If you haven't seen the new trailer (and Kickstarter campaign) yet, here it is:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1480255348/sourlands-stories-from-the-fight-for-sustainabilit?ref=card

I’ve spent the past day redesigning the Sourlands website.  I have experience in graphic design (from my days as a college newspaper editor) but I’m not much of a programmer. So I use a web service called Weebly that allows me to do the design myself but takes care of all the coding for me. For anyone looking to start a website, I highly recommend they check out weebly.com.

I’m starting to compile some production photos for a Sourlands image gallery I’m going to add to the site. Check back soon.

Finally, here’s a really easy thing you can do to help. Google “Sourlands.” You’ll see that the Sourlands documentary comes up in the search listings about five items down. Press the PLUS ONE button next to listing. That’s it. This will, theoretically, help the listing appear higher  in the listings.

Last night, SOURLANDS reached an important milestone. At roughly 8 p.m., awash in the glow of a computer screen, I edited together the closing sequence of the documentary, added it to my timeline, and hit save.

The editing process over the past months has been a gradual affair -- a full day of reviewing footage and experimenting with edits often yielded only a few minutes of polished storyline. But in the past two weeks, it came together easily, like the end of a game of solitaire. In the last few hours of editing, after months and months of incremental steps, the threads of the story seemed to tie themselves together without much input from me.

There remains an incredible amount of work left to do on the documentary -- hundreds of hours in fact. But a finished rough cut means that a fully realized story -- with a beginning, middle and end -- now lives on my editing timeline. It passes the bus test: If I were to be hit by a bus today, the executors of my (modest) estate would discover SOURLANDS as a completed thought.

 My task now is to immerse myself in post-production and continue to work efficiently. January 6 is circled on my calendar. That’s the late deadline for submission to the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival, which runs from April 18-29 in New York City. Tribeca is a highly competitive film festival, and it’s #1 on my list of aspirations for the SOURLANDS world premiere. Hot Docs in Toronto is the biggest festival devoted solely to documentaries, and their late deadline for submission is January 13. They’re #2 on my list. Applying to film festivals successfully is an art in itself, so I’ve started my preparations, beginning with a book I recently acquired, “Chris Gore’s Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide.”

Here’s a list of post-production work the remains to be finished on SOURLANDS:

-A few more scenery shots and at least one more interview
-Editing of a new preview trailer
-Narration
-Fact checking
-Final graphics
-Music
-Sound mix
-Color correction
-Test screenings and revisions
-Credits
-Press kit, film festival submissions, publicity
-Fundraising

That last item is a significant one. My goal with SOURLANDS, above all, is to create a meaningful documentary that tells an important story. That’s the goal that gets me moving in the morning. But I’m also determined to discover whether independent documentary filmmaking can be a sustainable livelihood – rather than one that feels like a game of highstakes poker. For SOURLANDS, I continue to apply for grants from funding organizations, and I’m also exploring the possibility of selling underwriting credits to non-profits, businesses and individuals. So far, the most successful fundraising for SOURLANDS has also been the most gratifying – pre-selling DVDs directly to my audience on Kickstarter.com. Once I have a new preview trailer ready to go, I’m considering another Kickstarter campaign, this one focused on post-production expenses, generating publicity, and trying to pre-sell as many DVDs as possible before the premiere. More on that in weeks to come.

Sourlands editing continues…

I thought I’d use this week’s blog post to pass along some of the excellent online resources I use to stay up on the latest in the world of digital filmmaking. Here they are:

notesonvideo.blogspot.com

dvxuser.com

nofilmschool.com

philipbloom.net

You can learn most of the universe’s secrets at these four links. (I spent much of this past weekend at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC, and I'm pretty sure you can learn the rest of the universe's secrets there.)

I’ve read a lot of books, but there are only a handful of books I’ve read more than once.

There are two books, however, that I reread at least once a year, often when I’m feeling the need to refresh the reservoir of creative energy. The first is Stephen King’s “On Writing,” which I consider to be an all-time Classic of the Ages. I don’t write fiction (at least not on purpose) but I’ve never found another book that offers such sensible, concise advice on how to become a better writer. “Elements of Style” comes close, but King’s book also happens to be a great read whether or not you give a hoot about the way words go together.

Another book I cherish is “Digital Filmmaking” by Mike Figgis, who directed “Leaving Las Vegas.” This book is a big mishmash: In some parts it offers advice on specific technical and artist aspects of filmmaking, but in other parts it’s all about attitude and gearing yourself up mentally for the work ahead.

