Pan Left Productions

This morning, while drinking my fair trade, organic Peruvian coffee (Oh!.. Major enviro creds, yo!! Chalk 'em up, bitches!!! -- just kidding), I stumbled across this interesting document from San Francisco-based Roughstock Studios. It's called "Keeping It Real Green: How to Marketing Your Efforts in an age of Greenwashing (LINK)," and it's worth considering in relation to Pan Left Productions' marketing/publicity strategies. See attached PDF if you want a copy of your own.

Exciting trailer for (what I hope will be) an awesome new documentary. Perhaps this is a response to the "slacktivism" of the internet?!

Lately, I've been doing a lot of online (and word-of-mouth) research on a variety of 35mm adapters for digital video. While perusing the web, I stumbled across this comprehensive and highly-informative tutorial that fully explains the physics behind the ubiquitous "Depth of Field" (DOF) issue. For those of you who are just geeky enough to get off on this sort of thing, or if you are also planning on using a DOF adapter at some point in the future, I recommend taking a look at this 20-minute instructional video.

I want to introduce you guy to a piece of software that I have started using. It's name is Celtx. It is an integrated pre-production software for film, theater, audio, Av and comics.

You can use Celtx for the entire production process - write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, sketch setups, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule productions, and prepare and circulate informative reports for cast and crew.

It has a choice of fully integrated production tools so that your end product turns out the way you want it.

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

Interesting production accessory.

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/04/20/wristshot-turns-your.html

Heather

I just discovered a great blog by a professional editor in the UK, Alex Gollner. His blog, called "Alex 4D: Editing Organizized" is a great source of tips and tricks for editing and using Final Cut Pro. He also has made some FCP plugins of his own, including a really handy one called Move, which lets you animate a clip or image or text in ways that would be quite difficult to accomplish with the built-in motion controls of Final Cut.

Recently I came across a great resource online called TubeMogul. Located at http://www.tubemogul.com, this web service allows you to upload a video once, and have it be 'launched' simultaneously and automatically on a multitude of video-sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, MySpace (ugh), and more. Anyone who has wrestled with all the effort it takes to distribute their video work to all the social networking sites out there will appreciate this tool. Tube Mogul also allows you to track views and other statistics about your uploaded videos on all these sites.

I'm in perhaps the most exciting yet frustrating stage in my work on the documentary about war tax resistance that I'm making. I'm basically trying to make sense of all the footage and figure out how to present it in a compelling way - the big question is: what is the story? I've been struggling with this for about 4 years, ever since I started thinking about the challenges of making a film about this subject - Put another way, how do I tell the story of war tax resistance in a way that's interesting and exciting?