At the end of the year, all the bloggers I read unveiled their “best of” lists ( like this one, ) each of them ranking pretty much the same ten films in a slightly different order.

You won’t find any of that nonsense here. My best of ’11 is format-friendly.  We’re on the web, after all, not in a graduate seminar, and in that spirit you can watch my entire list in about fifteen minutes if you’re so inclined. More than anything else, 2011 brought back the “movie moment.”  While there weren’t many truly great films IMHO, there were plenty of good films with great moments.

One of the few things I’m enormously grateful to YouTube for is mixups and mashups. Film needed the mix-tape, something to yank it out of its all-important filmy-ness and remind us that a movie is, after all, a collection of moments. Here are a few of my favorites from the past: Best Morgan Freeman quotes, best ways that Sean Bean dies, John Cusack in the rain.

Honestly, if you’re watching a film and there isn’t at least one moment that doesn’t make you catch your breath, doesn’t grab you and pull you out of your seat, can you really say you loved it? 2011 was full of moments like this for me, which makes me wonder — can a film succeed even if it doesn’t resolve into a cohesive whole? Can it become a classic on the strength of a couple great moments the way a rock album can on one or two tracks?

With that in mind, here are my five favorite moments at the movies in 2011:

A separation: ‘The Gas Station.’ 

A Separation begins with a father refusing his wife’s request to emigrate from Iran so that their teenage daughter can grow up in a more open society — not an unreasonable request given what we know about Iran. Because of this you find yourself siding with the mom and daughter and stereotyping the dad. But in the next scene they’re at a gas station – and I confess, this is the earliest I’ve teared up in a movie, ever — and the father forces the daughter out of the car to pump gas (unheard of for women in Iran, apparently) and, more importantly, to confront a male gas-station attendant who has stiffed them on change.

As he watches her in the rearview mirror you realize something important about him: he doesn’t believe he has to leave his country to protest it’s injustices, he’s been finding opportunities every day and he wants to teach his daughter that seizing these opportunities  can take as much courage — and be just  as important — as making grand gestures like the one his wife is suggesting.  Suddenly, we’re not sure where our loyalties lie – mom’s got a point… But so does dad – which is crucial to establish early in a film that asks us to reassess our loyalties many times before it’s done with us.

Like Crazy: ‘Finding the Note’ 

The thing I loved most about ‘Like Crazy’ was the way it made a story we’ve seen hundreds of times seem completely new. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back… Basically. But all the big beats happen offscreen. What’s left onscreen are the moments in between: lingering in a doorway at the end of a first date, getting ready for work, finding a note left on the windshield of your car. Mumblecore has tried this but never with results that are as emotionally satisfying. Like Crazy is a clinic in style and if (as some critics complain) it falls short in the substance department, well, so do long distance relationships.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: ‘Smiley leans on the stairs’

One of the central themes that emerges in Tomas Alfredson’s brilliantly layered spy film is loyalty: If to country, which? If to love, whose? For several of these characters, their answer to this question decides their fate. For Smiley – the film’s inscrutable protagonist – we’re certain we know the answer: England… But in one of the last shots of the film he arrives home to find his wife, whose recently cuckolded him,  waiting. It’s in that instant, in the way he braces himself on the stairs and lets out a gust of air, that we know where his deepest loyalties lie.

Drive: ‘The first fifteen minutes’

Somewhere in the beginning of ‘Drive’ I turned to the person I’d brought with me and mouthed ‘wow’ only to find them mouthing it right back. Unfortunately, a short time later, the film lost me in a maelstrom of hyper-violence and melodrama that it never recovered from. But the beginning is dazzling. There are dolly shots cut in lock step to coarse Euro club beats, locked-off close-ups drenched in grainy shadows, aerials floating high above a neon and black Los Angeles. And it all pulses forward with a desperate urgency, like someone’s last night on earth. You can’t take your eyes off it.

Beginners:

I liked so many moments in Beginners it was really tough picking just one. In the end I have to go with the phone call Ewan Mcgregor’s character receives from his recently un-closeted, 75 year-old, cancer-stricken father. It’s about four in the morning and his father (played pitch perfectly by Christopher Plummer) has been out clubbing and wants to know the name of a piece of music he’s heard. “Probably ‘house.’” Says Mcgregor’s character. His father writes it down. While both amusing and tender, the scene also foreshadows things to come – late night phone calls, scribbled notes and names of medications, and, as Plummer’s character gets sicker, a need for simple explanations regarding impossibly complex things. Beautiful.

