you’ll meet guys who have Kustom Kulture stuff, cars and stuff.”

Magazines also play an important part in the culture. “There’s a couple magazines, Car Kulture Deluxe, and Ol’ Skool Rodz. They both really highlight Kustom Kulture and what it’s all about,” Sebasstion points out.

There have been plenty of films and television shows done about Kustom Kulture or ‘greasers,’ as they have also been called. Films like; Hotrods to Hell, Dragstrip Riot, Dragstrip Girl, and even the famous James Dean film, Rebel Without a Cause, fit into the category of Kustom Kulture.

Not too long ago D.A. added a new film to that collection and explains, “my movie, Hot Rod Girls Save the World, is kind of paying homage to that…..I felt like there hadn’t been a ‘real’ hot rod movie made in probably 40 years.”

Sebasstion was able to tap into the network he created for himself putting together Go-Kustom TV for Hot Rod Girls Save The World. He notes, “the hostess of Go-Kustom TV is actually one of the stars of Hot Rod Girls Save The World.”

The television show did more than provide cast members for the film; it also provided authenticity. D.A. says, “because I had met all these people who have hot rods and stuff we were able to get the hot rods in the movie. My screenplay kind of was written around that whole Kustom Kulture style because that’s what I was really getting exposed to, and what I really wanted to do a film about.”

With it’s mixture of aliens, zombies and hot rods, D.A. compares it to a Jim Jarmusch or David Lynch film. It tries to stay true to the style of the late 50s, and introduced many people to Kustom Kulture for the first time. Recent documentary style shows like The Hot Rod Havoc series, and Road to Bonneville have played a part in introducing Kustom Kulture to the public.

Though Kustom Kulture aficionados are often associated with Southern California and other perpetually warm regions, Sabasstion says, “there is a lot of us up here in Seattle and the Northwest area too.We have the Billetproof, and I heard Ink & Iron are on their way up here.”

A hurdle Northwest Kustom Kulture fans have to face is the Seattle weather. Winter provides little in the way of Kustom car show activity, but D.A. explains that in the springtime, there is a cocoon-like emergence of hot rods. “I live up on the north end of Seattle and I see like, tons of cars all of a sudden. There were all of these old Corvettes, and all these old Fords, and stuff. I’m like, ‘Wow! These guys are coming out of their garages like they’ve been sleeping all winter, hibernating.’”

“With the whole hot rod thing you have a real since of tradition, and that is one of the things that attracted me to it overall. Besides the fact that the car is the central piece of the whole scene– and I’m making films about that.”

“I was thrilled at the request,” says Cioffi. This interview, she felt certain, would finally bring much needed international attention to MEND’s cause in a country where 80% of the economy, according to Cioffi, derives from oil production, primarily by Shell, Chevron, and Exxon.

Despite the risk, the government having shown a pattern of responding to non-violent protests with force, on December 20, 2006, Paul, a shy but well-spoken rebel in his early twenties, agreed to be the “unmasked face” of MEND. He was patched through by phone from Oporoza to ABC’s Brian Ross. Both ends of the conversation were caught on film and the footage included in Sweet Crude.

Ross opens by asking who their “beef” is with, but his countenance takes on the laser focus of a bird of prey preparing to dive at its target when he repeatedly encourages Paul to admit that MEND is a “terrorist” group. Paul prefers to call his fellow rebels “freedom fighters.” But as soon as he admits that MEND began taking hostages among oil workers in February 2006 during negotiations to use as human shields, Ross draws a finger across his throat, a signal to his crew to stop recording. Ross fails to tempt Paul to say the word “terrorist,” but “hostages” is apparently close enough.

Cioffi’s film does not flinch from spelling out the cost of oil production to the 20-30 million people crammed together amid the rivers and mangrove swamps in an area roughly twice the size of Maryland. According to her research, one in five children in the Niger Delta die before the age of five from pollution related causes such as asthma or skin disease. “A new steel railing was put on a building in November 2005 when I first came to Oporoza. When I returned in July 2006, seven months later, the acid rain from the gas flares had left rain-shaped divots in the metal.” The average life expectancy has lowered from 65 years of age in the late 1950s, when oil exploration began in the delta, to 40 years of age by April 2008 when Cioffi stopped filming. “Seeing things like this really changes you.”

The Nightline report was eventually “left on the cutting room floor,” but the tenor of the interview sent a clear message. “The outside world views MEND as gangsters,” says Cioffi, interesting only to the degree that they threaten the “cheap supply of oil.”

“After that,” says Cioffi, “the locals seemed to reach a tipping point.”

“If I die today just sitting here,” says a young man in Oporoza interviewed by Cioffi for the film in the months preceding the ABC interview, “I just die. But if I die today trying to change my life, I think that is the best way to do.” After the ABC interview, the grandmothers and mothers no longer felt compelled to prevent their young men from joining the rebel training camps in the mangroves.

Cioffi’s filming activity did not escape the notice of the government, and on April 12, 2008, Joint Task Force (JTF) soldiers arrested Cioffi and her crew to put a stop to it. “I was in a boat outside Sapele in the Niger Delta with my Seattle crew, Sean Porter, Cliff Worsham, and Tammi Sims, and a local, Joel Bisina, a peace mediator, when we were stopped at a JTF checkpoint. I had a legal visa and this was my fourth time in the country, so I never thought we’d be arrested.”

They were pulled out of the boat, their cameras and recordings confiscated, and they were driven without food or water eight hours north to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, where they were processed into the military prison at the Headquarters of the State Security Services (SSS).

“It’s the creepiest feeling I’ve ever had,” admits Cioffi. “The slow descent into becoming something more serious” began. A six-hour grilling in 110 degree heat followed. “They kept asking crazy stuff, like did I have a Swiss Bank account. They assumed we were rich.” Letters were sent to the Nigerian President Y’ar Adua by fourteen U.S. lawmakers contacted by Cioffi’s human rights attorney, who’d been retained for such a contingency. After six days of incarceration, the five were released. The SSS warned Cioffi and her Seattle crew that if they ever came back to Nigeria they would be arrested immediately.

“Their intention was to scare us so we’d go home and tell other journalists not to go there.” It worked.

What hadn’t been confiscated were 140 hours of previously recorded footage, which Cioffi edited down to a 93-minute film that opens a view onto “one of the most polluted places on earth.” If her film hits its target, the outside world will finally start asking the question she asks in the film: why is this outrage allowed to continue?

At age 47, Cioffi, a professor at Seattle Central Community College in the Film and Video Communications Department is not new to filming. Along with documentary news clips such as Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride filmed in 2003, Cioffi’s credits include narrative features, such as Terminal 187, a half-hour special for PBS. Sweet Crude, Cioffi’s first feature-length documentary, is beginning to earn for her much deserved critical attention.

Three screenings in June 2009 at the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) won for Cioffi the Lena Sharpe Award for Persistence of Vision. The film was also runner-up for the Golden Space Needle Best Documentary Award. The International Documentary Association’s 2009 DocuWeeks showcase, a program created to provide week-long theatrical runs in Los Angeles and New York for groundbreaking documentary films, selected Sweet Crude as one of only 18 features for the program. Showing in DocuWeeks is considered in the film world a prerequisite to qualifying for an Oscar nomination.

“I collaborated on the specific look we wanted with my director of photography [DP], Sean Porter,” says Cioffi. “We wanted to show the landscape as a dead character in many shades of gray, offset against the color of the people. We did a lot of shots of feet to accentuate the feeling of strength coming up from the ground.” Cioffi used two handheld Panasonic DVX100 cameras (“post-production, the final film is ‘rezzed’ up to high density”) so that one camera could still be in play if the other broke down. Repairs or buying spare parts were simply not options. Re-charging batteries was also not an option. Most places in the Delta have no electricity, “a sad irony not lost on the crew,” considering that the region feeds billions of dollars of crude oil to the world’s hungriest consumers of oil for power.

Why Cioffi decided to set aside the risk factor and begin shooting this film is still not entirely clear even to her. In November 2005, Cioffi was hired by an unnamed NGO to film the building of the Niger Delta Friendship Library, ostensibly a peace gesture between warring factions and Chevron.

“While filming the library,” says Cioffi, “a couple of mothers in Oporoza urgently grabbed my arm. They looked at me and my camera like we were a canister of oxygen.” The outside world, she decided, needed to know what was happening there. “Those people were literally dying in order to get media attention.”

The Nigerian government’s hanging in 1993 of Ken Saro Wiwa, the Ogoni environmental leader, is presented in the film as the event that galvanized resistance. Ensuing incidents led to the government wiping out as many as 20 entire communities.

By Cioffi’s count, 50,000 civilians in the Niger Delta were killed by government troops between 1999 and spring 2008. In a film voice-over, Cioffi grimly observes: “Today [April 2008] the Niger Delta feels like an occupied land. The JTF branch of the military is… a constant presence on waterways. They force villagers to pay bribes to pass safely and routinely abuse [“abuse” is the word used in the film; Cioffi confides that what they really do is “rape”] women.”

With the February 2007 national elections, Cioffi’s interviewees began briefly singing notes of optimism. “The election was completely corrupt,” says Cioffi, “but the vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, was from the Niger Delta.” The election encouraged the rebels to return hostages unharmed and come back to the talks.

When Cioffi returned to Oporoza in April 2008, she says, “I intended to film real change.” What she came back with is a memorable scene that shows 40 clean-cut teen boys who look like they should be asking dates to a prom. After daring to demand access to discussions they hoped to be part of, the boys are lined up side by side belly down on a dock. What we don’t see, but what we’re told follows, is that the JTF soldiers flogged them, and then, using their own version of “water-boarding,” pushed their heads into the water and held them until they nearly drowned.

In the summer of 2008, the militant faction of MEND openly declared an “oil war” in Nigeria. By June 2009, says Cioffi, “Chevron in the Niger Delta has been completely shut down by the rebels. Shell’s production is down 40%.” The reaction from the Nigerian government-supported military has been predictably violent.

On May 15, 2009, according to the film’s epilogue, JTF attacked Oporoza and killed “hundreds” of villagers while the film’s Web site reports that as a result of this attack against civilians, “as many as 20,000 are now refugees, cut off from food, water, and medical aid.”

“But what if they were to win?” asks Cioffi. “The rebels want representative democracy. They also want 25% of oil revenues to go to building local infrastructure. They need roads, schools, hospitals, electricity. But none of this will make any difference unless the multinational corporations extracting oil in the area would be held to higher standards and threatened with consequences if they didn’t clean up their mess.”

The Niger Delta has a checkered history. It sits at the mouth of a river that, claims Cioffi, “is Africa’s superhighway,” and for 250 years was the main shipping point for the African slave trade, and because of that became a repository of displaced people from many different ethnic groups packed together into a country called Nigeria in the 1960s after the British left. For the first time, perhaps, the people of the Niger Delta are willing to work together to fight back against the “benign neglect” with which they’ve been looked upon by a world that wants its oil and wants it cheap. The launching of Sweet Crude might be the warning arrow that pierces the armor of that world’s neglect.

To get the message out, Cioffi’s film has received generous financial assistance beyond its support from The Northwest Film Forum. In 2005, Jody Hall, owner of Seattle’s Café Verite/Cupcake Royale, pumped in enough dollars to get the film rolling. In 2006, another Seattle-ite, Menno VanWyk, who started a film company, “Virasana Productions,” raised support for Sweet Crude to continue. Elizabeth Rudolf of Seattle kicked in money in 2009 to help offset the cost of attending film festivals. Five distributors are showing an interest in the film. “It’s a matter of selecting the distributor best positioned to advance the film’s message,” says Cioffi.

“Honestly, I was taken with Sandy and the story, the potential ramification of getting the story told,” says VanWyk, the film’s leading investor. “The fact that she wanted to do the film to effect a positive outcome frankly impressed the hell out of me. It was something that needed to be done.”

It’s a deserving film that will make you uneasy. It could be argued that the film is biased and fails to pursue key angles: the government’s willingness to permit oil drilling without mediation of damage to the area; the plight of the hostages taken from the oil rigs by the rebels; the responsibility of a government that receives, according to Cioffi, a 60% tax on oil profits but spends very little of that revenue to help its own people.

Cioffi admits that, in the filming, she lost her journalistic objectivity, even came to question its validity. But was she prepared to be the ambassador for the delta’s cause?

“When the stakes got high,” says Cioffi, “I asked myself, was this something I meant to do, put myself in this much danger? Sitting in a military prison, you realize the real price of oil.”

Scott Driscoll is a Seattle-based freelance writer and teacher.

Contact: Sandy Cioffi, 206-612-0684 or fastfwd@speakeasy.net
Menno VanWyk 206-236-3229

Hamedani should know. Although from all appearances he might easily have just jet-setted back from a Mediterranean seaside village, and he speaks only a few phrases of Farsi, when September 11 happened the entire weight of 4,000 years of Persian history and U.S.-Iranian tensions was on his back. Iranian-U.S. relations were still shaky years after the 1979 student-led revolutionary takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, but in 2001 there was no connection between Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center towers and Iranian dissidents. It didn’t matter; Hamedani is convinced his Edmonds neighbors were afraid of him. They stopped greeting him and he feels they should have known him better than that. When on an airplane he later found himself eyeing each Middle Eastern passenger with suspicion, he walked to the back of the plane and inadvertently looked at himself in the mirror. He had an epiphany: “I look exactly like the people I was staring at. You have to work against the tendency to discriminate,” he says.

At the University of Washington, where Hamedani earned a degree in comparative literature in 2005 with a focus in cinema studies, there was no discrimination. “I was a freshman at the time, and no one at the U. ‘Dub’ gave a shit.” But Hamedani still cared enough about his experience in 2002 to start writing a screenplay. “I saw Shaun of the Dead [classic comedic zombie flick by Edgar Wright] and got depressed. I thought, ‘someone’s already done it,’ and put it away for two or four years.” What emerged in 2006, when he had several shorts to his credit, is a portrait of a town so caught up in surviving that its townspeople are finding it literally impossible to remain human. It’s a portrait drenched in political satire.

In ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, overseas Islamic terrorists unleash a deadly virus in Port Gamble that turns its normally phlegmatic inhabitants into terrorizing, cannibalizing zombies. Within minutes the infected turn ashen and are driven to pursue, then rip and devour healthy flesh. One of the first close encounters with “undead” is with a middle-aged mother, played by Linda Jensen. Her gay son Tom is attempting to ‘come out’ to her. When Tom yells that he is gay and she stumbles back into the dining room ill, one cannot escape the disagreeable feeling that this is how Mrs. Hunt really feels about her homosexual son.

The film’s special effects enthrall the viewer to the screen in a horribly memorable way, and the victims’ disgusting transmutations are relevant to its underlying topic. (Hamedi refers to Tom Devlin and 1313fx, creator of ZMD’s remarkably detailed special effects, as “an amazing guy who took his time and bent over backwards to create these amazing effects for us.”) The viral zombie epidemic is an extended metaphor for the viciousness of small-mindedness, the tired bigotry that needs only an impetus like national disaster to tip it into bloodthirstiness. Survivors of the epidemic include two female and two male gay characters resistant to the conformist strictures of small town life. Hamedani philosophically says, “Humans tend to be zombies when they follow a certain routine.” His father, who in the film plays the father of young female protagonist Frida (and who with his accent lends a certain cinema verité to the film), worked 20 years as a restaurateur in Seattle. It’s not hard to discern that the younger Hamedani has been traumatized by his country’s lead up to military engagement in Iraq. “There was a lot of support for the war in the beginning. It was fear. There was too much, too fast, too soon, and people believe what they see on T.V. There was no reliable news.”

Hamedani’s inspirations for his film are the cinematic satires-Dr. Strangelove by director Stanley Kubrick and Election by director Alexander Payne. Kubrick is known to have been haunted by the nuclear arms build-up, and his objective was to hold his audience (with comedy) long enough so that it might give consideration to an unpleasant topic. Hamedani thought about Payne throughout his shoot. “The writing in Election is so good. [Payne] loves his characters and the comedy is respectful.” He adds, “Back in the day zombie films were scary. Now they’re often comedic, but not satirical.” He acknowledges that sophisticated moviegoers don’t warm to genre films, and he didn’t know how Seattle audiences would respond to ZMD– in spite of its political satire– so he was thrilled when it went over big. “The audience reacted exactly as I’d hoped.” And adds, “Seattle’s a very intellectual, highbrow town. Sometimes I get frustrated with elitism. It’s hurtful for young filmmakers to be surrounded by elitists who preach against genre films.”

Hamedani takes his cues from Francis Ford Coppola, and Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature film, Dementia 13, was a horror flick. The things he’s learned about filmmaking from Coppola have informed the most important decisions of his career. Godfather Part II is his favorite movie; he did his thesis on it. “I’m obsessed with storytelling, having two stories, cutting back and forth, and I got it from Godfather Part II.” Hamedani thinks horror is a great way to start, that the lighting is very cinematic, that it lends itself to great storytelling. Hamedani was able to talk to Coppola for a moment during the party after Tetro, which showcased at the 2009 SIFF festival, and tell him his first feature was horror. Coppola was supportive. Hamedani says that SIFF has been very good to him, and he calls Carl Spence, its artistic director “awesome.”

When Hamedani talks about encounters with others in the industry, those who have helped him and influenced him, he does so with gusto. His passion for and his appreciation of his particular cinematic journey are palpable. The influences on him are wide-ranging. He says:

“I like John Cassavetes, Kurosawa, Sam Raimi (Evil Dead). I like Kiarostami (A Taste of Cherry). I love Antonioni. I studied Fellini for a good year; I met his co-writer for Intervista. Tetro is a really good, simple, strange film; I could see Fellini the whole time. I like Scorcese, Herzog, Bergman. I like Czech new wave, Forman’s Loves of a Blonde. I like all (Judd) Apatow films, I’d like to work with him. Spielberg is so good with actors, the acting is so good in Munich (Hamedani thinks Munich is Spielberg’s most restrained, mature film). Young filmmakers focus too much on camera work– let’s actually care about the writing, care about the actors, the same way we would if they were in a drama [theatre piece].”

The dramatic arcs for each of the characters in ZMD were crafted with astute attention to story, genre and affect. John Sinno, producer of ZMD and 2007 Oscar-nominated documentary Iraq in Fragments, hired writer Ramon Isao to assist with the ‘fleshing out’ of the characters, but Sinno and Hamedani remained actively involved in reworking the story. Hamedani recounts, “At one point John said, ‘we need more horror, go write a horror scene.’ That’s when I wrote the scene with the little girl.” The film’s main protagonist is Frida, an Iranian-American college student home for un unspecified length of time. When Frida lends a hand to a terror-stricken girl, the expectation that a strong adult will protect this cute-as-a-button child and that they will go through the movie and survive this ordeal together is misleading. Hamedani refuses to be subdued by expectation or by what has worked in the past. “I don’t like safe films. That was my middle finger to the filmmakers who use cute kids to keep the audience invested.” Hamedani’s investment is to drop us into a kind of war-zone that very few Americans have ever experienced: one of uncertainty, carnage and mayhem.

The most disturbing scene in the film is the one in which quick-witted, good-natured Frida is tortured; her only crime is the misfortune of having Iranian antecedents. How did Hamedani know in 2006 the extent to which the CIA was involved in torturing terror suspects? “Abu Ghraib. I was going off what I’d heard about innocent people being taken and locked up in small rooms and tortured.” How did he know the audience could tolerate this excruciating scene, coming on the heels of 2009 disclosures about the extent of the ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used in Iraq and other places? “I hope the audience feels uneasy about torture. It’s supposed to take you out of the film. You’re laughing, ‘ha, ha,’ and then… ‘is this supposed to be funny?’” Sinno warned that putting a nail through the arch of Frida’s unblemished teenage foot was reminiscent of Jesus Christ being nailed to the cross, and that it might create an uncomfortable if not entirely unintentional parallel. Hamedani insists he isn’t in the business of making religious innuendos. Not consciously, anyway. Deliberate or not, the effect is chilling.

Frida, played by Janette Armand, is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill female horror protagonist, either, and hers was the most challenging character arc for the creators. Hamedani recounts, “Ramon [Isao] and I tried to give her some edge. She’s a pothead and says things that would get [her] killed in any other horror film.” The character has traits that feel true-to-life. Hamedani admits that he was very lucky to find an actress like Armand, who has so many distinctive and ultimately complementary features. “She had to be ethnic, all-American, a pothead, attractive, so many things at once.” Armand got a BA in Drama from the University of Washington in 2008, and ZMD is her first film. She displays vibrancy and openness, and fictional Frida displays so much common decency in the face of unimaginable brutality that watching her makes you pray if you were in her shoes you would be as decent and resourceful. Armand pulls you in directions that are surprising; you feel invested in her survival.

