microFilm

4D media

5 | very interesting

microFilm

A 3-in-1 video project

We will model this project on three popular challenges in the world of indie filmmaking:

The Microfilm | Make a film that is one minute long…
Shot with Smartphone | …using ONLY a smartphone camera…
Make it Epic | …that tells an extraordinary story using ordinary things.

To succeed at this, we’ll explore some resources, but before we do that we’ll embrace the related ethics of two principles that define indie art production: DIY and Distributed Culture.

Do-it-yourself culture

Distributed culture is a phenomenon borne of DIY which you’ll explore in this project. What does it mean for the basic means of culture production and dissemination to be upended? How does this change the relationship between the artist and the audience? And how will this affect you in your professional life?

Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito’s study of distributed culture: At the Edge of Art

Roots and shoots of DIY

As we learned in the discussion on digital democratization in The Moving Image, the terms for the distribution of creative output have fundamentally changed in the last twenty years. The playing field is more level, but it’s also global — much bigger — and you have to figure out how to tap into the audience that appreciates your work. You have to do it yourself: DIY.

DIY has its roots in the Arts and Crafts Movement. John Ruskin, an art and social critic,William Morris, a painter and textile designer, advocated a self-reliant rejection of the mechanization and standardization of the Industrial Revolution and a return to home-based craftwork. A century later, in the 1970s, punk rockers and hip-hop artists who were rejected by a highly centralized system of culture distribution in the music industry subscribed to the DIY ethic so they could circumvent the corporate gate. They put on their own shows, made their own record labels, and promoted each other through photocopied fanzines. This ethic has since inspired a DIY culture that has spawned everything from a resurgence in house renovation to computer software development. A great examination of DIY is the film DIY or DIE by Michael W. Dean, who has made it available, in proper DIY form, free on YouTube in an 8-part series.

Distributed Culture

A large measure of what Jon Ippolito calls distributed culture (as distinguished from a centralized culture blessed by music corporations, museums, or film studios) is not only DIY in origin, but it also further enables DIY. YouTube, Facebook, and even Apple Computer all started as garage or dorm-room enterprises. LINUX and other open-source software invite collaboration among users. Creative Commons allows the licensing of work for sharing that acknowledges authorship. While some of these enterprises have become more of a walled garden over the years — lookin’ at you, Tim Cook — they have largely enabled artists like you to create and distribute work of a quality and scope the generations of artists preceding you would have died for.

One of these agents of distributed culture is Vimeo, a kind of YouTube without the terrible API and sucky UI. In Vimeo, you can find great DIY tutorials on filmmaking here and here. You’ll find suggestions like how to create a smooth camera pan using a rubber band on your tripod grip, or a dolly shot using a skateboard. You’ll also find channels and groups where you can post your films. Unlike YouTube, where you are sometimes competing against stupid cat vids, Vimeo can narrowcast your work to an audience that is looking for what you do. Don’t get this wrong by the way: YouTube is great for broadcasting, but Vimeo is great for a targeted and well-defined audience. This author distributes using both, depending on the nature of the intended audience.

The Power of Limits

So: one minute, eh? On a phone? With stuff we have just lying around? Let’s explore how limitations like this don’t limit your creativity. We’ll learn that limits help unleash it!

The Microfilm

You can tell a story in ten seconds.
— Raoul Servais, legendary Belgian animator, speaking with John Lasseter

Your video will last for one minute. If Raoul Servais is right, then you can tell SIX stories! But seriously, the minute format is a classic challenge wherein the form privileges a certain manner of content, explained by D4Darious (Darious Britt):

These one-minute winners from Film Riot’s 2018 challenge demonstrate that great work is actually enabled by limitations:

Ryan Connolly and his crew also created a great series of Covid-related Stay at Home Challenges in 2020. These pandemic videos had not only a duration limit but also had to be completed in only 2 weeks from shoot to post-production and upload!

Shot with Smartphone

Competitions like Cinephone and the iPhone Film Festival have challenged people to create cinematic-quality short films since as early as 2010. Looking at the winners of IFF9, we understand it’s not the gear, but the idea, that drives great film-making — though having access to a good post-production tool like Premier Pro doesn’t hurt. Most of the winners are heavily edited and effect-ed:

You’ll want to visualize your process as broken down into the shoot for gathering raw material (audio and video, foley sound effects, license-appropriate music, etc.) and post-production for editing and sound design.