In certain ways, “On Writing” and “Digital Filmmaking” resemble one another. King and Figgis both preach the virtue of rigorous discipline. King says good writers should write constantly, several hours every day, and when they’re not writing they should be reading constantly. Figgis says you should always have a camera nearby, you should shoot constantly, experiment constantly, and you should know your camera and other gear inside and out.

Figgis says:

“The first thing a solider is taught is how to dismantle his gun and put it back together – make sure it’s clean, make sure it functions – because that’s the thing that will save his life. You don’t want your gun to jam. You don’t want your camera to jam either. If something goes wrong with it, you want to know how to fix it or adapt it. That’s why I always say it’s important to own your camera, because in that way you have a different relationship to it.”

Maybe the gun metaphor is a little off in the age of non-mechanical digital cameras, because I can't imagine being able to fix the electronics of my camera if it broke in the field (or anywhere for that matter) but I get it what's he driving at. How many people actually read the entire manual for their camera, and then learn what every single menu option does?

Figgis also has some interesting ideas on what a “cinema” really is.  Regular readers may recall I recently purchased a digital video projector, and this passage from Figgis was part of the inspiration behind that purchase:

“A cinema is any space where chairs can be placed all facing in the same direction; where a white wall or a screen exists, and where a medium-priced digital projector is connected to a DVD player with a couple of speakers. That is a cinema. In a way, this takes us back to the roots of cinema and a time when it was brought to the small towns and villages of Italy by a van.”

Changing topics only slightly here, on Nov. 3 Canon and Red both announced new, affordable digital cinema cameras, small enough to stuff into a backpack and good enough to shoot Hollywood films on. Affordable is a relative term – these cameras will cost between $15,000 and $20,000, plus lenses. But now, just as Figgis envisions, many professional filmmakers will be able to own a camera of a quality that previously they could only rent.

Now, these two cameras weren’t quite as affordable as many independent filmmakers had hoped, but they’re stilling exciting to me, because they mean the cost of the technology continues to drop. Right now, in fact, it seems there are great cameras to choose from no matter what your budget. For about a $1000, you can get a Canon 60D or a Panasonic GH2. For under $5,000 you can get a Panasonic AF100 (which is my current camera aspiration) or a Sony FS100. And for $15,000 to $20,000 you can get one of those new Red or Canon cameras or the Sony F3. In each case, you gain features and additional control as you go up the line, but you can make an outstanding film with any one of them. In other words, it’s a great time to be a filmmaker.

Since the title of this post is "Good Reading," here's one other recommendation: "New Jersey's Sourland Mountain" by T.J Luce is a great read and has served as a wonderful historical resource for me as I work on the Sourlands documentary. One particularly exciting place to jump in is "Chapter 24: Shady Characters."

Some good news: A short "sneak preview" of SOURLANDS will screen at the 2012 Princeton Environmental Film Festival, followed by a panel discussion with myself and number of other New Jersey documentary filmmakers.

The details are still being figured out, but it looks like this is going to happen in late January or early February. I'll keep you updated.

If you've never been, the Princeton Environmental Film Festival is held every winter at the beautiful  Princeton Public Library. Their programming is always good and they bring in incredible speakers and filmmakers from all over the place. Check out their website (which hasn't been updated yet for 2012) here:

http://www.princeton.lib.nj.us/peff/

A subject I’ve been mulling recently is digital distribution. The future of getting your film out to your audience, many in the filmmaking world are proclaiming, will be to pipe it to them through the Internet.

It certainly seems to me that this will turn out to be true, sooner or later. And it might be great. Envision:  Halfway around the world, someone I’ve never met reads a review of SOURLANDS on a blog, visits my website, decides to purchase the film, enters their payment information, downloads the film, and then starts to watch it on their laptop, iPad, or Kindle Fire. The time that passes between them first reading about SOURLANDS and them starting to watch it is under 10 minutes. Perhaps they're waiting in an airport, trying to fill some time. Instant gratification for them, and a sale for me.

I don’t know why -- because this model seems to have so much potential -- but something about it also gives me pause. The Internet has a strange way of devaluing things. It devalued newspapers, it devalued music, and perhaps movie are next.

That could be wrong. I certainly hope so.

Will I distribute SOURLANDS on DVD? Definitely. Will I offer it as a digital download? Still thinking about it…

This past weekend I was in Milford, Pa., at the Black Bear Film Festival, for a screening of my first documentary, The Farmer and the Horse.

