Ergodic Film Project Communications

Ok, Santropez, got your message, will reply a bit later.

I’ll push everyone’s date to end of Feb. (hey, we have Leap Year this year!) and then check back again. But I’ll still PM the rest of you by the end of this week to find out the details (if I don’t hear from you before).

Wrote you, Santropez.

Guys I’ll set the new due date to the end of Feb. Will update the status table, etc. and do a little update on my website too, as I did before, before the end of the week.

So as it stands now, new deadlines are Wednesday, February 29th.

One important thing about this project – and that is, that we keep plugging away at it. Persistence pays off. It will get done.

And I MUCH prefer that you do something you’re really proud of, even if it means starting over because you are having trouble with your production, than go through the motions and make something you don’t want anyone to really know about.

This may be a novel idea for a creative collaboration, but we’re also aiming for QUALITY here. Make the film that you love making. Please.

I’m patient. As long as people keep working at it.

BTW, this status table detail (see my profile page) shows you who is working off of whose script:

Alright people, I’ve pushed the deadlines forward to March 1st.

This is the updated production schedule. I’ve heard from some of you but not all, which means I’ll have to chase after the silent ones (Max, Roboko, Ryan, Tremolo, Bobby).

Alright. I just finished the second rough cut. The first I established the various sequences but this second one I had to cut everything together based on what footage is usable re: visual effects. Half of the shots I need are rendered and delivered to my VFX guru, but I still need to deliver him the latter — and more complicated and time consuming — half.

I’m not happy with the pacing, but I’m cheating it a bit with transitions. Next I have to deal with sound. Stuff like VFX and pacing, I have confidence I can find creative solutions. The sound I am rather cynical about. I am definitely going to have to get a clear indication of how it’s going within the next few days, however, so that if I must record emergency dubbing I can get it done post-haste. Here’s hoping.

Once I get some rough sound laid out and the VFX exports (near the end of the month???), I will edit together my final cut and upload it. After that point it’s beyond fixing, however it turns out.

—PolarisDiB

Cool, wish you the best of luck with this, DiB — I hope it works out the way you want it to.

Hey guys,
Sorry it’s been so long. Unfortunately, due to lots of various kinds of crap, some of it from my own stupidity, most of it due to awful timing/luck, and in one instance, due to sheer awesomeness, I will have to bow out. I am a terrible person for leaving you in such a lurch, but I am running out of money and time to be pouring into this. I believe in this project, I do, but must exit. I am sorry! :(

Oh man, Bobby… :(

Next question then — since this project is taking much longer to complete than the year we had set out for ourselves originally: should we bring on another filmmaker and should that filmmaker be a solo type like myself, Dylan, and Leefurfur so as not to get into the difficulties of budget costs?

Or… should those of us who are finished come up with a collaborative piece to replace Bobby’s? I.e., we share actual clips and edit them together into a story?

I’d be up for that.

Oh, no…. :( Sorry, Bobby..

As for the collaborative piece. I kind of like it. More info would be needed.

Shall we brainstorm it, here? Like we did on the initial thread?

Here are all the script assignments, so you can see what films were linked in some way to Bobby’s:

So, we could retain linked elements and come up with something new.

Then, we could film parts of the whole, and edit them together (not necessarily like this, ours would be more sequential, just showing how these two came together from two different places, on one word, and somehow made a unified film that works).

Here is a collaboration, albeit more abstract but works very well, by a filmmaker I know in NYC and someone she knows all the way over in England. They’ve never personally met, they took a word, made their own films, and put them together this way — it’s amazing how they go together. I think we could find that kind of synergy, for sure. It could be very cool.

More about it:

Video/Sound Maria Niro & Richard Broomhall 2012

Richards’s turn and the fourth word is S U R F A C E.

An online installation / collaboration between Richard Broomhall and Maria Niro.

WORDS is an evolving moving image collaboration, exploring language, cultural context, chance and the nature of online artistic relationships. Entirely remote from one another, the two artists investigate the power of synchronicity in art. The artists never met in person, never seen the others face or heard the others voice.

Each artist takes a turn in proposing a word. Then they are to create a two minute video with original sound interpreting the proposed word. The work has to be shot in each artist’s lived environment and be a response to said environment. All images and audio must be original. There is no discussion of content or production techniques or direction. Neither watched the others work until both were finished. The videos are then composited as a diptych, with no tweaking to adjust synchronization, and is then uploaded to the internet and available for viewing world wide.

Maria is based in New York, USA and Richard is based in Bristol, UK. They don’t know where the project will go or how it will end but ask you to accompany them in finding out by checking back regularly and giving your feedback.

I like this. It could work…

Cool! Let’s put our heads together then and brainstorm. :D

Alright then.

I’ll take a look at the related elements and think…

let’s do it!

