Storytelling is sacred

Following up on Matthew's original paradox a little more explicitly:

This creates a paradox, which I don't know how to overcome; can a new wave of Australian filmmakers kick-start the nation's cinema without resorting to pseudo-Hollywood fodder that panders to the audience?

In a word: yes.

Making films for an audience is different from pandering to the audience. The first I consider noble, the second I consider misguided [but certainly not immoral].

Why? Because I believe storytelling to be a sacred duty. Stories are the way that humanity tries to illuminate the darkness in the spaces that science cannot reach. They're the fundamental element in every human culture. Stories* are what are separate humans from other animals. Stories are the expression of our counciousness and our self-awareness - the need to draw the threads of life together in a grand narrative. Religions are founded in stories - they're the grandest narratives of them all.

Tarkovsky (in Sculpting in Time) said that Art and Science have the same goal: to help us understand our lives. The only difference was that science used scientific reasoning and art used poetic reasoning.

I think this is especially true of stories, because it is most universal most democratic art. Everyone I know engages in storytelling, for good or worse, as they tell us what happened in their day - in their week - in their hour - the stories of them getting drunk on the weekends with their friends - their stories of how their parents came to this country - of the old guy trying to put the bottle in the recycling bin. Stories are how we communicate with each other; its how we know there's someone other than us.

But being a storyteller - a professional storytelling - is something even more significant. Its about having the skill and the talent to transcend accounts of events and turn them into something sacred. A good storyteller takes us on a journey to understand ourselves and each other better. They make us laugh, cry, cheer, boo, fret, yell, afraid... at the least, they entertain us and give us reason to continue living.

A TV show like 'Desperate Housewives' becomes a cultural ritual. Whatever you think of the show, for lots of people it serves both as a diversion from the pain in their own lives but also as a reflection of their lives. They find solace in seeing aspects of their own personal dramas and fantasies and nightmares reflected on screen. It becomes a way to connect to other people. Its like the language of Star Wars becomes a way for the antisocial (cough nerds cough like me cough) to connect to each other and remind themselves that they're not alone.

... and 'cinema' (widely defined here to include TV) is the most pervasive form of storytelling. Its audience reach is massive and it connects effortlessly with the subconscious, reptilian aspects of our lives. How many times has Spielberg manipulated us to feel emotion over trite 2D pictures running at 24 times a second?

While there are good economic reasons** about why cinema needs to find an audience, to me the most compelling reason is because of its power. Because cinema is a medium with so much power to do so much good [however you define that good], it creates a moral imperative to USE that power responsibly.

... and what makes me so angry about the Australian film industry is that we have utterly FAILED in that duty. Our movies rarely connect to an audience, providing voices to those who have none, allow people to express emotions that they were incapable of, to become sites of debate in a wider cultural flux. There is probably only one or two movies a year we produce which does that. Nor are we even satisfying the audience in terms of providing entertainment and joy. Hating Allison Ashley has bombed, apparently because it just didn't know for whom it was making a movie. Its core audience was young girls - year 5-8 (stretching) - yet they cast people who are widely known for being adults. That's not pandering to your audience, that's insulting them.

We're failing in our duty to do anything worth a damn. The ONLY way that the Australian New Wave is both going to happen and going to sustain itself is by making movies that people want to see. This doesn't mean pandering to our audience***, or even having great box office returns. It means finding an audience who WANT to see your film. Everyone I know in the Australian film industry (and that's quite a few) mostly sees Australian films because they feel they should support the local industry NOT because they want to see that film. A revival will only succeed if people see the films because they want to see the films per se not because they're 'Australia'. And the only way I can see that happening is if we see cinematic storytelling as a noble duty that we are obligated to provide to others rather than as a narrow form of 'self-expression' which we are entitled to get funding to do.****

Finito.

[Although, side note, the advantage of digital cinema is that it lowers the cost of entry... this allows filmmakers to make more personal stories for more niche audience. I think that is a great thing! But I don't think it negates the public-duty nature of storytelling. It just means the 'scope' of the duty is much smaller.]


*Even moreso than music. Music occurs naturally in the world through birdsong and the like, but stories don't. They're completely artificial.