After the film, I answered questions from the audience – 25 people maybe.

After more than a year of screenings, I’ve discovered that these things get progressively easier. In large part, it’s because some of the same questions are getting asked, and you get a chance to polish up your answers.

One question I received was, “What advice would you give to someone thinking about making their first documentary?” Here’s the answer, in three parts:

1. I had a great-grandfather from who was famous for saying, “You no starta, you no finish.” That’s solid advice. There are many people who talk about making a film, far fewer who actually get started, and far fewer than that who actually finish. There are always good reasons not to get started, but what makes you a filmmaker is that you start anyway.

2. For low-budget filmmakers, it’s usually not possible to get all the best equipment all at once. I think this is not only okay, it will make you a better filmmaker in the long run. Once you become a great shortstop using a baseball glove made out of paper bags, you’ll be even better when you get a proper glove made out of leather. (That’s an Ozzie Smith reference from my youth.) But my advice would be: Buy the good stuff, one piece at a time, when you can. Cameras come and go, but don’t cut corners with workhorse pieces of gear like microphones, tripods, and light stands. These things should last forever, so pay for the right tripod the first time, and you’ll probably never have to buy another one.

3. Watch a ton of documentaries, to get inspired and see what’s possible. Just off the top of my head, here are 10 docs that really made me pay attention to what the filmmakers were doing:

The Civil War
Murder Ball
Gasland
Bowling for Columbine
Why We Fight series (Frank Capra)
Planet Earth series
Hoop Dreams
Inside Job
Collapse (it's just one guy talking the entire time!)
The Cove

One question I get asked a lot while filming Sourlands is about my camera – “Is that a video camera?”

The reason this question gets asked is that the camera – a Panasonic GH2 – looks exactly like a digital photo camera. And it is. It’s a hybrid that takes both photos and videos.

One of the most exciting things to happen to independent filmmakers in a long time started about three years ago, when the first Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLRs) photography cameras were designed to include video features. I’ll spare you the technical details, but the reason this was so exciting is because these cameras have the ability to create images that rival Hollywood film cameras, something traditional video cameras can’t come close to.

However… there were also big limitations to using DSLRs for video. One example is that the cameras would overheat and turn off in the middle of a scene. There were many other problems as well.

The Panasonic GH2 was released about a year ago and is something of a compromise between the video cameras of old (which have small sensors) and the newest DLSRs (which have huge sensors.) The sensor of the GH2 is big enough to blow the video cameras away, but small enough that it avoids many of the problems the DLSRs have. It is, in essence, the middle way.

The GH2 is still not perfect, and it isn’t the camera I would use if money were no object (then it would be a camera called the Panasonic AF100), but I have to say the GH2 has been a wonderful tool for capturing the beauty of the Sourlands. The images look fantastic, and it’s so small and portable you can run around and make a documentary and go pretty much unnoticed.

Camera technology is in an era of incredibly rapid change.  This coming November 3 is going to be a particularly interesting day (at least if, like me, digital cinema cameras excite you.) Two companies -- Canon and Red –- are each slated to make big announcements about their newest large sensor cameras, and the rumor is that they might even be affordable.

Next week, though, I’ll write about tripods. Although cameras often get all the attention, somebody smart once observed, “Cameras come and go, but tripods are forever.”

The completion of Sourlands is still months away, but I’ve started to ponder how to roll it out once it’s ready. I premiered The Farmer and the Horse at Howell Living History Farm, outside on a perfect August night in 2010, and it was a fantastic experience.  Outdoor screenings can be a little stressful for the filmmaker -- because there’s no knowing what the weather will be -- but nothing beats showing a film on a huge screen under the stars. It was downright festive. The great outdoors is also very accommodating to situations when you have no idea how many people will come but you're hoping for as many as possible. That was the situation for The Farmer and the Horse premiere, and we ended up with over 300 moviegoers.

I like the idea of having a big outdoor screening for Sourlands as well. Somewhere local. (Or maybe it should be several screenings, throughout the Sourlands region.) Today I took the first step toward screening self-sufficiency by ordering a new digital movie projector. Now, to project a movie just about anywhere, all I’ll need is an electrical outlet and something to point the projector toward. I’m pretty excited.

If anyone has any good ideas about places to show Sourlands in Summer 2012, drop me a line at [email protected]. Indoor locations work too. Also drop me a line if you’re interested in hosting a screening of The Farmer and the Horse. I can bring the projector.