Why would a couple of hundred people with bubble-making machines and video cameras show up on a Sunday morning in the East Village of New York?
And what does Motionbox have to do with a murder that took place at a Manhattan nightclub?
For answers to those questions, one of Motionbox's co-founders sat down with Eric Phillips-Horst and Althea Wasow, two emerging New York filmmakers, who recently joined Motionbox.
"THE WANNABE"
Douglas Warshaw / MOTIONBOX(read bio)
Althea, tell me about your film.
ALTHEA
It's called The Wannabe, and it's based on a true story about a man wrongfully convicted of a shooting at the Palladium nightclub in New York City, in 1990 &mdash it's an active case, right now. I actually started working on the project in July 2000. Ramon Rodriguez is our lead star &mdash he's on this season of HBO's The Wire and ABC Day Break, which is very exciting.
MOTIONBOX
The trailer [above] was made to raise money, to complete the film?
"What's been great about uploading the trailer to Motionbox: I'm not the only one showcasing the video &mdash all of the actors and crew are using it to share their work, send it out to people &mdash the D.P., the editor, the composers, all these people have something they can share with their network."
ALTHEA
My film was sponsored by the Center for Urban Pedagogy and I won a development award through Columbia, through the Film Division, from the Bridges/Larson Foundation, and I also raised money through a fundraiser that helped get us through principle photography. Then after we finished shooting I had to raise more money to complete the film. And that's why we made the trailer.
What's been great about uploading the trailer to Motionbox: I'm not the only one showcasing the video, the actors and crew are using it to share their work, sending it out to people &mdash the D.P., the editor, the composers, all these people have something that very easily they can share, connecting people to the project. And in the description of the video, when they share it people can add whatever links they want, for example festival info, IMDB info, or their website or MySpace page.
By sharing/emailing it out through Motionbox, I can keep all the people who've supported the film in the loop about what festivals the film is going to, and other news about the project.
MOTIONBOX
Are you sending out whole clips or just selections?
"I'm sending people highlighted clips that ask them, after they've watched the part I've highlighted, if they want to watch the rest."
ALTHEA
Both. I'm sending people highlighted clips that ask them, after they've watched the part I've highlighted, if they want to watch the rest.
And, again, everybody involved in the film, can get to their work and personalize it.
Let's say I'm one of the actors featured only briefly in the trailer, I can just go and highlight and select the ten seconds where I'm featured &mdash just like I'm highlighting a sentence in a word processing program, and send that out as part of my personal mailing &mdash and at the end of playing my selection, it'll ask: "Do you want to watch the whole trailer?
If you receive that clip that starts with the featured selection, it's a better viewing experience. It's like if I emailed someone a one-line quote about the film from a newspaper or magazine article: It would be annoying if I only attached the full article, because then I'm forcing them to figure out why I sent it to them &mdash they don't know which part is relevant. It's much more effective communication to first display the relevant quote in brief note at the top, to get them interested, and then include the full article underneath that. Now you can do that with time-based media, with Motionbox.
"So you can send out multiple clips that are personalized for the audience on the receiving end; so you end up involving them, rather than annoying them."
MOTIONBOX
So you can send out multiple clips that are personalized for the audience on the receiving end; so you end up involving them, rather than annoying them. And you're able to really leverage your cast, crew and supporters' personal involvement and connections to spread the word about your project.
The cast has some forty actors. Obviously, Ramon Rodriguez, our lead, if he sends it out he's in the first frame, everyone knows it's about him, he's in the description — and I know, actually, that he's sent it to a bunch of people — but some of the other actors, they might not appear until two minutes into the piece, but on Motionbox they've been able to highlight the section they're in and share the trailer by highlighting their own selections.
There are actors who've been on Law & Order, but there are also people that, you know, I really had to track down, because I didn't want it to be a completely polished feeling. I wanted a kind of mix of performance styles. And so, there are actually non-actors who are in the film who can send out their work to people who may not even know that they were featured in a film that won Best Short at the New York International Latino Film Festival. And they can use it to showcase their contribution and collaboration on this project.
And it's great because I don't have to send all 40 cast members 20 DVD's apiece. Financially, that's just beyond the scope of the project.
ERIC
And when your film starts getting great reviews, you can add links to those reviews to your description, too. Not a bad way to share the news.
"When I put the trailer up on Motionbox and listed the film's site, it jumped up in Google."
ALTHEA
When I put the trailer up on Motionbox and listed the film's site, it jumped up in Google.
MOTIONBOX
Emerging filmmakers like you and Eric have to be so focused on how to represent yourselves: building websites to spread the world about your films, and figuring out how to use technology like Motionbox to engage and maintain interest. I mean, think about it this way:
When Spike Lee made his first feature, She's Gotta Have It (1986), he maxed out a bunch of credit cards and shot his film for $175,000. Now, there aren't a lot of people as talented as Spike Lee, but there also aren't a lot of people who are confident enough to roll the dice on their credit like that. (Clearly, Spike did the right thing, 'cause She's Gotta Have It made over $7,000,000 at the box office.)