Another atypical element in the movie is its B-plot story involving two gay partners, Tom and Lance (played by Doug Fahl and Cooper Hopkins), who venture back to Port Gamble to relieve themselves of the stress of keeping their relationship under wraps, and who are ironically swept into the maelstrom of the epidemic. Tom’s ‘coming out’ to his mother is a come-out-again, go-back-into-the-closet-again ordeal for Lance and the audience, but a few seconds into the confessional scene the film gives us one of its moments of pure theatre. The dimension of absurdity is lobbed onto the screen. As Tom’s mother morphs into a dim-witted predator, her degradation is topped by the defensive action of her son’s partner Lance, who with a deft movement completely restricts her ability to move. Previously fearful Tom browses through the family photo album as though nothing unusual has just occurred. The scene leaves a nauseous aftertaste, not because of its graphic nature, but because it is unflinchingly funny as well as horrible. It is morally discomfiting. If there is anything that can illustrate the folly of trying to understand human activity, here it is. The unpredictability of the two characters, and indeed our own alliances as we watch the two men struggle with hate and love, are laid out bare. Tall, lanky, dressed in tight jeans and a white Panama hat, Kevin Hamedani does not appear to be the kind of young filmmaker you would expect to take on a gay theme, but he is unapologetic about tackling hypocrisy. He is suspicious of homophobic people; he wonders what it is they’re afraid of in themselves.

Frida’s fictional father, portrayed by Kevin’s biological father Ali Hamedani, succumbs to the epidemic. Although the character is inflexible and impossible to deal with from his teenager daughter’s point of view, he is true to his culture and he is authentic. After eight long years of real war waged in Iraq, one wants someone from the ancienne regime to survive, even if only in fiction, so his downfall comes as a blow. Cheryl Banks, a politically correct survivor drawn from Hamedani’s real-life middle school drama teacher and played by Cornelia Duryée Moore, swivels a full 180 degrees before the film draws to a close. When the scourge has finally fallen on itself in exhaustion, and daily life in ‘idyllic’ Port Gamble is returning to normalcy, she stands before her fellow citizens and exhorts them to be “vigilant against any future threat,” because “we can’t protect a island, or a country for that matter, on peace alone.” After everything that has happened, after witnessing a society steeped in barbarity, one silently begs: Ms. Banks, please concern yourself with preserving your civil rights and your humanity… never mind vigilance or future threats. It was Sinno’s idea to have Cheryl Banks abandon her idealism. Behind her, the camera zooms in on crayon drawings by fictional child survivors of the epidemic. An “I Hate Arabs” by-line accompanies a drawing. Hamedani pauses before commenting on the final moments of the film, on its nihilistic undertones. “The drawing next to the hate speech is a picture of me. It’s a self-portrait.” The real terror lies in realizing that the seeds of destruction are there all along, lying dormant beneath the glassy surface of neighborly coziness.

Leone Fogle edits and writes for onscreen magazine.

I always approach internships with worst-case scenarios lodged in my head. I convince myself that I will have to pull out all the stops to make sure my attire is as sharp and as business classy as I can muster, that I should expect to make endless amounts of coffee, and prepare myself for an onslaught of menial labor. And while I have been lucky to avoid such an internship position so far, I continue to be surprised by the actual work and work environment I find myself in, and 911 Media Arts Center was no exception. Instead of cardigans and pencil skirts, I was able to wear clothes that I was comfortable in, clothes I could imagine doing real work in. I’ve always felt like a dress code inhibits and confines a person, and is a silly exterior way to judge the merits of a workspace. 911 is comprised of amazingly intelligent and hardworking people wearing shorts and flip-flops, and I really couldn’t imagine it any other way. And while 911 Media Arts Center does indeed run on caffeine, they respect my dislike for coffee and have never asked me to make them some, though I expect they’ve picked up on the fact that I wouldn’t know what to do. The menial work in particular is one aspect of internships I fully expect, but once again I was both excited and comforted by the fact that all the work I did and continue to do, regardless of its initial importance, has always served to help the center. Non-profit work is by no means glamorous, but is certainly rewarding in many exciting ways. I have been able to take part in the Seattle International Film Fest, watching films and posting reviews on 911’s social network, meet an amazingly diverse and intelligent group of people working within the realm of media arts, get a first hand perspective on the Seattle arts community, get some valuable first-hand experience in running a non-profit, and watch as 911 adapts, celebrates, and works within the community. This has been the most amazing summer in my college career to date, and I have gained so much respect and admiration for the work that 911 Media Arts Center does, and its place within the amazing city of Seattle.

After having interned at 911 Media Arts Center for almost three months now, I can think of no other place that better serves the Seattle community. To me, 911 Media Arts Center is the ideal non-profit, consistently catering to the communities various media needs, fostering creativity in the arts, and enabling people to come together to build upon each others experiences. 911 is a secondary home and community center, a place to feel comfortable enough throw around thoughts and ideas that might even manifest themselves in ways you never thought possible. In my three months here, I have never felt stretched beyond my means, but have been challenged day to day in trying to understand that with a small amount of resources themselves, they are still able to be an amazing resource for others. I hope to take that and apply it to my own life, and serve as a resource within the Bryn Mawr community. I have made friends here and gained some very practical knowledge that will continue to influence me when I return to school, and even on through my future career. 911 Media Arts Center is a place I will most certainly return in the future, and a community and internship I will undoubtedly miss when I return to school.

This year the Seattle International Film Festival celebrated its 35th anniversary. This seminal Seattle institution was one of the reasons I moved to Seattle 18 years ago, and it has been an amazing window into the world of film for many in our city all this time. SIFF is the biggest film festival in the United States and is considered by many to rank among the top ten in the country. At 35, SIFF is more ambitious than ever. Following their venture into year-round film exhibition with the establishment of the beautiful SIFF Cinema a few years ago, SIFF is about to make another big leap. This bold new step will take SIFF into the realm of film education. However, this year it seemed as though SIFF showed signs of aging and of being out of sync with the times.

With all this in mind, I would like to examine some of the thoughts I had while attending the film festival this year:

A lot has changed in the film industry in the last 35 years. We live in an age where accessibility to films is no longer an issue. A good festival sets an agenda of what is worthwhile among the dizzying array of films produced in the world each year. As the film industry moves into new and un-charted digital terrain where film revenues are dwindling and film output is at an all time high, film festivals all over the world are scrambling to keep filmmaking and film viewing relevant in the twenty-first century. Some of them, like SIFF, have ventured into the year-round exhibition business with varying degrees of success. Others are acting as mediators between funding agencies and filmmakers. However, with the plethora of entertainment options available to moviegoers these days, film festivals should be focusing on their audience more than ever and delivering a rich and rewarding festival experience. Due to its incredible size, SIFF experience centers around what was unfortunately missed rather than on what was seen and enjoyed. The feeling of community is lost that a smaller festival would engender. With their top-notch website, SIFF does its best to help attendees navigate its cinematic offerings; this year, SIFF even unveiled an iPhone application that allows attendees to sift through the festival’s nearly 400 films. Even so, the feeling is that one is never able to adequately cover the festival, nor therefore share that experience with others.

In addition to its unmanageable size, SIFF takes place at the wrong time of year. Just when most Seattleites are coming out of hibernation to salute the sun, filmgoers are asked to spend an entire month in a darkened theater. This year I could not convince a number of friends to check out SIFF’s offerings with me; I was turned down because those friends preferred to spend their time outdoors enjoying the season’s first gorgeous weather. I would bet that the festival would gain a 20-30% bump in attendance if it were rescheduled in the autumn, winter, or even sometime earlier in the spring.

On the curatorial front, the festival has had a history of discovering gems, (The Stunt Man, for example), and has been credited with promoting German cinema in the 1980s. Apart from its emphasis on size, however, it’s hard to see a distinct curatorial strategy of late. This comes at a time when many festivals are focusing their film selections to pursue an identifiable niche. I would argue that there is a niche for SIFF that would give it an edge nationally– internationally even– and that relying on size alone no longer works in this brave new world of 24-hour video-on-demand.

The festival has always made an effort to showcase local films and filmmakers, and the good that it does is incalculable. However, it does so in a way that segregates them from other festival films. This year’s local films were grouped together under the heading “Northwest Connections,” and included several fictional films, an array of accomplished documentaries and even a multi-million-dollar Hollywood film starring Robin Williams screened under “Northwest Connections” only because it was shot in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood and executive produced by a local producer. Another local film received no less than 13 one-star audience reviews at SIFF’s website with one viewer lamenting that two hours of sunny Seattle weather had been wasted on the film. I can’t help but wonder if this film, its filmmakers and Seattle audiences eager to support local film might not have been better served if this particular film had been left out of the festival altogether. One assumes that if a film has been chosen for inclusion in the festival, it is qualified to screen alongside any other film chosen from among the hundreds submitted– otherwise it would not be an official selection.

This year, SIFF threw all its promotional weight behind a single Northwest film. Lynn Shelton’s accomplished, micro-budget film earned several Sundance awards and has been picked up for U.S. distribution by Magnolia Pictures. In the process several lesser-known works by Northwest filmmakers that were craving exposure to attract distributors received little attention, and the filmmakers we left to pursue their own promotion. Perhaps this does not have to be an “either-or” situation; perhaps several Northwest films could be highlighted every year? These films include the film I co-produced, ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, and terrific audience favorites like The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle and True Adolescents. Even without much promotion from the festival, ZMD screened to sell-out audiences and was voted fourth most popular film alongside Morris: A Life with Bells On.

A primary mission of any film festival is to deliver the chosen films in an ideal theatrical setting. Traditionally, SIFF films have been presented to the audience in a way that is more literate than at many other festivals. When Darryl MacDonald (one of SIFF’s founders and its longtime director) introduced films, the presentation was sometimes more exciting than the film presented. He was able to shed light on the significance of the film being shown, the circumstances under which it was made, and explain why it was selected for the festival. In addition to engaging the audience, these well-crafted presentations showed filmmakers that the programmers had carefully considered their selections and that they respected the films being shown enough to take a little extra time to prepare an introduction for an appreciative Seattle audience. Introductions now offer little insight into the work that’s about to be presented; after mundane announcements about voting and sponsors, audiences are told that they are in for a special treat. I believe each film is special, and that its uniqueness deserves special consideration as much as it deserves a paean extolling its general noteworthiness.

One of the mandates in festival planning is to show a film the way the director envisioned it. Showing hundreds of films with a variety of film and video formats can be a real challenge for projectionists. The opening night film, In the Loop, had soft spots on the screen, and sound echoed throughout the beautiful Paramount Theatre. These problems, coupled with the actors’ fast moving British accents, greatly reduced the effectiveness of this first-rate film. There was no audio for the first five minutes of a film screened at Pacific Place Cinemas; reels were projected in the wrong order at The Uptown; audiences missed the ending of The World’s Greatest Dad at The Egyptian when the projector bulb blew out during the film’s climactic final scene. Because film festivals are the main chance the majority of these films have to be shown in a theatrical setting, festivals have a responsibility to present the works they’ve selected in the best possible light. Other festivals struggle with these problems, too, but many festivals offer filmmakers a chance to do a technical check before they’re screened to ensure proper projection and audio. Currently SIFF’s contract states that filmmakers must pay a fee if they ask for a tech-check, but a free check could become an unlooked for boon if SIFF reigned in costs associated with logistics and size, and delivered a better exhibition experience to its patrons.

The opening night party this year was a scintillating, celebratory start to SIFF’s 35th-anniversary festival. Because Seattle is celebrated for its democratic fair-mindedness, however, I found it sadly unbefitting for Seattle to quarantine VIPs in a separate tent so that they wouldn’t have to mingle with “regular” guests. Not only is this not fair to the Seattle audiences who were asked to support the festival during the opening ceremony, but it put a literal barrier between visiting filmmakers and their local audience.

I think everyone agrees that SIFF is one of Seattle’s cultural treasures, and that SIFF is lovingly managed by a tireless, educated, ambitious and dedicated staff. Although the above critique may rub some associated with the festival the wrong way, I offer it with the best interests of SIFF in mind. I want the festival to enjoy another 35 years of bringing great films to audiences in Seattle. I want the success of Humpday and The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, True Adolescents, and ZMD to inspire a new wave of creative and resourceful filmmaking in our fair city. I want the art of film to remain relevant.

John Sinno is a writer and producer, and founder of Seattle-based Typecast Films.

by Nichole Rathburn

“Ultimately, martial arts means honestly expressing yourself…empty[ing] your mind. You have to train, you have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it, it’s there. When you want to move, you’re moving, and when you move, you’re determined to move.”

And with the words of the immortal Bruce Lee, Walking to the Cage, Matthew Hickney’s documentary on mixed martial arts, or MMA, begins. A Seattle-based screenwriter, filmmaker, and director fascinated by the stories and challenges we carry as individuals, Matthew’s work runs the gamut from the experimental to the commercial. After moving back to Seattle from Los Angeles in 2006, he became interested in making a feature-length documentary, and began to write. Making a movie proved to be no easy feat, and after several attempts at producing screenplays and raising money, Matthew became frustrated.

“I was inspired by the Sundance success stories of individuals who had made movies for less than ten grand. After seeing a short documentary piece that a friend of mine produced on moped riders in southern California, it seemed to be something I could pull off and I immediately began to brainstorm…what did I have around me? What did I know about? What would be interesting? By that time I had already achieved my blue belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.”

Matthew’s interest in mixed martial arts had been sparked by a visit to Amoeba Records in L.A. After randomly purchasing a DVD of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) fights to screen for friends, he realized that his perceptions of mixed martial arts had been skewed by ignorance.

“I was amazed at how much went into each fight, and how intricate and technical every moment of a fight was. I likened it to a game of human chess.”
Soon after, Matthew began to train in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, an offshoot of Judo focused on grappling techniques. “I fell in love with the sport and the art, and could see how beneficial this type of training could be in so many areas beyond the mere physical exercise aspect. I had made some awesome friends and felt a new sense that is difficult to put into words. A swagger, I guess, and an appreciation for simpler things.”

Through Matthew’s work in Jiu Jitsu, he came into contact with several men training to become amateur cage fighters. He quickly realized that showcasing the hurdles they faced could provide an opportunity to explain the connection he had found between mixed martial arts and his new quality of life.
Matthew also realized he had found a way to introduce cage fighting to viewers in a positive way. The general public rarely sees anything beyond the physicality of the fight itself, which can be off-putting if they are lacking in knowledge. “I felt that a lot of people had a negative impression of the sport, and through highlighting the community building aspects of it, the personal strength, respect and camaraderie, I could craft something that would offer a different, more progressive perspective.”

The pre-existing relationship that the director had with this subject provided Matthew with a valuable opportunity to get the footage he needed to prove his point; the fighters he chose to interview were comfortable enough with Matthew to give him honest glimpses into their community and support systems. Privileged enough to be allowed to see his interviewees (whose experience levels range from very experienced to beginning) at their most vulnerable, Walking to the Cage emphasizes how the fighters’ relationships with each other enriches their lives.

Matthew’s documentary also reminds the viewer of the oft-forgotten link between the condition of our bodies and our spiritual and mental well-being. Mixed martial arts are not necessarily an outlet for aggression or anger; the intense physical concentration needed for cage fighting feeds into many other aspects of life in a positive way. One interviewee says, “after fighting in front of 250 people, giving a speech in front of 30 doesn’t seem so bad.” By achieving such extreme physical goals, other hurdles — personal and professional — become easier to jump.

Matthew is active in Seattle’s media arts scene, having screened work at Northwest Film Forum and STIFF (Seattle’s True Independent Film Festival), as well as dedicating time to workshops and youth programs at 911 Seattle Media Arts Center and SOTA Humanities in Tacoma. He also works as a freelance editor and videographer. Despite Matthew’s broad range of media and life experiences, making Walking to the Cage has provided him with valuable lessons. “I feel more sensitive and empathetic to people and situations. It just feels good to create something [videos] that can bring some thought or emotion to an audience, and hopefully cause someone to think about the subject with a different perspective. It is my pleasure and passion to make movies…I couldn’t see myself doing much else.”

Walking to the Cage will informally screen on June 6, 1:30pm at the JewelBox Theater at 2232 2nd Ave. As an official selection of STIFF it will ‘premiere’ on June 11, 7pm at Central Cinema. Central Cinema is located at 1411 21st Ave., at 21st and Union.
More of Matthew Hickney’s work can be seen at www.chokeproductions.com.

Nichole Rathburn is a Seattle-based writer and student at Cornish School of the Arts.

by Scott Driscoll

Picture a young married couple in bed, laughing. It’s late. They lose interest in sex and agree it’s time for sleep. The doorbell rings. The husband gets up to see who’s disturbing them. It’s a bearded long lost friend, just back from Mexico. It’s the stranger at the door routine, but with a twist. The bohemian friend, who needs a place to stay, doesn’t mesh with the wife’s plans to get pregnant and start a family.

Cut to the interior of a low-budget hotel room. The friends convene to produce an unorthodox art video. Art, that is, with a porn theme. What’s unusual is that the porn is to involve two heterosexual friends. Is this a nod to the literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s assertion that asexual homoerotic passion between two males represents our purest manifestation of love? Or, will they follow through and actually have sex?

The story arc that leads from that doorbell ring to the hotel tryst is Humpday. And Humpday, which will probably be marketed as a romantic comedy, is proving to be Seattle director and writer Lynn Shelton’s breakout film.

Premiered in January 2009 at Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, the country’s leading showcase for independent films, showcased at the centerpiece gala in Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF), and picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures, Humpday is slated to appear in theaters sometime in summer 2009. Shelton’s third narrative feature film, Humpday may actually pay dividends to the cast and crew, who worked for minimal pay, but who accepted percentage points of the take in lieu of industry salaries. Meanwhile, Shelton’s low-budget film has drawn interest from Los Angeles. Shelton won the 2009 Someone to Watch Award, presented by Hollywood’s Film Independent’s Spirit Awards, and in May won the Seattle Mayor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in Film, presented by the Mayor’s Office of Film and Music. She is currently reading scripts sent to her by her new agent in L.A.

Shelton’s success with her latest film reflects an industry in Washington and Seattle that is healthy and growing. “Since the state incentive came on line in February 2007,” says Amy Dee, executive director of Washington Filmworks, “we’ve seen exponential growth, especially in Seattle. This year [2009] the state legislature took the incentive from 20% to a 30% return, a big jump that really makes a difference.”

Filmmakers in Washington State who can show expenses surpassing the minimum of $500,000 are invited to apply for a post-filming 30% return, or rebate. In 2007 Washington offered $1.5 million in funding assistance to filmmakers. That figure more than doubled to $3.5 million in 2008, and Dee projects that in 2009 the state will “give back” as much as $8 million.

Last year, in 2008 according to Dee, Seattle was rated by MovieMaker Magazine to be among the top ten cities in the U.S. for independent filmmaking. Eight narrative features shown at SIFF were Washington based in terms of money spent on local production services and talent as well as location. They are: Humpday directed by Lynn Shelton; Finding Bliss directed by Julie Davis; World’s Greatest Dad directed by comedian Bobcat Goldthwait but filmed and crewed entirely in Seattle; The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle directed by David Russo; True Adolescents, directed by Craig Johnson; The Spy and the Sparrow directed by Garrett Bennett, and Zombies of Mass Destruction directed by Kevin Hamedani.

Why did Humpday hit for Shelton?

“I yearned for a high level of naturalism,” says Shelton. “I shot it with handheld cameras and a minimal crew on set, and the scenes were shot in sequence as much as possible to make it easier for the actors to have a natural feel.” By using two cameras and minimal lighting (one light and two reflectors for most shots), she was able to help the actors maintain their sense of continuity, eliminating the long wait in between shots that lots of lighting demands. Even with the minimal use of lights, Humpday is less experimental looking than her earlier films.

My Effortless Brilliance was shot using only two handheld cameras and natural lighting, but Brilliance has more of a bouncy, gritty, cinema verité documentary feel than Humpday. Brilliance premiered in 2008 at the country’s number two independent film showcase, the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas, and will be distributed by IFC Entertainment. Also a “buddy” story, Brilliance follows two re-united male friends into the woods of Eastern Washington on a late night hunt for an elusive cougar.

Great filmmaking, Shelton demonstrates, can be done on a low budget. She won’t say what filming Humpday cost; she is hesitant to disclose the dollar amount she’s spent on projects partly because it’s difficult to assess given the amount she’s received in-kind donations. Major resources were donated, such as a place to stay for the lead actor, Mark Duplass, locations and food for the cast. Costs that couldn’t be donated were offset by grants from “4 Culture” from King County, “City Artists” from the mayor’s office of arts and cultural affairs, and not-for-profit status conferred by Northwest Film Forum.
She received a smattering of funds from private benefactors.

The low cost of production was a “happy side-effect” rather than something that was planned. The entire Humpday shoot was done in ten days in an effort to keep the cast and crew moving together seamlessly together through the arc of the narrative. A standard Hollywood film takes 28 days to shoot.
Brilliance was filmed in seven and a half days, again with most resources donated by friends and family. “If you’re uncle owns a cool pick-up truck, and you can borrow it, you try to work that into the script,” she says. She doesn’t want emerging filmmakers to be stymied by lack of funds or difficulty securing grants. Her first narrative feature, We Go Way Back, is the story of a young stage actor whose goal seems to be to please the men in her life. It premiered in 2006 at Park City’s alternative film festival, Slamdance, where it won the Grand Jury Award for the best narrative feature and the best cinematography.

