My current pieces:

“NC-17: Sex, Drugs, and Rigged Ratings”

“F.U. in D.C.: House of Cards”

“Tony Scott: In Memoriam”

“Warrior Seoul: A Korean Cinema Primer”

ManArchy is a men’s magazine about topics from booze to body art, fashion to fiction. It was recently re-launched under new management, and I couldn’t say no when the offer came in. (Seriously, the editor blackmailed me.) Even so, the collective talent assembled is diverse and insightful. They certainly have their ways with words. In fact, nearly everyone on the contributing staff is someone I’ve either previously published alongside, workshopped with, or split bar tabs with. Many are all three, and include alumni from such online collectives as LitReactor, The Velvet, and Write Club.

Be sure to like ManArchy on Facebook and share the articles you enjoy.

To coincide with today’s release of Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology, I created this promo. It’s composed of imagery inspired by stories in the collection, including original music from me. The intent is to evoke a feeling, a mood—ominous, violent, and redemptive—rather than paint specific settings or characterizations. Multi-plane animation (a.k.a. “2.5-D”) was used to breathe life into what are predominately still photos. I’m so proud to have a story included alongside so many talented and respected authors in what has to be one of the year’s best.

The paperback is available through Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com (both at $9.09 for a limited time), and Powell’s.com, with e-books coming very soon.

UPDATE: On its release day, the paperback was BN.com’s #4 best seller, trending #1 in hottest movers! (Click to embiggen.)

I just downloaded a file/mp3 on a friend’s computer. it’s in iTunes and I can burn it. thing is, it’s a live recording and only one file and too long to fit on a single disc. is there a way to break it up into individual tracks and not have pauses between them when playing?

Unless you’ve already got professional software, I usually recommend something called Audacity. It’s free, cross-platform, and open-source, so people have developed the shit out of it over the years. It’ll open and manipulate MP3s. There’s going to be some quality loss because the process of re-saving new MP3 files will introduce another level of compression. So, after you’ve sliced them in Audacity, I might recommend saving the new ones as stereo, 16-bit 44.1kHz AIFF files (that’s the audio CD standard) instead of MP3s, to help preserve quality. They’ll take up about 10x the storage space on your computer, but you can delete them after you burn the new CDs.

If you use iTunes for your disc burning also, it might add these AIFFs to your iTunes library by default when you drag them into the playlist, so you’ll want to delete them afterward. I think there’s a preference to turn this off as well if you like. There will be silent gaps between the songs on CD, because you’d otherwise need professional authoring software to get rid of these and conform to Red Book Audio CD standard.

[. . .] real-D. the new 3-D technology. MY BLOODY VALENTINE and the others. how the hell is that supposed to work on DVD? will it be the same, the same depth and all?

The whole point is trying to lure people back to theaters. However, looking toward the future, you would need a specialized television to experience this in its intended way. RealD uses a really high frame rate (more than your TV can handle), alternating frames for each eye that get filtered by different polarizers in the glasses, but it’s so fast your brain sees it as continuous. This would flicker horribly on a regular TV. But since it’s still just a single image running through a proprietary adapter on the projector, in theory future TVs might be able to use optics or software that either performs this or creates the traditional stereoscopic split, which is a different technology. SMPTE’s working on some kind of home standard as we speak. Here‘s an article. For now, it’s crappy red and blue glasses.

Time for a new gig. Like everybody else. Been thinking about going freelance (shooter mostly, maybe cutter). Never needed to make a demo reel before. Any ideas on what to include?

Only your best work. Quality is far more important than length; it’s not a career retrospective. If there’s a type of project you’re not interested in taking on anymore, remove those examples no matter how good they look, because invariably those will be the calls you’ll get. If your work includes celebrities or familiar campaigns, feature them up front, even at the expense of better material. Name recognition raises eyebrows and implies professionalism. And as you know, some unique POVs or exotic locales can supercede image quality as well. While too many people focus on proving they’re a jack-of-all-trades (at the expense of impact), if you’re looking for a full-time gig, highlighting your diversity can be an asset.