** Namely, how many visual artists or playwrights or poets can you fund if you distributed a movie budget amongst them? If Australian movies cost $1-2million each and they take on average, like $100,000 at the BO... then we've squandered $1.9 million of taxpayers money. You could pay 19 sculptors $100K to make public art installations and install them in the capital cities and I'm sure MORE people would appreciate the sculpture (particularly if its like Ricky Swallow) than would ever bother to see that bomb of a movie. As far as public art goes, are we really maximising utility with the money we throw at filmmaking in this country? AFTRS get around $18million per year from the government. Imagine what you could do if you gave that money to one or two large media courses in each state! Wow!

*** I suppose I should explain to the difference between pandering to your audience and making films for your audience. Pandering to your audience is essentially giving to your audience what they want at every possible time. But what audience's want is different from what they need. Shakespeare understood that better than anyone. He wrote plays for an audience - full of action, tension, drama, conflict, wit, philosophy - but he never pandered to them: Romeo and Juliet died. That's not what the audience would've wanted, but its what they NEEDED to satisfy the story and make it resonate.


**** I should point out that I don't think making movies as self-expression or for yourself is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think its vital that we 'tell our stories'. We want people to find resonance in your personal story. But there IS a difference between expressing yourself and telling a story that only you can understand. Your story can be - no should be - intensely personal. But the telling shouldn't [necessarily] be so personal as to be indecipherable. The biggest failure I see in short films - and in my own work - is the actually TELLING of the story. Allowing the audience to follow what is happening on screen, not just in narrative terms but in emotional and symbolic terms. A master craftsman is able to control what is ambiguous in a story, what's obvious, what's subtle, what's telegraphed. Most people think that somehow being ambiguous all the time is a good thing. Its not. And often people want things to be 'ambiguous' because they're lazy - too lazy to tell the story well.

... but in the end, does it matter?

There is so much more to worry about than "film or video." I'm not even sure why people get so worked up over it, because if they're right - they'll reap all the success and the other people will go down in flames.

The truth of the matter though? Everyone who is that worked up over that issue should really be putting that passion on the page and either writing the greatest story or finding the greatest story that's been written - because the people who can do that - those are the people who will always come out ahead.

[snip]

The message here? Don't fool yourself into thinking the cheap solution will empower you and make your life easy. When you decided to be a filmmaker, you chose the hard road. Don't whimp out now, don't cower for fear of something being hard. Don't distract yourself with the fantasy of something that might make your life easy. Do what you came here to do - tell your story!

And be ready - because you will spill your blood, sweat, and tears over a peroid of time you never imagined and no amount of technology will stop that. No clever invention or technological breakthrough will ever allow you to recapture all the time you will not be spending with your family or friends or the people you love - and the moments with them you missed in exchange for telling this story. So make it a good one.

-- Mark of cinemastory post his response to Mike's rant about HDproduction issues. (Emphasis added)

Wow. So true. So utterly painfully true.

Reminds me of Chris Doyle's decdiction at the end of his book on making Hero - R34G38B25 (its a colour code reference). Its a painful reminder of the selfishness of being a filmmaker - the most indulgent of all contemporary dreams:

"My family has lost a son and a brother and uncle and an heir to films. A book may be small recompense, but its what I do and all I have. It's for them"

the new paradigm of directing. vfx rules the world.

the director is just head of the element acquisition team

-- A certain compositor who is remaining nameless to protect himself :)

Directing as resource allocation

Mike from HD-for-indies has written a massive rant on 'experience in the field and lessons learned' about HD production. I was on CML during the flamewar and added some comments to Mike on the discussion. I'll address certain things here when i've got some time.