In fact, much of the marketing of She's Gotta Have It focused on Spike's audacity — back then he was one of a kind. Today though, taking nothing away from Spike, but today the field's a lot more crowded: you can buy a broadcast-quality HD camera for about $3,000 and Final Cut Pro for $1,000, so almost anyone can afford the tools to become a filmmaker — I mean, today you can throw a brick out of any window in any town in America and odds are that you'll hit a filmmaker in the head.
ALTHEA
I think over four thousand short films were submitted to Sundance last year.
"These days you really have to be able to personalize your pitch — and you better take me right to the good stuff, because now when I receive a link to a video from you, I don't want to waste my time."
MOTIONBOX
So for filmmakers like you and Eric, how do you cut through the noise? Aside from what you've already had to do, in terms of raising money and getting support from friends, you also have to be very focused on somehow getting heard.
ERIC
These days you really have to be able to personalize your pitch — and you better take me right to the good stuff, because now when I receive a link to a video from you, I don't want to waste my time.
PRE-PRODUCTION: CASTING AND LOCATION SCOUTING
ALTHEA
"Now unknown actors who use Motionbox will be able to do the same - have an account where they keep all their demo clips that they can tag up, and then easily mix a customized submission reel."
Two areas of pre-production where I think Motionbox can be very useful for filmmakers are in Casting and Location Scouting.
ERIC
For casting, established actors with agents already keep their clips online and send them to agencies, but now unknown actors on Motionbox are able to do the same — and have an account where they keep all their demo clips that they can tag up, and then easily mix a customized submission reel from there.
ALTHEA
And for reality shows, like MTV's "The Real World," those submissions are all from unknowns, and not only can they use Motionbox for their audition videos and the producers can even let their online community vote on which videos are the best, and who should be in the next season's cast.
ALTHEA
As a filmmaker looking for some actors who would like to get in on stuff, suddenly I don't have to depend on people who have put in the time and technical skill to actually get their videos online. Instead, even those who aren't very tech savvy can just send me links to their tagged selections, highlighting their work, and the diversity of my acting pool has just increased from actors who happen to have a video-nerd friend, to any actor who's motivated enough to link me to their their stuff. And when ratings systems go live on Motionbox, half the work will be done for me before I watch any of it.
ERIC
Location scouting is great on Motionbox. You can see so much more with a video than with just a still image. Video gives you a wider, more dynamic view — camera movement — as well as the ability to show how much room you actually have for your equipment, to capture that shot.
ALTHEA
And for those videos that are public on Motionbox, even tourist videos, location scouts can search a city name and see a bunch of videos and locations.
(Below, the first player shows a clip from Althea's location scouting reel for The Wannabe; underneath that, the second player shows the shot use in the final film.)
A NEW PRODUCTION TOOL
MOTIONBOX
Eric, you told me that you've even been using Motionbox as a production tool, to screen dailies and select takes to use.
ERIC
I just started using it for our dailies: I uploaded some footage we took and no one had seen it yet. The first time I watched it was when I went through on Motionbox and tagged it up and said, "Oh, Take-2 is a good one." You know, "Take-5 is a okay."
Again, I sent it out to everyone in our Meerkat filmmaking collective, and everyone's been commenting on it and writing their own tags right below mine and saying, "I agree with Eric," or, "This is funny."
MOTIONBOX
So you're using Deep-Tagging as a commenting function. Which is kind of interesting, because we'll soon be coming out with commenting, which will allow users to write full comments directly into the video.
ALTHEA
That will be tremendous for director's notes and producer's notes.
ERIC
And for scoring a film.
"That will be great for director's notes, and producer's notes. Motionbox's commenting function integrates everything - the visual and the audio, and the notes."
ALTHEA
That will be great. Right now, when we were scoring The Wannabe I had to transfer the film to a DVD, and I then had to FedEx the DVD to my composer and email him my notes: I would say stuff like, "Okay, at eleven minutes thirty-six seconds, till approximately twelve minutes ten seconds, I'm interested in this sort of a sound." And then my composer would have to print out the email, put in the DVD, and watch it while reading my notes. There was a ton of back and forth.
Motionbox's commenting function integrates everything - the visual and the audio, and the notes.
"THE COLLABORATOR"
MOTIONBOX
Eric, you mentioned your collaborative filmgroup. It's really a rather remarkable filmmaking community — a collective of filmmakers that's very much a product of new technology: "open-source filmmaking," rather than auteur.
Eric Phillips-Horst
My group is called Meerkat Media. We're a bunch of friends who began making movies together in college, at Sarah Lawrence. After school we decided we needed to keep it up to avoid letting our skills atrophy. We started about a year ago as a way to flex our filmmaking muscles. So we make movies together.
MOTIONBOX
How's it work?
"Let's make a movie about whatever we have lying around the apartment, or some random event that's coming up."
ERIC
We'll say, "Okay, we're going to set up a little challenge today: Let's make a movie about whatever we have lying around the apartment, or some random event that's coming up — and everybody's going to part of the shoot, and everybody's going to do a different part of the project."