Odi and I have discussed before various contingent plans, and my realistic expectation is to get a minimum of five segments in. Though that is far from the 13 intended, from that five we can craft a seed, get things online to the website, and then try to make it bigger by using each additional thing we get done as more promotion to get interested parties involved in whichever level they prefer. This is why it is important that each of you use your own segments for personal promotional reasons and not rely on the ECP as being its finalized form. That said, we really do need a finalized product so that we have something to give the 21 investors of our IndieGoGo campaign.

So I say ’let’s do it!’ like leefurfur is saying, but again toward the interests of making a more official and pretty looking trailer. With this trailer we won’t use it exactly for crowdfunding but we can put together a DVD or marketing package to send to grants; with grants we can pay for the movies that have been made and give budgets to productions that want in. OR, it can fill an additional, ‘root’ spot; the structure can change so that everything builds outward from this central piece (I’ll design another spiffy diagram to show what I mean).

The point is, I no longer thing that this is so much a single project that will take one year, two years, whatsoever, as a continually building thing I’m just going to have to keep chipping away on with my free time. Options are always available and it’s growing organically (even often outside of my own control or ideas) and so I don’t write it off as a loss, not yet. At any rate, we have 3 shorts finished, one two weeks from final uploading, so we need at least one more to come in while I see about fulfilling our obligations to the 21 crowdfunders. At least one. Dandara is still working almost daily behind the scenes finding funding for her own segment, Roboko as I understand it is still floating around, Santropez seems to still be making progress, and so on. We may be losing a lot of links but we can still go back to previously discarded ideas such as filming connecting interludes between segments, etc, so on, and so forth.

—PolarisDiB

Yes, I agree. This is going to be developing organically.

Nevertheless, we need to have people complete their films. So at least we can see where we’re at and where we have to morph it. Right now we have one film for Act 2, 3 and 4. Five films will make a sequential movie, but it looks like we’ll have more than 5 if no one drops out from hereon in.

I still vote for brainstorming a collaborative replacement for Bobby’s film, I’m sure that Dylan, Leefurfur and I could do something fun.

But yeah, DiB, I think you need to post some new diagrams for possibilities. At this point it’s hard to make a trailer not knowing who’s definitely going to complete their work or not. And a trailer will be made regardless.

I say to keep enthusiasm and motivation going we start figuring out how to do different things with what we have at this point, and move forward. The three of us are ready and willing to get a fourth film in now, in the minimalist way we’ve already done it (low-no budget and without actors/crew outside of ourselves), so we should go ahead and do it and see how it looks.

I am sorry guys! Once things settle down a bit, I can help out however I can. Realistically, that won’t be until March sometime, or later. Good luck!

Le sigh

Here to report another delay. The VFX are taking longer than initially expected and my VFX guy doesn’t have the time right now what with a few projects he’s finishing up. We talked it over and decided that he’s going to put together a few shots for me to approve so that he knows the style is correct (basically he needs to turn the Figures into something more plastic and faded), and once I sign off on them he’ll get to work and have the over 20 shots done after I return all the way home; about March 15th.

He will have all the green screen shots finalized by the time I leave, which is a substantial part of the undertaking, and we’re looking on an alternative cut that will remove some of the work he has to do. I just recorded some “breathing” folly because the sound mix was a mess, and by the end of this week I’ll have a soundprint ready to go. So as far as delays go, this is still a working one.

Keep at it, is what I’m saying!

—PolarisDiB

It’s ok, DiB. This project grows more like a tree than a weed.

Alrighty. I’ve just sent Leefurfur’s interview off to Luis A. for publishing. That means the last one to go will be Dandara’s. She’s working on funding for her project in Brazil, so I’m going to wait a bit on that one.

NOW. Schedules. We need to keep deadlines even though I know all of you are not in a position to commit to anything hard just yet. So, after next week, I’ll push them all forward to the end of March, and keep checking back about progress. I know that a couple of you are re-working your scripts, and now Bobby has dropped out and those of us who are done with our original segments are interested in filling in that vacancy. In other words, this project continues at its own pace, but it keeps moving forward. (or backward and forward sometimes)

That’s fine. Now that I’m on pause with interview writing/information gathering for them, I can brainstorm with Leefurfur and Dylan about working on Bobby’s former place. If you two come up with some ideas before my brain spits out something coherent, post it here and we’ll riff on that. Either way, I’ll try to start us off sometime this week. At last — something fun for me to do aside from documenting, organizing, communicating and hounding! :D

One month has passed, and I need updates from you guys. I’ve pushed the deadlines forward to 4/30/12.

PLEASE contact me with your statuses.

Here is the updated deadline timetable:

Bump.

I’ve heard from only one of you.

Ok, I’ve heard from Tremolo and Roboko and DiB.

Ryan, Santropez, JP, Max?? Please.

Ok, heard from JP – thank you!

Now — RYAN, SANTROPEZ, MAX — please report to the producer’s office with your status and revised production time table. ASAP.

I’m seriously waiting for just one single friggin’ shot. >.<

—DiB

^ sending you good vibes so you can get it! :)