Geoffrey Pope

I appreciate film composers. My go-to guy, composer and conductor Geoffrey Pope, gives me above-and-beyond work, quickly and painlessly to my picture-locked commercial work.

"Simply put," Pope notes, "music written for a particular purpose can convey things that stock music can't. Most people aren't actively aware of this, but there is a powerful subliminal component to every musical choice we make–whether it's in the melody, harmony, timbre or equalization. Good composers know this, and their original music serves their clients' purposes in unique ways."

Nevertheless, sometimes a client or project needs something different for half the price without delay. What are the options? Below is a short list of some options for your next project:

• Audio Network
  • Registration: immediate
  • Cost: fairly inexpensive depending on usage scale ($1.25 for temp/personal, tiers up to $495 for cinema)
  • Quality: overall pretty good
  • Search: keyword plus browsing by "style," "mood/emotion," "instrument," "genre," "album," and "composer"
• iStock Music
  • Registration: immediate
  • Cost: reeeal cheap ($1.67/"credit" or about $10 total)
  • Quality: mixed, with a few gems
  • Searching: keyword plus "lightboxes" — kinda sucks
• Extreme Music
  • Registration: human-verified and not immediate
  • Cost: varies
  • Quality: good
  • Searching: clunky Flash kiosk plus keyword and playlists
• First Com is one of the industry standards
  • Registration: immediate, but human-verified delay for download
  • Cost: pricey
  • Quality: great overall
  • Searching: keyword plus libraries and playlists
• Video Helper is another industry standard
  • Registration: human-verified and not immediate
  • Cost: varies ($100 for local TV, $200 flat for internet, tiers up to $1,125 for all media rights worldwide)
  • Searching: clunky Flash kiosk, plus keyword and "genre," "scenario," "instrument," "moods," "tempo," and "composer" browsing
• Vimeo Music Store
  • Registration: immediate
  • Cost: inexpensive ($1.99 for temp/personal, $98 for indie)
  • Searching: keyword plus "genres," "tempos," "themes," "moods," and "instruments" browsing via mouseover

Thoughts on these or others? Please add a comment below.

(Some recommendations provided by FWD:labs member and pro editor, Jeremy Troy.)

5/12/2012 Update: David Driver reached and exceeded the goal one day before the deadline!

There's less than a week left in David Driver's Indiegogo drive to raise $20,000 for his feature, "Way of Life." It's close — really close. I asked the filmmaker, and personal long-time mentor, what it take to get this far, how does it compare with other fundraising choices, and what's involved in wrapping it up to ensure a strong finish.

Describe your overall experience of continuing to complete this long-standing project over 8 years. Any key moments, highlights, or turning points?

David Driver There are a lot of turning points. Nothing terribly dramatic, but you are always pursuing elements of a story hoping they will pay off. This particular film took a long time to materialize. There were a lot of false roads to go down before I came to a final idea about how the film would work.

One key moment I had was working with a legendary film artist/doc fixer on another unrelated project. I was working with Nathaniel Dorsky cutting a completely different film. Nick is totally old school. Now in his late 60s, he grew up using flatbeds and rewinds. His films are all shot on 16mm and all silent. So when he is called in to do some fixing he has to work with another editor to run the software. He sits back and dictates how things will be. And dictates is the keyword here; he is incredibly insistent on how things will be. At the time I was working with him, there were a lot of discussions as to why material was cut and what was changing in that particular film, but Nick always won out in the end — for a good reason. There was a clarity of style and keen idea as to identify story elements that he applied to the process.

I’ve cut hundreds and hundreds of pieces but the experience totally affected me. It is like one of those situations where you are learning something simply by engaging in this process with someone who is really good at what they do. It’s like it rubs off on you. I gained another layer of editorial perception during that process.

After that, it started to become clear to me how my film would look and feel. "Way of Life" is a slow moving meditative piece that works on a deeply inspirational level. It is one of the most difficult types of film to construct because it is easy to go off the deep end in any direction.

