Music video: 2-3 weeks out
July 6, 2010 – 5:16 pmThis music video thing is really happening! Mark is fully on board, we have an incredible DP (Vadim Putimtsev) and I am meeting with costume / set designers tomorrow. All we are missing is camera equipment, and I have been upturning every rock I know to find a RED or HVX camera for the 3-day shoot. On Thursday we will hold auditions for three male and one female roles, and in about two weeks we will shoot this thing!
Do you know any, or are you a good-looking actresses who would like to be in a music video? Email us!
An idea of the tasks on my plate now as a Director/Producer on a tiny no-budget shoot:
- choose from among a number of talented costume designers and work on the individual wacky elements we want to include
- work with the DP to draw a storyboard, shot by shot
- find 3 good-looking men, one good-looking female, and a PA to help out on days of the shoot
- get a cheap or free camera
- ensure that we have everything we need: a laptop to download footage as we shoot it, a stabilization system for smooth shots, and a dozen other things
- schedule it all to be in the right place at the right time
Below is a gallery of the photos I just sent to Vadim to get the juices flowing on the look of the video. It’s helpful to start with collages and images to get on the same page with things, and I thought you dear readers might want to dig the images.
Stay tuned for more. We’re planning on a release party in late August.
Triptrop NYC: heatmaps heating up
July 5, 2010 – 8:23 am
I’ve been looking for a tool to generate a heatmap of transit times from any point in Manhattan, and just discovered the awesome triptrop NYC.
For any address in New York, it displays a map of transit times to the rest of the city. Very useful for sussing out potential places to live. It even has a feature to compare two maps side by side. Check it out!
It looks like the author has done a lot of work just to get this running Maybe they will do a bit more work and consider building a few more features or releasing an API for this so anyone can build off of it. My big feature requests:
1. Enter two addresses and get a single heatmap showing which is closer to all locations. Green areas mean one address is closer, red areas mean the other address is closer. Lighter areas mean less of a difference.
2. Enter multiple addresses with weights (for example, work and friends’ addresses, with a frequency per week they are visited) and create a map of best places to live based on a weighted average of transit times to those places.
3. A clearer color scheme.
“Race Conditions” in security dialogs
July 4, 2010 – 1:26 pm
I don't know why it's called a "race" dialog but it is.
Ever wonder why you have to wait three seconds to install a Firefox add-on? I’ve always thought the delay was to make sure that I read the security box. Turns out it’s more inspired than that: a hack can be created that preys on human reaction time to get them to push the button. Imagine a website that asks you to type the word “only.” When you type the “n” it tries to install the add-on, and when you type the “y” you accept the add-on’s installation in the Firefox dialog. Nefarious…
Another example and a demo of this attack at Jesse Ruderman’s blog.
Before the tea party
July 3, 2010 – 12:49 amRemember the old days, before everyone went bonkers?
In mourning of data
July 2, 2010 – 10:16 amData on the New York City subway system
The great trickster himself, SATAN? Or just his unwitting ally?
About a year ago a magnificent thought occurred to me. I had previously thought that it would be impossible for the MTA to determine what level of subway cheating there is. It would be an important statistic, useful for police departments and general knowledge. But there are not enough cameras and security guards…
Then I realized this: while someone jumping a subway turnstile is not counted electronically, they aren’t going to jump the turnstile on exit. Simply by subtracting the number of entrances from the number of exits over the course of a year, the MTA could determine how many people cheat and how much money they are losing on it. The subway became a closed system, a data laboratory!
Until a few days later, when I observed a massive crowd trying to get out of the turnstiles. Some data-insensitive bozo popped open the Emergency Exit door and the flood exited through there. In the anarchy and chaos, a few people jumped in through the door. I cried a little inside, watching these data points hop off of my perfect cheating metric.
I still cry a little inside when I see those Emergency gates open, filled with longing for what could be.
(By the way, if you’re thinking about using those exits know that you can get in trouble. Also be aware that they cost three dollars and eighty cents to install.)
A call for privacy standards
June 26, 2010 – 1:49 pmIt’s easy to take a defeatist attitude towards things we once considered undefeatable, like privacy and getting paid for producing content. For the most part I agree with the argument, which goes: there are millions of people using the internet across international borders. Preventing any behavior (bittorrent and copying text verbatim as two examples) is fighting an unwinnable arms race. Either there are too many people doing it, or the technology you develop will quickly become hacked or defeated. It’s a mishmash of challenges that come from an open internet, but the defeatism that comes from it is too often universally applied.
You can regulate Facebook, and you can regulate them hard and effectively. Same with Google. They are not bittorrent, they are small centralized companies that can be held accountable for their actions. But effective regulation in the digital age does not rely on laws; it relies on working with a company and its users.
Certification
My effective regulation strategy is certification. Agree upon several tiers of privacy awareness through a consensus-building process. As an example, the lowest-tier level would include deleting data immediately from a database when it is deleted on the site (Facebook probably has photos you deleted years ago) and protecting personal data from employees. A higher tier would require all privacy-related changes to be opt-in.
Next, establish companies that perform extensive security audits, with full access to the practices and systems of the companies. Establish peer reviews to keep them better than bond rating agencies. (Easier said than done, but c’mon this stuff is doable.)
