Up Early With The French New Wave

If you're ever in our neck of the woods at 5AM on a Monday morning, you can join us for a movie screening at our office. Yes, I said 5AM. For years, Lee and I have been wanting to find more time to watch and study classic and influencial films. But with running the business and keeping up with our wives and children, it's been really hard to find the time. Thus, "the 5AM" was born. If you're willing to get up at 5 in the morning, you'll find there are far fewer demands on your time.

For the last couple of weeks, we've been checking out films from the French New Wave. Here's a blurb from Wikipedia about the movement:

The New Wave (French: la Nouvelle Vague) was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced (in part) by Italian Neorealism. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.

So far we've taken in, Truffaut's 400 Blows and Godard's Band of Outsiders. Interestingly, Band of Outsiders in French is Band A Part, and that's where Tarintino's company that produced films like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction got its name. If you watch Band of Outsiders and you know Tarintino's films, you'll definitely pick up on some of the influences there. I really liked both films, but Band of Outsiders was my favorite of the two. I just love the way these films feel real and alive and stripped down. The way that you can sense the filmmaker behind the camera. There is a joy in them. The joy of filmmaking and of storytelling and of trying to say something that matters.

If you have any suggestions for films we should definitely see, let us know what they are and we'll add them to our list. I get to pick the next film and I think I'm going to switch us over to an Italian track and pick up a copy of Bertolluci's The Conformist.

Best Wishes for Memorial Day

We wanted to wish everyone a happy Memorial Day. We hope you enjoy the day with family and friends. And don't forget to take some time out to reflect on and remember those who have given their lives so that we can have the freedom to enjoy days like this. Thank you to all the soldiers past and present who have served and are serving.

And thank you to everyone out there who helped make our Memorial Day video, For Freedom, our best selling video ever. We are so humbled and honored that our simple tribute video resonated with so many people out there. To think that we were a part of so many of your Memorial Day services all over the country just blows us away. We thank you and we thank God for his inspiration, for his blessings, and for the freedom he has afforded us all in Christ.

The Editblog

I've had some feedback that folks reading our blog would like some more information on editing. If you're an editor or are interested in editing, I wanted to point you to a blog that Lee and I try to keep up with. It's called The Editblog (click here to jump to it).

The Editblog keeps up with all the latest updates to programs like Final Cut Pro, Premiere and Avid (all the professional editing apps). It also points out good places to see film and video clips on the internet and handy little applications like the cool little widget posted about today:

VideoSpace is a dashboard widget from the good folks at Digital Heaven. According to the Digital Heaven Freeware section it is:

“a free widget for Mac OS X Tiger which calculates the disk space required for a given duration, codec, frame rate and audio setting. It works in both directions so you can calculate time to space or space to time as indicated by the direction of the arrow between the two input areas.”

And one of my favorite recent posts points you to where you can check out some of cinema's most famous long takes:

If you are looking to kill some time this weekend the check out The Long Take post over at the Daily Film Dose. They’ve put together a huge collection (thanks to You Tube) of some of the “greatest long tracking shots in cinema.”

There may be some questionable content in these clips. I didn't have a chance to watch them all. But you can definitely learn a lot by watching long takes done by some of cinema's greatest storytellers. My personal favorite is the shot from Goodfellas. I know it's a really violent film, but the shot they've chosen is one I've studied in film school and in a Steadicam workshop I attended in CA. It's one of the most famous shots ever committed to film. Watch the shot and check out how much is conveyed about the character played by Ray Liotta by this single take. I've embedded the clip from Youtube below. Magic.


For those of you on the feedreader, here's the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=666F4QWgjpU

I'd love to hear what you think about the Editblog and let me know what your favorite long take is.

For Freedom and Other News

We're really excited that our brand new Memorial Day video, For Freedom has been received so enthusiastically. We're setting daily sales records with it on our site and it's also selling really well with other distributors. It's always really gratifying to make something that so many people can use. It's humbling to think about and we're really grateful that God is blessing the video in this way. You can check it out by clicking here.

I'm also really excited about the reponses we've received on last Friday's post, Been Caught Stealing. Check out the comments we've gotten and jump into the fray with your own. I'm thinking we need to talk some more about what actually constitutes a parody. So, that will be food for a new post some time soon.

In other news, it's been a busy week here in eleven72 country and that's kept me off the blog. It's mostly personal stuff, but I'll let you in on some of the what's goings ons...

I wrecked my car a couple of weeks ago (no serious injuries but the car was totalled) and so I'd spent the last 10 days or so hunting for a replacement. Yesterday, after much research and agonizing, I became the proud owner of a 2003 Ford F-150. There was much rejoicing as I can now get back to work and eleven72 now has a work truck to haul around production equipment, props and what not.