Be clear about the role you performed in a shot or sequence. Don’t let us assume you were the DP if you pulled focus. Don’t feature CGI if you’re a Steadicam op. I once received a reel full of dazzling ESPN graphics, only to learn the applicant was a producer who made the phone calls that got the work done. Why she even had a reel I’ll never understand. Depending on the jobs you’re going after, you might create multiple cuts to narrow the viewer’s focus, especially if you’re a freelancer: editing, sound design, cinematography, viz fx, etc. Or even by market if you’re that guy: commercial, retail, corporate, docco, etc. But only if you’ve got the goods; don’t stretch yourself too thin.

Oh, and don’t steal your music. Drop a little money on some royalty-free cuts or find a friend who could use the exposure. Setting the right tone without distraction is important.

As for how to get them seen, you’re on your own. YouTube will probably degrade the image too much. There are some dedicated hosting services (that’ll place yours right alongside your competitors, for better or worse), but I’m not really in the loop on those at the moment.

A former professor sent me an email recently about a movie shoot, and mentioned that they would be using a “Red Camera.” What is this new camera, and what are your thoughts on it? Is it a good product, is it expensive, and/or worth the cost?

RED. The short answer is that it’s a brand name for a completely modular digital camera system that combines still-camera resolution with the fast frame rates of film. You buy a “brain” plus any other components you want, all of which are compatible: power, storage, monitoring, I/O jacks, lenses, etc. No tapes; it records on your choice of a RAID, flash drive, or CF cards. The idea is that when your needs change, you only have to buy a new brain. These rely on a line of sensors they call Mysterium. This determines what size image it can resolve, which starts at 3K (3000 pixels wide), and the largest sensor available next year will do 28K.

For some perspective, a 2K image is around HD quality, and is what most 35mm feature films are scanned at for color correction (a “digital intermediate” or “DI” you may hear it called) and/or home video. Effects shots are often scanned at 4K to preserve fine details. IMAX is around 9K. Doing the math, you’ll see that a 28K image is over 100 times the size of a frame of HD. Today’s high-end SLR still cameras max out around 20 megapixels. RED offers the equivalent of 261 megapixels. In other words, pants-shittingly ginormous.

At the moment, few media outlets can benefit from these sizes, but consider the sharpness you achieve when scaling such images down. Last year I received a ton of RED footage from an agency to edit into one of my projects, and was initially only mildly impressed, until I understood that the 720×405 clips had been scaled to around 1/30 the size of their originals! The image was noiseless and very transparent.

Speed is also important, and the larger the frame, the fewer of them per second it can resolve. The 28K model will be capable of just 30 fps, but many of the smaller resolutions can do up to 250 fps, for very sharp slo-mo. Or just 1 fps if you want to undercrank. Another major selling point is that most of them are directly compatible with cine lenses or 35mm still lenses, for that sexy shallow depth-of-field you can’t get on video without a clumsy adapter system (like I use).

The biggest advantage to using something like RED is it eliminates several steps in a typical workflow. There’s no scanning, no digitizing or capture; it’s immediately available. The same footage shot on set can be used for the poster in the lobby. Stills or motion with one-stop shopping. Plus, the cameras are small. Whether it’s RED or a competitor, such technology is certainly the future of both cinema and commercial imaging. When you consider what they do, the brains are a great value, but the components and accesories are ungodly expensive. Still, for pro filmmakers, an easy call.

Jim Jannard, RED’s founder, sold Oakley (his sunglasses company) to pursue this, and he often posts on the DVX User forums personally. Though their RED One camera has been available for some time, they’re a startup, and their reputation has at times been one of potential vaporware since they haven’t released any of their big guns yet, and many of the product shots are renderings at this point.

Official site

The system’s incredible real-time capabilities made it ideal for tonight’s election returns coverage, where the speed and volume of incoming/evolving data was most effectively translated into visuals, which included maps, calculations, pie charts, video clips, Web site content, satellite imagery – all completely interactive and “driven” by its host on-demand without the need for advance rendering. The appearance is organic and transparent, displaying complex data in an understandable, accessible context.

The Wall was originally designed with military intelligence in mind. It was also used to comic effect by Fred Armisen on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago. The Wall is actually pressure sensitive, and will soon have those supporting features enabled. One lingering question is whether competitors will agree to adopt a univeral system of gestures, or if new ones will be required for different operating systems. For the moment this is of little concern for consumers, as the professional market is the industry’s primary focus.

