It’s often worth watching documentaries that suck in order to learn what not to do as a filmmaker. While watching the 2004 documentary “The End of Suburbia” (available on Netflix but don’t bother) several lessons occurred to me. Here’s my new list of what not to do in my ownRead More →
Personally, I’m a big fan of using “relative time,” in other words, using titles or narration or lower thirds or what-have-you to convey that time has passed in a relative sense rather than an absolute one (i.e. “6 months later…” instead of “June 24th, 2008…”).Read More →
Are you a doc center alum or do you know one? Shoot us an email with what you’re up to these days (vivadocumentary@gmail.com) and we’ll post it the next time we do one of these posts…Read More →
The “Super Size Me” doc-maker talks about his latest feature film.Read More →
When it comes to labeling your camera originals, the key is having a consistent format. How do award-winning local nonfiction production houses like Chicago’s own Towers Productions label their tapes? Towers has a huge on-site archive, and they’ve got thousands of tapes to keep track of, so you better believe they’ve got a coherent labeling system.Read More →
For one reason or another, the clip you just imported into Final Cut Pro looks squished or stretched. Here are five quick things to check to find out the reason why your AR is wrong.Read More →
(Written while waiting for several MiniDV tapes to be captured) 1. Capture full tape in X segments. Sometimes, for a simple offline edit, I just want to capture a full tape. Why isn’t Final Cut smart enough to just capture the full tape in, say […]Read More →
