politics

It's not even a background, really. It's pretty explicitly the absence of a background. Even lighting, no shadows, almost adrift. Not in a bad way. Stephen Smith did a great job of covering this in the May-June issue of Creative COW Magazine, including why it's best to use chroma keys to acheive the look.

The most frequent place you're seeing it these days is the "I'm a Mac" ads. (Check the end of this entry for a great variation.) If you cast your mind back a little further, you might recall the same look in the Apple "switch" campaign. As an Oscar-maniac, I hope you saw the short film with this look in the 2006 Academy Awards show, one of the highlights of what I thought was the best Oscarcast in years.

All from the same guy. The guy who invented the look: Errol Morris.

Almost. While it was common in still photography, it hadn't been used in any meaningful way before he used it for the first time in a short film for the 2002 Oscars.

You may have heard his name before, by the way. He won an Academy Award for the documentary The Fog of War, and has been nominated for others of his films, which include The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, Gates of Heaven, and Fast Cheap & Out of Control

Roger Ebert has said, "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more...Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini."

Mr. Morris is not shy. This quote is on the front page of his website.

I've always been struck that he's also unapologetic for enjoying making commercials, including the Mac Switch and "I'm a Mac" campaigns. You can find dozens and dozens of his commercials at his website. Be sure to check the links in the right margin -- yet dozens more.

These full-frame commercials are what got him the gig making the short film for the 2002 Oscar Award, where he used the white background style for the first time. The short film that opened the show that year instead of the traditional musical number is a whole bunch of folks, famous and not, talking about movies they love.

First, watch it here. I watch it pretty regularly, and it still delights me every time.

Then read the whole tale of how it happened in this AMAAAAAZING New Yorker story.

Just in case you're thinking that reading this might be a waste of your time, here's an excerpt from the article.

The interviews were stacked up, one per half hour, and by mid-morning the schedule was a shambles. Walter Cronkite was [on camera.] Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail Gorbachev and entourage were trudging up the stairs. And Iggy Pop was in the greenroom.

You read correctly. Iggy Pop was scheduled to go on after Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out is a big Russell Crowe fan. "And anything with Julia Roberts." You think I'm kidding?

BTW, I also put the "schedule was a shambles" quote in there because every one of us in production can relate to that nightmare.

So here's where he talks about that "white background" style for the Oscar film.

I interviewed over a hundred people on a white background....Of course, I'm not the first person to film someone on a white background. It's been done by a whole number of photographers, August Sander, Avedon, etc. I have no patent, no trademark, on shooting someone on a white background. Of course, when you try to do something that's free of artifice, somehow that becomes artificial as well.

(Although I can't find it online, here's an article in the Hollywood reporter talking about it, again, very much worth your time to read.) 

The white background isn't the reason that that Oscar short, as well as the Switch and I'm a Mac ads, among others that he's done, so compelling. It's the way that people look so directly and comfortably into the camera. To acheive that, he's created a device he affectionately calls The Interrortron. It's like a teleprompter, but instead of text, it superimposes his face in front of the lens.

Soon after the Mac Switch campaign, he applied the same white background style to a series of political ads for MoveOn.org that also played on his own site. They were a variation on the switch campaign if you will: dozens of people who voted for Bush in 2000, but were voting for Kerry in 2004. Darn near none of them was happy about it either, but they felt compelled by their consciences to switch anyway.

When we first discussed shooting [them], my producers and I would have endless discussions about the way to shoot these political ads, what the appropriate way of doing it might be. Should the lighting be absolutely flat? Should the background be white?...But I like the idea that there's something very straightforward about the ads....

So no matter how you feel about either of those candidates, take a look at political advertising at its best. (Sez me.) And again, lots of related links in the right margin.

After watching the spots, you might think you've got his politics pegged, and maybe you do, but it's more complicated than that. He bumped into Karl Rove in a Hilton breakfast room in Waco. I introduced myself. I said, "I'm Errol Morris. I made this film The Fog of War." Karl Rove said, "That's one of my favorite films. I give that as a present to my friends." So it's certainly not that he's incapable of accurately representing what people say across the range of political experience.

That's really the power of The Fog of War, and an example of how startling it is to look someone in the eye, really look. McNamara's clarity is startling, an experience you won't forget.

I could keep yammering about it, but I'll spare you that to show you this, six of Fog of War's strongest minutes. 

As deeply visceral a reaction it provokes while watching it, Morris has little confidence that much will happen as a result of his work.

I think we're rudderless bumblers, regardless of what we might imagine. You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.

That's from an interview in a magazine called, appropriately enough, Stop Smiling. Still, there's a reason he keeps going.

My interest is primarily in what people are saying, and in not detracting or distracting from what they're saying, because that's at the center of what I'm doing.

That perspective, applied across all the work he does, and his strong visual style, are a few reasons among many why I agree with our man Roger that Morris is among the most important filmmakers -- and commercial-makers -- of our time.