Derek Thompson wrote in the Atlantic awhile ago that a film’s theatrical release is now expected to contribute less than a fifth of the total money that film makes. The thinking goes, apparently, that films are now ads for the brands/franchises they hope to become. Even if, I don’t know, Happy Feet II only makes X percentage of its marketing costs back while it’s in the theaters the people who see it are more likely to spend money on it down the line… On Happy Feet toys, lunchboxes, video games, etc. It’s the film equivalent of “The Long Tail.”

*Yawn.

After reading this I’m feeling sort of disoriented. Is this the industry I decided it was a good idea to build a life around? I stop a kid on the street with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He looks like he could be a film student. We’re close to NYFA.  I want to hear something hopeful, I tell him, it doesn’t have to have any bearing on reality. In fact, the more un-tethered from reality it is, the better — I’m looking for Hope as drug, Hope as hallucinogen, the kind of Hope that only comes from watching movies made half a century ago with other people who were picked on in high school.

“Happy Feet Two? That’s not a film.”

Jackpot.

“Antonioni made films, Kurosawa made films.”

He even has a metaphor to back up his point. It goes something like this: You’re with some friends and you’re looking to score. Happy Feet II is this, maybe this, but it’s certainly not this, and if you’re looking for this you’re gonna have to get back in your car and drive awhile.

“Happy Feet Two is like a gateway drug, it makes you dizzy and shit but you don’t have any real fun, you don’t climb trees or stop feeling your legs.”

It gets me wondering, could Independent Film learn a thing or two from the people who sell good drugs?

The drug industry operates on a simple, governing principle: Let the product do the talking. You don’t see billboards for heroin or 30 second spots for Crystal Meth during Glee but they’re doing fine. People who want good drugs drive into neighborhoods the Google Maps Car has never visited and have prolonged conversations with folks named “Daddy Fuck” because they want the product. You can read all about how hard it is to market your film without the millions the studios have, but historically that has nothing to do with whether American Independent Cinema is thriving or not. It thrives when it offers a great product, something the studios can’t or won’t. Something the public wants. And as for those “Independent” divisions of studios, my new friend has a few thoughts on them as well.

“If a chemist tried to create user-friendly heroin he would get dead. Heroin dealers protect their product more aggressively than filmmakers, we’re fine with Little Miss Sunshine and Bee Season.” This certainly explains the evolution of Pulp Fiction into Two Days in the Valley and all those Stephen Baldwin movies. So we’re in agreement — dealers are cool with their product causing homelessness and despair, Independent Film isn’t so sure… It still wants to get all Juno when it feels like it.

Before I go he has one last metaphor to share that, unsurprisingly at this point, involves drugs. It’s about an uncle who showed up to a bar mitzvah on an eight ball. ”No one wanted to stand close to him, he was shaking, he threw up on a plant. One of the dads finally asked him to leave.”

The uncle on the eight ball is Independent Film? I ask. He nods. And the dad who tells him to leave the party? “That’s how the studios should have reacted but, you know, it’s Hollywood, no one’s thinking about their kids, they’re thinking what’s that guy on? I wonder if we could make a version of that without all the twitching and vomitting.”

This is an interview I did for Jeremy Campbell’s SpidVid podcast about Lonelygirl15, Social Media and Filmmaking.

SpidVid 10/29

Recently I sat down with Kathleen Grace, creator of the original series’ The Burg and The All For Not’s to talk about her career, working with Michael Eisner, and some of the new opportunities available to filmmakers on YouTube.

Social Film: Why are you a filmmaker? Can we even call it that anymore? Why do you do what you do?

Kathleen Grace: The reason I’m a filmmaker and web series creator is because I have a very active imagination. I was the youngest of four and was forced to entertain myself a lot of the time when I was a kid. I would reenact entire scenes from the The Little Mermaid for my family. I thank god every single day that YouTube did not exist when I was that age.

SF: You created one of the first successful web series in The Burg. How did you come up with the idea for it and what was that experience like?

KG: The Burg was my grad school – instead of going to film school I created a web series. In 2005 I was working at a box office for a theater company and I hated my job. I was watching a lot of Channel 101 with my friends when we were supposed to be working and I thought that I could create my own series. I started watching RocketBoom, Ask A Ninja, Homestar Runner and a lot of the early web series. I reached out to my friend Thom Woodley who was a writer, and told him I had an idea for a series and asked him if he wanted to work on it with me.

I had lived in Williamsburg for two summers at the time but when I moved to New York full time I couldn’t afford to live in Williamsburg anymore so I lived in Astoria and Harlem. I thought it was hilarious that I was this struggling artist that couldn’t afford to live in the place where all the struggling artists apparently lived and I thought it would be fun to do a show about that. We started writing it at the time YouTube started to explode. We were really shooting a TV show but since the episodes were fifteen to twenty minutes long we couldn’t put them on YouTube at first because YouTube didn’t allow content over fifteen minutes. So we shot these little shorts and we would host the episodes on our site and seed the shorts on YouTube.