And earlier today, I helped Lee and his family move into a new place. So, their family is in transition to a new house today. And this should be the start of a great new chapter in their families history. So that's exciting.

Talk to you later.

(I wanted to put an image here but I didn't want to steal it)

Been Caught Stealing

So... I saw a video this morning on a certain distributors website which shall remain nameless. The video is a "Christianized" copy of a video put out by the ONE campaign. The ONE campaign video uses highly recognizeable faces and a stark black and white aesthetic to draw attention to the startling statistic that a child dies every three seconds from AIDS or extreme poverty. The video is really well done, highly creative and very effective in communicating its message. Click here to watch it now.

Imagine my surprise when I'm looking through the new releases on a certain website and I come across a video that is an exact copy of this video. It's black and white, shot on a white background, the people in the video aren't the same celebrities but they are snapping every three seconds. Then the text comes up and it's been changed to reflect that every three seconds (same as in the ONE video) six people die. The point the video is trying to make is that people are dying every second and a lot of those people don't know Christ as Savior. I get that. And I applaud the filmmakers for trying to make that point. I just wish they would have taken inspiration from the ONE video and used that inspiration to creatively come up with their own original idea. As it is, to me it seems they've just stolen the idea. They give no credit to the original creators and they are passing it off as an original work. I could go on but I think I've made my point.

This isn't the first time I've seen this in the church video space. It's one of the most blatant copies I've seen, but it's not the first. We need to be innovators. We need to be drawing on the creativity that God has given us to come up with original and powerful ways to communicate truth. And we need to be above reproach. There is a difference between parody and stealing. There is a difference between homage and rip off. And it just seems wrong.

I would really love it if you guys would weigh in on this topic and let me know your thoughts. I really feel like this is a discussion we all need to be having as makers and users of media and most importantly as bearers of the image of Christ.

Don't Waste Your Life

We've been working on getting our new Memorial Day video, For Freedom up on our site and out to our various distributors. So, I've got Memorial Day on my mind. Meanwhile, my small group is studying through a John Piper book called Don't Waste Your Life (great read, highly recommended). This morning I picked up the book to read and God did one of those things that He's so good at. He brought the things in my life, on my heart, and in my mind together in a powerful way.We're in Chapter 7 of Don't Waste Your Life. The Chapter is called, Living to Prove He is More Precious Than Life. The chapter kicks off like this:

To make others glad in God with an everlasting gladness, our lives must show that he is more precious than life. "Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you." (Psalm 63:3)

In the chapter, Piper talks about what he calls a "wartime lifestyle." He illustrates how what we do with our time, our money, and even our very lives is what shows others that "he is more precious than life." He goes on to explain that during WWII, even the people at home here in the States made great personal sacrifices for the war effort. One of the mottos of that era was, "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without." In his explanation of a "wartime lifestyle," Piper exhorts us to remember we're in the midst of a great battle and the stakes are very high. Given the fact that, in times when our nation has been at war, people were capable of rising to great levels of sacrifice, how much more should we, as Christians, rise up and sacrifice for the cause of Christ (which he calls "the greatest cause in the world). To illustrate the sacrifices people are willing to make, he pulls from the book Flags of our Fathers, which Clint Eastwood recently made into a film. Flags of our Fathers is about the WWII battle for the small Pacific island of Iwo Jima.

Iwo Jima was home to one of the bloodiest battles in our nation's history. 21,000 Japanese soldiers died in the battle, but our Marines suffered 26,000 casualties in the process. This was the only battle in the Pacific where the invaders incurred higher casualties than the defenders. The Marines spent forty-three months fighting in WWII, and yet, in one month of fighting at Iwo Jima, one third of their total casualties occurred. Many of those Marines who fought so bravely there are buried in the Pacific. It's here where I'll pick it up directly from the book, Flags of our Fathers:

Thousands of families would not have the solace of a body to bid farewell: just the abstract information that the Marine had "died in the performance of his duty" and was buried in a plot, aligned in a row with numbers on his grave. Mike lay in Plot 3, Row 5, Grave 694; Harlon in Plot 4, Row 6, Grave 912; Franklin in Plot 8, Row 7, Grave 2189.

When I think of Mike, Harlon, and Franklin there, I think of the message someone had chiseled outside the cemetery.

When you go home
Tell them for us and say
For your tomorrow We gave our today

Those were the lines that really hit me. How powerful, to live in the reality that we are engaged in a spiritual war, a war for the souls of all mankind. That we hold in our hands and in our hearts the spiritual antidote that can transform the lives of all the men and women living on this planet. We all long to be a part of something. To know and to have and to live for something bigger than ourselves. To find something worth not just living for, but worth dying for. And we Christians are blessed to have found the fulfillment of those longings, of that desire in our relationship with Christ. How powerful to be able to say to them, in the end, "For your tomorrow, we gave our today."