Pre-production

In your progress folder exercise, you document the process, which includes planning items like storyboarding. Here, Ryan Meeks takes inspiration from D4Darious to help develop his idea:

Production

The importance of good raw material is like cooking with good ingredients — it makes getting to great that much easier. Here are some tips from TeamSuperTramp for getting good raw footage with a smartphone.

You heard Devin mention some gear — books, which you probably have, or gimbals, which you don’t — but don’t worry, we’ll chat about that below. He also encouraged the use of third-party apps. It’s not essential (the native app is a limit you can work with), but if you can afford an app like Filmic, it’s a power boost. This tutorial from the Community Media Access Collaborative lets you see if it’s worth the $15 or so:

Lighting and other techniques can be explored through quick video tutorials. Most indie filmmakers are budget-conscious, so how can you make a reflector (aluminum foil!) or a dolly (tripod on a skateboard!) out of things you have hanging around? Check out this low-budget turntable solution from the iPhoneographers:

More shot design techniques at the iPhoneographers site >

Post-production and audio

You’ve gotten your raw footage and audio, you’ve moved it over to a computer, and now you assemble it into the final product. You’re moving from the role of cinematographer to editor.

iMovie is a familiar editing tool for Mac users, and pretty simple. But you have taken some tutorials for Premier Pro, which has amazing capabilities for editing, special effects, title sequences, and the entire range of post-production activities that make a video pro-grade. Use your tutorial knowledge of Premier, and synthesize it with your conceptual knowledge of filmmaking, montage editing versus sequential editing, and so forth, to inform your use of the software.

One thing that gets overlooked by a video-centric focus is the role that audio plays! It is difficult, but not impossible, to get good audio from your smartphone. Kevin Fremon shows you 4 audio effects you can use to manipulate bad audio into good:

NOTA BENE: DENOISER in ADOBE CC 2017+ is now ADAPTIVE NOISE RESTORATION!

Though this tutorial says it features the Filmic Pro app, there is a good backstage look at combining different kinds of sound — the phone’s mic, foley sound, music, wild lines, room tone — in Premier:

Make it Epic!

The classic film school “first project” is typically called something like “make it interesting.” You get the idea right away: take an everyday object and figure out a way to shoot it so that it becomes something unique to your audience.

The premise behind such an approach is that it takes an individual’s unique perspective on an object (which can be a concrete thing like a tuba or a goldfish, or an abstraction like “justice” or “love”) to make that object interesting. In other words, your job is to get others to see that object through your eyes. It has always been the job of an artist to communicate the world he or she sees to spectators — your world is not the same world they see!

It’s hard to get worked up about something you don’t personally care about, so you’ll certainly choose something that in some way is already interesting to you (even if you don’t think you care about it when you choose it — the subconscious works in mysterious ways!). But don’t assume, just because you’re interested in your object, that other people are too. For example, let’s say you love apples — the fruit, not the computer company — and you know that not everybody cares quite as much as you do.

How do you make it interesting?

So how do you convince the rest of humanity about the awesomeness of apples? The first step, you can already guess, is to inform your intuition. You know apples are cool to the core (already a metaphor slips in!), but why do you know that? Examining your object through your sketchbook, through drawing it, researching it, and journaling your thoughts about it, which these days can include a blog. In a less-than-twenty-minute Google search, this author discovered these art-historical perspectives on the apple:

Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1507

Guiseppe Arcimboldo, Eve and the Apple, 1578

M. C. Escher, Rind, 1955

Piet Mondrian, Apple Tree in Flower, 1912

Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Apples, 1890

René Magritte, La salle d’écoute [The Listening Room], 1958

Abraham Mignon, Fruit Still-Life with Squirrel and Goldfinch, c. 1670

Georgia O’Keefe, Red Apple on a Blue Plate, 1922

Pablo Picasso, Carafe, Jug and Fruit Bowl, 1909

René Magritte, Le fils de l’homme [The Son of Man], 1967

Andy Warhol, Apple, 1983

And that’s JUST a painting search.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign

Looking more deeply at these paintings, we’ll discover that the reason an apple is so interesting is… well, it turns out it’s not really about the apple. It is instead about what the apple can mean. This search for meaning is an innate human condition, and we study it using semiotics, the theory of signs. Anything can become a sign; that is, anything can carry meaning for the author in a semiotic condition: metaphor, allegory, subtext, abstraction, irony, formalism, or any of several pictorial, literary, or narrative devices. As a warm-up to your own search and research, identify the tropes that inform the use of the apple for each of the painters above: revisit the Master Tropes for help.