SF: How did you go about promoting the show at first? What were some ways you made sure people saw it?

KG: We sent the shorts we were doing to a list of people we called “Tastemakers” – our friends who were in positions of influence where they could tell people about the show. A good friend of mine was writing for the Daily Show and I would email her and just ask her what she thought of it – I wouldn’t ask her to tell anyone about it I would just ask for her creative feedback.  We partnered with Brooklyn bands and created a soundtrack for every single episode and so the bands promoted the show as well. For example there was a woman who managed one of the bands we had on the show who was also a blogger at Gothamist and every time we would show an episode she would blog about it. We posted our first video on May 24^th, 2006 and within six weeks we had been featured in the New York Times, Gawker and Wired.

SF: What do you think is the biggest thing that’s changed about producing for the web since you made The Burg?

KG: The size of the audience – it’s grown larger and larger. On the web, on YouTube… Continue reading →

With the news that the popular CollegeHumor show Jake and Amir is premiering a 30-minute show on Facebook, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at long form vs. short form in terms of what’s working and what’s not in web video.

Two camps are emerging; Short form is larger, older and more successful – let’s call them the Yankees. In place of a billion dollar payroll and twenty-seven world championships they have history and a pesky little thing called “reality” on their side. They point out that  audiences watch videos out of order, don’t stay in one place for very long and usually have a sandwich in their mouth… the web clearly isn’t the place for long form stories. Besides, if something is longer than a few minutes, why not just call it TV?

The other camp – long form video – is smaller, poorer, generally angrier and possessing of a far less-firm grasp on reality… I know, we’ll call them the Mets. They claim that the social-web-video-whatever-verse is in it’s infancy – “Look at TV in 1950” they love to say “would you have ever predicted The Wire would come out of this?” They tout artfully crafted shows like this and this which get about as many views in a month as iJustine does tweezing an eyebrow… And the Yankees keep on minting money like Germany in the twenties.

So why would you want to be a Met? Doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? The truth is, we can’t help it. Did I say “we?” Awkward. The thing is, Mets (advocates of long-form web video in case you’re totally lost by now) were raised on TV shows like this had parents who did this and thought it would be a good idea to learn this, eat this, and watch this even though our friends seemed to be having a shit-ton more fun doing this and this. When kiddie Mets speculated that they were being prepared for, oh, I don’t know… a world that doesn’t exist? We were told things like “you make the world what it is sweetheart” and “follow your dreams.”

Maybe that was just me. It’s a good thing I’ve sorted all that out.

The point is – advocates of long-form video on the web are kind of idealists whereas advocates of short-form video are sort of realists. Despite recent posts to the contrary, long-form video still gets bludgeoned-like-a-baby-seal by short form shows like this and this.

Maybe we’re losing because were setting our sights so high. We’re going up against 30 Rock and The Wire. Ray William Johnson isn’t. We go toe to toe with million dollar per episode budgeted shows. Epic Meal Time doesn’t. Or maybe short-form shows do go up against television as much as long form shows and they just win. Boy, that would be depressing. Either way, it’s obvious that short form is tailored to the way the web is now whereas long form is more for the “Way We Hope The Web Will One-Day Be.”  We chose this fight, no one held a gun to our heads and said we couldn’t make the next Epic Rap Battles of History instead of that ten part mini-doc on Chinese labor camps (Which. I. would. Totally. Watch. )

There is good news however, for long form content creators, this recent study commissioned by Blip shows that during primetime hours, viewers are moving online for entertainment more and more. Hopefully they are looking for something more challenging than what entertained them over lunch. Unfortunately we can’t count on that viewer to distinguish between a show that’s been produced for television and happens to be available online and something produced specifically for online distribution. We have to find ways to not draw attention to our low budgets and limited resources, and when possible, even make those things an asset ( I know, tough.) I don’t have a crystal ball but I still believe the web can be a place for content that is as dynamic and challenging as anything television has to offer. Here are some examples of shows that I think are doing that… and of some short form shows… that are evil

Long form: Trivial Pursuits of Arthur Banks, Anyone But Me, Jake and Amir, Leap Year, Easy to Assemble, The Westside, PrisonValley, A Day In the Life,

Short form: Hello Giggles, Daily Grace, Epic Meal Time, Ray William Johnson, Funny or Die, Annoying Orange

IFP’s 33^rdIndependent Film Week kicked off yesterday with a slate of panels at Lincoln Center’s new Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center and continues through Thursday with a wide selection of screenings and panels. Its main event, Project Forum, gives emerging filmmakers the chance to share their projects with the industry. Some of this years most interesting sounding projects are:

• Man-Child – Ryan Koo’s look at a 13 year old basketball prodigy on the verge of super stardom that could make Kickstarter history.