Rather than detailing the technology here, you can just go to the Web site – where, aside from a video demo, he simply uses press links to let journalists speak for him. Systems are reportedly available for around $100,000.

[...] the rule-of-thumb for fonts was to use sans-serif, lest the serifs disappear in the laces, so to speak. Now that we are entering a world of de-interlaced, HD video, does the rule still apply?

Ah, tricky one – a “yes, but”/”no, if.”

It wasn’t that we couldn‘t use serifs, it’s just that their details are too fine at the point sizes most editors choose, resulting in twitter from single-pixel-height lines because the edges only appeared in every other field 30 times per second. Progressive displays like computer monitors, DLP, and LCD televisions are unaffected, and these constitute the majority of HDTVs as well, though tube displays (like mine) remain interlaced.

Much of the HD broadcasted is interlaced. Both 1080i and 720p formats can have about the same perceived quality, but use two different methods to get there. With 1080i, only half the vertical lines of a 1920 x 1080 frame are displayed during each of 60 fields per second, forming a complete image 30 times per second as we’re used to in standard-def (SD). With 720p, all 1280 x 720 of its pixels are displayed in their entirety 60 frames per second.

So, getting to your question, a 1080i signal displays 540 lines at a time. Standard-def NTSC, with its 480 visible lines, displays 240. Assuming comparable-sized TVs, in HD, there are more lines crammed closer to one another. But they’re still interlaced, and in theory still flicker on superfine details. However, a progressive display receiving a 1080i signal will deinterlace it first using hardware, so these artifacts are practically invisible. Though it doesn’t mean they’ll look good.

Text-wise, keep in mind that a 24-point font may appear the same from one graphic to the next regardless of the image dimensions, but most HDTV screens physically are not four-to-six times bigger than their SD counterparts (otherwise there’d be no quality improvement). So if 24 was your minimum point size in SD, you should at least double that in HD to keep the perception equal. It’s still a good practice to avoid fine graphical edges, but serifs are okay, and you don’t have to blur them anymore, just keep them at at a respectable size.

Also remember that all HDTV formats use square pixels just like computer monitors, not the rectangular (.9 ratio) ones you had to account for in 601 and DV. And sRGB is the closest Photoshop profile to HDTV. There’s much confusion about whether to use the 0-255 luminance range or 16-235. Blu-Ray definitely clamps the signal down to 16-235, as do most HDTV inputs, even HDMI. I would match that of your footage/project and deal with it in post depending on your output format.

I’m teaching myself photography . . . [with a digital SLR] . . . and have been using family and friends for portrait practice. But the results so far are honestly not much better than those I created with my old point-n-shoot. What am I missing?

There are several elements that make portraits effective. One is setting: putting the subject in an environment that’s reflective of or complementary to their personality or occupation, depending on the purpose of the shot. If you’re profiling someone, you want the right background context. The bartender and his tappers. The chef at a produce market. A loner in a canoe in the middle of a lake. Using metaphor will add another dimension to the image.

Then there’s perspective. You’re passing a certain judgment on the subject by where you place the camera (why it’s called subjective camera instead of objective – well, that’s not really what it means, but bear with me here), and as you know, many creative endeavors were born simply by taking a common theme and shifting the point of view. A reflection of a dancer in her studio mirror. Looking down from an aerial. Underwater camera shooting what’s above. Using a wide-angle to exaggerate a body part. Maybe some verticals appear to imprison your subject.

Technically speaking, traditional portraits use long lenses, I’d say 80mm or more (or the long end of whatever zoom you can muster – just move the camera back for the desired framing). The reason is that it draws focus to your subject with a shallow depth of field. And it also has an appealing bokeh. A large aperture (like f2.8) will contribute to this as well – preferably both. You can also try putting more distance between your subject and background if using a wider lens.

I’m a fan of backlight, or rimlight, but it’s mainly just another function of separating the subject from the background, as is focus. Outside, I like to shoot into the sunlight, using it as backlight, and put a bounce card in front of the subject to fill in their face. You get two light sources for the price of one (free). And remember that many practical surfaces can be used to bounce as well: pages of a book, pillow, etc. In the absence of backlight, other techniques you can use for separation are color and contrast, by which I mean actually arranging the design of your location, wardrobe, etc. to make the subject pop. And speaking of, an eyelight is a nice touch, too, just to give a little sparkle in the pupil blackness.