A glance at the 43 year old’s filmography bio—experimental and documentary films dating back to 1994 followed by music videos—suggests a life devoted to making films. That wasn’t always the case. Her first love was acting; she was addicted to feeling the “electricity between the actor and audience.”

After studying theater in college and moving from Seattle to NY for auditions, Shelton landed a series of roles in one-act plays that were “misogynistic, women were either raped or murdered.” She was fast on her way to becoming a “theater slut.”

Being on stage suddenly seemed “vain.” She enrolled in the New York School of Visual Arts in the MFA Photography Program. It was there that she discovered film.

“Video allowed me to really explode with creativity,” and gave her a marketable skill. “I used a digital program to edit and got work in New York editing corporate commercial stuff.” When it was time to start a family, she and her husband moved back to Seattle, where she got work editing her first film, Measure, a dance film showcasing a dance-team duo, “33 Fainting Spells.”

“I edited that film for free, but it showed at a lot of 35 mm film festivals, and then people sought me out to edit feature films. That’s the nice thing about working in Seattle– you have opportunities like that.”

Shelton admits that she was “harboring a secret desire to direct.” That chance came with We Go Way Back. The now defunct Seattle non-profit The Film Company raised enough money to produce five feature films a year, and impressed with Shelton’s editing on earlier films, The Film Company commissioned her to do a feature-length narrative film (minimum 75 minutes) that would employ a Hollywood-style set with a big crew, fixed cameras, staged lighting, and lines that had to be memorized.

“When they came to me with the idea I had no story. That was okay. They thought you’d write differently if you knew the film would get made.” Within five weeks she had a script, and within nine months, using The Film Company’s cast and crew, she shipped her film to Sundance and Slamdance. She was 39 at the time.

Shot mainly in Seattle, We Go Way Back is a story about a disillusioned adult looking back to her pre-adolescent self to see what went wrong. Protagonist Kate, played by Amber Hubert, listens to the voice-over of her younger self, 13-year-old Katie, played by Maggie Brown. Katie ‘talks’ to Kate in letters written from an earlier time. Kate spends time on the couch drinking, screwing, and pondering why the harder she works to please the men in her life, the less they seem to care for or understand her. Kate becomes the theater slut Shelton worried about becoming.

Kate lands the lead role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Told by the director that she needs to speak the lines in Norwegian, she hires a coach and learns Norwegian. Despite the effort, the director decides it’s just not working. What if, he suggests, Hedda were taller? Maybe Kate could wear stilts?

Shelton claims she didn’t intend for men in the film to seem evil. “They certainly don’t see themselves as rapists” or users. But the film refers to autobiographical material. As a young woman Shelton was date raped by a friend. “I used to get really angry. But now I realize I had been complicit. So this movie is about exploring her [Kate’s] passivity. It’s a cautionary tale.”

Aside from a two-week run at Seattle’s Varsity Theater, We Go Way Back never got distributed. The reaction from women who’ve seen the film, she claims, made it worthwhile. “They say when they see it they’re seeing themselves.”

That big-budget film taught Shelton what she didn’t want. “Everything is shot out of sequence to keep the number of filming days as short as possible. The actors are considered last.” Filming Brilliance, she “slashed the number of people on set to the minimum– a director of photography, a sound guy, me the director, and occasionally a second camera operator.” Working this way made it possible to get multiple angles without laboriously resetting lights and cameras. “It allowed me to give the actors a lot more freedom to develop their roles.”

Shelton learned she could achieve the naturalism she sought by developing the script with the leading actors. The lead role in Brilliance, a writer in his late 20s whose pride took a hit when his second book bombed and who wants to rekindle an old friendship, was developed as a collaboration between Shelton and actor Sean Nelson, who sang in a band and was at the time also writing for Seattle’s free weekly alternative publication, The Stranger.

“I do like structure, though,” notes Shelton. “I dislike too much improvising on screen. I have a thorough outline of each scene, the meat of it, and how it feeds into the next scene. We talk a lot about character backstory. My actors know who they are when I let them talk.” She adds, “I let them go for 20 or 30 minutes, and in the editing room, cut it down to the 5 minutes I need. My goal is to make it seem like we’re a fly on the wall in these peoples’ lives.”

The story is set mainly at a cabin in the woods somewhere east of the Cascades. The friend, played by Basil Harris, has moved out to the cabin. It’s been two years since the friends have seen each other. That night in the cabin there’s a lot of drinking. Another friend, played by Calvin Reeder, shows up with a rifle, and Calvin wants to go cougar hunting. The action pushes to a dramatic climax that night, fading into early morning, when, fed up with Sean’s carping, Calvin raises the rifle, points it, and tells Sean to shut up.

How did this become Humpday?

“I pitched Mark [Duplass] the idea, and then let Mark develop his own character. I cast around him. I had a script in place, no dialogue. That was improvised by talking with the actors.”

There’s Ben, played by Duplass, who chooses to marry the conventional Anna, played by Alycia Delmore. Then there’s Andrew (Joshua Leonard), the would-be artist with wanderlust who has yet to complete a project but who’s having fun in an X-rated Huck Finn sort of way—basically by refusing to grow up and get serious.

Mix those extremes together and what do you get? Temptation. A Dionysian party at a friend’s apartment, Ben stripping to his tee-shirt to show he can get down, too. And, a challenge. Andrew throws down the gauntlet. “You’re all locked up and can’t do porn,” which, after more banter, incites Ben to retort, “Okay, I’m renting a hotel room, Sunday night. And I’m getting the equipment.”

From there the tension mounts. There’s Anna to consider, believably so, but at its heart, the story is about the halves that are at war in so many of us: the rational, disciplined Apollonian side that wants a conventional slice of the American Pie, versus the Dionysian side that wants to indulge and take pleasure to an ecstatic extreme. And it’s about the downside of one-upmanship.

So why does Humpday work? Maybe it comes down to this: Shelton’s talent for drawing fly-on-the-wall naturalistic behavior out of her actors; an emerging ability to edit scenes in a way that keeps narrative tension mounting; and a story that taps into themes in which we all have a stake. Bake that together and you serve a film that keeps viewers, this viewer at least, wanting more.

Scott Driscoll is a Seattle-based free-lance writer and teacher.

By Shannon Gee

David Russo has always kept almond milk in his refrigerator. He says if he didn’t make films he would be a dental hygienist. And he thinks Walt Whitman is the greatest artist since Shakespeare. One can’t be sure of the influence that almond milk has had on his work, but office hygiene and Walt Whitman figure in Russo’s first feature film, The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009.

“Whitman was a complete individual, the first slacker artist who indulged his body and his mind and was completely outside of fashion. The character of Weird William is my homage to Walt Whitman,” explains Russo as we sit down in one of the office building hallways that serves as a location in Dizzle. In this corridor, Dizzle’s band of janitors vacuum, gripe and mop like charming delinquents in the twilight hours after office-worker drones have left the building. And their boss Weird William supervises… wearing a dress.

There seems to be a bit of Whitman in most of the characters in the film. Dizzle begins with Dory (Marshall Allman), a data manager, who after experiencing an overload of white-collar office chatter inanity, fritzes out and quits. He finds a new career through Spiffy Jiffy, Weird William’s (Richard Lefebvre) janitorial company that is staffed by a misfit bunch that includes the hyper-sexual couple Ethyl (Tania Raymonde) and Methyl (Tygh Runyan) and the charismatic, motor-mouthed OC (Vince Vieluf), a struggling artist-amongst-the-urinals.

Why Russo chose janitors to be the protagonists in his very first screenplay and feature length film is one part personal history, and one part American. Russo began writing the script in early 2003, a couple of months before Operation Iraqi Freedom began. Russo himself was a janitor for over a decade and that post 9/11 brand of “you’re with us or against us” patriotism jogged some memories. “It brought me back to that feeling of being marginalized, of being a janitor,” he explains. “You’re a receiver of culture but not really a participant in the culture. So that point of view, that janitor’s eye view of the world, is sort of what I was really feeling at the time.”

The invisibility of Dory, OC and the gang make them an ideal trial group for a bit of nefarious experimentation run by Gary (Matt Smith) and Tracy (Natasha Lyonne) of Corsica, a research firm that test markets novelty gems like farting wine bottles and non-F.D.A. approved cookies that create the illusory comfort of freshly baked cookies still warm from the oven.

A steady diet of chemosynthetic cookies strategically and deliberately placed in trash bins (“Being a janitor, we ate out of the trash a lot. We did and we do!” says Russo), cause the male janitors, but not the women, to crave salt, experience horrible cramping and wacko hallucinations. This is where “Dizzle” drops into something markedly Russo-ian: dazzling imaginative sequences made in his distinct animation style, a hands-on, analog technique that has developed and evolved throughout Russo’s short films.

A self-described “weirdo animator,” Russo’s shorts have screened all over the world and have garnered several awards, including The Stranger’s Genius Award, and the Special Recognition Award given by the Betty Bowen Memorial panel for the visual arts. He went to Sundance with Populi in 2002, and Pan With Us in 2003, where Pan got an Honorable Mention. These two films have action that leaps far beyond the confines of any animation cell; from open fields to speeding pavement, Russo moves objects he’s painted or built (a bird drawn on paper that transforms to metal, an endless rolling carpet of shadowy leaves that stretch to infinity) effortlessly through never-ending landscapes. The process is painstaking, time consuming and uniquely his. “The opening sequence (of Dizzle) took me a LONG time,” he reports. The scene is a breathtaking journey of a bottle traveling in a smeary drift of blue and purple water. “People would be shocked [if they knew] how long it took.”

In “Dizzle,” the construct of Russo’s own imagination and the subject of the film are blue fish-like creatures that are borne out of the market research experiment … and the male janitors’ digestive tracts. They make memorable appearances and make for some good old-fashioned, slapstick butt jokes. “Giving birth to a little blue fish… is very much the feeling I get being a male artist in my culture,” he says when asked about what Little Dizzle, a single biogenetic specimen, represents. “The film itself … is Little Dizzle, the thing that gets born. It’s this misfit creature that I knew was going to come out malformed. I knew it was destined for possible oblivion.”

The possible oblivion Russo is referring to is “Little Dizzle’s” continued search for distribution after its debut. It is a film that defies description somewhat, but Russo wanted it that way. “There was a time when we as movie goers were more adventurous,” he says. “And I built my film for those people. I don’t really think there is a niche for me, but I’m just going to err on the side of vision, I’m going to err on the side of originality and just let the chips fall where they may.”

One chip has already fallen towards his next project. After the Blue Man Group screened Dizzle, they tagged Russo to work on their next project, a film to be shot so it can be shown in no less than 3-D IMAX. Their film about “the human brain and its functions within a musical operatic structure” seems like a natural next step for Russo. “I feel like I’ve been struggling with 2-D my entire life,” he explains. As a filmmaker who has created feverish and distinctive animation with hand crafted/low-fi techniques, it will be very interesting to see what Russo will do with some of the highest-fi technology around. “The more I learn about 3-D it’s like ‘oh my gosh,’ all my short films…they’re struggling to have a dimension they don’t have. So this is my opportunity to run off into the distance with that.”

Shannon Gee is a writer and documentary filmmaker; she produces the documentary series “Community Stories” for the Seattle Channel.
This article will be reprinted in ON SCREEN magazine, a publication of 911 Seattle Media Arts Center.

by Tajuan LaBee

German born composer, inventor, sound sculptor Trimpin has been described as one of the most talented and undervalued artists in the nation. * Trimpin, who uses only his last name, has been the recipient of a 1996 Guggenheim fellowship and a 1997 MacArthur Genius grant, so it is surprising that there has been no commercial recording of his music, and that his name for most Seattle residents does not conjure up images of scuptures, like Dale Chihuly’s does.

Enter San Francisco based filmmaker, Peter Esmonde, who decided that Trimpin would be a good subject for a feature length documentary. Over the course of two years, from early 2006 to early 2008, Peter filmed Seattle native Trimpin in his workspace environment and in concert, and the outcome is Trimpin: the sound of invention, which is having it’s west coast premier at the Seattle International Film Festival in May 2009.

What made you choose Trimpin as a subject for a documentary?

I wanted to observe someone working creatively, across disciplines, with various collaborators, using multiple design methodologies and a wide range of aesthetic criteria. And I hoped to spend time with someone who – just by the nature of who they were and how they worked — challenged the aesthetic assumptions and practices of those around them.

To put it in context: this society values people on the basis of what salable commodities they produce, how famous they are, or how much they can consume. It’s a narrow and horribly pernicious way of viewing humanity. And anyone who tries to make a living as a truly creative person in that kind of society has their work cut out for them.

So, for very personal reasons, I needed to observe and learn from a highly creative person not tempted by the lures and snares of a market-driven society. I needed to witness the life and work of someone who would not trade in their creative gifts in order to become rich or famous or fashion a more readily commercial product. I had to find a creative person who not only retained the courage of their convictions, but reveled in them.

All of this led me to Trimpin.

You’ve mentioned that it took you months to shoot something resembling “passable footage.” ** Why was that and what did you learn from that process?

I wasn’t speaking about focus and exposure — or even composition. I learned that retaining a producer/director’s overview while doing the nuts-and-bolts work of a cinematographer means making a lot of compromises.

To shoot well, you need to be extraordinarily open and alert. The footage always betrays your emotional state; if you’re tired or distracted or closed off, it becomes painfully obvious on the screen. You need to continually evaluate what’s taking place around you in the context of the argument(s) you’re hoping to make in your film. Ultimately, translating that argument into mise-en-scene equals cinematography.

What type of preparation did you have to do before starting this film?

I prepared in the same way I do before every film, doing lots of research about the subject and his world– tried to appreciate Trimpin’s modernist roots in Dada and Fluxus; his connection to composers like John Cage and Conlon Nancarrow; his deep respect for free jazz, particularly the work of Anthony Braxton and Cecil Taylor; his ties to sculptors like Jean Tinguely; and his affinities with traditional makers of music. He is inspired by the repetitive ‘music’ that machines and automata make, too.

All that research was a prerequisite for my initial conversations with Trimpin.

What were some of the challenges you faced translating to film the experience of observing a Trimpin piece in person?

First off, I needed to determine what exactly ‘translating the experience’ meant before I could proceed with any kind of filming.

From the outset, it was clear to both Trimpin and myself that I’d never be able to reproduce the experience of being in a space with a Trimpin sound sculpture. The best I could hope for was to determine precisely what the most central audial and spatial aspects of each sculpture were, then do my level best to represent them.

Assumptions about the very nature of what I was up to – representing rather than reproducing – led me to specific choices around filmmaking process, apparatus, and personnel.

Did you find yourself working more with your sound department than in any other film you’ve done?

Having worked as a sound editor myself, I was determined to give the music in this indie documentary the kind of treatment usually reserved for commercial studio features. And for some of the professional doc folk, divvying up the work in that way seemed a bit puzzling and off-putting.

So I needed to work closely and supportively with the audio people – especially music editor Phil Perkins and sound designer Jim LeBrecht – to make sure key dialogues and exchanges took place. I wanted to make certain each of them was in a position to do their best work.

I didn’t spend any more time recording, editing, or mixing than is usual for me – but spent much more time organizing resources and teasing out everyone’s best game.

You filmed Trimpin in Seattle for two years. What was your overall experience of the Seattle art scene and how does it compare to other scenes in other major cities you’ve worked in?

I have to admit that I quickly fell in love with the arts scene here. Having worked in LA and NYC, I anticipated I’d have to make my way through labyrinths of attitude and artspeak — but I was surprised to find both artists and art professionals in Seattle and Tacoma refreshingly straightforward, generous, and wonderfully dedicated to the work at hand.

And — this being the Pacific Northwest — they generally had more physical room in which to work. So their ideas and their work seem more expansive.

Seattle is known as a big music city. Was that a factor in making this film?

Yep. Lots of people with big ears in this town – and Trimpin’s smack in the middle of it. I’d really like to say ‘thanks’ to the Seattle arts community for all the help I got on this film, so there will be a special screening of Trimpin that will happen July 1st at Experience Music Project in Seattle Center. Trimpin will be there himself. I’d like to think that some of the joy in and through music that I found in Seattle comes through in the film.

* “[Trimpin is] one of the most stimulating one-man forces in music,” Charles Amirkhanian, http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Trimpin.shtml. “[Trimpin is] one of Seattle’s most talented and best-hidden artists,” Rock Hushka, http://www.tacomaartmuseum.org/page.aspx?hid=442.

** http://www.indiewire.com/article/sxsw_interview_trimpin_director_peter_esmonde/.

Tajuan LaBee is a Seattle-based filmmaker and frequent contributor to ON SCREEN magazine.

By Ty Hulse

The Internet promises a new world of distribution possibilities, and anyone can succeed. This is a presumption that is usually false. Before the Internet, selling a film was practically impossible without a distributor, because distributors controlled the market. Filmmakers didn’t make much even when they got them distributed, because the retailer would take 50%, the distributor would take 60% or more of what remained, which left the filmmaker less than 20% of sales. So selling direct via website not only offers the opportunity to double money made on a film, but provides a mechanism for the filmmaker to brand himself or herself and his or her movies by controlling the look and feel of the movie’s site. Proper branding improves the reputation of a filmmaker and increases the likelihood that visitors will become repeat buyers. But succeeding requires a good understanding of marketing tools.
Any viable distribution plan has two parts: 1) monetization (a way to make money); and 2) promotion. Major distributors work to monopolize monetization, both on and offline. They have successfully monopolized standard distribution to the extent that no independent can compete with. The advantage of the Internet is that large distributors cannot control every avenue open to a would-be on-line independent distributor.

Promotion costs money and time, and so the bigger players still have an advantage over the smaller ones. Indie filmmakers thus need to work more intelligently with the resources they have in order to maximize chances of success. Independents, by utilizing the Internet, can control their marketing, target specific audiences, and do it at a lower cost than they could elsewhere.

Monetizing

Success requires that the filmmaker use as many methods to earn revenue as they can. Pay-per-view retailing is the most obvious means of earning money and the method with the highest potential for turning a profit. But selling direct is just one way of monetizing a movie. Another method is to sell through retailers who already have a known brand. Selling through an existing retailer helps to increase the likelihood that consumers will purchase a film, and increases consumers’ opportunities to purchase.

Amazon.com is one of the better retailers, and they have a built-in system for independent filmmakers called CreateSpace.com. Through this site, any filmmaker can sell DVD’s or downloads. There have been a few sports documentaries that have done very well on this site. Documentaries have a huge advantage because they are not sold using their own “brand,” but instead rely on the “brand” of the sports team they are documenting. Success in the retail world, whether on or offline, requires that a film be built on a solid brand or promotional strategy, and this is where independent marketers run into difficulties.

The problem is that most people who go online to purchase a film already know what it is that they want to buy. This means that most of the money made selling online is made selling movies that are already blockbusters. Therefore, the independent marketer cannot depend solely on a few retailers to help carry his or her film; a film must be sold through a large number of retailers to meet with success. In order to expand beyond a few retailers such as Amazon.com, the filmmaker must use Business-to-Business (B2B) distribution methods.

B2B on the Internet is the process of marketing and selling to businesses. This works differently from using retailers such as Amazon.com, because in the B2B process one must build a relationship with the retailer, or with the warehouses/shops that sell to retailers. There are a number of websites that help with this process, places where retailers go to purchase their goods. By promoting a film on the warehouse sites, by promoting directly to retailers, and by selling films at bulk rates, a filmmaker can add a large number of stores to their revenue stream.

The difficulty is that most wholesalers on the Internet deal in cheap goods– dollar stores, used goods, overstock and so on. This means that a movie sold through a wholesaler on the web typically has to be sold cheap. There are potential advantages to this– short films in particular could be distributed to dollar stores, in a way that would provide a new outlet for a genre that typically doesn’t generate much in the way of sales. And as the B2B online industry grows, filmmakers will find additional opportunities to sell their movies directly to retailers through the Internet.

Beyond wholesalers, another method of adding more sources to a film’s revenue stream is the ‘drop shipping’ method. Drop shipping means that the ‘e-tailer’ will attempt to sell a film. If they are successful in doing so, they will pay the filmmaker for the sold film and the filmmaker will ship to the e-tailer’s customer. Doba.com is one of the many drop shippers that allows any filmmaker to sign up to become a supplier for their e-tail customers.

A method similar to drop shipping is something that was developed and used first by Baker and Taylor and a handful of other companies for offline book and video stores. Baker and Taylor’s distribution method has made them one of the most successful distributors, and is a major reason that Amazon.com has been profitable. Amazon.com used Baker and Taylor to distribute, and therefore didn’t have to purchase or stock many products, because book and video stores can order products without paying for them unless they are actually sold. While nearly any content creator could historically sign up with Baker and Taylor, the Internet has simplified this process greatly.

Once a movie has identified a number of ways to sell to retailers, filmmakers should begin to promote their films to businesses. Filmmakers should have a section of their website devoted to selling direct to retailers just as they would to do for customers. They should sell their movies to retailers for about 50% less than market value. The exact amount depends on which distribution system the filmmaker is using to send to the retailer, and which distribution group, if any, the filmmaker and store agree to utilize.

