According to the guidelines, the idea is to “create a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on 24 July 2010”. All the content of the film will be submitted through YouTube, and if the footage you submit is chosen for the film (by director Kevin Macdonald), “you will be credited as a ‘co-director’ in the credits that appear at the end of the film. You will also be eligible for consideration to attend the film’s premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival”.

I'll save you a seat.

Awesome, right? Sure. At its core, this is a pretty creative idea. And it’s always great when an established filmmaker like Ridley Scott or Kevin Macdonald decides to get involved with something like this. However, there is a key factor at play here that I think deserves a look, and it is the exact reason why I chose to wait until after the 24^th to write about this film.

Is it possible that this film project isn’t meant for filmmakers at all? That, rather than looking for professionally shot footage from up and coming filmmakers, the producers of this project are actually looking for the best home movies they can find? Kinda like an unfunny version of America’s Funniest Videos?

They were ALL unfunny.

Considering that they are requesting completely raw, unedited footage, and that some of the tips they provide include stuff like: “The built-in microphone on your camera will struggle to record usable sound if your subject is any further then 3 feet away from the camera” (improper grammar theirs, not ours), it is pretty clear they aren’t expecting a lot of footage from seasoned film-making veterans.

It seems more likely that they are expecting footage from people who are more interested in “being involved in a movie” than people who will care about how the final project turns out. Because of this, I ask, is it possible that this film isn’t really showing multiple perspectives of the world, but just letting Kevin Macdonald use your footage to show his perspective?

While I don’t want to make it seem like I’m just some cranky dude who doesn’t like the idea, I simply what to highlight the fact that it isn’t really going to be any kind of stepping stone or building block for anyone chosen as a “co-director”. If this film is successful, none of the “co-directors” will get any of the praise. Instead, Macdonald will, for being able to make a great film out of “armature” footage.

This made us sad but it also made us realize that the problem starts with us… and so will the solution. This is serious.

In an attempt to boost the number of incoming calls to our Super Hotline, we hired an extremely expensive and famous internet marketing corporation to come up with a more comprehensive marketing plan for the hotline. They determined that the best way to get more incoming calls would be to shoot a commercial for the hotline. A commercial that they were unwilling to let us be a part of. While this move seemed to go against everything we stand for with a DiY-Filmmaking website, they had a really nice powerpoint presentation with techno music that we just couldn’t say no to.

They also had a slide with this picture.

So, with our tail between our legs, we handed the production over to the marketing corporation and told them to finish quickly, stay on a strict budget, and keep it as far away from “Hollywood” as they can. 18 months and $250,000 later, the marketing corporation returned with a 30-second spot starring Lost‘s Evangeline Lilly.

“This should do the trick,” they said, “if this doesn’t get you’re Shitty Hotline ringing off the hook, nothing will!”

“Super Hotline.”

“Whatever…” and that was it.

They put their cigars out and flew away in their helicopter, it was crazy.

To avoid making this commercial the biggest waste of money in the history of our website (our Waterworld so-to-speak) we had to post it to YouTube… but we post it with a lesson learned and a request.

We’ve learned the hard way that using a big marketing corporation will not help a DiY-Filmmaking website very much. We also learned that rather than turning to a big company, we should turn to our DiY-community for help, so that is exactly what we are doing. After you watch the big budget version of our DiY-Filmmaking Super Hotline Web Commercial, please come up with one of you’re own, and show the big corporation (and us!) that DiY is always the way to go. Enjoy!

One thing that struck me was the announcement of iMovie for the iPhone. Bam!

Remember when FCP Daily did that April Fool’s joke – FCP Mobile? Well, it seems like it’s coming true in a sense. Of course, not with the features that Final Cut Pro offers, but iMovie for iPhone is no slouch.

First of all, the new iPhone 4 hardware allows you to shoot in HD with a tap to focus feature. Pretty cool for a phone. It seems like iPhone 4′s hardware and processor capabilities have been really boosted to allow processes like this (along with the facetime thing).

Now you’ll be able to edit those movies for the low price of $5 with the iMove app. You get features like themes, transitions, titles, geolocation maps, music, and photos. Plus, you get the ever-present “Ken Burns Effect” thing. Export to YouTube or Mobile Me in Medium (640×360), Large (960×540), or HD (1280×720) sizes. You can email video too.

Obviously, this is aimed at people on vacation. In fact, if you were an alien and sat in on all of Steve Job’s demos, you’d probably think Apple makes products specifically for people on vacation. No one is going to use this for any serious work, and I think that goes without saying.

However, I think there is a really cool filmmaking use for this.

Let’s say you are shooting a scene. Many times you will wait until you get to the location on the day to block it out with your actors. Most of the time, they’ve only really read the script (and the blocking directions on it). You can see where I’m going with this. It usually ends up to be fine, but the blocking and the visualization of the scene is learned on the fly.

What if you could go out on location with your actors and not bring anything with you but your cell phone. Just you and them, and block the scene out. They could read from their scripts, and you can get an idea of exactly where you want to put your camera. After an hour or so, you’ve got some clips on your phone of just basic blocked out shots.

After that, you can just piece them together on your phone using iMovie, and email a blocking reference to your cast and crew. Heck, you could do the whole thing with just random people reading a script – it still helps a lot. On the day, you know where every camera setup is, and the actors know what the final scene is going to roughly feel like. I think something like that is really valuable.

I think iMovie and the new iPhone 4 hardware has a lot of potential to be a pocket-sized tool in the hands of a director. It could make visual storyboarding quick, easy, and effective.

Anyways, it’s a good place to have some conversations and interact a little bit more. LIKE IT or else we look stupid.

You can find it right here.

UPDATE: FCP Daily has pointed out that this has been denied by Apple.