Integrate this system into consumer products like Firefox’s site identity features. Firefox can warn users when they are entering a username and password with a site that is not privacy-certified.
Only now can we call on the government for a little help. Establish a mandate requiring companies above a certain size that operate in the US to be certified. Require web browsers developed in the US to integrate awareness of the privacy certification.
This model can be set up by the government and encouraged by the government, but it would ultimately succeed because of the consumer. On the one hand it’s a decline in the power of government; on the other it is an affirmation of their continued role in keeping the internet working well.
What it’s like to own an Apple product
June 20, 2010 – 8:48 amto iPhone 4g or not? It has more RAM than the iPad…why would they do that to customers? Oh right, because if they released a perfect product that worked a lot they couldn’t convince you to replace it in two years. I’m also not so enthused about the draconian dictatorship that is the app store .
What a great comic from theoatmeal.com:
It’s simple: do something.
June 18, 2010 – 2:46 pmIf idle hands are the devil’s plaything, then consider me Miles Davis! Those who know me will not be surprised to hear that I am writing this from an airplane in between reviewing a script, moving a website, editing another script, and watching DP reels. And listening to Regina Spektor.
I’ve learned an incredible lesson about making it in this world. In fact, it might the single greatest lesson I have learned. It’s this: do something and get hired to do it again. When people want a certain result, they will look to others who have delivered it before, or are expected to deliver it in the future. There’s little further investigation about a person’s capabilities, because what better indication than what they have done before, people think. And with mostly good reason.
I see it in my own decisions as I look to hire a Director of Photography for my music video. I’m not going to choose someone based on talents they have not demonstrated when there are plenty of people desperate to work for free who have already demonstrated them.
The lesson came to me strikingly through web design. In February I completed work on Ted Hope’s shiny new blog, and he offered graciously to put my name on the bottom with a link that sends me an email with the subject line “I’d like to hire you!” No sooner did the blog get launched that I started to get emails.
Start a riot and people ask you to start another. Build a chess set and you are asked to build another, or someone asks you if you do backgammon too. So I’m in the web design business now. I swore to myself that I wouldn’t get into the web design business, but then I went and designed a website 
. It’s not terribly challenging now that I’ve learned the basics (though is very fun when it is) and it certainly pays the bills.
But that’s what made me think, well what happens when I make a music video?
Projects /ˈpɻɑʤεkt/
I’m hoping to shoot our music video for Mark Williams Band’s song Wonderful in a few weeks – Mark and I are meeting about it next weekend. I posted an ad looking for a cinematographer to the film industry job search site Mandy.com and got 27 resumés. Now I’m contacting the applicants and discussing the project. We will try to shoot it on the Mark 7D or 5D (relatively cheap SLRs that produce absolutely beautiful images and have been used to make the SNL intro video.) They produce lovely film-like images, even in poor lighting. Our project is no-budget and will be shot outdoors so we need that kind of flexibility. No definitive word on the content of the video, but I’ll say for now that it involves not many clothes and a lot of paint.
I also recently built the website for Peace After Marriage, a great indie film that begins shooting in a few weeks. The creatives (Ghazi, Faruk, and Bandar) are really funny and on point and it’s going to be a great film. The most exciting aspect of the site is my integration of Facebook’s new graph API. It felt odd to implement the tools while I have such rage over Facebook’s privacy policy, but I was sure to make the process entirely voluntary and upfront. There was a certain solace in writing <!– Implement evil Facebook tools –> before the code, though. Check it out – with a single click it grabs your email address through Facebook and subscribes you to the mailing list. I expect you’ll be seeing this a lot in the future, as any filmmaker will tell you that an email address is worth a lot, and it’s risky to rely on Facebook for a publicity strategy. Mailchimp, our email address provider, detects a user’s location and allows us to segment emails by particular cities or regions. Peace After Marriage’s presence will include an iPhone application, series of web video on YouTube, among others.)
I am also working with movie distribution superstar Vanessa Domico to revamp the site for her LGBT distribution company Outcast Films. One of their most recent films is Sex in an Epidemic, which details the rise of AIDS and the ugly culture of hate that grew around it. The changes I implement in the site will mostly be on the back end but there will be some cosmetic changes as well.
My resumé has hyperlinks
June 14, 2010 – 10:50 amDoes yours? Why not?
Quick tip: Go to Format -> Style in Word to customize the appearance of hyperlinks. Once you convert to PDF you have to open Acrobat Professional and redo the hyperlinks by selecting the text and right clicking. It’s worth it, I swear.
The ultimate web app
June 9, 2010 – 1:28 pmThis program is totally possible, and to be honest I’m surprised that nobody’s invented it:
A sidebar for Firefox that shows all discussion around a webpage after you browse. Every time you load a page it refreshes with information:
- any friends who have shared the page
- social media comments (Facebook, Google Reader)
- discussions about the page on forums
- blogs and websites that link to it (including wikipedia, etc.)
- aggregated reviews from the relevant sites: Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.
- related pages
- greasemonkey scripts and other web actions – for example, when browsing a Facebook photo album you see the option to download the whole thing, which has been engineered but someone on the greasemonkey site.
Build it with less than $5k, put ads up, make the world a better place. Most of these APIs are already in place.