I'm thankful for my time working with a genius like Dorsky and for gaining so much knowledge from that experience. After that, I started to construct the final version of "Way of Life" and present it to peers, audiences and of course my long-time mentor, Ronald Chase. I finally had a clear inspiration for what I wanted the film to be after working with Dorsky but it would still take many months to fashion it into the film it is now. If it were an issue driven piece or a journalistic piece it would have been simpler and faster.

How is this experience with Indiegogo different than other fundraising efforts — online or offline — whether it's the San Francisco Film Council or people just writing checks?

DD Fundraising is always tons of work. It is never easy. (Grant writing and wooing donors are both a different story.) For “fundraising,” I am saying something that will definitely bring in money; the question is “how much.” Normal fundraising tends to revolve around an event — say a screening or a party or something like that. You go through a lot of effort to get people to a venue, set it up, serve food and drinks, you show your piece and you make a pitch. Sounds simple enough. Then you factor in the idea that 40% of the people you send invites to will answer, and maybe another 40–50% of those who answer will actually show up. There are probably real statistics for this stuff. I'm just talking anecdotally now. At any rate, your event happens and let’s say your event is even “a success.” You get some money and then you start to measure that against the work it took to do the screening and process the checks. You start thinking, “is there an easier way?”

With a crowd-sourcing platform like Indiegogo, you have clear format set up so you can show people what your are doing on an ongoing basis. I can’t say that it is any easier. There is a lot of work to do to set up the campaign and a lot of strategizing. I did a spreadsheet that factored in all the fees and the cost of all the perks for each level of participation. Then I started plugging in numbers for each contribution level and seeing what it would take to reach our goal.

I had the basic idea that 400 people contributing $50 bucks for a limited edition DVD would equal $20,000. I thought I probably had to get the campaign in front of 10 times that many people. Then we really tried to set up a incentive structure that would encourage people to reach beyond the DVD level without burdening people with too many choices. To a certain extent, we got it right.

Once the campaign starts, it is a long grueling process. Your job is to try to keep people talking about the campaign for its entire lifespan. You track the data and the views on Indiegogo/Kickstarter and on Facebook, Twitter and your video platform. Then you keep trying to post things that people will respond positively towards. You want to keep people talking about things without turning people off. It is not an easy task and it takes a lot of work to maintain.

I was very encouraged from the beginning with the level of support we were getting. I have always tried to help people out — in the business wherever I could — and it seemed like that attitude was being reflected in the generosity I was seeing. Plus, the main character, Michael Daube, is a great guy who does a lot of good for people so there are folks who really wanted to see his story get out to more people. I also think that the overall incentive structure seemed to allow people to jump in at a higher level.

What's the biggest surprise you've come across in the final leg of this film?

DD It was really heartwarming to see the generosity of so many people. In the end, if we reach our goal, we will probably do it with half the number of people we originally thought.

What's your next step with this film, and your career?

DD We are looking forward to playing at a few festivals and then getting it out to people to see, probably through a mix of DIY distribution platforms.

How can people help right now — and after this pledge drive ends?

DD The deadline for this drive is this week, May 12th. So take a minute and check out the campaign. If you like what you see, join us, make a contribution, it’s a great story to be part of.

When we wrap the Indiegogo campaign, you will no longer be able to get your name in the credits. You will still be able to make a charitable contribution to our fiscal sponsor, The San Francisco Film Society, and we will give you a DVD or a T-Shirt or USB jump drive.

As for me, I’ll start looking for a new project. There are opportunities I have been looking at. But it’s really all to be determined. For the most part, I’ll just keep at my day job which is, for the most part, shooting and editing.

The marketplace for digital camera bodies for filmmaking is gaining some momentum. ARRI's ALEXA is "thriving," RED's Epic and Scarlet is "upgrading," and Canon is getting a run for its money from Sony and Nikon. Now, this last Monday at NAB, from the color grading company Blackmagic Design is a new 2.5k-resolution camera, starting at $3,000 and shipping in July.