Apple Insider had an interesting article yesterday about Final Cut Pro. Basically, Randy Ubillos, the man behind FCP and also the man behind the much-maligned iMovie ’09 is back at the helm of the Final Cut Studio team. Apparently, there is a makeover in the works that will bring Final Cut Pro to a more prosumer level, since Apple mainly sells Final Cut Express. There’s been some job postings for Senior UI positions, which are pretty interesting.

What does this mean for Final Cut and the pro apps? Seems like it’s too early to tell, but I think all Final Cut Pro users can agree that FCP needs an upgrade – both to 64 bit and to a new interface. It appears as though both of these will be addressed in the refresh.

I, for one, am a little wary of something that is more “prosumer” – will they leave out key features for professionals in fear that regular users will get confused? Will they make it too simple to be useful?

Time will only tell, but there may be a silver lining here. Since Apple is leaning more and more towards the consumer level products, we know that those products will be supported and frequently updated. If it means bringing more people into the Final Cut Pro Pro party to get more attention from Apple, I’m for it.

What do you think? Dark clouds on the horizon or maybe a dawning of a new age? Let us know in the comments.

Yesterday, Facebook changed the way people traditionally interact with these pages by dropping the “Become a Fan” button and adding the “Like” terminology. Users should already be familiar with this, since you can “like” anything you find in your news feed.

The number one change as I see it though, is the connections feature that Facebook is rolling out. Essentially, what you “like” shows up in your profile, categorized by the type of thing you like. As Facebook puts it:

connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile

(from the Facebook FAQ)

Apparently what this means is that if you like both “Little Timmy’s Independent Movie” and “Star Wars” they are both going to show up as movies you like in your profile. You can edit the order, but they still get lumped into the same pile.

The question I wonder is – will this hurt or help DiY Filmmakers using Facebook Pages to promote their film? Traditionally, users have kept a list of their favorite movies (“The Notebook”, “Star Wars”) in their profile, and then fanned some pages of maybe filmmakers they know or are interested in. When everything gets lumped together, will the user think twice about adding your film to their list of films they like?

I’m not talking about the hardcore independent film enthusiast here, but more about the casual user. We’d all love to have audiences made up of hardcore fans, but lets face it: as a promo tool, you try to catch a wide net with a Facebook Page.

If you have any experiences of how this change has affected your film promotion, leave it in the comments or call our podcast line.

The number is 954-324-7349, or 954-324-7DIY.

Google Voice has a problem with custom greetings, so if you want the cool custom greeting featuring yours truly, you just have to use this handy little Google Voice call widget.

Hope you give us a buzz soon!

Sony Vegas Pro 9

Sony Vegas announced Vegas Pro 9.0d at NAB with a few new features. Multi-layer PSD support (with support for manipulating individual layers within Vegas, which is pretty cool), closed captioning support, more device support, and a burn to DVD from timeline feature.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

I have to admit that I am not a Premiere fan. It was my first serious NLE that I used, but I floated over to FCP and never looked back. However, Monday Adobe showed off the CS5 versions of its video lineup (which includes Premiere, After Effects, and all the little tagalong Adobe apps like Media Encoder, blah blah) and turned some heads, including mine.

First of all, Premiere Pro uses Adobe’s much-touted Mercury technology, which boasts “amazingly fluid” realtime editing of clips snagged right off of your Canon 5D or 7D (to name a few). It’s also only 64 bit – no 32 bit machines allowed. And if you have the right graphics processor, you can gain some significant speed advantages in rendering and playback by using your GPU over your CPU. This, when FCP is still dancing around Open-CL is a little distressing to FCP users. At least, of course, until Apple decides to let us know the next steps for Final Cut Pro (fingers crossed).

Some other cool features involve being able to share assets with FCP and Avid. Some are yawners like being able to easily export a still frame from the timeline, but there are some useful things like a tool that sniffs out gaps in your timeline. Of course, the real news is in the whole structure of the program, not some of the feature bells and whistles.

Moving Away From Features and Towards Platform

I think what we’re seeing now is a great emphasis on the platform for editing, and less on the specific features. This has of course been the case for a while, but the emphasis on workflow so far at NAB really works it in for me. Less talk about what you can do with the program on a feature level, and more about how you can create a very smooth workflow quickly and easily.

Why? We already know what a NLE can do. Every editor uses the same tool: cutting shots together to make a compelling piece. Yeah, a gap sniffer is cool, but what we are looking for now is Minority-Report style ease of getting footage in and footage out. Mercury and 64 bit is a huge step forward for Premiere Pro in that regard, and I hope that Apple follows suit.

No More Tape

There is very obviously no room for tape in the vision for NLE editing. Sitting down and capturing your HDV tape is a huge time waster when you can slide in your Canon 7D footage right onto the timeline. Makers like ARRI are even showing FCP some love by supporting Apple’s ProRes codecs.

So again, this has been the case for a while, but Monday at NAB shows just how far into the tapeless world that we are. All the exciting stuff is workflow-oriented.

Hopefully there is more great stuff coming up for the rest of the week!

We aren’t at NAB 2010 in Las Vegas, but we are hooked in and seeing what sweet new technology will be coming out of the expo for DiY Filmmakers to use and adopt.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter where we’ll be tweeting some awesome NAB stuff, and following NAB’s official twitter account might not be a bad idea either.

As is to be expected the NAB official list of talks and things like that reads very much like the things we write about here on the site, so we’ll see how things go down. It feels like filmmakers of all budgets as well as broadcasters are on the same page here. Very excited to see what goes down!

This is pretty cool because both Poetzero and MAKE magazine are doing some even more DiY filmmaking articles than they usually do, which we will be sure to link to.

But how will we commemorate DiY Filmmaking Month? We’re coming up with something, so hold tight.

Can we use this graphic? I don't even know, but I'm going with it.