• The Feast – Ed Gass-Donnelly’s follow up to the hypnotic Small Town Murder Songs is a musical about a mute girl who sells her soul to the devil.

•  The Light in Her Eyes – A documentary about a female Koran teacher in Damascus directed by Julia Meltzer and Laura Nix.

I’ve attended IFW every year since moving to New York in 2008 and it never disappoints. This year looks to have an enticing slate of films and panels; here are some of the highlights.  For tickets to these events and many more, please view the full schedule here or you can watch livestreams of some of the panels here.

Walking the Line – The Fine Art of Promoting Your Film (Monday, 11:00 am)

This panel features two of my favorite panelists on distribution – Sheri Candler and Ryan Werner. Sheri is a brilliant and passionate spokesperson for how filmmakers can use social media, her book Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul was released last week and is a must read, you can read it FOR FREE here until October 1^st.  Ryan Werner, Senior VP of Marketing at IFC/Sundance Selects, is just downright gangster on panels, I’ve seen him on probably half a dozen over the years and he always has insight into fests and distribution windows.

Kinyarwanda – Opening night film (Monday, 7:30 pm)

Filmmaker Alrick Brown landed this year’s coveted opening night slot – which had Medicine for Melancholy in 2008 and Howl last year – with his tale of genocide and friendship that took the World Cinema Audience Award at Sundance this year. The film participated in the 2010 emerging narrative lab and now comes full circle for its New York premiere.

Paying The Bills (Tuesday, 11:00 am)

This one should be packed with indie filmmakers for obvious reasons. If you’re one of the few that doesn’t have trouble paying the bills, come anyway – Ursula Lawrence is engaging and insightful about film and new media. I’ve been on her panels at the Writers Guild East (where she oversees expanding the Guild’s membership in new media) and they were well-run and well-attended. I haven’t seen the other panelist, Gil Holland, but with 70 + films to his credit you can bet he has something to say.

Master Class – How to Mobilize an Audience (Thursday, 12:00 pm)

I’ve never seen Paulo Freccero speak on a panel but she was a mentor at last year’s labs and her bio looks interesting. She and her partner Liz Ogilvie are definitely on to something over at Crowdstarter where they are looking at new ways to reach audiences through social media. Nuff said. I’m in.

So that’s what looks most interesting to me this week. I’m bummed I missed Scott Macaulay and Ted Hope onstage yesterday, I heard it was fun. If you’re attending, drop me a line on the Facebook or Twitter and let me know what you saw and how it was.

For more in-depth coverage, Filmmaker Magazine has the week covered top to bottom here. 

Last February, while the world watched Hosni Mubarak’s regime crumble , one filmmaker spotted something in the crowd that changed the way he thought about stories and social media.

While watching the protests in Egypt last winter, documentary filmmaker Jigar Mehta was struck by the images of Egyptians holding up their cell phones during rallies. “It dawned on me,” he said over coffee recently, “that there are millions of people that just documented this pivotal moment – let’s try to figure out a way to tell these stories.”

Jigar scrambled to assemble a team with a presence in both Silicon Valley and Cairo and, over the next eight months, developed ways to enable social media fragments such as video, photos, audio clips, and tweets to become stories. They called their project 18 Days in Egypt. Somewhere in the course of their work, though, Jigar and his team realized they had something on their hands that went beyond Egypt. “The more we looked at what we had, we realized Wow, there is a way to do group-based storytelling around any event – from the uprising in Egypt to your sister’s wedding.”

For a filmmaker with an acute sense of the impact social media has had on film, Jigar’s background is surprisingly old-media.  He studied documentary filmmaking under Jon Else at Berkeley and worked for the New York Times for five years. Now, looking back on those years, it’s clear he was watching the walls for cracks all along. “At the Times, we would need someone in, say, Azerbaijan, and we could fly someone out. But there is someone there who has those skills already – we just don’t know who that person is. We needed a way to connect to him or her.”

It was this need that landed Jigar at Stanford in late 2010 on a Knight Fellowship studying collaborative journalism, “I went in with a project where the idea was to develop a way to connect video journalists around the world.” And perhaps that’s what he would still be doing, were it not for those fateful 18 Days last February. Now, with a promising write-up in Mashable and an invitation to the 2011 Startup Bootcamp in Copenhagen, the project has the potential to become a poster-child for social filmmaking. I sat down with him recently to discuss his experience with 18 Days and his plans for the future.

You began your career working for the New York Times, can you talk about how that experience shaped you as both a filmmaker and journalist?

In 2005 the Times dissolved its marriage with the Discovery Channel and decided to reboot their video unit in-house…

Continue reading →