Similar to the retail method of monetization is the pay-per-view system. Potential customers resist paying for content online because the original Internet companies offered much free fare, assuming they would be generating a lot of ad revenue. Charging for a service can be difficult. Indeed, even Google has tried a pay-per-view system and had very little success. Again, these problems are exacerbated by the rise of YouTube and other large free-content providers.

Providers of rentals, on the other hand, have met with better success, a hint that filmmakers could and should consider rentals in combination with retailing. It is often easier to convince people to pay three dollars to try something than it is to get them to pay the full twenty to purchase. Netflix, Blockbuster Online, Red Box, and other rental providers have started to take a huge percentage of the total rental market by renting DVD’s through a combination of Internet and mail. Amazon’s UnBox and iTunes, among others, have also had some success renting downloads.

Only UnBox offers a way for independent filmmaker to earn money. Netflix stopped dealing with indie films because they didn’t want to appear to be competing with major distributors. iTunes has determined that they don’t want to deal with a lot of filmmakers, and would rather work with a limited number of distributors, which practically speaking means that a filmmaker must have a deal with a distributor to sell through iTunes. Blockbuster will allow anyone to work with them as a content provider, but has strict supplier guidelines that will prove difficult or impossible for most independent filmmakers to meet.

Beyond sales, advertising is the most common way for content providers to earn money on the Internet. During the Internet bubble, Internet standards were set so that it was difficult for any content provider to earn money through fees. Sadly, ads did not pay as much as was first thought possible, adding to the burden that led to the crash.

The new set of Web 2.0 companies are currently running into the same problem. Ad space does not sell for much on the Internet, so as a result even well-established sites like Facebook and YouTube are struggling to make money. Organizations like MTV say their biggest problem earning money online is the trouble they have selling ad space. Companies such as Revver (similar to YouTube except that they pay a percentage of ad revenue to those who load content) have had serious difficulties selling their ad space, making the amount earned per view very small.

There are a few sites, however, that can and do share a decent amount of money with makers of short films through ad revenue. Atom Films is one, and it is perhaps the oldest the best established among these sites. Their ad system works well because they target their site to a very specific audience, and allow for media ads that earn more revenue per visitor.

Blip.tv offers a syndication service to filmmakers, allowing them to syndicate their films across a number of sites, including MySpace, blogs, and other sites. Blip.tv, furthermore, has a unique and high-value ad format within the videos themselves. While some find such ads annoying, they are the only way for filmmakers to earn money with ads. When reviewing a site that might be a source of ad revenue, filmmakers should keep in mind that certain types of ads pay ten or more times what other types pay; the number of visitors is just one factor to consider.

Outside of the difficulty of earning revenue from ads, the biggest challenge filmmakers face when trying to earn money on ad syndication is that the business is currently fractured into a large number of companies and different services. Some companies offer the technology needed to syndicate, others offer ads to earn money, while others provide a space to show the film. This makes navigating the world of ad syndication complex and often unaffordable for smaller independents operating solo.
Perhaps the only viable solution to the problem is for filmmakers to build their own conglomerates for the web, similar to way that newpapers created CarerBuilder.com in order to compete with online job classifieds. This idea is simple enough: a group of filmmakers would join together to create a site that syndicated and sold ads for the filmmakers’ movies, allowing them to earn money on the content they placed on sites such as YouTube. In practice, however, things could become very complicated unless various rules were established to ensure that the brand remained intact. Negotiating deals with publishers such as YouTube might also raise issues for many alliances of indie films, as they are not yet profitable and so are very concerned with earning their share of any revenue. Furthermore, any rules established to ensure the continued success of the conglomerate make it another disturber, creator of barriers that keep independent filmmakers out.

Promotion

In order to find an audience for movies, filmmaker must either spend time or money promoting their movies. If more time is spent on promoting, less money needs to be spent, and spending more money generally requires less time. Knowledge of marketing methods can help to lessen time and money spent and increase the odds of success in any campaign. It is very important that filmmakers understand that it is not possible to simply make a good movie and walk away from it in the hopes that a large audience will see it, and it will somehow become successful.

The first and perhaps most important aspect of promoting a film on the Web is the film’s website. The difference between a well-designed and a poorly-designed website is not always obvious from a visual point of view. Such differences can be huge, however, when one examines the sales and visitor reactions to a website. For some websites, a few small changes can double or triple sales. Sometimes small changes may not be enough, and the entire website must be redone in order to achieve the same result. Eliminating egos from the retooling process, and focusing on results is important. In order to understand the response to a website, the filmmaker needs to subject it to analytics, and Google offers a free analytics program at www.gooogle.com/analytics. This site includes tutorials that instruct the user in how to use the site.

Even with a good website in place, a movie may not sell simply because the Internet is filled with millions of websites. In order for anyone to find a movie’s website, the film has to be promoted outside of its own website, so that customers know where to look. This kind of promotion requires a combination of public relations savvy and advertising.

The mention of pop-up ads often elicits a groan, but pop-ups can be very useful to filmmakers. Pop-ups have a number of advantages over other forms of marketing, which is why some companies still use them. Netflix has used pop-ups, earning millions of dollars with very little marketing expense. Pop-ups are one of the lowest-cost methods of advertising. Further, trailers can be placed directly within the pop-up. Pop-ups also offer the largest visual branding space for ads on the Internet outside of expensive page-insert advertising.

Another common ad format is the banner ad, or small visual ads placed on the actual web pages. For a filmmaker, these can prove to be an invaluable promotional tool for the same reasons filmmakers have difficulty earning money from advertising: banner ads are the cheapest form of visual advertising, online or offline. Further, banners can be used to target specific interests, demographics and regions. The ability to target viewers and track their responses allows advertisers to make certain that banner ads are effective.

Banner ad targeting also allows filmmakers to show ads to towns and segments of the population that react well to the film in festival. By targeting specific groups of people, the filmmakers can build their movie’s brand within the audience that is most likely to purchase it, while spending the minimum amount of money necessary to do so. Once money has been made, filmmakers can then continue to expand their reach without fear of losing money.

Currently, banner ads are fading in popularity on the Internet and are being replaced by text ads. Text ads are growing in popularity because they bring lots of low-cost visitors to the site, and filmmakers have only to pay for a text ad when someone clicks on it. They cost less than other ads overall, but for movies, text ads may not be as useful as banner ads for a number of reasons. First, a text ad does not provide visual recognition of the product, it offers name recognition only. Second, if a banner is well-designed and interesting, the banner can receive enough clicks to make it cheaper than text ads.
In order to know what advertising mix is right for any given movie, the promoters need to keep track of which ads are bringing the most people to the website, and need to keep track of the ads that not only bring people to the website but bring customers who actually end up buying the movie. ‘Google Optimization’ helps the filmmaker make this determination.

The key to success in advertising is to review the effectiveness of any ad campaign in order to constantly improve marketing methods. The effectiveness of an ad campaign can be improved to a point where a filmmaker is earning more money than is being spent. In that case the overall amount spent becomes unimportant because the filmmaker has the potential to earn money for promotion, using minimal investment.

There are many ways of marketing online beyond advertising, and many of these methods are free, outside of the time spent to set them up. Each of these methods—as with websites—require that consumers find them to be successful. This means that some knowledge of SEO is necessary. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is in essence building a page, writing an article, posting a video, or placing some other form of content online which people can find easily using search engines. SEO is important because most people on the Internet find what they are looking for using search, whether it a search portal like Google or Yahoo, or an onsite search within YouTube or MySpace. Making content findable by search is important to the success of that content.

The most important aspect of SEO for most filmmakers is ‘keyword’ or ‘keywords’—words in the text of a page that people use to search with. Search engines determine content by the words in the page to an exacting degree. For example, a page with the words “independent film” on it would not likely be found by someone searching for “independent films,” “movie,” “indie film,” or any other term not on the page. In order to be found, a page must contain that word or phrase that the searcher is using. Many people assume this means they need to put as many search terms as possible onto their page, but this is not the case. A page will typically get better results with three or four search terms than it will with dozens, because it is unlikely that the results will be ranked by more than three or four terms anyway.
In order to choose the words that should be used on a page, filmmakers on a tight budget should use Google’s ‘Keyword Tool.’ This program allows filmmakers to see how many people are searching for a particular word each month, and to see how much competition there is for that word, in other words, how many other results come up when that particular word is searched. Picking a keyword that produces enough searches to be valuable, but that doesn’t have too much competition for a movie’s promotional materials to rise to the top, is tricky. SEO in general can be very tricky, and so anyone who plans to use SEO should research it before performing it on a website. Making mistakes with regard to keywords can actually hurt a website.

Outside of websites, there are many places where it is easier to perform basic keyword SEO, such as Article Marketing. Article Marketing is the process of writing an article and posting it to an article directory (such as ExineArticles.com) where it will show up in search, and be republished on blogs and other websites. By placing three good keywords in an article, the article can be seen by thousands of people, along with the biography of the writer and a link to the website. Be forewarned, however, that too many article links to a website is considered a form of spamming by Google. For this reason many articles should link to a site separate from a film’s primary website.

Finding a subject to write about that is both relevant to the film and is searched can be complicated. A simpler option is to use PR Log or a similar online PR site to submit press releases about a movie. In the case of press release distribution sites, an article about the film and the filmmakers can make it a valuable marketing tool.

For movies running the festival circuit, a press release can be submitted for each festival that screens the movie. This release can include the name of the region, or some keyword related to it, so that anyone searching for entertainment in that area might read the press release.

SEO can also be important for the success of social media. Flickr and YouTube both show up on Google and Yahoo Search and have search features of their own. By choosing the right words for tags and descriptions, a filmmaker increases the likelihood that people will see the images and clips from the movie. Even Facebook pages show up in search, so carefully chosen keywords for the profile aids in getting a film noticed.

Ultimately, for independent films to succeed, both online and offline, there should be coordination between the many forms of promotion and monetization that a film uses for distribution, and increasingly, coordination between films as well. Independent films never have the resources major films have, and for that reason, filmmakers, producers and distributors should work together to find niches they can occupy. This is what the Internet does well; it provides openings for a group of intelligent entrepreneurs to spot and utilize. Forty or fifty horror film writers/filmmakers could band together and create a site that comes up any time that genre is searched, eventually and theoretically making that site a prominent brand for horror. By understanding the unique challenges of the Internet, and beginning to explore the many ways it can be utilized, the Internet has the potential to be a superb marketing mechanism.

By Stelarc

I was always intrigued about engineering a soft prosthesis using my own skin, as a permanent modification of the body architecture. The assumption being that if the body was altered it might mean adjusting its awareness. Engineering an alternate anatomical architecture, one that also performs telematically. Certainly what becomes important now is not merely the body’s identity, but its connectivity- not its mobility or location, but its interface. In these projects and performances, a prosthesis is not seen as a sign of lack but rather as a symptom of excess. As technology proliferates and microminiaturizes it becomes biocompatible in both scale and substance and is incorporated as a component of the body. These prosthetic attachments and implants are not simply replacements for a part of the body that has been traumatized or has been amputated. These are prosthetic objects that augment the body’s architecture, engineering extended operational systems of bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected.

Having constructed a Third Hand (actuated by EMG signals) and a Virtual Arm (driven by sensor gloves), there was a desire to engineer an additional ear (that would speak to the person who came close to it). The project over the last 12 years has unfolded in several ways. The EXTRA EAR was first imaged as an ear on the side of the head. THE EXTRA EAR: ¼ SCALE involved growing small replicas of my ear using living cells. And recently, THE EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM which began the surgical construction of a full-sized ear on my forearm, one that would transmit the sounds it hears.

The EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM has required 2 surgeries thus far. An extra ear is presently being constructed on my forearm: A left ear on a left arm. An ear that not only hears but also transmits. A facial feature has been replicated, relocated and will now be rewired for alternate capabilities. Excess skin was created with an implanted skin expander in the forearm.

By injecting saline solution into a subcutaneous port, the kidney shaped silicon implant stretched the skin, forming a pocket of excess skin that could be used in surgically constructing the ear. The body is a living system which isn’t easy to surgically sculpt. And recovery time is needed after the surgical procedures. There were several serious problems that occurred: a necrosis during the skin expansion process necessitated excising it and rotating the position of the ear around the arm. Ironically, this proved to be the original site that the 3D model and animation was visualized. Anyway, the inner forearm was anatomically a good site for the ear construction. The skin is thin and smooth there, and ergonomically locating it on the inner forearm minimizes the inadvertent knocking or scraping of the ear.  A second surgery inserted a Medpor scaffold and the skin being suctioned over it. The Medpor implant is a porous, biocompatible polyethylene material, with pore sizes ranging from 100-250 micrometers. This can be shaped into several parts and sutured together to form the ear shape. Because it has a pore structure that is interconnected and omnidirectional it encourages fibrovascular ingrowth, becoming integrated with my arm at the inserted site, not allowing any shifting of the scaffold. We had originally considered mounting the ear scaffold onto a Medpor plate thinking that this might elevate it more, and position it more robustly to the arm. But this wasn’t the case and this solution was abandoned after being tested during surgery. Now, implanting a custom-made silastic ridge along the helical rim would certainly increase helical definition but also would make room for later replacement of that ridge with cartilage grown from my own tissues. The helix would need to be lifted enabling the formation of a conch and make the ear a more 3D structure. The ear lobe will most likely be formed by creating a cutaneous “bag” that will be filled with adipoderived stem cells and mature adipocytes. In other words the ear lobe would be partly grown using my own adult stem cells. Such a procedure is not legal in the USA, so it will be done in Europe. It’s still somewhat experimental with no guarantee that the stem cells will grow evenly and smoothly – but it does provide the opportunity of sculpturally growing more parts of the ear… and possibly resulting in a cauliflower ear!

During the second procedure a miniature microphone was positioned inside the ear. At the end of the surgery, the inserted microphone was tested successfully. Even supported with a partial plaster cast, the arm fully wrapped and the surgeon speaking with his face mask on, the voice was clearly heard and wirelessly transmitted. Unfortunately it had to be removed. The infection caused by the implanted microphone several weeks later proved to serious and heroic efforts were undertaken to save the scaffold, after the microphone was surgically extracted.

The final procedure will re-implant a miniature microphone to enable a wireless connection to the Internet, making the ear a remote listening device for people in other places.  For example, someone in Venice could listen to what my ear is hearing in Melbourne. This project has been about replicating a bodily structure, relocating it and now re-wiring it for alternate functions. It manifests both a desire to deconstruct our evolutionary architecture and to integrate microminiaturized electronics inside the body. We have evolved soft internal organs to better operate and interact with the world. Now we can engineer additional and external organs to better function in the technological and media terrain we now inhabit.

It also sees the body as an extended operational system- extruding its awareness and experience. Another alternate functionality, aside from this remote listening, is the idea of the ear as part of an extended and distributed Bluetooth system – where the receiver and speaker are positioned inside my mouth. If you telephone me on your mobile phone I could speak to you through my ear, but I would hear your voice “inside” my head. If I keep my mouth closed only I will be able to hear your voice. If someone is close to me and I open my mouth, that person will hear the
voice of the other coming from this body, as an acoustical presence of another body from somewhere else. This additional and enabled EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM effectively becomes an Internet organ for the body.

The body now performs beyond the boundaries of its skin and beyond the local space that it occupies. It can project its physical presence elsewhere. So the notion of single agency is undermined, or at least made more problematic. The body becomes a nexus or a node of collaborating agents that are not simply separated or excluded because of the boundary of our skin, or of having to be in proximity. So we can experience remote bodies, and we can have these remote bodies invading, inhabiting and emanating from the architecture of our bodies, expressed by the movements and sounds prompted by remote agents. What is being generated and experienced is not the biological other – but an excessive technological other, a third other. A remote and phantom presence manifested by a locally situated body. And with the increasing proliferation of haptic devices on the Internet it will be possible to generate more potent phantom presences. Not only is there FRACTAL FLESH (bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected, generating similar patterns of recurring activity at different scales); there is now PHANTOM FLESH (Phantom not as in phantasm, but as in phantom limb. Haptic technologies generating tactile and force-feedback that results in a more potent presence of remote bodies). The biological body is not well organ-ized. The body needs to be Internet enabled in more intimate ways. THE EXTRA EAR: EAR ON ARM project suggests an alternate anatomical architecture – the
engineering of a new organ for the body: an available, accessible and mobile organ for other bodies in other places, enabling people to locate and listen in to another body elsewhere.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOR EXTRA EAR ON ARM

SURGICAL TEAM- Malcolm A. Lesavoy, MD,  Sean Bidic, MD and J. William Futrell, MD
CARE IN MELBOURNE- Supervised by Wayne A. Morrison, MD
STEM CELL CONSULTANT- Ramon Llull, MD
PROJECT COORDINATION- Jeremy Taylor, October Films, London.
PROJECT FUNDING- Discovery US for the documentary series “Medical Mavericks”.
3D MODEL & ANIMATION- The Spatial Information Architecture Lab, RMIT, Melbourne.
SURGERY PHOTOGRAPHER- Nina Sellars, with funding from the Australia Council.

By Adrian MacDonald

A Skilsaw gets squirrely at the Power Tool Drag Races in Georgetown, 6/28/08.

Rusty Oliver has been making art in Seattle for 10 years, has drawn hundreds to his installations and performances, and presides over an art collective some 30 members strong. But he has never shown in a gallery, and probably will never be the darling of the city arts commission. “If I want to fucking do something I fucking do it,” he says. “I don’t need permits, I don’t need insurance, I don’t need red tape, and when the cops show up, sometimes I stop, sometimes I don’t.”

Rusty stands over a worktable in his Georgetown machine shop, tinkering on a new interactive sculpture. The piece consists of four control consoles in a square, with three large metal cages in the center. To make the sculpture work, people have to fiddle with the controls until together they discover the right combination of switches, resulting in three magnificent blue fireballs coming alive inside the cages. “I expect them to be yelling back and forth and going no, no, throw that lever, or put the fuse in like this,” he says. “They’re going to be decoding this deliberately wonky, anti-intuitive control with a couple other people.”

It is difficult to define the kind of art Rusty’s collective, Hazard Factory, deals in. The work tends toward the sculptural, but with a heavy palette of industrial materials and equipment, and a distinctly interactive element. Rusty calls his MIG and TIG welders his “paint brushes” and his 5-horse air compressor his “texturing machine.”

“What really drew me to it is the fact that you can mix technology, tools, and processes at will,” he says. “If you can work metal you can fix things, or hack machines together, and you really have access to quite a lot of power.” The interactivity is where the hazard comes in. “I rarely put something in front of my audience that is easy for them to deal with. I don’t like audiences really, I would much rather have people get involved.”

The same Skilsaw...shot by the guy in the middle of the first picture...

In Hazard Factory’s most famed project, teams of artist-machinists convert old power tools into moving vehicles and hold the ever-popular Power Tools Drag Races at events like the Georgetown Artopia and Critical Mass and traveling as far as the Robodock festival in Amsterdam. “Legitimately dangerous,” the event consistently attracts an enthusiastic crowd of PBR-swilling race teams who decorate former Skilsaws, drills, and lawn edgers with sponsor stickers, doll heads, plastic brains. The machines get raced, sent off ramps through flaming hoops, and pitted in head-to-head collision combat.

One woman became so involved in the races that she developed a cult following around her machine, a converted Skilsaw on rollerblade wheels she called Lady Safety. “It was the best time she’d had I think, perhaps in her entire life,” Rusty remembers. “She now has a posse.”

Risk and danger is a constant element in all of Hazard Factory’s work, and Rusty revels in being able to challenge people’s boundaries. “On a daily basis, the most dangerous thing anyone’s doing is driving a fucking car,” he says. “That’s a risk everybody takes every day. It’s the minor chances that you take like saying hello to somebody or responding to a phone call or an email, putting yourself out there—those are the kind of things that we as a society should be doing more of.”

In one piece shortly after 9/11, as the US military began bombing Afghanistan, Rusty fastened a dummy bomb to the hood of his car like a giant horn and made readerboards for the side saying “George W. Bush bombed my Toyota because it’s small, foreign, and full of oil.” He drove around for a year that way, engaging in dialogue about the war with anyone brave enough to approach him. “For people to even come up and talk to me was for them to take a chance, for them to come out either for or against the war,” he says. The small few that attacked him for defaming the war were “chickenshit,” he adds. “If you stood there and looked at them and just didn’t blink, they just backed off, they were done. The depth of analysis wasn’t there.”

Rusty Oliver in his natural element.

Then there was last New Year’s Eve, when another local tech-art workshop, Hackerbot Labs, invited Hazard Factory to perform in their industrial Georgetown lot (the location is secret). Rusty and company devised a deafening parade, dressing up like business people and pulling behind them 55-gallon oil drums, lit by road flares. Then came a bombed-out Mercedes Benz, towed behind on chains. The lead actress Janice began unchaining the slaves with bolt cutters, ranting about the evils of global capitalism—“can’t you see, can’t you see”—as tension built.

“Anytime you put a car in front of an audience and they suddenly understand that you’re going to destroy the car,” Rusty says, “All hell breaks loose. Every single time. It’s like something more than a little ugly.” Janice smashed the windows with bolt cutters, while someone chucked an oil barrel through the side window. The audience surged in for the kill, but Rusty held them back—if only because he was explaining that he was going to set the car on fire. “Which is what I did next,” he says. “I charged it with about 15 pounds of magnesium compressed air and a couple of propane cans, and lit it up. It was just a pretty little New Year’s fire.”