But for the moment, I'll be brief and offer one comment:

Mike is bang on about cost. CML is a very biased view of HD production because its a list populated by DoPS. Of course they're going to want to throw the most dollars at the format and lighting! Throwing money at camera isn't always the right choice. Contrary to popular belief, there are other things which also make a film like -er- actors, design, lighting, locations, sound, script, editing, and vfx. A director must balance the needs of each of these areas with the needs of the story s/he is telling. If you're making an exceedingly design heavy show like, say, the new Doctor Who, then you MUST spend your money on design even if that mean shooting on Digibeta (which is what they're doing) - otherwise its just going to be even worse. If you're shooting a low budget music video that's 90% exteriors, like Thirsty Merc's Wasting Time, then you can afford to blow your wad of cash on 16mm (which we did). If you're doing a short film which requires shit-hot acting, then spend your money on the acting. $5K music videos on 2 perf 35mm are viable IF you don't need any lighting or expensive locations. Its about being smart with your money. Thats why I think HD offers something for the 'Australian New Wave' because we will have such small budgets, that we need to push everything we do to make the movies we want. We don't have the luxury that US productions do. (Though I did shoot a TVC for Channel 31 - a no budget, community TV station - on 16mm. But we shot less than 200' and got the camera for free!)

Of course, the equations aren't that simple, but if taking a hit on 'image quality' by shooting HD suddenly frees up money so I can spend it on other areas which need it (whatever areas they may be) then I'd do it.... and I'd do it every time.

With the new music video I'm prepping at the moment, we want to shoot Super16mm. But its so design heavy, that if we get our budget slashed then I'm fully prepared to bump down to digibeta to get the dosh to make the clip work. Why? Cause its going to be the design (locations, props, wardrobe, buttloads of extras) which will make the clip work. I can make digibeta look 'good enough' to satisfy the story requirements... but without the money to make the world believable, then it will matter fuck all if I shoot on s16mm.

To summarise:

DoPs are passionate about cinematography... and that is why I love em and love hanging around them (at least those without the personality problems)... But remember films are not constructed from cinematography alone. They're biased and tend to see the whole HD thing in isolation.

Director's MUST be involved in budgeting and MUST be aware of the issues, so they can balance the competiting interests of their teams... its about intelligent resource allocation to tell the best story you can in the best way it can be told.

"Its not the camera that makes something look good, its what you put in front of the camera that makes it look good"

-- Me at the Cricketer's Arms when talking to Adam Teale about our next clip.

How to fix Australian Movies.

Matt Clayfield has kindly linked to my aggregation of the 'what's wrong with the Australia film industry' and offered his own commentary.

He quite rightly understands that my personal opinion: "that [our] that screenplays are lacking and that parochial Nationalism is still, inexplicably, the order of the day when it comes to Australia's national cinema."

Yep, that's pretty much what my opinion is: spend more on scripts and don't be concerned whether those scripts promote Australian culture. Parochialism is rooted in ethnic essentialism and any agenda which pushes any culture is going to suffer the problems of essentalism, namely it reduces that culture to mere exoticism.

{I think the current contemporary culture of the West isn't so much 'recyling' of our own culture as it is exotica-fication [is that a word?] of our past. This is a malady particular to late post-colonial cultures [Does it have to be late post-colonial? Only in the sense that essentialism emerged as a discursive zone in post-colonial discourse... and, I guess, the notion that colonialism was a key component of the cultural identity of the colonial powers. Defining the other defines the self.] We have to evoke to ourselves our own "point of origin" in order to ground our identity. The Castle isn't a real or authentic view of Australia, rather it is an invocation to Australia of an Australia that never was.}

Anyways. I just wish there was a willingness to spend money on developing scripts and to risk spending money on untested writers. The problem with Aurora and other writing schemes is they only want to give money those with 'runs on the board'. But if you can't get funding and development, how can you get runs on the board? Direct commercials and music videos? This is a far more common path in the US than in Australia. The AFC snubs its nose at TVC/MV directors. What about writing a play or novella that gets successful? Great! But assuming you're willing to work in another medium, how do you get money to develop those projects? I suppose, at least, a novel exists as a work per se in the written form. Which is why I've heard a few producers suggest to young writers that they turn their script ideas into novels in order to make it easier [!] for said producer to get funding for the feature adaptation.

The most common path seems to be this.

Film school [AFTRS; VCA] or relevant experience [acting or writing]* --> funding from the FTO --> make a short --> win awards, preferably at the big festivals like the Dendys --> get funding from the AFC for a big-funded short --> make the bigger short --> win awards --> develop a short feature script --> get funding from the AFC for a short-feature --> make short feature --> win awards --> develop a feature script --> funding from the AFC --> make feature --> watch it sink and burn.