To sweeten the deal, all of this is included in the pricetag: RAW / ProRes422 right out of the can (ala ALEXA), color timing software (ala RED), and a 13.5-stop / 12-bit image. The depth and range in color and exposure makes this camera look more like 16mm/35mm film, less like a DSLR.

EOSHD.com calls this news the "downfall of the big guys," especially given other improvements to the lower-end market like HD-SDI and Thunderbolt output. Comments at NoFilmSchool.com balks at first-generation hurdles: un-ergonomic design, an internal battery, and 1/4" audio (although it's two jacks and live headset monitoring, unlike most other DSLRs). DP John Brawley, who shot engineering tests for BlackMagic, notes on his blog the process, most notably the benefits of no compression and how tests with ALEXA and RED compare.

(via Jeremy Troy via NoFilmSchool.com)

• Puma "Social" champions a million views, but the short film/ad "focuses on the benefits of living life by going out and hanging out with friends rather than watching reality TV on the couch" and tracked well over social media shares (via Mediapost)
• Aside from whether a movie is shot on film or not, what's pushing projection away from film? "Today, the driving force isn't so much a single movie as it is the studios' bottom line — they no longer want to pay to physically print and ship movies. It costs about $1,500 to print one copy of a movie on 35 mm film and ship it to theaters in its heavy metal canister. Multiply that by 4,000 copies — one for each movie on each screen in each multiplex around the country — and the numbers start to get ugly. By comparison, putting out a digital copy costs a mere $150." LA Weekly (via Spencer Goodall)
• Online viewership of content is doubling, while disc viewership is slowly decreasing, even though online doesn't yet deliver the same content. "According to the study [in IHS Screen Digest], streaming viewing of movies will overtake disc viewing this year. IHS Screen Digest projects that there will be 3.4 billion online viewings of movies this year (and that's just the paid, legal ones), more than double the 1.4 billion streams and downloads tracked in 2011. By contrast, disc views will number 2.4 billion, down a bit from 2.6 billion views last year." (via Moviefone)
• Trailer viewership online is way up. "'We teased the teaser [for Ridley Scott's "Promethius"],' said Fox Chief Marketing Officer Oren Aviv. 'And it was viewed 29.7 million times.' … Yahoo, AOL and Apple's iTunes battle to be the "exclusive" first home for a trailer online, often trading high-profile placement on a home page in exchange for the favor. In other cases, trailers are shared first with devoted fans via a Twitter feed or a Facebook game. Sometimes studios pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies that promise to help turn videos viral." (via Los Angeles Times)
• Web series are still trendy. "53% [of a 2012 Digitas study] said that if their favorite celebrity announced that they were starring in or launching an online video or web series, they would check it out. That last finding is not surprising, but it also underscores a key learning that brands increasingly have gotten hip to over the last year. This may seem obvious but few adhere to it — if you can land a familiar face for your branded video, DO IT." (via Mediapost)

Producer Doug Blake's most recent film, “The Surrogate” — which he co-produced and stars John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, and William H. Macy — premiered at this year's Sundance Film Festival and took home an Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for dramatic ensemble acting. I sat down with Doug to discuss the experience.

There was a bidding war at Sundance for "The Surrogate." What was that like?

Doug Blake [The bidding war] was very interesting. The big thing of course was the overwhelming audience response during the screening and then the bidding war.

I was the designated producer who got sent to the party. So I'm the one who's talking to the heads of all these studios, but all I can do is say, "well, I think you gotta go talk to the guys at CAA, if you're interested in this." So normally everybody kept saying how long this takes — "you should be calm" and "you shouldn't rush" — but at the end of the day the film was sold about ten hours after it screened. I believe the papers were signed at 11:30 at night with Fox Searchlight. The deal was more or less made by 7:00. The whole day had a certain "surrealness" to it, [the deal] being the most interesting part of that "surreality."

What was the highlight of your Sundance experience?

DB About halfway through the screening, I started to cry. No one had seen the film before, literally! The most was, I think, twenty-five to thirty-five people at a rough cut. Otherwise no one had seen the film.