Rusty doesn’t have much trouble finding collaborators and volunteers for Hazard Factory projects. At any given time the active roster comprises about 30 people, but the number of people who can be called on to help or consult on a project is “vast.” The group holds weekly meetings of around 5 to 10 people, depending on what projects are up. “We’re a deliberately amorphous organization,” Rusty says. “If you show up and continue to show up, you are in Hazard Factory. If you are no longer showing up, you are no longer in Hazard Factory, or maybe you are no longer participating right now.” What matters is that when participants say they want to take on a project, they do it, on time. “In a few instances you’ll say, this person just didn’t really have the chops, or just didn’t really seem to understand the purpose behind this, or he really didn’t seem to have a sense of egalitarianism about him.”

Hazard Factory at the Robodock Festival 2007, Amsterdam

Rusty takes much of Hazard Factory’s organizational structure from his experience with the Infernal Noise Brigade, an activist marching band that formed in the 1999 WTO protests and lasted until 2006, including a legendary tour of Europe. Famously, the band of some two-dozen musicians made every decision by consensus, and would keep playing even as police began arresting its members.

Artists join Hazard Factory in much the same way they did the Brigade, he says. “Someone would say, ‘hey I’ve got a friend who I think would be a really good addition,’ so they come to one practice, and everybody sort of checks them out musically and socially and sees if they want to work with them. Very frequently that will turn into a long-term collaboration.”

Hazard Factory's Fire on the Duwamish

Rusty is also a founding member of the Stronghold Arts Collective, with a roster of some of the city’s heavy hitters in the underground, do-it-yourself art world. The group of eight includes Randy Engstrom, director of the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and the couple of Gabe Stern and Jordan Howland, the central organizers of the Georgetown Artopia. (Randy and Gabe were also the founders of the lower level bar in the Capitol Hill Arts Center, and ran it for the first year of operation.)

Stronghold recently pooled its funds to buy four houses on Beacon Hill, which they own and live in collectively. “The upshot of that is that now we all do have some ownership, and we have the ability to bootstrap the next art location,” Rusty says. “There have been a lot of interesting side notes as well – there’s a lot to learn in really tight communal living.”

As a central figure in Seattle’s counter-cultural art scene, Rusty is sometimes at odds with mainstream institutions like the Seattle Art Museum. He remembers attending a meeting for the Lawrimore Project (a progressive Seattle art gallery), and being appalled by the group’s lack of a critical eye toward a SAM exhibit bringing art from the Louvre to Seattle.

Rusty, who lived in Paris for 7 months and visited the Louvre extensively, maintains the work is irrelevant to Seattle. “Why is that useful? Why would anyone give a fuck that the work from the Louvre is here?” he growls. “Have they done a single piece about either of our wars [in the Middle East]? Have they circulated so much as even an interoffice memo? Virtually anything in there, you can pretty safely say it’s the work of dead white men.”

To an extent, SAM represents Hazard Factory’s mortal enemy, soaking up all of the attention and funding in the art world and distracting from the culture being created locally by grassroots artists.

At the meeting, “most of the people sitting at the table are art critics, or art makers, or artists—but it’s the gallery crowd,” he says. “I mean, I’m going to this meeting so I can understand what is the non-underground art scene like. Because I have no idea.”

By Amy Sellers

Above the reference desk in the Seattle Central Library’s fifth-floor, 19,500 sq.ft. “Mixing Chamber,” six LCD panels showcase a cascading shower of titles and keywords.

The installation, titled “Making Visible the Invisible,” was designed by UC-Santa Barbara professor George Legrady. Part art and part technology, the display draws real-time data from the Seattle Public Library’s circulation database and visually renders system-wide usage statistics into a vivid display of color and light.

The four phases of Legrady’s display – labeled “Vital Statistics,” “Floating Titles,” “Dewey Dot Matrix Rain,” and “Keyword Map Attack” - correspond to the four key categories of circulation data. In a constantly moving, animated series of floating titles, pulsing Dewey decimal grids and bold numeric statistics, the panels catalogue the volume of materials that move through the library system. As the day progresses, the display grows brighter and denser as it tallies the traffic for the day. The following morning, the system resets and begins again.

This process utilizes a usually ignored type of data called metadata. Metadata is a set of “invisible” additional information linked to most digital files. Most users are familiar with the metadata embedded in digital music files – artist name, album title, maybe a link to the album artwork – that appear when the file plays in a digital music player, but “Making Visible the Invisible” pulls metadata from an unexpected source – the Dewey decimal system.

The Seattle Public Library's "Mixing Chamber."

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Legrady’s piece highlights the metadata attached to specific Dewey decimal numbers and uses that additional information to situate each circulating item into a broader cultural context. Titles, check-out times and keywords create an interlocking web of data and the simple visual display adds order and cohesion to the chaotic mix of information.

In a city that prides itself on connectivity, “Making Visible the Invisible” transforms metadata into a dynamic showcase of the flow of ideas, materials and energy through the Seattle Public Library system. The display creates a cohesive daily snapshot of the shifting interests of Seattle residents and reveals on a day-to-day basis what Seattle residents are thinking and exploring.

The installation is a fitting centerpiece for the “Mixing Chamber,” the floor dubbed the “trading floor for information.” Surrounded by computer terminals and busy patrons typing away, the surroundings add to the concept of the piece. It is easy to imagine a user typing in a keyword and that same keyword popping up onto the LCD panel a short time later.

“Making Visible the Invisible” is not just a novelty display of day-to-day data. Watching the piece over time reveals consistent behavioral patterns of library users. According to Craig Kyte, Manager of General Reference Services, “Materials in the 780’s, typically music and CDs, and the 600’s, called ‘Applied Technology’, things like user manuals and how-to guides, are the highest traffic areas on a regular basis.” As part of the long-term vision of the project, the installation will collect data for ten years and allow for a retrospective look at shifting interests and popularity of materials.

Selected by the library’s Board of Trustees as a part of the “Library Unbound” series, Legrady’s work is a permanent fixture in the Central library. Living in the heart of the glass and steel space, “Making Visible the Invisible” brings digital transparency into the information hub of the library and the collective mind of Seattle citizens.

It has long been presumed that the Internet promises a new world of distribution in which anyone can succeed, a world in which independent films can finally compete with Hollywood. The truth is however that most independent filmmakers have met with mostly poor success using Internet distribution, leaving them and everyone else to ponder why this should be. The reason the Internet has not worked as it should is that it has not been used as it should. Very few people creating content in hopes of selling it on the web understand Internet distribution.

There are certainly more opportunities for filmmakers online then offline. Outside of the Internet it is almost impossible for independents to get their products into stores. The primary difficulty online is in rising above the millions of websites to gain an audience. In order to do this a filmmaker must develop a solid distribution plan. They can’t simply build quality content and hope that people accidently stumble across it.

Any functional distribution plan has two parts: 1.) methods of monetization (earning revenue) and 2.) methods of promotion. At the moment, major distributors are working to monopolize the methods of monetization both on and offline. These distributors have succeeded offline so that no independent can compete with them. The advantage to the Internet is that, although large distributors have come to monopolize most of the methods of monetization, they can’t control them all.

Promotion like the Internet is something no one person can monopolize. At the same time however, promotion costs money and/or time and so the bigger players have an advantage. Indie filmmakers thus need to work more intelligently with what resources they have in order to ensure success. The advantage independents gain in utilizing the Internet is that marketing on the Internet can be measured, used to target specific audiences, and do all this at a much lower cost then they could elsewhere. This means that filmmakers can spend money only marketing to the people most likely to purchase their movies.

Methods of Monetizing Films

Success in monetizing a film requires that the filmmaker use as many methods to earn revenue as they can. Multiple sources of revenue are the way any movie finds success. After all, no movie can become famous if it’s only sold in one store.

Pay-Per-View or retail methods are the most obvious means of earning money and are also the method with the highest potential for profit. Before the Internet, selling a film was nearly impossible without a distributor, as they controlled the sales channels to most stores. Adding to this problem was that filmmakers didn’t make much for their films even when they did get them distributed because the retailer would take 50%, the distributor would take 60% or more of what remained, leaving less then 20% for the filmmaker.

One of the major advantages the Internet offers is that filmmakers can earn 100% of the money from the sale of their film by selling it directly to consumers via the movie’s website. Doing this is fairly difficult and requires a good understanding of marketing methods, which is why most content providers struggle to sell units directly to the consumer. Even so, selling direct via a website not only offers the opportunity to double the money made on films sold, it also provides a way for the filmmaker to brand themselves and their movies by controlling the look and feel of the movie’s site. Proper branding can improve the reputation of a filmmaker and increase the likelihood that visitors will become repeat buyers for their movies.

Selling direct is just one means of monetizing a movie. Another method is by selling through retailers who already have a known brand. Selling through an existing retailer often helps to increase the likelihood that consumers will purchase a film while also increasing consumers’ opportunities to purchase the film.

Amazon.com is one of the better places to have a movie sold, and they have built a system for independent filmmakers called CreateSpace.com. Through this site any filmmaker can sell DVD’s or Downloads. There have been a few sports documentaries that have met with an [increasable] amount of success using CreateSpace.com. Such documentaries have a huge advantage because they are not sold based on their own brand, but instead use that of the sports teams they are documenting. Success in the retail space whether on or offline requires that a film build a solid brand or a promotional plan which is where most people trying to sell independently through Amazon.com, eBay, etc run into difficulties.

The problem is that most people who go online to purchase a film already know what they want to buy. This means that most of the money made selling movies online is through selling blockbusters. Because of this, one cannot depend solely on a few retailers to help carry their film. A film must be sold through a large number of retailers to meet with success. In order to expand beyond a few retailers such as Amazon.com, the filmmaker must use Business-to-Business (B2B) distribution methods.

B2B on the Internet is the process of marketing and selling to businesses. This is different than using retailers such as Amazon.com because in this process one must build a unique relationship with retailers or utilize shops that sell to them. There are a number of websites that help with this, places where retailers go to purchase their goods. By promoting a film on these sites or to retailers in general, and by selling films at bulk rates, a filmmaker can add a large number of stores to their revenue stream.

The difficulty filmmakers will run into for now is that most wholesalers on the Internet deal in cheap goods, dollar stores, used goods, and overstock. This means that a movie sold through a wholesaler on the web typically has to be sold for cheap. There can of course be advantages to this. Short films especially could potentially be distributed to dollar stores providing a new outlet for a genre that didn’t have much sales potential before. Further, as the B2B online industry grows filmmakers well likely find further opportunities and methods of selling their movies directly to retailers using the Internet.

Beyond wholesalers another means of selling through more stores is the drop shipping method. Drop shipping means that the e-tailer well attempt to sell a film. If they are successful in doing so they will pay the filmmaker for the sold film and then the filmmaker must ship to the e-tailers customer. Doba.com is one of the many drop shippers that allows anyone to sign up to become a supplier for their e-tail customers.

A method similar to drop shipping was developed by Baker and Taylor and like companies for offline book and video stores. Baker and Taylor’s distribution method has made them one of the most successful distributors and is the reason Amazon.com was able to find success (Amazon.com initially used them and a few other companies to distribute and so didn’t have to purchase very many products to sell a lot of products). In this method, video/book stores can order products without paying for them unless they are sold. While nearly any content creator could historically sign up with Baker and Taylor, the Internet has simplified this process greatly.

Once a movie has a list of ways to sell to retailers, filmmakers should begin to promote their film to businesses. As part of this filmmakers should have a section of their website which allows them to sell direct to retailers just as they would to customers. In order to do this the filmmaker must sell their movies to retailers for about 50% less then market value. The exact amount depends on which distribution system the filmmaker is using to send to the retailer, and which distribution group, if any, the filmmaker and store agree to go through.

Similar to the retail method of monetization is the Pay Per View System. This method of monetization has had real difficulties because people don’t generally like to pay for content online. This is because the original Internet companies presumed that they would simply earn ad revenue and so offered everything for free. This means that earning money by charging for a service can be very difficult on the Internet. Indeed even Google has tried a Pay Per View system with very little success. These problems are exacerbated by the rise of You Tube and other large free content providers.

Rental systems on the other hand have met with more success, a success which filmmakers could use in combination with retail methods to sell more units. This works because it is often easier to convince people to pay three dollars to try something then it is to get them to pay the full twenty to purchase.

Netflix, Blockbuster Online, Red Box, and more have quickly started to take a huge percentage of the total rental market by renting DVD’s through a combination of Internet and mail. Amazon’s UnBox, iTunes and others have also had a decent amount of success renting downloads.

Of all of these only UnBox offers a real solution for independent filmmakers to earn money off of this growing monetization system. Netflix has stopped dealing with indie films because they did not want to appear to compete with major distributors. iTunes has determined that they don’t want to deal with a lot of filmmakers and so would rather work with a limited number of distributors, which means that a filmmaker must have a deal with a distributor to sell through iTunes. Blockbuster will allow anyone to work with them as a content provider, but has strict supplier guidelines that will prove difficult or impossible for most independent filmmakers to meet.

Beyond sales, advertising is the most common means for content providers to earn money on the Internet, and during the Internet bubble the Internet standards were set so that it was difficult for any content provider to earn money through fees. Sadly ads did not pay for everything it was thought they could, which is partly why the Internet market crashed.

Right now the new set of Web 2.0 companies are running into the same problem. Ad space does not sell for much money on the Internet and so even sites like Facebook and YouTube are struggling to earn money. Organizations like MTV say that their biggest problem in earning money online is the trouble they have selling the ad space they have. Companies such as Revver (like YouTube only they pay a percentage of ad revenue to those who load content) have had serious difficulties selling their ad space, making the amount earned per view very small.

There are a few sites however that can and do share a decent amount of money with makers of short films through ad revenue. Atom Films is one example of these, and it is perhaps the oldest and best established of these sites. Their ad system works well because they target their site to a very specific audience while also allowing for rich media ads that earn more revenue per visitor.

Blip.tv offers a syndication service to filmmakers allowing them to syndicate their films across a number of sites including MySpace, blogs, and more. Blip.tv further has a unique and high value ad format within the videos themselves. While some find such ads annoying, they are the only way for filmmakers to earn any money on their creations with ads. [unclear]

When reviewing a site through which to potentially earn ad revenue, filmmakers should keep in mind that some types of ads pay ten or more times what others pay. So the number of visitors is not always as important for earning revenue

Outside of the difficulty in earning revenue on ads, the biggest challenge filmmakers will face in earning money on ad syndication is that the business is currently fractured into a large number of companies and different services. Some companies offer the technology needed to syndicate, others offer ads to earn money, while still others provide a space to show the film. This makes navigating the world of ad syndication complex and often unaffordable to smaller independents working by themselves.

Perhaps the only real solution to this problem is for filmmakers to build their own conglomerates for the web similar to how newspapers created CareerBuilder.com in order to compete in online job classifieds. This idea is simple enough: a group of filmmakers join together to create a site that would syndicate and sell ads for the filmmakers’ movies, allowing them to earn money on the content they place on sites such as YouTube. In practice however, this idea could become very complicated as various rules would need to be established to ensure that the brand remained intact. Negotiating deals with publishers such as YouTube could also raise problems for many alliances of indie films, as they are not yet profitable and so are concerned with earning their share of any revenue. Further, any rules established to ensure the continued success of the conglomerate put it in the position of being another disturber creating barriers for independent filmmakers.

Methods of Promotion

In order to find an audience for movies, filmmakers must either spend time or money promoting the movies. The more time they spend the less money they need to spend and the more money they spend the less time they need to. Knowledge of marketing methods can of course help to reduce both of these needs while increasing the overall success of any campaign. Even so, it is still important for filmmakers to understand that it is not possible to simply make a good movie and walk away from it in hopes that someone will see it.

The first and perhaps most important aspect of promoting a film on the Web is the film’s website. The difference between a well designed and a poorly designed website is not always visually obvious. Such differences can be huge however when one examines the sales and visitor reactions of a website.

For some websites a few small changes can double or triple the sales that site is able to generate. Many times small changes may not be enough and the entire website must be redone in order to get this same effect. As with any marketing effort what’s important is not egos but how people respond. In order to read how people are responding to a website a filmmaker needs to use analytics, Google offers a free analytics program at www.google.com/analytics. This program also has some tutorials on how to use it.

Even with a good website a movie may not sell simply because the Internet is filled with millions of websites. In order for anyone to find a movie’s website the film has to be promoted outside of its own website so that people know what to look for. Such promotion requires a combination of public relations and advertising.

When most people think of Internet advertising they often think of pop-up ads and groan. This should not be the case for filmmakers however both because there are many other types of online marketing, and because pop-ups can themselves be very useful to filmmakers.

Pop-ups have a number of advantages over other forms of marketing which is why some companies still use them. Netflix for example has used pop-ups to earn millions of dollars with very little marketing expense. Pop-ups are one of the lowest cost forms of advertising there is. Further, trailers can be placed directly within the pop-up so that consumers can click to play a film within the ad itself. Of equal importance is the fact that pop-ups offer the largest visual branding space for ads on the Internet outside of expensive page insert advertising.

Another common ad format is the banner ad, or small visual ads placed on the actual web pages. For a filmmaker these can prove to be an invaluable promotional tool for the same reasons filmmakers have difficulty earning money on advertising. This is that banner ads are the cheapest form of visual advertising there is, not just online, but offline as well. Further banners can be used to target specific interests, demographics, and regions. This ability to target the views of the ads and track their response allows advertisers to make certain that banner ads are also one of the most effective method of visual marketing they have as well.

Banner ad targeting also allows filmmakers to couple their ads with towns and groups of people who reacted well to the film in festival. By targeting specific groups of people the filmmakers can build their movie’s brand to the audience that is most likely to purchase in order to build a revenue stream while spending the minimum amount of money necessary to do so. Once money has been made filmmakers can then continue to expand their reach without fear of loosing money overall.

Currently banner ads are fading in popularity on the Internet as they are replaced by text ads. Text ads are growing in popularity because they bring low-cost visitors to a website as filmmakers only have to pay for a text ad when someone clicks on it. For many, this means that they seem to cost less then other ad types overall. For movies, however, text ads may not be as useful as banner ads for a number of reasons. Firstly, a text ad does not provide visual recognition for a movie; it instead provides short name recognition only. Second if a banner is well designed and interesting which a movie banner should be, then the banner can receive enough clicks to make it cheaper than text ads are.

In order to know which advertising mix is right for any given movie, those promoting the movie need to keep track of not only which ads are bringing the most people to their website, but also which ones are leading people who buy the movies to the website. Again Google Optimization can help determine this.

The key to success in advertising is reviewing the effectiveness of any ad campaign in order to constantly improve the marketing methods. The goal of an ad campaign can be improved to the point where a filmmaker is earning more money then they are spending. That way it doesn’t matter how much or little the filmmaker has to promote their movie, because they can potentially earn the money needed to do so with a minimum investment.

Beyond advertising there are many forms of marketing that can be done online, and many of these methods are free outside of the time spent on performing them. At the same time, each of these methods—as with websites—require that consumers find them. This means that at least some knowledge of SEO is key for their success.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is in essence building a page, writing an article, posting a video, or placing some other form of content online which people can easily find using search engines. SEO is important because most people on the Internet find what they are looking for using search, whether it is a search portal like Google or Yahoo or the onsite search within YouTube or MySpace. This means that making content findable by search is important to the success of that content.

The most important aspect of SEO for most filmmakers is keywords—words which are used in the text of a page that people are also using to search. Search engines determine what something is by the words within it to an exacting degree. For example, a page with the words “independent film” would not likely be found by someone searching for “independent films,” “movie,” “indie film,” or any other term not on the page. In order to be found by people using a word or phrase to search, a page must have that word or phrase in its pages. Many people presume that this means they need to put as many search terms as possible on their page. This is not however the case. Typically a page will get better results with three or four search terms than it does with dozens because it is unlikely that they will be ranked for more than this number of terms.

In order to determine which words should be used, a filmmaker on a tight budget can use Google’s Keyword Tool. This will allow the filmmaker to see how many people are searching for a word each month, and how high the computation for that word is. Picking a keyword that has enough searches to be valuable, but which doesn’t have too much competition for a movie’s promotional materials to rise to the top is a fairly tricky business. SEO in general can be very tricky and so anyone who plans to do SEO should research it before performing it on a website. SEO is complex and making mistakes can actually hurt a website’s ability to be found on search.

Outside of websites there are many places where it is much easier to perform basic keyword SEO such as Article Marketing. Article marketing is the process of writing an article and posting it to an article directory (such as EzineArticles.com) where it can show up in search, and be republished on blogs and other websites. By placing three good keywords in an article the article can be seen by thousands of people along with the biography of the writer and a link to their website. Be forewarned, however, too many article links to a website is considered a form of spamming by Google. For this reason many articles should link to a site which is separate from a film’s primary one.

Finding a subject to write an article about that is both relevant to a film and which people are searching for can be complicated. A simpler option is to use PR Log or similar online PR sites to submit press releases about a movie. In the case of press release distribution sites, the article can be about the film and the filmmakers, which can make them a valuable marketing tool.

