David Bordwell's website on cinema

A great website/read. It's like an online film course, for free!

$2 Million Airtime, $13 Ad

Washington Post: In the YouTube Era, Even Super Bowl Advertisers Are Turning to Amateurs. "For the ad creators, it's a shot at the big time and an end run around traditional barriers to appearing on advertising's biggest stage. Indeed, it could be a career starter -- more than 90 million viewers are expected to tune in to the Super Bowl." I don't know about a career starter when it's more likely to be a one-hit wonder.

Jordan Heads

A Documentary about Air Jordan and its owners. I like Air Jordans, but I guess I grown out of Basketball shoes.

Cringely Analysis of iPhone

That which we call an iPhone by any other name would sound as sweet.

"The iPhone is this amazing connectivity quad-mode device that can probably make use of as much bandwidth as it can get, so making it suck through the little straw that is EDGE makes no sense from a user perspective. But remember that the parties involved here are Apple and Cingular, neither of which is 100 percent allied with user interests. Cingular has a 3G network called BroadbandConnect or "MediaNet" if you buy Cingular's associated Cingular Video service.

And there's the problem -- Cingular Video, which is based on RealVideo, NOT QuickTime or H.264.

The media and the market's ecstatic response to the iPhone will put strong pressure on Cingular, which has what is apparently a multiyear exclusive with Apple. If Cingular gives in, as I'm sure it will, the iPhones will suddenly become faster and have more features. And if Apple is correct, Cingular will then have the mojo to take them to the top of the U.S. mobile market." This is how Apple is planning to dominate digital content landscape. Well, at least Jobs is a benevolent dictator, unlike Sony.

You can download SD version of iPhone keynote video from iTunes and marble at it again, again, and again. It's truly the benchmark keynote presentation of how to introduce a new gadget.

Circle of Karma Still

Very first public presentation of "Circle of Karma" production photo. Currently in production / post-production.

I had to trackdown How to Export non-square HD image for Photoshop/Web.

Good Karma

I'm back from exhausting first day production of "Circle of Karma." The usual production drama ensued: the landlord bitched and kicked us out from our interior location in the morning, and our jenny died on us on the last hour, but it's all good. The cast is great, the crew is working hard and experienced compare for our measly rate that I'm grateful. I'm trying to run the production as professional procedures as possible, and it's kinda working out. You can only plan so much, and get derailed at the last minute. Now that I know how the production works, in a way, you're milking your production budget to do more and more.

I'll be spent for the rest of the weekend, as I'm writing this on drunken state after couple of shots of soju. You can expect full report in coming week. Good night, and good karma!

Crewing Up for Circle of Karma

The SVA thesis film production, which I wrote the short script, which I'm running the production as the AD, and editing later, is in the final stretch as I and my director interviewed a number of crew last Friday. It was weird to sit on the other side of table, meeting eager members to participate in this production, although we are paying them little. To backtrack a little, I was in a position to hire an audio engineer for a hip hop documentary two weeks ago, and now I'm in the position to hire production crews. It's great learning experience to review people's resumes as well their cover letters, and interview them. My director has a long history of colorful jobs and experiences in the production fields, but many of members out-experienced me. But, that's good as we need all the experience and knowledge these people can bring to this production, compliment my lack of production skills as AD. It's my first AD gig, after all. :-) It's another chance for me run a production crew and team for my future production efforts. This shall be fun.

As my director like to claim, good Karma brought many great people to this production to succeed. And I believe there's good Karma on this production that will lead to successful and entertaining short film. You'll know soon enough from this blog in coming months. Stay tuned. (And pray for me and for this production.)

Online Videos Explosion

So Time made You & Me and Everyone We know as the Person of the Year. However, it's more credited to YouTube and the explosion online videos, thanks to faster computer & bigger bandwidths on the net. We can't leave out the digital revolution in video production as well. Good thing Google is off the hook from their sky-high price for YouTube acquisition. (Hey, they gotta spend their money somewhere.) However, you just have to wonder how much deals Google has to cut for YouTube before they make their money back, if not profit.

However, what about the legal online video distributions? The paid ones where the real money exchanging hands?

I was surprised that Xbox 360 started offering videos, including HD movies for people who are staying off from the current HD-disc war. $400 Xbox 360 offering is far more attractive than $500-$1000 next-gen players either HD-disc camps are offering, even if HD movies are only rentals. (Who would want to watch Poseidon more than once? just to bask in the HD glory.)

Thanks to this new venue, Box office bombs are finding extra money to make up for the loss. I got some episodes of South Park to use up Microsoft Points that left over and the experience was pretty good. As good as iTune TV downloads or better since I'm watching on a bigger screen.

But the real revelation in these articles are that Amazon.com's offering is lackluster. (No shit?!) When I first saw their offering and deals, I can't help but think that they are simply jumping guns to get a foothold, nothing serious. I hope Netflix's digital download service don't repeat their mistake.

But these points are all mute as iTunes has 90% of paid video downloads. If Apple releases iTV as Jobs promised a couple of months ago, the game could be over, like iPod is dominating legal music downloads.

2007 will be the year where online video distributions make the mainstream splash. The impact, could be bigger than TiVo brought to the TV landscape. It could also mean a better distribution channels for indie producers like you and me.