Last Call for Mother's Day Media

There's still time to sign up and get our free Mother's Day Media pack. Click here to go to the homepage and sign up. Once you've signed up, you will be emailed a link to download the free Mother's Day media. If you'd like to see what you'll get, click here to see our FREE MEDIA page.

We've also got a great Mother's Day Sermon Illustration and Countdown available on the Seasonal Tab of our website. For Mom: A Breakfast Story is our best selling video ever, so we must have done something right with that one. Here's a comment we received about For Mom:

Well done! Way to give Moms a good laugh and recall good memories at the same time.
Michael Yaeger
Temple Baptist Church

We've also got a great Mother's Day Countdown where real women share their answers to the question: What's the worst Mother's Day gift you could get? Hint: Don't buy her a Dieting Cookbook!

Here's wishing you all a very Happy Mother's Day.

Do The Right Thing

Storme blogged the other day about the copyright law podcast done by Creative Synergy Podcast. I listened to the entire podcast (about 1 hour) and it is extremely informative. From my perspective as a long time media volunteer, the issues discussed are very enlightening and somewhat disturbing. Anthony Coppedge and Greg Atkinson invited 2 copyright lawyers and the President of the Church Copyright Administration to discuss this very hot topic in churches. I realized that there were things I did as a part of the media team that were just outright illegal. I knew some of the issues and had the same feeling that Greg and Anthony discuss, but some were new to me.

If you are involved in any form or fashion with a church in media, music, arts, programming etc. then this podcast is an absolute must hear. The way they approach the topic, from Scripture's perspective and then dive into what our country's law says is very encouraging. Basically, we as Christ followers, must be above reproach in regards to all matters, not just ones of convenience or of seemingly "big" sins.

Three big ideas that jumped out to me personally:
1. Stealing is stealing and many churches don't know or don't care that they are infringing upon copyright laws in video/film, music and dramas.
2. YOU are liable for any law that is broken, not the church.
3. 1 Timothy 5:18

If you haven't had the chance to listen to this podcast, I really encourage you to do so. You will be very thankful that you did. Click here to download it now.

Lee

Questions About Copyright and Church?

In the planning and execution of church services, we've all run into questions about copyright. What songs, images, videos can we use? How do we get permission to use songs or images if they are copyrighted? The truth of what you can and can't do with copyrighted material isn't always clear. It's hard to figure out where to look for the right answers. And if you've ever tried to read through the actual copyright laws, you know how hard they can be to understand. I often come away more confused after researching something.

That's why I'm really excited about the latest podcast from CreativeSynergyPodcast.com. This is the fifth podcast put out by Greg Atkinson (Church Video Ideas) and Anthony Coppedge (anthonycoppedge.com). Greg and Anthony have a lot of experience both working in churches and consulting them. And it's awesome to see them sharing that experience through this free resource. For this episode on copyright law, they sat down with three copyright experts. I'll be listening to this soon and I'm really looking forward to learning more about this very important and often confusing issue. Click here to download the podcast now.

Office Space

We made a short (silly) video to show off our new office space. It's just a sublease, but for us, it's a big step forward in the life of our little company. Here's the video:



For those of you reading the feed, here's a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvvFzN8yhGk

Enjoy!

Better off Rock'd

Depression affects more than 19 million people each year in the US. In any typical high school classroom, it is likely that three students have made a suicide attempt in the last year. Among college students, there are an estimated 1,100 suicides per year (an average of 3 per day).

Those are some sobering facts. Better off Rock'd wants to do something about it. Started by a good friend of mine, Better off Rock'd is putting together their first tour to raise money for suicide prevention. This is a great endeavor and it's being put together by a guy who has a real heart for following Christ and for young people. And they've gotten some of the biggest names in Christian rock involved. The bill so far includes Seventh Day Slumber, Everyday Sunday, Nevertheless, and Stephen Speaks. Check out their Myspace page and if you're in the Austin or Ft. Worth area in June, be sure to check out a show. I'll be there shooting video highlights of the event. I hope to see you there!

eleven72 is moving

We are moving into a new office today. For the past year and a half, Lee (the other half of eleven72) and I have been officeing out of our homes. Recently, we decided to take the big step of moving into an office. We've got a sixth month sub-lease in a nice area of NW Austin. It's just a run of the mill business park, but it's a big deal for us. Anyway. I just wanted to post that little bit of good news. It is our hope and prayer that this move will foster and usher in a new era in our young company. Whatever the case, we're really excited about it. I'll post a couple of pictures soon.