On average, this path seems to take 10-20 years to happen. There are certain prodigies who are able to skip part, Cate Shortland went:

AFTRS --> win dendys --> direct secret life of us --> develop somersault by herself --> get somersault into Aurora --> get funding from SBSi.

Whereas Andrew Dominic went:

VCA --> direct music videos and commercials for ages --> develop chopper for 10 fucking years --> get funding from the AFC --> make a great movie --> don't get heard from again.

Anyways. I just wish there was more development money for scripts early on (so the writers, like my flatmate, can actually concentrate on y'know, writing). Cut funding for features but help writers write good scripts. They can then market these scripts to companies like Icon Productions who want to make Australian movies. Foreign investors are more likely to invest in a good script that's been well developed than one that HASN'T been. Develop a writing culture!

Then bitches like me who'd rather not write can pick from an assortment of kickass scripts.... make the best one really well and be shot to superstardom and direct Rush Hour 4.... and never be heard of again but be perfectly content with a $10mil salary. (What a dream!)

Anyhow...

To summarise Matthew's comment, once again to push my own agenda (selective quotation is another name for selection bias):

... And people wonder why I'd much sooner make films for either the international art cinema audience or, even more obscurely, an ideal future audience than for the majority of filmgoers!

The problem with this probabaly elitist position of mine is that only a select handful of people are ever going to consider a purely artistic revival of our national cinema to be much of a revival at all; I, of course, on the other hand, am adamant that such a revival need not be gauged by box office receipts.

I'd be one of those few people, I'm afraid. But neither would I consider purely commercial revival of our national cinema to be a revival. Because it wouldn't be.

I want an Australia film industry which is capable of self-supporting (ha!) mainstream, b-movie and art-house cinema, because I think thats the only way it can happen in a meaningful sense. The success of mainstream cinema will subsidise for the arthouse movies. It already does to an extent. Our post facilities often rely on getting one or two big American features a year to keep them in business - if they're in business all year, then they can pay their staff to do Australian feature work, often when the companies are losing money on the project. Hell, most commercial post houses (or design firms) lose money on music videos in order to attract commercials. There are other post houses which lose money on commercials in order to attract feature work (cough Animal Logic cough).

But what does a vibrant art-cinema scene do for the mainstream? It provides ideas - new ways of looking at the world. These ideas filter into the mainstream. A vibrant b-movie scene provides a stomping ground for people to practice their techniques on low-risk projects, as well as satisfying all the horror/thriller/action/rc junkies.

Australia needs a Frank Capra, a Roger Corman, and a John Cassavettes... [curious that I only cite men. Hmm. Filmmaking is still a very patriarchal art]

That said, the art-house & b-movie scenes - particularly in English speaking countries* - have always remained viable by being international. Their economics are rooted in the long tail. That's part of our problem - only a few of our film makers (Paul Cox, Rolf De Heer and Gillian Armstrong are the only ones that spring to mine) are able to become part of that circle. Perhaps trying to have a self-sustaining art film industry is impossible and that the only way that filmmakers like Matt and my flatmate can make their work is by appealing to the international film circuit of distribution, finance and exhibition. Hell, that's probably true -regardless- of the genre you're working in.

So, where does that leave Australian filmmakers really? Nowhere.... and that's the problem.

Update:Matt wanted a conclusion; whereas I'm always relucatant to give conclusions cause they're too conclusioney. So I've restructured to make this more conclusioney - even if its a trite one - and I've finished finished that last sentence which was left

* The advantage that other 'foreign' cinema, French, Indian, Asian or whatever, is language. The Hong Kong cinema scene was able to flourish because of the language barrier. We don't have that luxury. Unless, of course, we decide to adopt a new national language. I'm thinking blimpese.

internet tv

Announcing a new platform for internet television and video. Anyone can broadcast full-screen video to thousands of people at virtually no cost, using BitTorrent technology. Viewers get intuitive, elegant software to subscribe to channels, watch video, and organize their video library. The project is non-profit, open source, and built on open standards. Today we're announcing the project and releasing our current sourcecode. The software is launching in June.