For movies running the festival circuit, a press release could be submitted for each festival the movie is accepted to. This release could include the name of the area the festival is in or some keyword related to this, so that anyone searching for information on entertainment in that area would have a chance of reading the press release about the movie.

SEO can also be important for the success of social media. Flickr and YouTube both show up on Google and Yahoo Search and have search features of their own. By choosing the right wording for tags and descriptions a filmmaker can increase the likelihood that people will see the images and clips from their movie that they place on these types of sites. Even Facebook pages can show up on search, so choosing keywords for the profile can aid in getting a film out there.

Ultimately what’s important for independent films to succeed online and off is coordination both between the many forms of promotion and monetization that a film uses for distribution, and between other films. Independent filmmakers can never have the resources that major films do. For this reason they will likely find that they must work together to find niches that they can dominate on the Internet. This is what the Internet offers, openings that a group of intelligent people can come to dominate. For example if forty or fifty horror film writers were to get together then they could create a site that was found first any time someone searched for horror films and that became the major brand for these types of films.

So while many filmmakers have not found the success they would like to have online, if filmmakers come to understand the Internet then it well begin to work better for them.

by T. LaBee

While on her first trip to Ethiopia, professional photographer, Amanda Koster, took a picture of a young giggling boy holding up a bushel of the bananas he was selling on the side of the road. He was wearing a winter coat and standing behind him was a little girl smiling. She then brought that photo back to the U.S.

“I showed some people some of my pictures and they honed in on this particular picture of this boy with the bananas,” she remembers. “They looked at me and they said, ‘Are you sure that you were in Ethiopia? Are you sure? Because this kid isn’t starving. He’s holding food and he’s wearing a winter jacket’” Aside from the fact that someone would actually think that she could have been mistaken about what country she was in, Amanda was also taken back by the fact that even a group of educated people, like those she had shown the photographs to, would be so ignorant about this country that they actually steadfastly believe that everyone there is starving in the desert, covered in flies.

“The reason they thought this is because the only pictures they had seen, up until that point, were pictures that Sebastiao Salgado took of babies being weighed in grain scales during the famine of the eighties.” Although she is an inspired fan who studied the Brazilian photographer in school, Amanda has made a decision to try to avoid taking the shocking and depressing style of photographs that pervades Salgado’s career.

“I don’t feel that it does people a whole lot of respect. Plus, enough people out there are bringing back all these pictures so why do I need to be another photographer bringing back just sad stories that creates a sense of hopelessness out there?”

Amanda has expanded her artistic ideology from a personal mode of operations into an actual organization. After spending years, taking photos all over the world, and having so many people asking her if they could come along, she decided to found Salaamgarage (www.salaamgarage.com), a socially conscious travel company for media savvy people. She describes it as, “essentially creating trips that I would have done on my own, but opening it up to eight or ten people to come along and work on this particular project with a focus.”

This adds successful company founder to an already impressive list of titles that she has been accumulating over the years; professional photographer, activist, anthropologist, teacher, and soon to be published author.

The activism came along before the photography. “I’d always been helping since I was real young for one reason or another. I don’t know why,” Amanda admits. “I’ve always felt that it was important to help. My mom asked me once, ‘why are you trying to help people so much’ and I just looked at her and told her ‘because I can’ and she just looked at me like, ‘okay’”

Amanda carried her love of people to college. “I thought I was going to be an anthropologist,” she confesses. “I studied anthropology, got a degree in that.”

Like so many other great discoveries, Amanda found her love for photography by accident. “I took a photography class because I thought that it would help me as an anthropologist. I thought that it would help to have good pictures of my research. It just seemed to make sense.”

When she took the course though she says, “that was it. I fell in love with photography. Madly in love. I actually caught some kind of crazy disease.”

She then enrolled into the Creative Arts Workshop in New Haven, Connecticut. “It’s just like 911 [Media Arts Center] basically. It’s just this little community school where the teachers are professional photographers. So I got to learn from pros.”

Amanda received a lot of support from the staff at Creative Arts. “They were able to teach me what it takes to start as a photographer, like, how to get into the business,” she reminisces. “They got me jobs. They got me internships at Yale and all this stuff. Unbelievable amount of support from this school. I owe a lot to that school.”

While attending Creative Arts Amanda took a class called “The Concerned Photographer” that paved her way and helped her figure out what kind of photography she wanted to do. In this class she had to do a photo essay that would help people and do a project on a photographer she admired.

As the photographer she admired she chose Sebastiao Salgado. “I was very influenced by his work,” Amanda expresses. “His images are unbelievable. He always shoots in black and white, 35mm, and I just felt that that’s what I wanted to do with my photography. Those pictures, you don’t have to speak any language to see the pictures. You can look at the pictures and you can just learn and see a situation that you’ve never seen before. A human situation that you might have never known about and a situation that needs help.”

For her photo essay she chose to photograph in a battered women’s shelter.
“I had to use a lot of different techniques that I had learned in photography to keep the women’s faces or certain children’s faces out of focus, or use motion, or something like that.”

That proved to be a pivotal project for her because when she showed those pictures to people she says, “they were really impacted. So that’s where it all started for me, in that class.”

In 2004 Amanda was planning a trip to Kenya. Around this same time she met a woman named Loyce Mbewa-Ong‘udi, who is from Kenya and at that time was trying to figure out a way to address a growing concern back in her native village of Rabour. This resulted in Loyce founding her non-profit organization, the Rabour Village Project.

“I saw there was a lot of changes in issues around HIV/AIDS and orphans,” Loyce recalls. “So Sara [a mutual friend] happened to be in a certain photography class room with Amanda, and Amanda also, at the very same time, had gotten some work she was going to do in Kenya, but in a different city.”

Together with Sara and another associate, Loyce and Amanda constructed a plan to tell the stories of about five people from the village to help illustrate, in a positive way, what is going on in the area and the various different ways that people are dealing with it.

Loyce explains, “I’m born and raised in this certain village where, though there is this problem, I wanted stories of what is right. Many people talk about the downfalls, and the sadness, and diseases, and all this stuff about Africa, but they never seem to talk about what is great. And my experience, having been in the U.S. and here for a short while, I seem to have had a lot of magnification of what is not right.”

After formulating the project that they called, AIDS is Knocking, Amanda headed to Kenya by herself with Loyce following later. Loyce put Amanda in contact with her family and had them show her around.

“We hadn’t had any photographers in the village.” Loyce admits that along with the two other members in their group Amanda was, “the first white people that really went to the village and lived in the community and brought back the stories in a honorable matter.”

The project had a lasting effect on Amanda. She explains, “the way Salaamgarage is structured is just like the project I did with Rabour Village Project.”

“When I created Salaamgarage,” Amanda remembers. “I saw people traveling and I saw people with travel albums and people putting their photographs into Flickr, Facebook, You Tube, all that social media that’s coming out.”

She noticed positive potential in these recreational activities. “People were creating content and bringing it back, and the content was about their trip. Like, ‘me in front of the Taj Mahal,’ or something. And I thought to myself, ‘well, what would happen if all those tourists, and all those travelers would visit an NGO for a couple days‘…..And instead of coming back and saying, Yeah, there‘s all this poverty and there‘s all these problems, actually meet people that are solving these problems and get to understand these problems on a different level. With a little more depth.”

Amanda attracted the attention of Seattle based Bennett & Hastings Publishing after their graphic designer got a look at a book Amanda made for her clients and friends.

Referring to Amanda’s photos and other content as, “graphic, intense work,” Celeste Bennett, co-owner of the independent publisher, felt that Amanda’s, “values really aligned with our values.”

“The publisher loved the idea about Salaamgarage…they thought ‘How could we make a book that shows your work and shows what your doing with Salaamgarage because we also want to support what you’re doing?’”

Instead of an photography book with just pictures it was decided to also include Amanda’s writing.

Amanda explains, “basically, the book is a collection of four different projects that I’ve done in the world in Brazil, Kenya, Romania, and Morocco and journals that I was writing while I was on these trips.”

The book’s name, Can I Come With You?, comes from the mouths of just about every person who use to ask Amanda about her trips before she started Salaamgarage.

“That’s basically why I started the whole organization in the first place, because so many people were asking me that,” she elaborates.

Amanda Koster’s fusion of media, travel, and social awareness has a made several positive ripple effects in the many different lives and countries she has visited, and she plans to continue this trend with among other things a trip to Vietnam next year to document the removal of land mines left over from the Vietnam war. Having a firm understanding of the importance of vision and pre-planning, Amanda has been preparing the trip since early last year.

“I don’t take on a project until I see the path,” she tells. “When I see the path, I can’t turn around. Like with Salaamgarage, whatever happens with Salaam Garage happens, but I saw that it could work.”

For more imformation about Amanda Koster and Salaamgarage go to www.salaamgarage.com

Tamiko Thiel has become one of the world’s great media artists, working in one of the most unusual and elusive mediums available - virtual reality. With cutting-edge technology and an educational background that encompasses Product Design (Stanford), Mechanical Engineering (MIT) and Applied Graphics (Munich Academy of Fine Arts), she has combined multiple disciplines to pave the way for career-making, socially-critical art. Tamiko’s first professional experience with virtual spaces came about when working for Steven Spielberg - creating a 3D virtual reality world (Starbright World, a precursor to the popular Second Life) for seriously ill children - an experience which would shape her work for years to come.

As an independent artist, she has explored topics like the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II with Beyond Manzanar (2000). In The Travels of Mariko Horo (2006), she imagined a surrealistic exploration of the culture of the West, including trips to a Christian paradise, seen through the eyes of a young Japanese woman.

Her most recent piece, Virtuelle Mauer, is a form of historical preservation in of itself - allowing participants to explore and experience a literal and metaphorical structure that no longer exists in the physical realm.

Tamiko describes her art candidly, and reveals her inspirations, influences, and her hopes to connect with audiences of all ages, backgrounds, and nationalities.

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So let’s start - you have an end user, they’re not familiar with the work, they come to the exhibit and see your piece - what’s their experience?

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Well I always try to provide some amount of information beforehand - just because so many who come to these exhibits haven’t dealt with 3D worlds before.

I very specifically orient my technology in the presentation to more general audiences rather than gamers. Also, it’s often that they’re not always art audiences - especially with this Berlin Wall piece, the topic is interesting to a wide range of people who are not necessarily art museum goers. So I try and provide information before they go in. Depending on the venue, some curators don’t want to provide any information at all except for the title and name of the artist.

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Virtuelle Mauer: T+T Tamiko Thiel & Teresa Reuter (2008)

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In 911, there’s a hallway before the installation space, and in this case, I’m working right now on a number of information panels that start out with the basics. You know, “Where is Germany?” “Where is Berlin?” (Laughs) “Why was the city divided?” Keep everything rather brief… but we do a very long chronology of events that will also be up.

We try to provide some context for people, because most people know, or have heard of the Berlin Wall at some level, but don’t necessarily know what it was really about.

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That’s my own experience. I’m 27 years old, was never a huge history buff - I knew the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, it divided Germany, was a symbol of East vs. West… but my own personal knowledge of it is very limited.

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Right, and I suspect that’s typical. Obviously, when we showed in Berlin the situation is very different. There were lots of people who came to the exhibit who had actually lived directly in our project area, during that time, in the houses that we show in the 3D space. The topics of my pieces are fairly diverse and if you’re familiar with my previous piece at 911, The Travels of Mariko Horo, that’s a very fantastical piece, more of a fantasy trip. In the case of Virtuelle Mauer, or the first piece I did called Beyond Manzanar which was set around the Manzanar interment camp where Japanese Americans were interned in World War II in California, it’s very historical.

Any pieces with a real historical background I try and give that background, because partially they are, admittedly, political pieces and I’m trying to provoke people’s interest - there’s something interesting in the topic that I think is worth knowing about.

There’s obviously a very big span - if you have 4-year-olds, I don’t expect them to know much about history at all, if they’re 12-year-olds, they may not also have much interest in history - God knows I didn’t at that age - but what I’ve seen and I’ve learned from showing Beyond Manzanar, is that kids, even if they have no interest and no idea what the piece is about, are attracted to it. Even if they can’t shoot anything, you know, they’re still interested in the technology - they see it as something that belongs to them. It’s there that they can show off their competence to their parents and grandparents and share it with each other. They have no fear of the joystick - they pounce on it and it’s often hard to get them to let someone else on it. So the kids just jump on the joystick and sail off in the world, and have fun with the space. But in the process of doing so, they’re also very open, because they’re paying attention. Their defenses are down, and it’s very easy then to talk to them about the content - they’re interested in hearing about it.

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Beyond Manzanar: Tamiko Thiel & Zara Houshmand (2000)

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So this was an effect I hadn’t expected at all with my work. I hadn’t planned on addressing any kids at all… and then it started happening with Beyond Manzanar. Grandparents started talking and telling me that they were able to talk to their grandchildren for the first time about growing up in an internment camp. There was a context all of a sudden where the kids could understand more of what that meant. Educators told me these pieces can be a bridge between generations - where the kids show the adults how to use the technology and the adults talk to the kids about the content. It’s really worked out well in that way - with both Manzanar and the Berlin Wall pieces, I find all sorts of teachers bringing in their classes, parents coming in with their kids, and that’s an effect I didn’t plan and which really surprised me and delights me.

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Let’s talk about usability for a second. How did you arrive at a joystick control system to navigate throughout the 3D worlds?

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I started at Starbright World, which was for seriously ill children, and all sorts of ideas for tricky and interesting interfaces fell by the wayside when you realize that the kids are connected to all sorts of machines - they’d have all sorts of ailments so accessibility really means giving them general devices. These were also spaces that were just running off of PCs and oriented around mouse and keyboard controls, and that’s how I started, rather than starting from a game background. I’m really not a very good gamer at all, actually, I just don’t have the patience for it.

When I did Manzanar one of my primary user groups was going to be adults over the age of 55 - people who were born the last year of World War 2 in the camps. Even the mouse and keyboard proved difficult for them - lots of them had never used computers before in their life, and I thought back to my earlier work with people with disabilities. People with very severe spinal cord injuries could often drive a wheelchair using a joystick, and I figured that if they could navigate real 3D spaces with a joystick, then they could certainly navigate virtual worlds with a joystick. Over the years I’ve often tried out different interfaces that would be interesting in various ways, but I always come back to the fact that I want to interest a very wide audience. They might be 4-year-olds, they might be six-foot-five, they might be in wheelchairs… they might be old and never have touched a computer in their life.

All this ends up boiling down to a joystick being the most accessible - they don’t have to be able to stand, they don’t have to be able to walk, they don’t have to really do much more than move their fingers or maybe their arm around a little. So it’s really the accessibility that boils it down to the choice of the joystick.

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Speaking of making it accessible, and speaking about the differences in generations, do you have an agenda or narrative that you want to get across to an audience, or you just sort of let them explore, discover, and take their own experiences away from it? Or do you really drive them to a certain point?

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It’s somewhere between the two. I think if I had a very specific message to communicate then I would prefer to write something, or make a film where I can control their experience very strongly. Although I do tend to have for each piece a number of things that I want to communicate, and it’s a challenge for me to create a somewhat flexible space that the user has to explore on their own, see if I can set up the space in a way that brings across the sorts of messages I’m interested in communicating. A lot of this comes from my father Philip Thiel’s work on experiential spaces - some of his life’s work was with dealing with how you could design spaces as an urban planner or as an architect to be dramatically interesting and communicative, what sort of emotional effects that different types of spaces, and sequences of spaces can have on the user.

So these, for me, are all tools in order to try and communicate a certain type of meaning, but it’s also a very wonderful experience to talk with different people who have used my works and to find that they’ve come up with all sorts of different interpretations and different experiences that I didn’t necessarily plan. That’s a certain aspect which, actually, any artwork has… you can’t force the person to see an artwork in only one way. It’s more interesting that they can bring in their own thoughts and experiences and interpretations.

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Going back to games, you said you weren’t a “good gamer,” but have you explored what’s been offered, not only in the mainstream but the independent scene - see how people are using interactivity to elicit emotion?

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I’ve explored a little, but… the games where you have to solve problems or, you know, reach a certain skill level before you can proceed to the next point - I don’t get very far with those. At some point I got Myst and Lara Croft [Tomb Raider] because I was very excited by the games… and found that I couldn’t even get out of the first scene and I wasn’t willing to, for instance, go online and find out all the cheats or all the information to proceed further. So that for me is a serious handicap - I’m always delighted when someone who is a better gamer or more knowledgeable will show things to me.

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Lara Croft of Tomb Raider fame. Copyright Eidos, 1996.

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I think it’s a deficit of mine and I’m hoping that I’ll get to know more people involved with gaming - I’ve been to a lot of conferences that really deal with issues of gaming, and the way people think about things are so different from what I personally want to do. It hasn’t been that helpful, which is too bad, but it seems like the purposes of what those people want to do and what I want to do are very different.

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That might be an inaccurate statement - “deficit as a gamer.” To enjoy a movie, you don’t have to be a good ‘film watcher’… or a ‘good reader’ in the sense that you can’t enjoy a book. Of course, some skill and proficiency are involved in terms of vocabulary and things of that nature, but the actual challenge that many games present can definitely be a limiting factor in what people experience.

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Yeah, and that was actually a reason for me to want to do my 3D worlds. I thought that there was a lot that could be done in 3D environments, that the majority of people (including people like me) weren’t able to get into. That’s also why I stress the access issue - so that I can reach those people, just like me, who would never devote the time to mastering a game just to get to the next level.

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Does Virtuelle Mauer have a definitive end point, or is it more open-ended and anyone can just come in and pick up at any time?

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Because I show in installations, I specifically want to have the large screen about 9ft by 12ft so that it’s an immersive experience, ‘virtual reality,’ so to speak, without the hardware. And that sort of installation means that you have to deal with the fact that people can wander in and wander out, so Beyond Manzanar actually had a circular structure. It was really only a loop, although people didn’t realize that.

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Beyond Manzanar: Tamiko Thiel & Zara Houshmand (2000)

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None of the pieces have a real beginning and end - Manzanar had a specific sort of high point and low point, but the other pieces have multiple smaller and dramatic sequences, but there’s definitely no beginning or end point. And therefore each person’s experience is different depending on where they come in and what they do as their first thing. That’s also an interesting challenge to create a piece that has some sort of dramatic structure and dramatic pull, without having that set beginning and end. Of course, it goes against all classic drama theory, so it’s one of my favorite challenges.

There are definite sequences that are controlled - the theorists like to have a set of infinite possibilities that are infinitely combinable and each time you go into the piece it’s completely different and stuff, but I’m not interested in creating a piece that sort of fits someone’s theories about what would be the coolest ludological structure to have, I’m interested in conveying a certain set of material of experiences, of information, of images. I want to build dramatic arcs that have very definite sequences of events. The piece as a whole consists of a collection of these dramatic arcs, and depending on what order you encounter them, things will happen to the user in a different order but they’re not really changing things at all. I decided early on that my interest was in creating this specific type of dramatic structure rather than creating, so to speak, a machine that could generate any number of possibilities.

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So it’s easier to get your message across if you have these pre-ordained events. Otherwise if things are a little random happenstance, then it leads to confusion and…

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Yeah. It’s not a fully open experimental space, there’s definitely control and I usually use a balance of free will and determinism to try and also create a certain amount of dramatic structure. To give the user the impression that they have flexibility, that they have freedom of movement, and then at some specific points, confront them with their lack of control in order to convey a dramatic point or convey a message about imprisonment.

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Speaking of control, do you implement any tutorials to guide the user experience?

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No, no, I try to keep the navigation simple enough, so when people say “How do you this?” I can say, “Push it up to move forward, push it back to move back, right to move right…” and they get it. If they can get up the courage to actually move the joystick then they get it, and I employ real world analogies - up a stairway, down a stairway, then a door…

There are other pieces that I’ve done where going in a doorway can change the world substantially. It’s not quite so strong in the Berlin Wall piece, but that’s a very conscious decision to try and use real-world situations so that I don’t have to have a tutorial. Also, say there’s three people in a room using the installation, a fourth person comes in and watches the first three for a while, the other three people go out… It’s sort of like, at what point do you bring in the tutorial? And if they’re a person who’s never used a computer before… where does one even find a tutorial? I could have something on the screen that says, “Tutorial - click here!” But if they don’t understand how to click on it, then that won’t work either, so this also means having to animate the user sometimes for more complicated sequences where I know that a lot of people won’t be able to do it themselves.

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So have you have had any focus group testing or have you ever incorporated anyone’s feedback?

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Nothing formal, but I do have a large number of people who are not gamers. I can just ask my random friends to come test out the piece and then I learn very quickly where the problems are. And also, what do they recognize, and what do they not recognize? In the Berlin Wall piece, we have a more specific set of content that we do want the people to get, and there we’ve taken the expedience of putting in characters in the world who are kind of markers to say, “If you go up to these characters, something will happen.” And then some of the characters are interactive at a very simple level. If you go up to the border guard then he’ll ask you for your passport or your ID… real world sorts of actions - you know, walking through an area and you see a couple of people who are obviously being tourists and one is explaining something to the other, so you kind of go up and eavesdrop on them, again using a real-world situation that is understandable to people who don’t play 3D games. And I really don’t want to have little buttons that say, “Click here for the next scene.” I really don’t want that because then I should have made a movie and not try to make a 3D space.