And you thought this was going to be an article about keying.

PS. Xavier Reivax made a short film called "Same" that matches Nine Inch Nails' "Every Day is Exactly the Same" with film footage, the largest source of which is The Fog of War.

PPS. On the I'm a Mac ads, your pal and mine Eric Bliss sent me this GREAT picture:

It's impossible to overstate the impact of Harry Potter on the past ten years of world bookselling. As a bookseller in the mid-80s, I never imagined numbers like this could even be possible: 8.3 million copies of "Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows" in the first 24 hours of US sales, with another 2.7 million in the UK. In the first hour, my former peeps at Barnes & Noble alone sold 156 copies per second! Here in the world of media, we know better than anyone that there's no connection whatsoever between popularity and quality (insert snarky pop-culture reference here). But here's the thing: I think it's almost impossible to overstate how good this series is, the latest installment in particular.

Not that everyone agrees. The American Library Association noted during their Banned Books week last September that the books in Harry Potter series are the most frequently challenged in the 21st century.

They've also been subject to the largest bookburnings in American history, with one particular conflagration of 1.5 million copies all by itself. (Feel free to find your own link. None from me, though.) Of course, these geniuses included as part of their grounds that our boy Harry killed his parents with a butcher knife. Harry didn't kill them, there's no knife involved in their deaths. In fact, not a single butcher knife anywhere in the thousands of pages in the series.

Grrrrrrr.....

Okay, with THAT out of the way, I'm still astounded by how much I enjoyed this series. I'm a pokey reader, and have the attention span of a gnat. Yet the 756 pages flew by, a literal page-turner. Like the best so-called children's novels, their appeal is hardly limited to children. As entertaining as they are, they can also be dark and violent, playing out themes of war motivated by racial intolerance, class conflicts, political intrigue, a malicious press, the horrors (okay, and the rewards) of school, deep personal loss, and the power of friends and family connection to transcend them all.

Oh yeah, and a sense of fantasy, magic, wit, and childlike wonder. 

And as with many of the great children's novels, they're not anywhere near appropriate for all ages. The author, J. K. Rowling, recommends that kids not even be exposed to them before 6, and read only WITH kids until 9 or 10, which is what she did with her own kids.

I'm far from alone among well-read adults who feel that this series already stands alongside King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia and other heroic epics. 

That link, above, to Metacritic? One of the sites I check a couple of times a week. It's also rotated in and out of my home page. Here are some of the quotes that jumped out at me: 

Los Angeles Times: What Rowling has achieved in this book and the series can be described only as astonishing.

Chicago Tribune: This is a deeply engaging book, filled with love and loss, with crackling action and almost unbearable heartbreak.

Washington Post: I cried at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's that rare thing, an instant classic that earns its catharsis honestly, not through hype or sentiment but through the author's vision and hard work.

And really, how often do you see a review fessing up that they cried?

Anyway, enough yammering from me. Follow the link to Metacritic and read the reviews yourself. Better still (you knew this was coming, right? The traditional closer) read these books yourself. And if you've read the others, hold on for the last installment. My heart's racing again just talking about it. 

As soon as we get the next issue of The COW Magazine out, I'm going to re-read all 7 of the books.

PS. Unlike Lord of the Rings, where I thought the movies were better (sorry), other than #3, the Harry Potter movies are just okay. Don't let them influence your feelings about the books.

Since the issues surrounding rights and fair use come up at The COW all the dang time, from various perspectives, here are some of my very favorite web resources.

The Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center has a heavily scholarly orientation, maybe moreso than you'll find useful. But the coverage here is certainly exhaustive.

One of the coolest things about it is a free, digitized version of Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, called Free Culture. He's been a pioneer on rights in the electronic age from pretty much the beginning, and has fought vigorously against the rapidly diminishing rights that we have, both as creators and consumers of media. Gotta love this:

As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom--freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Like I said, you can download a free copy of the book with rights to reuse and remix for non-commercial purposes, so he's putting his money where his mouth is.

If you're going to get into a fight about rights, definitely better to know the real lay of the land. Even if you're not a scholar, definitely a site worth checking out.

More oriented toward practice than legal underpinnings or broad social examples, the Center for Social Media at American University is amazing. They offer what they call "Fair Use and Free Speech Resources." Note that they, like Lessig, equate the two.

Some great articles for documentarians in particular. Although this one is from 2005, it's got great information on efforts to expand the rights of documentary filmmakers wrt copyrighted materials. In the meantime, this article describes best practices for fair use as defined today.

People ask all the time about where copyright fades into the public domain. The guidelines are pretty clear, and you can see them here.

I could continue, but you get the idea. There's no reason for you to have any major questions about rights, and certainly no excuse for crossing the line. These two sites will help shine a light on the right path forward.