-- Internet TV is Open and Independent -- via digg

Update: This appears to be a TorrentCast (they call it a blogtorrent) - ie a site which uses RSS enclosures to push .torrent files which are automatically loaded by your BT client.


Hmm. Potentially interesting delivery method for Maggots, if I ever get around to (a) finishing the third draft and (b) getting the money together to make it properly. Not that I think the FTO would approve of funding (c) a horror movie which is then (d) given away for free.

a + b + c + d = not bloody likely.

Digital Projection Update

Disney, Warner, & Sony have teamed with Technicolor to roll out digital projectors in 3000 screens across the country, with the studios covering some portion of the costs as an attempt to offset the costs of creating and distributing prints.

-- Three Studios Join Technicolor in D-Cinema Plan via HD For Indies

Mike conjected, rather logically, that this deal would be used to block out competition vis a vis distribution. Historically, this is how the film industry has ALWAYS worked and, ironically, is why Hollywood became the site of the motion picture industry. [There are better historical accounts in books, particularly the Oxford History of World Cinema but they're, y'know, in books]

Mike follows up a day later with:

According to an industry source who contacted me after publishing the above linked article, the deal is set up to keep others out of the game. From the studios' business perspective, this is a smart play for them - disincentivize smaller, threatening outsiders from having equal access to the means of distribution to the marketplace.

[snip]

According to my source, the plan is to allow others to screen their digital movies in those theaters...but only if they pay. And pay a lot - something in the ballpark of the cost of a film print. Per screen. So there is ZERO cost savings available to those outside of the club as compared to film...

-- Technicolor/Studios Digital cinema deal designed to block outsiders?

Commentary:Its an interesting development because the push behind digital projection in the UK has come from the national film body. I've also heard that there's a similar roll out happening in Australia (finally) but my google searches have proved fruitless. Though, I did find an article in the SMH from August 16, 2004 saying the cinema industry doesn't want digital projectors.

There's a good analysis (from my cursory view) of the potential of digital cinema in Australia in Metro.

What's wrong with Australian movies?

A bunch of responses are posted up at the Sydney Morning Herald website. You might need registration to view them all. But here, quoted in the interest of criticism and review, are my favourite comments (yes, they push my own person perspective of the problem):

There is far too much inclination to produce films that are overtly Australian (The Castle, Priscilla etc) rather than simply make good films. In many cases, the ‘Australianness’ of the film creates a degree of appeal that papers over the thinness of the script.

-- Rob Charlton

I think the main failing is in the scripts and the controls around it, or lack of. There are not enough people pushing back on poor scripts, rather they are of the mind-set that we have to promote Aussie film purely because it is Australian. Or because somebody in the Eastern Suburbs has been 'working on a script' for the last 10 years, so let's give them a break, even if their script is crap.

I believe the industry has many talented people, but it also has a self-congratulatory, narrow minded culture, which fears constructive criticism and where script writers and directors get caught up in their own artistic vision without considering if people outside their peer group actually want to see the film. How else do you explain garbage like You Can't Stop The Murders or Blurred even getting funding?

-- Jamie Murrie

So in essence the problem with Australian movies now is this. They lack heart, soul, originality, creativity and don't make any effort to appeal to real Australians. They too often take the easy road of falling into ‘Australian Character’ rather than characterising Australia, and frequently try to capitalise on the success of others rather than creating there own.

-- Victoria Keen

but most of the Aussie films in recent years have either been unfunny comedies or parodies/stereotypes of Australians of past generations. Where are the stories of today?

-- Sandy Guthrie

While we're not a serious people, which can be a blessing, we're more than a little obsessed about ourselves and our rather vague sense of own social anarchy, which has become a large part of our sense of identity.  Australian film seems - and of course this is just an overall impression - to rarely escape a parochial fascination with same.

[snip]

Perhaps we're a little tired of focusing on ourselves, a little tired of mistaking identity with the Australian sense of anarchy, a little unaware that our sociopolitical dramas a good deal more evangelical than we may imagine, and perhaps in these particular respects we need to grow up.