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This could also detract from the immersion you’re trying to achieve.

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Exactly, yeah.

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Talk about these characters… I understand you’ve incorporated some archival footage and photography. Have you re-created scenes using the 3d models?

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Virtuelle Mauer: T+T Tamiko Thiel & Teresa Reuter (2008)

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Some of it, yeah… There’s a fair amount of information which we’re not using or putting the archival material directly in the piece right now. We’ve got some of it, some of it is on the Wall, on the Berlin Wall as graffiti, and some things are re-enacted… one of the escape attempts is re-enacted in a kind of abstracted way. To be truthful, there are a number of things that we weren’t able to build into the piece yet because we had technical problems with the underlying 3D browser. Which were fixed last Wednesday, like three days ago, so…

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So would there be time to incorporate those assets into the show here in Seattle?

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A little bit more, but seriously I think the middle-end of next year there will be more, there’s certainly enough right now. There was enough in August to make the piece interesting, so all of the Berlin Wall historic preservationists got very excited about the piece and want to re-show it in their own various venues.

I’m comfortable that there’s enough material in the piece right now to cover a lot of ground. There’s a still a number of things that I’d personally want to put in, so for me it’s a little bit of a work in progress, although it’s primarily done. I still want to incorporate a little bit more of the archival material that we came up with and because of these technical problems weren’t able to build in just yet.

But that’s also a point where I’m very interested in getting feedback in Seattle. We’ve shown this piece in Berlin to an audience who obviously tended to be more familiar with Berlin. There were people who knew the areas of Berlin that we’re showing, and people who had actually lived in that area during the time of the Wall. Obviously in Seattle the situation is a lot different… a lot of people won’t even really know why they should be interested in the Berlin Wall in the first place, and also, obviously, the number of people who will be able to understand the German language content is a lot smaller than in Berlin.

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Is the piece subtitled?

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There are no subtitles, there’s some content which is purely audio files in German and the future I’d like to interpret those visually in a different way because if I put in English subtitles, then what am I going to do in Korea or Spain, what am I going to do in Tajikistan?

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So it would not be worthwhile to simply translate the assets for a multitude of languages?

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All of it!? And who’s going to pay for it? (Laughs) How many Tajiki translators do you know, and what do they charge?

Beyond Manzanar, for instance, had poems in Farsi, in Japanese, and then there were translations into English. And it was interesting to see the reaction in Japan, obviously the audience there paid more attention to the Japanese than the Farsi or English poems. But you know, how many languages can I put in the piece? How much time and money do I have to do that? So my approach, my hope, is to interpret a lot of the information visually, and also through tone of voice. There’s one audio file spoken by a female actress - she’s just got this great tone of voice that just makes your blood chill. It’s clear to the audience that it’s sort of an official police or military or secret service report, and her tone of voice just adds this whole element.

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Virtuelle Mauer: T+T Tamiko Thiel & Teresa Reuter (2008)

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And I’ve also been working in multicultural areas since I was two years old. I’m used to the fact that you don’t understand everything, and that you have to think and look for yourself. And I guess that’s one thing that I do require from my audiences: they’re not going to understand everything and they’re going to have to think and look for themselves - there’s some material that they won’t get and some material that they’ll think about it, and maybe they’ll interpret it in the way I meant it and maybe not - I’m really not sure how the piece will come over for an American audience. That’s going to be a learning experience, and I expect to have a lot of criticism - I hope some of it’s positive, and I know some of it will be negative. That’s also a lot of my feeling of ‘a work in progress,’ that this is the first time it will be in front of an American audience. And because of that, it’s quite likely not to be perfect, it’s quite likely to need a bit of work - Seattle is one of my home turfs, and it’s also important to me that Misha Neininger, the director of 911, is German but has lived for a long time in the U.S., so he knows both sides also. I’m hoping that by having the U.S. premiere at 911 with Misha there, that there will be some very fruitful discussion and feedback. So in a sense, Seattle is my ‘beta test.’ Well, that’s not quite true - Berlin was the first beta test, and Seattle is the first non-German beta test.

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Where else do you plan to exhibit?

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Well we’ve got… I can tell you where we already have exhibits lined up. Boston, Washington D.C., Berlin next year, Lübeck, which is a Northern German city, and we’re in discussions with a city in Spain, a city in Italy, and a couple of other locations in the U.S. But Boston, Washington, Berlin (again), and Lübeck are confirmed.

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I want to go back to what you were saying about adding more assets in August of next year.

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More like November (laughs). Well, more sort of over time… there’s no specific date, there’s just things that I’d like to add, and if I can get around to them, I’ll add them.

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Do you find this revision process unique in the art world? Like someone exhibits a painting, then they touch it up, or a film is shown and is then recut, or…

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I think it’s definitely something that artists very often do. I mean, there’s paintings that have developed over 25 years, and have been shown over those 25 years… That’s maybe a flexibility that artists can allow themselves that a commercial production doesn’t have. You can’t tell your customer, “Well it’s kind of finished, but I want to add to it over time.”

But now, if I’m my own my own boss, then I can say, “Well, this is Version 1 and over time I might develop more.”

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So where or when do you think you’ll arrive at an endpoint for this project? Do you think you’ll constantly be revisiting it?

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Hmmmmm, I doubt it… the piece itself does not have an endpoint. Probably at some point I’ll just get too busy with other things. And you know, maybe I won’t put in anything else at all (Laughs) - that’s also a possibility! I’m just talking about a personal feeling of, “Well, did I get everything in that I wanted to get in…?”

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Suppose you had absolutely no budgetary concerns, you can do everything that you want to do, unlimited resources, translators, everything… how would you improve your art to reach other people, or even just be more satisfied with your work as a whole?

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I don’t know… I suppose that in the sense of reaching wider audiences, maybe there would be value in putting in more translations… Well, no - scratch that. I’m not convinced that in an artwork that you have to understand everything. I’m not convinced that in any artwork there is anyone who understands everything in that artwork. I mean, I know that my own experiences as an artist I’ve created things and then had other people find things that I’d never thought about, when they tell me about their experience - I think the wonderful thing about creating artworks is the fact that they contain more than what you consciously put in.

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The Travels of Mariko Horo: Tamiko Thiel (2006)

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An artwork doesn’t have a single thing that you’re supposed to ‘get’ and that you either get it or you don’t get it, and that if you don’t get it you’ve somehow lost… that’s not my concept of what art is, or how it works, or how art should be. And so in terms of what I would do if I had unlimited funding, I’d definitely would then want to enlist people who can do things that I can’t. I mean, I already do that at some level - I’m not a musician or sound artist, so in all my pieces I’ve relied on people with more expertise in those areas.

But, you know, there’s lots of people who can do things better then me, who can do better 3D than I, better animation, whether 2D or 3D, who can program better than I… So it would be wonderful in the future to be able to work more with other people who have capabilities that I don’t have. On the other hand, at some very basic level, I want to keep control of the program structure - the main program and the integration and I do all the programming because I’m the only one who’s going to be interested in keeping it working in 50 years. And if I had massive amounts of money, I’d be hiring some poor programmer who’d try to understand my code. (Laughs)

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How many people are currently involved in the creation of Virtuelle Mauer?

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Currently? Two. And over the last year, around 35. Currently we have completely run out of money, so the only people currently involved are those who are willing to work for free. (Laughs) That would be myself and Theresa. That’s not quite true, we’ve got a couple of people who do small things for us, as favors, but yeah, we can’t pay anyone anymore - we’ve run out of money!

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Speaking of audiences and trying to reach them, and getting them to experience your work… are you familiar with the new downloadable services? Xbox Live, Playstation Network, things of that nature - would it be possible to ever adapt one of your works so that they could work in these environments? There is an art community surrounding games. Most gamers are playing shooters and platformers and such, but there is interest in artistic works, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Jonathan Blow’s Braid, which has become sort of the poster child of art games. It sold very well, so there’s really an artistic-minded community that could support something like this. So if you have the option of putting it on a console like the Wii or Playstation, would you do that?

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Well, I’d love to do a piece using the Wii… the Wii seems like the one interface that might be more interesting than a joystick. That’s another thing where it would be lovely to have gobs of money! And pay someone to redo the interface, that would be wonderful.

With the pieces, there is a large audience, especially among teachers who say, “When can I get this piece on a DVD so I can use it in the classroom?” And we haven’t gone that route, partially because at least with the new pieces, the Berlin Wall piece in particular, it barely runs on a machine that I can afford. It’s not going to run on most of the machines that most people have, and those that could, it’s not the audience I’m interested in. I’m not interested in high-end gamers, but rather a much more broad, general audience.

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Virtuelle Mauer: T+T Tamiko Thiel & Teresa Reuter (2008)

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Another point is that I really want to show the piece on a 9×12 projection. If someone’s running it on their PC or on their Playstation on a small screen, for me it’s another piece altogether - and frankly, everyone who I’ve ever talked to who’s seen it on a small monitor and then as a large projection, what they’re constantly telling me, even without my prompting, is that it’s like two different pieces.

So that is very strongly working against putting it on a games console or distributing it as something that people can use at home, because I want them to have that immersive experience of the large screen.

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Is there an element of control there as well? How often are you watching people participate in the art?

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Actually not very often - the first couple of days, I try and go in and watch it for several hours to make sure it’s working and make sure that there’s no bugs and things like that. But you know, when it runs for three months in a country or city I’m not living in, I can’t be there, so that’s definitely not a part of it… Wanting the users to have an immersive experience, you can call that a control if you want - that’s the way I want my artworks to be shown, and every time I’ve shown it on a monitor I’ve regretted it. It gets stuck over in a corner, and people go to the show, and say, “I couldn’t find your artwork.” And that’s not what I want - I want people to see it!

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So are you at liberty to talk about your funding?

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Well, yeah - my funding is now non-existent! (Laughs)

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I was wondering. You get grants, I’m assuming…

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Yeah, what usually happens… I’ve done three pieces now and two of them took 5 years and this one only took 4 years. On the other hand, like I said, I’m continually working on it because I want to add more content, so in effect all of them take 5 years.

The first three years are spent coming up with the concept, doing background research and writing a lot of grants, and it takes about 3 years before I get some grant that says “Okay.” And they’ll pay me for maybe half a year, two years of my time, and I will use that to try and get as much of the project done as possible. And, so the first time it was around $15,000… the second piece over $40,000, and this one was $110,000. So that’s why we were able to employ 35 people, and that’s why we were able to do the piece in a year instead of two years with an immense amount of content. We had 150 façades that we had to process and each façade took 3-4 hours. Sorry if this getting overly techie, that’s just what it took in order to create the textures for the buildings that we had. And not all of the buildings, just all of the residential buildings.

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Each project that you’ve worked on has grown in complexity, would that be a fair assessment?

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Yeah - and I really want to do small. (Laughs) The more complex the project, the more time we spend managing, the more complex your team structure and the more time you spend managing other people instead of doing it yourself, so at this point I would really love to do a three month project that I could do all by myself! That’s my dream right now, but I won’t be able to get around to it for a while, I’m afraid.

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Do you find that the cost of producing these has gone down over the years?

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Well, that’s been counteracted by the increased complexity of the projects - the Berlin Wall was definitely the most complex - not in the sense of the interactive structure that we have, but the amount, the size of the virtual world. I mean it’s nothing compared to World of Warcraft - it’s tiny. On the other hand, I also don’t have half a million dollars and a team of 20 people working for three years - that makes a difference too.

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Virtuelle Mauer: T+T Tamiko Thiel & Teresa Reuter (2008)

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It’s more like, as the technological capabilities increase, then certainly the size of my textures increase and the complexity of what I try increases. So it doesn’t have to be a direct correlation, but I’ve used these opportunities. Which is also why I think why I would love to do a small, simple project!

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So who else has worked in this field? I’m very familiar with games, but in terms of actual VR… is it ‘VRtists,’ is that the term?

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Yeah, people call themselves different things depending on kind of where they come from, and then it also depends a little bit on how you want to break that down.

Maybe you know of Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, who do 3D work involving artificial lives. They have really beautiful 3D worlds with a lot of behavior, a lot of organic and biological rules - they do really wonderful stuff. And then, Char Davies is also a very well known 3D artist who does incredibly beautiful 3D worlds. She helped start SoftImage and therefore has some pretty good resources in 3D graphics and programming - she’s done some really amazing pieces. And there’s a bunch of other artists… I think those two sets are probably the most well-known people. Bill Viola has come out with an interactive 3D world which was very specifically a project initiated together with the University of Southern California, so there you had a whole department of USC working with him on the project. (Laughs) But those are probably some of the most famous and well-known.

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Going back to what you were saying about the pieces being used as pedagogical tools, if were to adapt Virtuelle Mauer to a DVD, would you try retain some interactivity (i.e. the menu system), or would you simply allow it to become a passive experience?

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That’s not quite clear yet - again, the technology is a bit of a problem. Beyond Manzanar, which came out in 2000, just now runs on Windows XP machines.

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Well, you were saying teachers were asking for a DVD of a piece, so if you were to provide merely video footage of the piece… DVDs have a simple menu system which allow for some form of interactivity. Would you be interested in that? You would essentially be adapting your work.

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I mean that’s the question - would we give them the full interactive 3D piece or produce something completely different? And this is also sort of an art market question, I sold one of my installations to the San Jose museum, and I’m hoping to sell other installations in the future.

If you can buy it on a $25 DVD, are you going to be interested in paying thousands of dollars to buy the installation? I know what my answer would be! (Laughs)

So frankly, with the hope of being able to sell the installation and with the technical problems that people are likely to have, our tendency with the Berlin Wall project for instance is to say that we would make a DVD that provides more of a pedagogical treatment of the issue and we would use machinimas of the piece or potentially simplified 3d models with the piece to present more complex material in a more intellectual, pedagogical way. So yeah, that would be more of our tendency right now.

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So going to back to gaming, do you feel games have potential as an artistic medium?

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Oh, definitely.

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Roger Ebert came under fire from a lot of people in the gaming community because he said games were not art - that games required choices of the player, and the author did not have control because players were ‘interacting’ with storyteller and thus it was not art… People really jumped on him for that.

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(Laughs)

Oh, I know these discussions: “Is it art or not?” It took photography about 100 years to go through that discussion, it took video art actually a lot less time - took only several decades, and now we’re going through it with interactive art. So I hope at some point people just stop asking the question, and say well, you know…

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You mean “What type of art is it?” rather than “Is it art?”

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The definition of what art is changes with every artist, also. I’m quite happy with the idea of if the artist says it’s art, it’s art - and I don’t bother spending much time debating the question. (Laughs)

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Jordan Mechner’s The Last Express. Copyright Broderbund, 1997.

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How you experienced any games or interactive works of art that have really affected you? Judging from what you’ve been telling me and reading up on your exhibit, I’m reminded of what Jordan Mechner did with The Last Express. The game was a recreation of the Orient Express prior to the outbreak of World War I. All of the characters in the game are drawn in an art nouveau style, and they’ve meticulously recreated the train, almost down to the last screw. It’s almost educational… of course there’s a story and intrigue and mystery, and great, eclectic cast of characters… Being a game, it’s more narrative centric. I didn’t know if you’d played anything that struck a chord. You mentioned Myst…

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Yeah… I think the three games I’ve fooled around with a bit and that are, for me, very inspiring are Myst, Lara Croft [Tomb Raider], and World of Warcraft.

I was also very involved in the online multi-user world a long time from 1994 till basically 2002 when blaxxun, Interactive had crashed. But that whole experience with Worlds, Inc. and blaxxun essentially doing the same things that Second Life is doing now. There’s another one called Deuxième Monde (Second World), that we would also run around in a lot. I’ve spent a lot of time in online worlds. Not so much in Second Life in the last year, because I’ve had no time, but that’s essentially where I come from, where I ‘grew up,’ so to speak.

And then, right now, I’m looking at graphic novels, and anime also, because I’m interested in 2D space again, and how you can deal with space in two dimensions in a way that is difficult in 3-4 dimensions.

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Have you read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics?

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Oh yeah, that was one of the must-reads at Worlds, Incorporated when we started. He’s really terrific. He’s wouldn’t like hearing this, but he’s definitely the ‘Grand Old Man’ of the field. And also from childhood I’ve been a fan of Frank Frazetta. I thought for a long time that I wanted to grow up to and be Frank Frazetta, and how he creates this world of his own.

And also, medieval art - the kind of weird narrative structures you have in medieval art, where you have all sorts of different parts of the story in one painting or in a series of panels, or in Japanese and Chinese scrolls. They’re almost more like films except that you unroll them yourself instead of having them unrolled for you.

In terms of gaming, there’s a lot going on out there and I should try and find more connections to the gaming community. As I was saying, in the more academic circles where I’ve encountered more people who are sort of game researchers, a lot of their interests have been elsewhere. For instance, developing realistic characters, which is not an interest of mine at all.

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Interest in lifelike depictions… in terms of artificial intelligence, or 3d modeling, or both?

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I’m interested in AI in terms of the behavior, but when I started thinking in terms of virtual worlds having a dramatic structure, all of the theory that I could find, on theatre or dramatic structure in any way, was focused on characters.

They were saying, “Well, you have to have a believable character - if you don’t have a believable character you can’t have drama.” My counter to that is always, well, anyone who’s climbed a mountain has experienced drama without having a character. Anyone who’s sat on a beach and watched the sun set has experienced drama without having a character. And lots of times, you’ll have some character saying, “Oh, look at this beautiful sunset!” It’s like, shut up! You know? (Laughs) The character doesn’t necessarily add to it. You can have an encounter with space that is truly dramatic and truly mind-boggling and that’s what I wanted to learn. In teaching myself, I ended up having to go to a book on music theory, actually, by Leonard B. Meyer, called Emotion and Meaning in Music where he talked about how music can create emotional meaning without references to real-life. And that, plus my father’s work on architectural spaces… Those two elements are what really gave me the theoretical structure to think in terms of dramatic structure and using encounters with space, separate from using encounters with characters.

The Berlin Wall piece has characters, because I felt like if you leave the border guards out, then you’re missing a vital element of the Berlin Wall. Because when the Berlin Wall fell, as soon as people knew that the border guards wouldn’t shoot, all of a sudden the whole thing had lost its meaning, the whole thing was harmless. So it was really only the threat of these people with guns that turned the Berlin Wall into what it was. So I thought, “Okay, the Berlin Wall piece has to have characters, and those characters have to, in some way, convey this regime is willing to shoot in order to keep people from crossing that border.” But that, for me, is very different from saying, “Okay, if you don’t have a character who talks to you, then you can’t have drama.” That’s a completely different point.

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The art style of the characters themselves seems to be fairly representational.

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Virtuelle Mauer: T+T Tamiko Thiel & Teresa Reuter (2008)

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Part of that is technology - I don’t have the skills to make 3D characters myself, but we were working with this company in Berlin, Lunatic Interactive, and they were developing these characters. So I was looking at what they could do, and there’s all these games that have life-like characters or convincing characters that are wonderfully animated and detailed, with floating capes and flowing hair and God knows what else, but we didn’t have those resources. And characters, as I said, are not the main point of the Berlin Wall piece. They’re part of the scenery, if you will. (Laughs) So there, we took a conscious decision to flatten out and reduce/abstract the characters ala Scott McCloud in order to show these are symbols of characters rather than characters themselves, and that the content of the piece is not these people, it’s the space. The people are devices that illuminate or animate the space in certain ways, but the focus is not on the characters, it’s on the space.

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And you might also risk the audience members falling into the ‘UncannyValley‘ where the models are literally rendered creepy in efforts to make them more lifelike.

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That was also the reason for simplifying them, to get away from the Uncanny Valley.

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Does this project have any personal connection with you? I understand you grew up in Seattle - what was your personal experience with the Berlin Wall?

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Well I had grown up essentially Japanese-American. My mother’s Japanese-American, a “full blood,” and my father, we said, was American. That meant he was a European American, and what he really was, was German-American, but third generation. So he essentially knew no German, had never been in Germany, didn’t want to go, (Laughs) was not interested in Germany, etc. But at some point as I was getting older and started wanting to become an artist, the German arts scene in the early 80’s became very interesting - the so-called ‘Young Wilds’ started painting figuratively at a time when anyone who painted figuratively was considered to be behind the times by a couple of decades. And then it was very much the so-called Young Wilds in Germany who brought the figure back into painting.

That was right at the point where I wanted to leave the engineering world and enter the art world, and so I ended up moving to Germany. And it was also a feeling like… I know Japan a little, I know America a little, but how about the rest of world?

And that was something in the 80’s, the Cold War still raging, the Berlin Wall dividing Germany - it was a symbol of a divided world, into the West Bloc and the East Bloc. Everything sort of came together. I thought, well, I want to move to a foreign country, I want to study art, I want to know more about the world, and it all came together in Germany. And the Berlin Wall, of course, was the symbol of that - it was the primary political structure at the time.