We knew it must have been pretty good because it got into competition and CAA picked it up, but about halfway through the movie I realized that. I went to film school and wanted to make good movies and wanted to make films that made people feel and think and react. All of a sudden, I realized I had done it. I was one of the significant people that made something that meant something.

How did social media impact your film?

DB It sure impacted the rest of the week [after the reception]! Because everybody knew that ["The Surrogate"] was the big deal. When I got on a bus, all of a sudden I was the star of the bus. It was very peculiar. And I suspect that social media had something to do with that because everyone was texting and tweeting and facebooking everybody at the festival.

Anything you'd like to add to the speeches given when "The Surrogate" won the audience and ensemble awards?

DB It was a communal event. Everybody tried really hard on this movie knowing that because of the script and because of the subject matter, that this was like a soufflé, it had to be perfect or it was gonna be horrible. Because if you pitch the idea of "The Surrogate," it doesn't exactly sound like a hit movie or a movie that would win an audience award. But everybody chipped in. Everyone helped make this a special event.

What's next for "The Surrogate" and yourself?

DB For "The Surrogate," it will be out in October/November through Fox Searchlight and they're certainly the right kind of company to put something like this out. They know how to deal with films with heart and I think this is a film with a huge amount of heart.

For me, the next week after Sundance I was in Thailand working on a movie, and now I'm working on yet another movie. So for me it's just another movie, and we'll see what the reception of "The Surrogate" is and whether that has any long term effects on my life.

• "Greyhound" music video for Absolut, the vodka company (care of TBWA\Chiat\Day), where they're "creating cocktail worlds through the lens of music." The ad-meets-music-video, featuring Swedish House Mafia and a "back to basics" drink with grapefruit juice, is also running abbreviated on television. Absolut is also known for creative content including a sponsored short film, "I'm Lost" by Spike Jonze. (via Fast Company)
• "Bourdain's TV Crew" is a product of online video advertising company Outrigger Media, creating sponsored content tagging along with Anthony Bourdain's show (via MediaPost)
• "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" DVD design from Sony matches the look-and-feel of the film, which reminds director Matt Checkowski of "how Fincher thought similar for Fight Club: used all the negative critic reviews on the box." (via Checkowski)

Back in 2003, I co-produced "The Plagiarist" for FWD:labs. This wasn't long after I had met Aaron at lunch in a UCLA cafeteria and heard about FWD:labs for the first time. I liked that it was an up-and-coming operation. I liked the work it had produced. I liked the artists that were affiliated. It was something I felt I could contribute to creatively and operationally.

Over the next three or so years I was a PA on the set of a zombie student film, produced and acted in a couple short films (including "Drive"), and aided numerous other FWD:labs productions.

Years later, and one month ago, I joined the FWD:labs team as an Executive Producer and Consultant. February was an exciting whirlwind: I got deeper into the grind of a web based production company and observed where the company is, and what it can grow to become.

Here are my observations and impressions one month in:

Workflow

Emerging from six years of tightly organized and monitored large company work flows, it's been difficult yet ultimately rewarding to be a part of a predominantly project-based work flow again. Project management is a very detail-oriented process and our company has many tools at our disposal to ensure every aspect is addressed (e.g. Google Apps, Basecamp, and Harvest). Producing has been a learning experience as well. The back-end work has been streamlined via Google Docs and we now have official FWD:labs templates to use for all client web and video proposals, agreements, invoices, etc.

In addition to the web based tools, we have the physical presence required to turn things around faster. Working in tandem with Aaron in Long Beach on a recent interview piece, I was able to oversee audio while he worked the camera. I conversed with the interviewee and established a comfortable working atmosphere while Aaron adjusted lighting and camera angles. I supervised the script and helped load and unload equipment. Our tag team allows for a speedy, yet still professional, production.

Producing

We produced two works this last month, a short film titled "Mother Earth Speaks" and a UCLA Magazine doc titled "To the Rescue: Team Rubicon's Josh Webster."