-- Andrew Boughton

Part of the reason local movies are flopping at the box office is that Australia is currently struggling to identify its own culture. Crass, and sometimes inane ocker flicks are losing their appeal, and we are turning instead to cultural struggle, style and sophistication, more typical of cultures overseas, like Britain, continental Europe, and dare I say, the USA.

 Part of this disillusionment with one's own culture is the failure of the country to come to terms with its own political identity (still a colonial outpost after more than 200 years), and part of it is the fault of the mainstream media, with refuses to identify with local needs and expression.

-- Roger McEvilly

Australian films generally miss the point. The Australian Film Finance Commission requires government funded films to have a particular Australian cultural angle, to be reflective of our society in some way. This is a good thing, don't get me wrong. The problem with this however, is that good story telling can be lost in this pursuit for Nationalism.

 What is wrong with a universally relevant and compelling story? Why can't Australian films be more about great, involving stories rather than first and foremost representing Australian culture and then looking towards story?

-- Niran Gunawardena

Asutralian films are failing for several reasons - because there are too many first time directors and writers who never get a chance to build a body of work; scripts are poorly written; concepts are out of touch with what people actually enjoy.

[snip]

In other words, get real, get a life, get out in the streets and show people who they really are, not what a bunch of critics and pseuds think that they are. And show some affection for your characters - why should we love them if the film maker does not.”

-- Louise Steer

It's our self portrait, our self imposed stereotype of ourselves, and we seem to want it to continue.    Others can do the grand visions - Lord of the Rings, we may just not expect it of ourselves.

-- David Kadrian

Mainly, I think, it's in the screenplays. Our plots are often thin and the characters vapid. Very rarely does a really tight script get shot in this country.

[snip]

Here in Australia, though, writers work for next to nix, for the love of it, and then probably have to pull extra shifts behind a bar to make the rent. Here, it's all a rush to turn over those cameras, because that's when the contract says everyone gets paid (if they're lucky). In Hollywood, the great screenwriters get paid in the millions (in advance), good ones in the hundreds of thousands. Ordinary ones make TV sitcoms.

-- David Rollins

Until we start to develop good scripts that are International Stories rather than Castlesque we are never going to produce anything worthwhile.

Our most successful films have been stories that everyone can relate to and  have Character Depth and plot. Not a Series of thinly strung together quirky Aussie Characters trying to endear themselves to the  audience. Every year the Australian Film Industry goes backwards, at this rate we will not have one, as it is its more of a small business than an Industry!!!

-- Henry Jennings

Australian movies suffer from a parochialness, they are often so narrowly Australian - they need to be more open and international in their outlook/ look. Australian films suffer from a kind of 'smallness' and from a lot of poor scripting. Where are the quick, clever, dynamic, articulate or poetic scripts? Why do Australian films feel they must be so self-consciously, so desperately Australian? Why can't they just be stories? Stories about lives, lives that could be anybody's?

-- Saskia Campo

'Nuff said.

The Tiger Post

So, Tiger has been announced. Ships the 29th of April.

But hopefully you already know all this.

Personally, I can't wait to get my hands on it and have a play. Particularly, I want to experiment with Spotlight, Dashboard and Automator. Dashboard has some butt-ugly widgets but they're goign to be useful. Currently, I use Stattoo to keep track of my appointments, but there's no reason that a similar widget could be made for Dashboard... a list of your next five appointments.

Given my interest in post, however, I'm thinking of ways I can use Dashboard/Spotlight/Automator together to streamline post workflows. Or, at least, a way to put more information at the tips of an artists fingers. A widget which lists the latest generated elements, a widget which gives shot breakdowns, a widget which tracks render farm usage. Hell, a flipbook widget would be interesting... but not that useful. Its more about seeing information at a glance rather than completely interacting with that info. But I could see a widget which was tied to a folder running on the SAN. That folder on the SAN used Spotlight to list the latest 50 (or so) elements. The widget was a searchable version of that folder; so you could bring up a list of what has been generated and hopefully get it into Shake/FCP easily. Ultimately, this will depend on what degree of interaction that Dashboard will allow in its html/java/css stuff.