I ended up moving to Munich instead of Berlin for various reasons, but in 1988 I met Teresa Reuter, who, along with my now-husband, had friends in East Germany. So we visited going through West Berlin to East Berlin, and sat up late night drinking bad red wine and talking. “Well,” we asked, “will you be able to come visit us in the West?” “Well,” they said, “probably not.”

So that was ‘88 and then it became ‘89 when the entire world seemed to be changing, and every week I woke up and said, “Okay, what country is falling this week?” And, the borders were coming down one after another. I think that year will remain one of the most amazing times I’ve lived through, because the world changed within one year.

And, you know, the Berlin Wall was only one of those changes, but it was a change that was incredibly symbolic for the entire West & East conflict. And then, several years later in 1996, I was with my sister, who’d studied history at Yale, and knew the whole history of Germany, and divided Berlin and East and West Bloc and everything like that, and we were searching for a piece of the Wall - she’d never seen it before. And we finally found a piece - it was all chipped up and covered with ivy. It was only a segment and her first, spontaneous reaction was, “You know, it really wasn’t that tall.” And that’s really, for me, the moment when I realized… Historic preservationists can say what they want about preserving natural pieces, but the actual pieces don’t necessarily convey what the thing was about.

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As you were saying earlier, as soon as the border guards were gone and they wouldn’t shoot people, the Wall ceased to exist in a sense.

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Photo by Staff Sergeant F. Lee Corkran, US Army, 1989.

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Right! The guards were still there for probably another couple years, but on that evening of November 9^th, 1989, as soon as the East Berliners realized they weren’t going to shoot, they just walked right over. They said, “Come on, step aside, we’re going to go over. Your bosses said it’s okay, we’re gonna go. Just leave us alone, don’t stop us.” And that was, you know, it was a revolution. It was a revolution that just came because someone said “Well, yeah, it’s probably open.” And everyone just walked right over.

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Is this moment depicted in your piece?

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No, because there’s so much already. I mean, most of the stuff that’s done on the Wall is about that. And we thought, well, there’s plenty of people who’ve covered it. And you know, the video footage, the film footage, it’s all so moving - there’s no way you can compete with that and there’s no reason why you should compete with that. That was reality, and it was a reality that was more fantastical than any art piece I could ever make.

So, we very specifically said, “Our piece is not about the fall.” It’s about what it was like when it was still there, and what it was like when it was still a threat.

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So what do you hope that visitors to 911 Media will take away from experiencing your work?

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I hope they’ll take away a curiosity, to find out more about the situation and more about what was going on, how the situation got that way in the first place, and also think about the Walls that are going up, or exist in other parts of the world. Why are they there, and what does it mean about the people on both sides of it?

Each Wall means something different, but each Wall does mean there’s some intractable situation between the government on one side and the government on the other. Or the structure on one side and the structure on the other. And that says nothing about blame, who’s to blame for it - like I said, in each situation, it’s different. But it is an expression of intractability, and of a government system that then produces an intractable situation for just normal people who have to live and deal with it. And you know, it’s usually not about the people themselves who actually live there, it’s about the systems that are on opposing sides of that fence.

So that’s what I hope that people will take away, more than anything else. I don’t really care if they can then recite what happened on which street in which year… just curiosity about why systems build Walls… and what would it mean to a society that’s divided by them.

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Photo by Staff Sergeant F. Lee Cockran, US Army, 1989.

In the process of gathering footage for a documentary I’m doing about the election process it was decided that it would be a good idea to attend both Denver and Minneapolis/St. Paul during the DNC and the RNC to get opinions of American citizens in the midst of it. While in St. Paul I found myself caught up an aggressive corralling of protesters by the police. I was incredibly shocked to find out when I made it back to Seattle that few people knew about all of the uprisings and oppression going on during the whole RNC. Most people knew about Amy Goodman getting arrested, but hardly anyone knew that there was a campaign of preemptive raids against certain media houses before the convention even began to keep them from being available to capture any of the events that were about to take place. So because of that I was inspired to post the over hour and half of footage I shot while being both a witness to and victim of the police’s suppression tactics during the particular corralling I was in.

I’ve broken it up into 13 short segments, each with text that provides a description of what’s going on around the camera. Occasionally I put in time markers that look like this, (0:00). These are to point out certain things that I feel are noteworthy but easy to miss.

1/13
This was the first day of the RNC. I had just finished getting interviews and footage from an anti-war protest in downtown St. Paul, not too far from the Xcel Center where the RNC was being held.

I had heard about a concert called “Take Back Labor Day” featuring Atmosphere, Mos Def, and The Pharcyde among a host of others for just $10. The concert was being held on Harriett Island. I was walking down Robert St. to get to the bridge that led to the island. As I approached the bridge though, I heard from a bull horn, “This is your final warning! If you do not you leave this area you will be hit with tear gas!” I turned on the camera and started recording what was going on.

2/13
I felt the earnestness in the voice of the kids in the street begging for the bystanders to join them. I still get a little choked up when I her that girl’s desperate cries for participation from the people.

I walked around to get another look of the situation. I saw that the police had blocked the bridge to Harriett Island (1:57).

Then the police began their slow and ominous advancement on the people extending their line of riot police from the streets onto the sidewalk.

3/13
It’s at this point, that I realize that I’ve just been hit with pepper spray. You’ll notice my coughing and expletives, as I run to the sidelines of the fray to take off my shirt and wrap it around my face, since I didn’t bring my bandanna with me.

4/13
The police fire a loud concussion grenade that pretty much symbolizes the beginning of the aggressive gassing and spraying that is to follow.

5/13
The protesters cross over towards my way as we all shuttle along the only open street available, trying to avoid getting trapped by the police.

Some protesters try to set up make shift barriers in the middle of the street to keep the police at bay, but if you’ll notice, the armed police behind the fence we pass (2:34) offer a good illustration of the futility of that.

6/13
For a brief moment a calmness is present in our somewhat casual stride down street. All of that abruptly changes though as we cross an intersection and see a bunch of riot police running towards us. They begin to aggressively spray us and forcing us to “move along”.

7/13
As I continue on warily with the pack, I notice to my left one of the riot police shoving a kid who seemed to be doing nothing (0:03). I try to zoom in on his face as I walk past him.

When I turn back around I pick up a dialogue between one of the moving pack and a city bike cop (0:43). Listen as she says, “you promise you’re not gonna’ block us?” And he responds, while guiding her with a can of pepper spray, “Not right now. Run.” Run?

I continue to walk as leisurely as one can with a line of riot cops behind you when I come across yet another instance of innocent people getting caught up in this madness. If you look at the left side of the screen at (1:00), you’ll notice a couple come out of a building and walk past me carrying their bikes. You can tell they have no part in what is going on in the streets. About 14 seconds later I hear behind me, “BACK UP!” “BACK UP!” I turn around and see that same couple getting verbally and physically shoved back towards me.

I come up on a park and another poor man’s blockade. The police don’t come into the park, so I decide to take this opportunity to unwrap a new video tape.

8/13
As soon as I step out of the other side of the park, I see a cop hop out of his car and arrest a girl who was on the sidewalk. I didn’t see why. As I ran across the street toward them, I tried to zoom in on the cop’s license plate, his name badge, and/or the girl as she is put in the back seat of the car.

Right after that I can pan the camera onto a motorcycle cop saying to one of the riot police, “You have a stick, use that fucking thing!” (0:54) It sounded like his idea of a sick joke. Just as sick is you can hear someone shout out agreement.

I hit the pause button on the camera for a second. I start recording again when I approach this cop explaining to a member of the National Lawyers Guild the acts of vandalism that occurred earlier.

I then follow a group who ask me not to film them administering help to a person who’s skin was irritated by the police’s chemical weapons.

9/13
I catch back up to a large group with a legal observer and while continuing the migration path I see this kid make the dumb choice of hitting an innocent car as it drove past right in front of the cops (0:55). Strangely, nothing happened to that kid.

We turn onto a group of medics getting arrested. I thought that was a malicious tactical move, because I know that the medics were making it a priority to stay out of the way. All they were doing was helping those who needed it which I’m sure is why the police targeted them.

People begin protesting the arrest of the medics and then you see the National Guard step up and begin to fire tear gas or something at the people, while shouting at all of us to, “BACK UP!”

At (3:24) you’ll see a kid give some horse cop the finger. That’s because right before I put the camera on him, they shot him in the chest with something, I couldn’t figure out what.

After walking past a guy in a wheelchair having a bad reaction to the chemical assault, some horse cops come up behind us and make two people out of the group lay on the ground. I get onto the sidewalk and watch them get arrested for seemingly nothing, before I rejoin the moving people. If you look at the middle of the frame at the (6:03) mark you will see a cop shove another innocent bystander.

10/13
It’s kind of hard to see at first, because I was walking across the street and looking out for the cops while I was filming it, but as I was re-joining the group I witness some motorcycle cops hit a guy with their motorcycle and make him lay on the ground. After observing that for a minute I continue back across the street to a parking lot about half full with cops, vans, and paddy wagons.

My tape runs out as I enter the parking lot. I hear cops screaming for everyone to leave. I figure that’s a good idea and I turn around to head out of the parking lot. In the process of turning around, my left flip-flop comes off. I try to slide my foot back into the flip-flop and BAM I get hit in the back of the leg by the front tire of a oafish looking bicycle cop who begins yelling at me, “Move!” I’m pissed but I figure it’s probably best that I comply as I try to put a new tape in.

I get the tape into the camera and point it at the cop as I ask him about where I can go and why I can’t be on the sidewalk. I only get 14 seconds of it though before the tape stops again because in all the confusion I accidentally put the tape I just took out right back in thinking it was the new tape I had unwrapped back in the park.

11/13
After getting shooed away by the bike cops, I chose to walk over a few blocks and then circle back around, sporadically capturing the police state mood I felt in the air by video taping the police cars and paddy wagons that came past me.

12/13
I find myself across the street from the parking lot I was told to leave. I cautiously re-approach and notice that the riot police are keeping all people -journalist and legal observers included- from entering the parking lot as they begin the mass arrests.

13/13
This is pretty much a compilation of footage shot from opposite sides of the parking lot of people trying to find out what’s going on, trying to find out about those getting arrested, and journalist trying to get the story (1:38).

Shortly after this my battery ran out. I call someone from Pepper Spray Productions who I met at the DNC and she told me that she was at a park (the one near Harriet Island where this all started) waiting to get arrested. I walked 2 miles back to where she was at and saw what she described, about a hundred people or so, peacefully sitting down waiting to get arrested.

For a more comprehensive telling of that incident and the RNC and DNC as a whole go to www.submedia.tv and watch an awesome video called Ground Noise & Static. It was put together by Seattle based production company Peppery Spray Productions and Vancouver based Submedia TV. You won’t be disappointed.

Thanks for your attention.

Dom Zook

Finding distribution used to be the point at which most independent filmmakers gave up. That might change due to recent advances in online distribution techniques. Alternative distribution models for feature and short filmmakers, primarily through the use of Web sites, are becoming more viable as a revenue stream.

That’s the word from a panel of experts who met during the Seattle International Film Festival to discuss whether digital distribution could be the savior for indie films.

The group featured some heavy-hitters from the online video world: Roy Price, director of digital media at Amazon.com and head of the new online video download service Amazon Unbox; David Strauss, co-founder and CEO of Withoutabox, the premier online film festival submission site; Scilla Andreen, CEO and co-founder of Indieflix; and Michael McMurray, director of product management at Film.com, a division of Seattle-based Real Networks.

Moderator Anne Thompson, deputy online editor for Variety, welcomed the thirty or so audience members by describing how the Internet was creating a new paradigm for the future of film distribution. Amazon Unbox has been running for over nine months and Price said the service’s sales were steadily increasing. Unbox is Amazon’s answer to Apple’s iTunes Store. Independent films offered on the service were doing well, especially documentaries like “Who Killed the Electric Car,” which has made more money online than it did theatrically. Unbox has a roughshare system to split proceeds with the filmmaker. Price described the share as being “very generous,” but did not go in to specifics. Unbox has a partnership with Customflix that allows the filmmaker to deliver his or her film to Customflix for duplication. Customflix will also deliver a copy to Amazon for sale on the Unbox service.

Withoutabox offers tools to manage assets and data for independent films. Primarily known for its film festival connections, Withoutabox is developing a system that allows filmmakers to connect with an audience and help culture and nurture that base, cross-marketing with other similar films to create a large network of fans. By creating a large fan base, Strauss said, the filmmaker creates a demand for the film and subsequently creates potential for monetizing the asset.
Andreen described Indieflix as being concerned primarily with the story and marketing potential of independent films. Through similar methods as those with Withoutabox and Amazon Unbox, Indieflix seeks to help filmmakers increase their audience base and market their film to new audiences. They have their own video-on-demand service as well as several online partners they supply video to.

Real Networks has jumped into the online film world with its site Film.com, which is more of an all-around entertainment news source. Some models the company is pursuing include attaching films to articles with similar interest, highlighting new filmmakers each week. The thought process is that the lure of Hollywood may help drive viewers to the site and therefore to see independent fare they normally wouldn’t have access to.

As Strauss stressed, “success is also relative.” The revenue streams are still being tweaked and profit potential is an emerging trend. The filmmaker must be willing to be the promoter of the film, or must be willing to find a promoter. The Web sites mentioned are just tools and can’t do their job alone. Strauss said of the 130,000 people using the Withoutabox service, about 10,000 are actively using self-distribution models.

Even with all the successes of online distribution, panel members agreed that a full theatrical release is still the preferred method for gaining a marketing foothold. As Andreen said, however, fillmmakers can always back into a theatrical deal if the movie is a hit online. Indeed, audience questions stemmed mainly from the fact that most films that have found success online are films that had already seen a theatrical release.

What does the future of digital distribution hold? McMurray hopes to see online film festivals that could reach a much wider audience than any live festival. Andreen hopes there will be more free content that could help drive audience involvement. Ultimately, Strauss said, filmmakers must take ownership of their film’s marketing. There’s no Web site yet that will sell your film for you.

Welcome to the world of the professional dare.

Della Campion

In its 5th year, the Seattle International Film Festival’s Fly Filmmaking Challenge is an annual stress test in limits given to three selected local filmmakers. This year SIFF, in collaboration with the Northwest Film Forum, Women in Film, and IFP Seattle, threw down the glove to directors Matt Daniels, Dayna Hanson and Lisa Hardmeyer. The challenge to each of them: 5 days to shoot, and 5 days to edit a short film.

As if the time constraints weren’t enough to keep things lively, SIFF placed a couple of
“flies in the ointment” just to keep things interesting: Each director was asked to choose at random-literally out of a hat-their main character. Additionally, each short was to contain one randomly chosen SIFF sponsor in their film (these turned out to be local icons Jones Soda, the Space Needle, and Cupcake Royale). SIFF gave the directors the opportunity to work with a Northwest screenwriter to produce the scripts, but each chose to write their own.

“The filmmakers chosen this year pushed the limits more than they ever have in the past,” said Amy Dee, producer of the Challenge for SIFF in her introduction to the June 13 screening at the Egyptian. “They were so engaged in the program and so interested in what they were doing. They were constantly asking me how they could push the limits to make their films better.”

ON SCREEN’s Della Campion caught up with director Matt Daniels after the screening to talk about his experience with the Challenge. Daniels’ film Numb (http://www.thinklab.com/numb), the surreal story of a little girl who becomes the star of her mysterious uncle’s puppet show, mixes live action with animation to create an otherworldly, storybook effect.

OS: Have you done the Fly Filmmaking Challenge before?
MD: No, this is the first year - it’s a one-time thing.

OS: Tell me about the timeline.
MD: I’ll give you some very rough dates to let you know how the process worked. We met in December/ January and we were told that we would be participating in this. Soon after we were asked to draw a character from a hat and a sponsor from a hat, so at that point we were free to start writing the story. We shot the stories in late February/early March. A couple of weeks before shooting we were assisted in finding a cast. Stephen Salamunovich, a local casting director, provided that service, and then we had our cast a couple of weeks out and were able to rehearse and lock down our locations and work out all the details that go along with making a film.

OS: Were there other restrictions for the filmmaker, besides the filming schedule and the “flies in the ointment”?
MD: The type of camera you can use…there were really quite a few. In a way it’s good to have those restrictions when you’re working on a project - it helps you to get focused early on.

OS: Did you use film or digital?
MD: We all used digital. I shot on a Panasonic HVX 200 video camera. I believe the other two films used the JVC video camera - all HD.

OS: What about post production? Did you have a more leisurely pace for that?
MD: We had two days rest [after shooting], when we could start to log footage and take notes, although they were technically “days off.” We had 5 days to edit; we were always restricted to 10-hour days. While shooting we had no more than 10 people on set at any time and while editing we had not more than 3 people touch the project at any one time, in a day. We chose to do a lot of animation in the film, and in doing so, we put even more restrictions on ourselves by saying that we have to do the editing in 2 days, so we can animate for 3 days.

OS: Was all of post-production considered the ‘editing process’?
MD: Almost. They said they’d give us 5 days to edit and then we had about 2 days to do some other finishing things that were provided by other local businesses. Technically, 12 days after we started shooting, we had to hand in our finished film. Then a couple of weeks later it’s taken to Modern Digital who did the color correcting and titles for us. A couple of days after that it’s taken to Bad Animals who does the final sound mixing.

OS: Was everybody given a start date and an end date for this 10 day window?
MD: Yes, exactly. At the very beginning we’re handed the calendar; this is where you start shooting…this is where you end…

OS: Did you sleep at all during those 10 days?
MD: It was tough. I’ve actually worked on two other 48-hour films that were sort of like an exercise for this in a lot of ways. Having five whole days to shoot and then five whole days to edit, I definitely pushed myself a lot harder than I did on the 48-hour films.

OS: What would you do differently, if you had the opportunity to do it again?
MD: Oh so many things, really. I really like the direction we took for the story. Doing it again I would just hope to have more experience and keep getting better at telling stories. Learning how to shoot exactly what we need, learning how to write so that the moments are always, you know, just hitting just at the perfect times - that the pacing is just right. So really, I don’t have any regrets. The only thing that I can say is that I want to do it more and get better.

OS: What advice would you give for someone who would be doing the Challenge next year?
MD: Have fun. Why not challenge yourself? Think a little bit bigger than you’re used to thinking. You’re probably going to have more resources than you did on your last project. Figure out ways to use those resources effectively, and push it. Shoot fast.

Fly Filmmaking Challenge

Jila Bazrafkan

One small chunk of time, one big task, the Seattle International Film Festival’s Fly Filmmaking Challenge remains a popular program with festival-goers. Nominated by local arts organizations, this year’s participants, Lisa Hardmeyer, Dayna Hanson, and Matt Daniels, were given five days to shoot and five days to edit a 10-minute long film. The three local filmmakers met their objective, premiering wonderfully varied projects to an expectant SIFF audience May 28th at the Egyptian Theatre. The time and budget constraints of the challenge remain a consistent hurdle every festival; what changes are the “flies in the ointment.” This year each filmmaker selected two items from a hat to write their film around: a character (an out of town uncle, the perfect hostess, or security guard) and a sponsored product placement item (a Cupcake Royale cupcake, Jones Soda, or the Space Needle).
Hardmeyer’s first narrative film, The Bridge is based on a haunting true-life experience; for her, the outcome remains unknown. Two characters meet in existential crisis. One goes over the edge. Lurking behind the film is the question: what kind of influence did one have on the other? Hardmeyer clarifies her aim in making the film, “I didn’t write the movie to know the ending. I wrote the movie to explore the beginning.”
Hanson’s film, The Rainbow, is also a narrative first for its director. Hanson has previously made experimental and short dance films as well as producing a documentary directed by Rainbow actor, Linas Phillips. Featured in this film is a Metro bus, a feat of procurement of which Hanson says, “It often pays to make things more difficult.” Shot with JVC HDV 250, the film is a multi-layered exploration of the main characters’ struggles with loss.
Matt Daniels’ contribution, Numb, is a partially animated fairytale that rivals Tim Burton in atmospheric mystery. A young orphan girl goes to live with her eccentric uncle. Unknown to her is the true nature of her new residence. To achieve the visual style of the film, parts were shot with Vaseline around the edge of the lens. It was then further darkened and blurred in post. Daniels reports that the special effects were made using a combination of Adobe After Effects, Cinema 4D, and Photoshop.
Speaking on the time limitation, Hanson says it was surprising how much could be shot in five ten-hour days. Having trimmed her 20-page script to ten minutes of screen time, she plans on expanding Rainbow into a feature next winter. Hardmeyer similarly had too much material, “The challenge of Fly Film is to get them to time.” Her continued plan for The Bridge is to make it into a longer short, adding back some cut scenes. Matt Daniels, however, says that Numb will stay in its current form. After participating in 48-hour film festivals, “Five days to shoot was fine.” He adds, “It’s really easy to get tired after five days of total shooting.”
While the Fly Filmmaking Challenge is a way to bring a few local filmmakers into the spotlight, the whole Seattle film community gets involved in the effort. Hardmeyer, after listing a slew of people (including John Keister for writing some stand-up comedy material) who made her film possible said, “I feel so indebted.”
The three films will be shown at SIFF again at the Egyptian Theatre on Wednesday June 13th, 4:30 pm.