So, you know, I'll do the filming and then I'll give it to Lex, and then Lex will do the sound. And then she'll give to Jay, who'll do the editing. And, you know, it'll be this sort of weird "pass it around," almost like an experimental art project.
We're all in the same room for the whole creative process. So, it becomes this mish-mash of everyone's abilities.
MOTIONBOX
And how many people are in the group?
ERIC
We have about ten people, but it's fluid. All with different skill sets. And we just continually produce content. It doesn't have to be great. And it doesn't always have to be everybody involved — as long as it's somewhat collaborative, we'll put it up and call it Meerkat.
MOTIONBOX
Tell me about the Bubble Video.
"The bubble video was a contest. We heard about it through a Flash Mob."
ERIC
The bubble video was a contest. We heard about it through a Flash Mob that was going to occur down in the East Village, on Astor Place — a Flash Mob is a random gathering of people who communicate through e-mail and text messages, and most of them have never met each other before. You just send it to every single person you know and you say: "Come to this place at this time, and bring X." This time "X" was: "Bring bubbles! Bring bubble solutions and bubble machines."
So on a Sunday morning at 11:53 AM all these people who didn't know each other showed up at Astor Place with bubbles and everybody just started blowing bubbles in the square there. There probably were like two hundred people there.
The contest was put out by this organization, New Mind Space, and the challenge they issued was: "Whoever can film the bubble event the best, we'll put your video on our site and link out to you, give you a little show time."
"We did it in a day ... and then we threw it up on Motion Box and were able to actually delineate all of the different parts of the video ... and email them around."
So, our buddy Jay went down there and filmed the whole thing and then he came back and we edited it to some music that other Meerkats composed, and then we all watched it together and helped Jay out with the editing process.
MOTIONBOX
What was the time frame for the contest?
ERIC
We did it in a day. Twelve hours of editing, tops, in terms of length, from the moment it was done to the moment, like, it's on the circuit. We posted it the next day, Monday morning.
ALTHEA
That's incredible. I love that video.
ERIC
It was very exciting, and we won the contest.
And then we threw it up on Motionbox and were able to actually delineate all of the different parts of the video that were little fun moments for us, and email them around.
About a month later we got an email from a guy in the video, whom no one in our group had ever met — he's from Buenos Aires and his daughter is in the movie, sitting on his shoulders, and at one point she's rubbing bubble solution on his bald head for a while. And he said in his email: "I'm the bald guy getting bubbles on my scalp."
And so we tagged that little part, "This guy is from Buenos Aires." And we tagged the part with the girl, "This is his daughter."
So that guy's now sending our video all over the place — as a viewer of the movie, he's suddenly engaged in the process.
Along with being on Motionbox, we also were able to embed that video right into our own site, along with all of the same deep-tags.
"It's the difference between watching a video on a VHS and watching it on an indexed DVD."
ALTHEA
It's similar to the difference between watching a video on a VHS tape and watching it on a DVD where you can easily move around from chapter to chapter.
ERIC
And, of course, if I decide to change any of the tags, or add any new ones, those changes are reflected live wherever that video's embedded.
"You represent a new generation of filmmakers. As the Nike ads say, you "Just do it" ... It's not just filmmaking; it's more like constant content creation ... the world is basically turning into a camera."
MOTIONBOX
Althea and Eric, you represent a new generation of filmmakers. As the Nike ads say, you "Just do it" — Althea, you graduated Columbia's Film Division in 2006, and you've completed a 35-Millimeter short film, which you wrote and directed, and Eric, you're part of a group of filmmakers who shoot about a film a week. And when you're both not making films, you're just using video in all sorts of ways to express yourselves.
ERIC
It's not just filmmaking; it's more like constant content creation.
MOTIONBOX
The world is basically turning into a camera — more and more cell phones now shoot video just as easily as they take still pictures, and almost every digital camera shoots video, also.
ALTHEA
There's a whole range of ways that I want to express my ideas about the world through moving images: I'm shooting with my cell phone, shooting with a cheap mini-DV camera, shooting with a three chip, you know, higher resolution mini-DV camera, shooting with super sixteen, shooting with thirty-five millimeter. Maybe it's rare, maybe it's not rare — but I'm someone who loves Panavision and I love my cell phone for shooting.
"Everyone in your Meerkat film group can video the same event with multiple cameras and then put their videos in a group folder, where everyone can share any of the footage with anyone else in the group, to mix it, tag it, comment on it. And who knows what else."
MOTIONBOX
It's really quite remarkable, talking to you two, to see how technology and art are coming together.
In the months ahead we'll be releasing a host of new functionality that will make working together even more collaborative — so that, for example, Eric, everyone in your Meerkat filmmaking group can video the same event with multiple cameras and then put their videos in a group folder, where everyone can share any of the footage with anyone else in the group, to mix it, tag it, comment on it. And who knows what else.
ALTHEA
And it's not just filmmakers; it's now at the point on Motionbox where people who would never feel comfortable with editing systems, like AVID, or even applications like Final Cut Pro or iMovie are just able to put things together by mixing and share the results.