Actually, having dashboard widgets for directing would be excellent. A shot list viewer would be cool (essentiall a page-by-page shot breakdown), as would a properly formatted style-guide viewer. Hmm. I need to develop some of my own directing tools. I have a standard excel template for shot listing, but its not as flexible as I would like. Director Board's looks interesting but its frigging expensive. If hypercard still existed (RIP) I could've coded up something pretty damn quick. Export to palm would be nice.

[Hopefully someone from RSP reads this and thinks 'wow, what a coordinator!'. Mwahahaha]

Toxik Maintenance

So, I've been reading up on Discreet (sorry Autodesk Media and Entertainment) Toxik. Its a workgroup oriented collaborative compositor that uses an Oracle database to manage assets. Essentially, it means elements can be updated automatically within in a comp once they are changed. From the sounds of it, the collaborative aspect is the ONLY advantage it has over Shake 4 (I know enough of what's in Shake 4 to make this assessment).

The clincher is that Autodesk (as usual) "force" you to pay a maintenance fee of around $3700AU per seat per year. Failure to pay results in an eventual 'timeout', and the seat can no longer connect to the main database - it will ONLY work standalone.

I'm just wondering if sections 47D and 47E of the Copyright Act (1968) could apply in such a situation. Both those provisions are 'acts not constituting an infringement of copyright in computer programs' and allow licensers to reverse engineer software to 'make interoperable products' and to 'correct errors' respectively. But don't EULA's prohibit you from doing such things? Not in this country. Under s47H the provisions of any agreement which contrary to Division 4A (ss47AB-47H) are considered invalid to the extent of their contrariness.

To be honest, I'm not sure they do apply. Not directly anyway. You could try to make a program to connect the two pieces of the puzzle (the compositor and the database) without requiring a licence and argue its protected under 47D. Tough sell.

Frankly, I just think this kind of maintenance fee is the worst kind of rent-seeking and should be discouraged from a legal and economic perspective. If it DIDN'T turn off features I wouldn't be so worried, but at this stage you're paying in excess of $3k per seat in 'renting' a frigging database.

In the end, I think this is going to encourage lots of facilities to look at how they can use other tools to achieve the same thing as Toxik does. I think a lot of what Toxik does do can be achieved with intelligent leveraging of Spotlight and CoreData in Tiger. While they may be mac-specific solutions, there's no reason you couldn't use symlinks or some nifty python scripting to bring the same (or similar) functionality to linux boxen.

HHGTTG

There is an intelligence at work in these books that I was trying to preserve. Douglas was a great satirist because he possessed a very real understanding of the incredibly heady concepts he was satirizing. In one interview he said that if they had had computers when he was in school and had taught computer science, that’s probably what he would have pursued. He also could have been a theoretical physicist; he was that knowledgeable on the subject. So it was important to me that that intelligence remains at the epicenter of the piece. It’s what I love about Python’s “Life of Brian.” That movie is just a hair’s breadth away from being viable theology. So the goal was to create something that had pace and narrative structure and an emotional storyline that an audience would care about and put all of that in the context of this very intellectual, irreverent, satirical world.

-- excerpt from Karey Kirkpatric on Douglas Adams and 'writing'* the screenplay for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Chris Milk and the MVPA

Chris Milk is a music video director I first noticed for his clip for Kanye West's Jesus Walks (the good clip, not the shit one in the church) after reading an article on the clip over at MVwire. I, and many of my friends, were completely blown away by that clip. The conventional wisdom is that music videos should be simple concepts well executed, whereas this video was a sophisticated idea [interweaving narratives] very well executed.

Anyways, I watched a bunch of his videos and TVCs after seeing that and was very impressed. Yeah, he's signed to @radical.media, which means he's very very good.

But, get this, Chris Milk just got nominated for 5 categories in the MVPA (Music Video Production Association) awards.

He got nominated for John Mellencamp's Walk Tall (Adult Contemporary), Kanye West's Jesus Walks (Hip-hop), and Courtney Love's Mono (Rock). Thats three nominations in three different genres; plus he got nominated for a whole bunch of other things.

Wow. Way to go!