For a comic use of a common pandemic concern, see if you can unpack the trope in this short from TeamSuperTramp. It features an item that became suddenly WAY less common than we like to take for granted!

The Project

Technical specifications

Create a video with sound using the following technical specifications:
- 1 minute long
- Frame rate 24 or 30 fps
- Shot ONLY on a smartphone
- Frame size 1920 x 1080 pixels HD format
- Saved in .mp4 format
In your sketchbook, write down your thoughts about your subject, narrowing it down to one object.
Look at the object from every possibility: formal, metaphoric, abstract, narrative, etc. Through this analysis, narrow down the approach you want to take with your object and generate a storyboard.
With the storyboard as a guide, set up, shoot and edit, or find footage to collage. Use a video camera or footage that can handle your frame size. Flip cams can be acquired in the library’s Media Commons, but there are limits to how and where they may be used. Use Premier to work your raw footage into a final cut.
Sound should be incorporated in a non-superficial way. And remember, in terms of synchronization: sound is often a driver of image, not the other way around! Do not use sound for which you don’t have a copyright.
When finished, upload to Vimeo. After a successful upload, find the embed tool in the video frame and use the code to paste an embedded video into your blog and website. Remember to set Player Preferences in Vimeo to avoid playbars and other Vimeo skin elements, as these are not controlled in the iframe code.

Original content: tools

We encourage shooting your own footage with your own phone or with a phone you have access to from a friend or family member. If you don’t have access to a filming device and you are taking a studio at the school where I teach, we can supply you with one (though technically speaking, it’s not exactly a phone!). We also have gimbals (for steady hand-held shots), tripods with phone mounts, microphones, and lights that you can check out from the Art Program. We need to coordinate with our class colleagues as supplies are limited and we need to share!

It’s possible to combine your original footage with found video and found sound. Here are some resources.

Found objects

Search Tools

Conduct broad-based searches using these resources:

The Free Media Library at Media Commons website gives you a refresher on copyright and citation that you may have forgotten since the topic was discussed in DART 202. It also provides links to browse free (as in speech) media sources.
Creative Commons provides a useful portal to search services that feature CC-licensed content.

Found Sound

Popular sites for found sound include:

Found Clips

Sites providing found video include:

YouTube | Obviously, but don’t look for the download button. YT terms-of-service are absurdly prim about enabling downloading capabilities for remix artists, but there’s hope… see below.
Vimeo (CC search) | YouTube without the junk. Video authors will sometimes allow direct downloads.
Others | This Wikipedia article lists other video hosting services like DailyMotion.
Plug-ins | Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and other modern browsers all have plug-ins that allow the download and conversion of video formats to a useful MP4 file. You can use them on your personal computer or laptop. Sadly, if you are working in the networked environment at the school where I teach, it’s not possible to install these plug-ins but wait…
The gray area around YT downloads | Sites like KeepVid, and various URL modifiers like replacing the “http://www.” with “dl” or “ss” or “pwn” to jump to a downloading site have been playing a cat-and-mouse game with YT for years. The reality is that downloading this way violates YT terms of service but in a rather gray way. Around 2016 YT clarified (or, some will argue, stirred) the mud somewhat by saying that you need the express permission of the person who uploaded the content. Because YT started supporting CC licensing around 2011, anything with a CC license has this permission. My advice: search YT for CC content. This whole controversy remains a point of contention between IP and free-culture factions; see PCMag’s article on video download software and helper sites.
Media Commons Free Media Library | Go to the Video section here and find sources like Internet Archive, NASA, Videvo, and others.
Internet Archive
Flickr (advanced search for video and/or CC)
AVG Threat Labs | Check the safety of your downloading (or any other) site here.

Appropriation, transformation, and Fair Use

Remember our discussions on copyright lawFair Use. Appropriation of content by artists is protected by this limitation to copyright. The intent of use should be transformative, not derivative, and there is a fine line in the courts dividing the two. Sadly, if you work in a transformative way and upload material to YouTube or Vimeo, algorithms go to work to detect copyrighted material. They may zing your content with ads. They might mark your account as not in good standing. You might even be closed down outright, even if your work is protected by Fair Use. In other words, you must use caution. More and more, I’m encouraging people to use their own footage!