In this tutorial, you learn how to use Photo Mechanic to auto-sort your stills and video into separate folders during ingest, so you don’t have to manually find the .mov files or .cr2 files yourself. This tutorial basically utilizes the power of Photo Mechanic’s many variables, namely the {mediatype} variable, by inserting it into the folder option in the Ingest dialogue. I hope it helps speed things up for you a bit. It does for me.

I recently found the gem of a site that brings me face to face with all the historical documentary film legends. I’m listening to Errol Morris talk about his initial work:

Documentary wasn’t just one thing, it was many kinds. Then for whatever reason it devolved into a certain style of filmmaking. Call it verite, call it the handheld school, the fly-on-the-wall school. People started to take this idea of truth cinema seriously … But it evolved into a kind of cinema journalism. And I never liked that idea. It’s not that I don’t like journalism. I consider myself a kind of journalist. But I never liked this idea that this film journalism had to be practiced in a certain way. Like the documentary film police telling you it has to be shot this way or that way. In Gates of Heaven, I wanted to break every single rule of documentary. Instead of being a fly-on-the-wall, let’s make everyone completely aware of our presence. Let’s have people talking directly to us, perhaps performing for us. Let’s put the camera on a tripod. Let’s not use natural light, let’s light everything. Let’s not get portable gear, let’s get the most obtrusive. So that’s the start of it.

Then there is the voice of Silvain L’Esperance, who says that cinema verite is not objective truth at all, that’s a subjective truth of a relationship that’s eminently personal, and if there’s any truth to yield, it comes from the authenticity of the relationship between creator and creation (filmmaker/subject).

As I listened to their voices, I was head-nodding their statements to my experience. Coming from a photojournalistic background that stresses fly-on-the-wall tactics, but yet in the pool of many photographers who have, in pursuit of ‘multimedia’, moved into video production, the jump in mediums requires an additional realization: compelling documentary will take advantage of cinematic liberties, and non-compelling won’t.

Now why does this matter to me? It allows me to make more confident decisions when selecting whether to use music, whether to record my own voice asking the questions during an interview (I might cut myself into the edit to make it more honest of a feeling, much like Ira Glass does on This American Life shows), whether to recreate scenes and cuts that present many angles (when in fact it was one camera that shot it all), and overall cinematic impressions.

There are many genres of documentary. If I have a nervousness about a particular one, it’s about mixing heavily dramatized or recreated scenes. Errol is known for this, as I saw Standard Operating Procedure earlier last year. The idea of including footage that is completely made from my mind and conception and doesn’t offer any voice from my subject, is hardly a relationship between me and my subject at that point.

In conclusion, I’m discovering that cinema verite, from the point of view of documentary filmmakers who had no journalism background, considered it a point in the evolutional history of documentary film, and saw it as an approach that hardly afforded the creative expression of a relationship. Relationships by nature are fluid and expressive, and how comfortable someone feels talking with me as a camera is rolling is a direct result of the previous off-camera conversations and histories that we’ve shared together. My relationship is what I have to offer to my audience: a condensed record of my experience with others at a certain place and time, and one that is deeply personal, full of mystery, honesty and transparency. That’s probably why I love this form so much. It’s a personal journal in a way. I’m always timid when I show my work to others for the first time. If it was truly cinema verite, I don’t know that I would be … So for us journalist-converted filmmakers, the leap into personally expressed stories might require a big gulp, but is enthralling and pushes me towards my subject even more than I might otherwise be willing to go. Far from the wall.

Thoughts?

Q) Where do you believe multimedia fits into today’s society and how will that role change over time?

A) I was struck by a recent comment from a friend on Facebook about Lady Gaga. They couldn’t understand how someone with unimpressive musical ability could be so popular. I commented that the next generation doesn’t listen to Lady Gaga, they WATCH her. The next generation is visual, not verbal. The next generation has video and multimedia in their DNA at a fundamental level, in much the same way that language shapes thought in previous generations. Multimedia has become a basic form of communication. Thirty-one BILLION videos on YouTube in a month. ‘Nuff said.

via Innovative Interactivity | Innovative Individuals: Chuck Fadely.

I have many writer friends, and yes there’s a place for meaningful text. But the issue I find important is the point of engagement with an audience–it must be visually dominant. In the vein of Inspire, Inform, then Entrust as a cycle for media involvement with users, it’s the Inspire point that must be visually dominant, and text or other layers of Inform-ation can vary once you captivate or ‘wow’ them.

In the end, it’s a number of factors that determine whether a piece of media or story is a success, but I think Chuck tapped into one of the more important factors that need to be appropriately considered during production…

you can check out the entire video feed, including Last Letter Vignettes, the making of “Revolution”, and more videos coming soon, at the Last Letter Vimeo Channel.

I should mention that we worked with some amazing musicians: Albert Kiteck did some of the solo electric guitar tracks, original stuff. And Jordan Martin gave us permission to use his song “Dark Days”. Beautiful work and mucho thanks guys.

¹²Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

I look forward to participation, making new photog friends, celebrating photography in Asia, and exploring the beautiful landscape around Dali for a few days.

“There is a wonderful book called The Profession of the Stage Director, by Georgi Tovstonogov, who writes that a director may fall into one of the deepest pits by rushing immediately to visual or pictorial solutions.”

When I read that, I thought to myself, “that’s precisely my downfall as a photographer.” The first thing I usually do is scope out the scene and look for the best ’shot’, and maybe think a little about motion and people coming in and out of frame. Then I might consider audio, and….

He continues in his book, “This statement influenced and aided me greatly in my career as a stage director; and, subsequently, in my work as a screenwriter. If one understands what the scene means, and stages that… one will be doing one’s job for both the author and the viewer. If one rushes, first, into a pretty, or pictorial, or even descriptive staging, one may be hard-pressed to integrate that staging into the logical progression of the play.

And there he describes my common predicament: I pull all my shots right into Final Cut Pro, and have no clue what they mean. They’re all pretty. But when I look at the script, or the interview, or ambient moments, I’m hard pressed at times to stitch them together into something that means something. Because, after 10 seconds, it’s the ‘after-taste’ or impression that the viewer is left with that counts, and not so much the aesthetic of a particular single shot (though ultimately the interplay of visual and audio are what makes the magic happen).

Anyway, this is looking to be a great book. I enjoy books most when I’m in the middle of an intense project…