Pan Left Productions

I put this together last week, inspired and moved by a particular deportee abuse report sent out by No More Deaths.

for more information see http://nomoredeaths.org/index.php/Abuse-Report

Here's a little experimental video I made from footage I shot last weekend at this incredible and fun outdoor music event in downtown Tucson, The Festival En El Barrio Viejo. A benefit for Tucson community radio station KXCI, the festival featured Calexico, along with this band, Sergio Mendoza y La Orkesta, as well as several other Tucson acts.

For this video I was named winner of last weekend's Vimeo Weekend Project contest and awarded a free Vimeo Plus account.

The clip features a voicemail left for me 8 years ago by a friend who was arranging a music gig for me in Portland, as well as lots of twiddly video processing using Apple Motion to auto-scrub and auto-blend footage in sync with different frequencies and peaks in both audio tracks.

In this clip you'll see that Steev Hise just can't stop being a director, even to the person interviewing him. He also talks about the idea behind the Truth On The Line project (a Pan Left Production), what its goals are, and why he's doing it.

Truth On The Line's first episode is in post-production. For more information and related content, and to sign up for the TOTL newsletter, see truthontheline.tv

Shot in HD (720p) with a Canon SD780IS, audio recorded with a Zoom H4. (There was a little technical problem with the microphone during this so you'll hear a little distortion on some parts of the interview. por siento!)

Steve discusses the dual nature of the TOTL story, what attracted him as an actor to the project and to the lead role of Stan, and the benefits he saw in director (and Pan Left member) Steev Hise's use of the Mark Travis directing technique.

Truth On The Line's first episode is in post-production. For more information and related content, and to sign up for the TOTL newsletter, see truthontheline.tv

This is an updated version of Wild Versus Wall, produced for the Sierra Club by Pan Left member Steev Hise. The film, which was first released in 2008, concerns the ecological effects of new enforcement infrastructure on the U.S./Mexico border. This new revision includes the newest footage and photos of wall segments, construction, and effects, as well as messaging about the current presidential administration's failure to halt or reverse Bush-era policy.
Narrated by David Yetman.

for more information see the Sierra Club Borderlands campaign web page: sierraclub.org/borderlands

This is an exciting time in the creation of the Truth On the Line pilot episode.

A few days ago I blogged about the film Avatar and how it reinforced gender stereotypes and dominant ideas about body images. I also saw this week a very different sort of film, one that I was pleased to see presented a much more realistic and healthy idea of what female bodies can be like, in addition to a more realistic vision of male/female relationships..  This sort of thing is so rare in the film world that I just have to mention it.

read more at Steev's blog

I was unsure, for several weeks, whether I wanted to go see the film "Avatar."  The concept was interesting, but given that it was James Cameron directing, and something like the most expensive film ever made, I was expecting it would have problems.  Not to mention that action movies appeal less and less to me these days, mainly because the cinematography for them, in general, has been steadily ramping up to a level of intensity that way too much for my nervous sys

A few years ago I wrote a blog entry about subtitling and a little text-processing tool I wrote for preparing text so that it could be imported into DVD Studio Pro.  I wrote it because often someone doing translation for you is not putting timecode start and end times in, not to mention chopping things up into lines short enough to fit on the screen.  My program simply made up some rough timecodes based on the time offset at which you'd like subtitles to start and a constant duration for each subtitle, then inserted them before each line in the STL f

An Age of New Narrative Structures and Fearing The Future -

Earlier this week Greta and I went to see the new climate change film The Age of Stupid. It's a documentary with a speculative fiction frame around it, and that's what I want to talk about, the form, rather than the content of the film. I've blogged before several times about climate change. You know where I stand on that.