Category: Life

Ahh…

As you may, or may not know, I’ve been trying to get the On Piracy documentary out the door for the last few weeks. It was supposed to be out by Monday. However, the process has been hell. Absolute hell. I’ve barely slept in the last week at all.

To understand the problem, you have to understand how I’m putting the movie together. For every of the twenty-four interviewees, I have a Premiere project file. In these files, I have the raw footage of the interview, and then separate “sequences” for each of the clips they appear in the movie. So I cut the footage up, put them into these clips, clean up the audio, clean up the video, add images, and render. This makes a small MPG file. I do this for each interviewee, each time they appear in the film. I also do this for the narration sequences. So in total, I have about 120 of these clips.

I then put these clips together in a new project file, adjust the volume of the clips, add the soundtrack, add any last images, and render. This is the part that’s problematic. Hours in, it just stops for no apparent reason. There are no error messages – it just stops rendering. But it fails consistently in one spot. It took hours of testing to figure out that it was the images. If I had pictures which were too big in filesize (either due to filetype or resolution), the whole thing would just fail. These images weren’t malformed or corrupt in any way (I checked), it was Premiere. It just couldn’t handle it. At least not when I was rendering such large projects.

So I cut it all up. In the end, the movie was separated into eight segments. I also kept toying with the images, making them smaller, converting them, trying other images altogether, attempting to appease the Adobe god. But even these, hours in, would fail. Sometimes at one point, sometimes at another. If I shut down Premiere and started it up again, I tended to have better luck – and sometimes render all the way through. It was a frustrating experience.

After many sleepless nights, I eventually made progress. I ended up with the massive files I wanted, and joined them together. I produced a DVD. Both these files worked great – everything in sync. But then came the conversion to XviD. Out of sync. To FLV – out of sync. So I cross-encoded the large base file into a raw AVI – still out of sync. It seems like no matter what I do, it messes up. Why? I haven’t the slightest clue.

And that’s the stage I’m at right now. Playing with this until it works.

So I leave to the UK for 10 days. My decision is to not deal with my emails and the like, instead leaving that for when I come back. 10 days. That’s it. And yet in that space, spammers managed to:

• Send me 108 spam emails.
• Send me 5 spam IMs.
• Send me 8 spam blog comment entries – even though I have a catchpa. I can’t imagine how it would be without one.

To say that I detest spammers is an understatement.

Warning: the following comments are extremely uninformed and represent my own opinions.

So just for the heck of it, I was searching through torrentspy. I searched for “korean”, looking for, well, South Korean films. Plenty of results. This is to little surprise to anyone that’s familiar with South Korean flicks: it’s a strong market. They first mandated that their theaters play homegrown films for 146 days of the year, and eventually the industry kicked in. Japanese films also brought in a good number of titles, as did the Hong Kong industry.

I like Korean films, and some of them even reached our shores. Oldboy came out in theaters, and I bought a copy of Tae-Guk-Gi over at HMV. They’re popular films, as they follow the Hollywood formula: good action, good music, good pace. It’s a bit shallow, but every industry needs those kinds of films.

Then I searched for Canada and Canadian. Nothing. And it’s quite reflective of the state of our industry. Actually, it’s more a reflection of the industry outside of Quebec. Let’s look at the most popular Canadian releases in the last few years: C.R.A.Z.Y., Bon Cop Bad Cop, Barbarian Invasions, Atanarjuat, The Delicate Art of Parking. Of these, three originate from Quebec. And for the Canadians reading this blog entry: just how many could you actually see in your local big-chain theater? Just how many Canadian films can you see in these at all? The likely answer is probably one or two a year. If that. Even our own “big hits” which we tout in the news don’t make it into our own theaters. What does that say of the health of the industry?

The theaters don’t want to play them because Canadian films make less money than American ones. And until our government steps in to mandate some percentage of Canadian content in cinemas, they’ll never be played. That is, unless, there’s the odd Canadian hit that made money in even the US.

Now if you go to Quebec, the situation is the opposite. There are lots of American films, yes, and imports from France; but there’s lots of homegrown talent as well, and you see them in theaters regularly. Les Boys, Elvis Gratton, C.R.A.Z.Y. are all films that made their rounds in Quebec theaters. And best of all: Quebec-made films are shown regularly in the province’s theaters. But then you go outside of Quebec, and there’s nothing but American films.

Canadian films have that reputation of making up for a lack of budget with really complex storylines. Those are wonderful. However, it needs to be complemented with horror, action, and nearly every other genre. The budget of those may seem prohibitive, but it’s doable. Sorta.

Beyond a complete lack of support from theater chains (can you blame them?), there’s no support from anyone. I was looking into all sources of funding for my fiction title… and guess what: unless you’re making documentaries that are intended to be aired on television, or a French-language film, you’re S.O.L. The support framework for, say, an Ontarian full-feature fiction film is nill. [I hold reservations about Telefilm.]

I thought I was alone voicing these opinions, until I googled for “Canada Film Industry.” And you know what the first result is? A page with this gem of a quote:

The Canadian Film Industry Filmmaker Paul Donovan once compared the difficulty of making a movie in Canada to climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. Faced with an indifferent public, harsh critics, limited funds, and foreign-owned movie houses, filmmaking in Canada is, by necessity, a labour of love. Canadian gems like The Barbarian Invasions and Nobody Waved Goodbye have succeeded because of steadfast determination.

Amen.

Until we mandate a percentage of Canadian films to be played in our own theaters, money won’t ever be generated. Unless that money is generated, there won’t ever be interest in private entities funding films. Without that funding, we won’t ever make the kind of titles we need to puncture foreign markets. But none of this will ever happen if the public continues to not care. And they won’t care until we actually have an industry to care for.

As it stands, English-Canadian films represent 1% of our domestic box office revenues. One percent. That’s quite a powerful testament to the state of our industry.

When it comes to film making, sometimes not asking for permission to do certain shots is better than to ask. I’ve been researching to see if I’m allowed to incorporate real products in the H4CK3R5. So that instead of using a can of generic energy drink in a shot, I can just use Red Bull or whatnot.

This is what I came across, from the Philip Morris website:

Unfortunately, the fact that Philip Morris USA does not engage in product placement does not mean that our brands are never shown. Some producers and directors choose to depict Philip Morris USA brands in their work without our permission.

But we are limited in our ability to stop all displays of our brands, because federal and state trademark laws, as well as the U.S. Constitution, protect freedom of expression and the “fair use” of trademarks in works such as movies and television shows.

But if you chose to ask their permission:

Philip Morris USA continues to deny all product placement requests for its brands.

So the trick is not to ask. Same when you’re requestion to film in certain locations: sometimes its better to ask. Because if you ask, you’re most likely going to be told “no.” Being told “no” and filming anyways opens you to far greater risk. But if you don’t ask, and its in a generic locale, then no one will ever be the wiser. Of course, exert some common sense.

When it comes to filming people, however, I tend to be a fair bit more cautious. If an individual is in the foreground of the shot, or the focus of the shot, then I always ask their permission. On film or on paper. I don’t consider simple vocal agreements to be enough. Yes, you’ll have plenty of people refusing for no good reason. But really, that’s better than a lawsuit.