Both productions were informative and fun. I'm realizing that my responsibilities as a producer are never-ending, in a good way. The key is getting all the pieces in place before the camera starts rolling. When a client didn't have the necessary locations confirmed the day before a shoot, I immediately suggested that we push the timetable back another week or two in order to get all locations and personnel confirmed. While at a friend's house in the Hollywood hills, I inquired about its viability as a future music video shot location. It's become good practice to never quite stop thinking like a producer.

Salon

I also helped host February's salon (#53 if you’re keeping count), and it was a ton of fun! Ten creatives, ranging from costume designers to documentary filmmakers and everything in between, attended a downtown bar and conversed for hours.

As someone who was fortunate enough to be local when the FWD:labs salons (then the "Wine and Cheese Salon") first started at Aaron's apartment at UCLA, it was a great pleasure to rejoin this consistent opportunity to meet and socialize with like-minded individuals once again.

The Future

There's a lot in store for FWD:labs! We are focusing our energy on many research and development initiatives that will enable FWD:labs to highlight its own best selling points. This will include new web app tutorials, print collateral development, and a wide variety of video productions and official websites. The newsletter will also come more frequently and the website will undergo further updates to the Productions page as well the back-end and sign-up pages. All of these will aim to strengthen the communication within the FWD:labs collective and spawn a higher turnout of updates, collaboration, and networking.

From 2010 through 2011, I had continuously told myself (and Aaron) that as soon as a fitting position opened up at FWD:labs, I would move back down to Los Angeles in order to take it. I'm thankful one did. I'm very passionate about my new role and responsibilities and urge you to reach out to me with website/blog/other feedback. I feel it's important to continuously promote our channels of communication to help the business and all of our creative endeavors thrive. I very much look forward to helping FWD:labs grow and working with all of you.

David Kruschke works at Studio G, Google’s in house video production team, as a director, producer, and editor. FWD:labs spoke with him about the new spot, "Best Best Man — Google Docs for Android."

What were your decisions behind the "best man" storyline?

David Kruschke We thought a wedding would be a fun and interesting reason for people to collaborate. It’s also something people could easily relate to. We tried to emphasize the fun side of it with our production design and character quips.

And, the camera angles that anonymize the user while demonstrating gestures and features?

DK I wasn’t specifically seeking to anonymize the user. If you watch closely, all the characters actually have personalities that come across by the type of edits and changes they make to the best man’s speech.

The camera angle came about because I wanted the look and feel of a wedding but didn’t want to use green screen or go on location. By shooting top down, we were able to convey the essence of a wedding by building what I call “micro sets”. These sets look realistic from a bird’s eye perspective (top down), but if the camera was angled any other way, you would see the studio and the lighting gear.

What would you say are the key elements to keep in mind when directing a product video and what do you have to avoid?

DK You need to remember the main message you want the audience to take away from the video and have a strong vision about how you’re going to achieve that. It’s a short amount of time and you do not want to distract from the message.

How much time did it take to shoot the video vs. time spent in post-production?

DK Thanks to the great team of people we worked with, the video only took two days to shoot.

Since I was also the editor for this project, I stayed late on day one and assembled the footage. On day two, I spent my lunch and breaks cutting in the selects. By the end of the shoot, I had a pretty good rough cut to show. Two weeks after that, the Official Google Blog post featuring this video went live.

How have product videos impacted the nature of advertising over the last few years? What's changed? Thoughts on the future of product videos?

DK Product videos have become a popular advertising method because the entire message can be delivered in a few minutes (or even less) and people have fun watching. At least the good ones, that is. When a product video goes viral, the viewers win and the company wins.

Having a clear script is becoming more important than having the highest production value. In other words, it’s more about what’s being communicated than how gorgeous and smooth the shots are.

I think in the future we’ll see companies placing more and more focus on education to draw in more users.

Moving forward, what type of product videos would you like to do next, and still in the director's chair?

DK I’d like to keep doing what I am doing: communicating the value of Google products to the users.