Bob Bemer has died of Cancer. We never talked and I never met him.

I am happy to announce that I have had talks accepted at both the upcoming HOPE and DEFCON conferences. If you wanted to meet me, this is the best time to do it. If you’ve already met me, this is a great way to do it again.

CAPTURING DIGITAL HISTORY: A Quick and Dirty Guide
HOPE (Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City, July 9th-11th)

Knowledge doesn’t move forward without history, and while there have been many steps to capture the stories, lore and data of different aspects of computer cultures, a lot of the same mistakes are made over and over. In a fast-paced one-hour talk, Jason Scott busts out some ideas, tools, and mindsets towards halting the loss, bringing the stories back, and making something to build upon instead of throw away. Along the way, expect a few bucketloads of trivia and memories to sauce up the proceedings.

DIGITZATIONS AND DOCUMENTARY
DEFCON (Alexis Park Resort, Las Vegas, July 31st-August 1st)

Jason Scott of TEXTFILES.COM, a site dedicated to the history of Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems, embarked on a quest to film an all-inclusive BBS documentary in 2001. What started out as a one-year project grew to three, and what started as a two-hour film will be a six-hour series. Thousands of miles of travel and 200 interviews later, the production is now nearing the end of editing and the release date. Jason tells you what he learned, why you shouldn’t hesitate to make your own projects, and the occasional story that technically can’t be mentioned in the film.

Like a lot of filmmakers, I have fallen into that “no new news” hole that leaves the waiting public in the dark while no progress or information comes leaking out. Unlike a lot of them, I will try to explain why that is.

For the last 3 months, I have basically been doing the clip culling that I mentioned in my previous news entry, wherein I take an hour of footage and turn it into a small pile of smaller clips, somewhat sorted for their possible final resting place in various episodes. This work is tedious, uneventful, and hard to keep updating folks on (”yes, I am STILL culling!”) and so I simply let the previous entries speak for themselves, because they were still quite applicable. I have gone through about 100 hours of footage, knocking it down to something like 10 to 15 hours. Obviously these hours will be knocked down even further in the final editing, but I need some flexibility depending on which sequences I think fit the different episodes. There are, roughly, 60-70 hours of footage left to cull, which are going very fast because I am an old hand at this by now.

If you are completely addicted to knowing every little thing being done, I started a little worklog that has no-frills day-by-day blows of what is going on. I will not explain what I write there, but stuff gets added nearly every day to it, so you can see motion if you want.

This is the required groundwork of any production; many places have interns or other folks working on it 8 to 12 hours a day, going through footage, getting out good examples of takes or shots, and then presenting them to the director or the editor to make choices. Since I’m the director, editor, AND the intern, I get to do everything at once, so it’s me with the 8 to 12 hours a day.

I should hasten to add that this work is not ALWAYS tedious, since I am in fact watching the full play-out of interviews I conducted months or years ago. In many cases, people are absolutely brilliant with their responses, considering I gave them little hint on what I would be asking, and for the fact that I often would switch questioning quite dramatically to make sure all relevant subjects were covered. While listening to the answers, I was often thinking about the next question I was going to ask, so even though I heard the answers, I didn’t HEAR them, if that makes sense. In many cases, this is the first time I’ve really, honestly heard the interview I’m editing.

The website has undergone a redesign to reflect its move into promotion and information. There is now a library which will hopefully reflect the more involved information that won’t make it on the screen, but which I ended up doing a lot of research on. The photos page will hopefully flower out now that the interviews are done, and folks can browse them.

Not a day passes by that I don’t get one or two letters with the same general question: “When is it coming out?”. I am not in a good position at this point to indicate when that time will come, although I am working quite hard to ensure it is 2004. Quality trumps deadlines; this is an all-in-one shot, and I want to be sure what goes on the DVD set is as good as I can make it. I’ve made sure to set up a notification page so that folks can be told when it’s ready for their order, so hopefully no-one feels left out.

I have forced some hard dates on myself to a small extent; I am giving a talk about the documentary at this year’s DEFCON convention in Las Vegas at the end of July/beginning of August. I will accompany it with some sequences from the documentary, and so now there HAVE to be sequences. I don’t expect this to be a problem, since it’ll be a number of weeks with all the footage in place to pull from.

All in all, the whole thing is coming along nicely. A lot of work, but well worth it.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

As I was collecting textfiles and other artifacts from the BBS era and beyond, I started to go after the logical next step: audio recordings and “art scene” creations. In the case of audio, it started with conferences from the 1990s and voicemail recordings, but it has quickly expanded into the current hacker radio shows and other collections that people have brought to me.

In the “artscene” section, I knew it was going to be large, since I would be collecting works from ANSI Art Packs, MOD and Music writers, and a whole host of other demos, drawings and works going back for a very long time. Indeed, the collection is already in the tens of gigabytes.

In both cases, the sites have gained in popularity, until the day has finally come that they are starting to hurt my bandwidth. This is bandwidth that comes out of my own pocket, with no advertising or other stupidities to augment them. I am fine with this, but people who use the sites are starting to notice the slowdown.

So, I would like to ask if anyone is interested in being a mirror for these sites. They are very large, and very popular with folks, and I don’t see the popularity coming down. I do not want mirrors who will add advertising to them, although the mirror link themselves will tell you who is providing it, and there can be a “information about this mirror” page that will be a “anything you want” sort of situation.

To save people some back and forth, I have to say that you have to be running your own server and have a lot of pipe to really be a mirror in this case; people often offer me space out of the goodness of their hearts, and I appreciate it, but this stuff will get you kicked off a shared server faster than you can imagine.

If you know someone with a lot of space and a need to flex their muscles, please contact me: mirrorhelp@textfiles.com. Thanks.

I’ve been watching an awful lot of documentaries for the past couple of years, mostly out of a self-interest, but also because I tend to like them. I especially like documentaries where the subject matter is not so self-evident, like people who play lots of online games or The Fisher-Price Pixelvision Camera or people who wait in line for 30 days to see a movie.

But I also watch dozens of other documentaries in which the subject matter is pretty well established. They cover subjects like skateboarding, or historical figures, or eclectic characters. Certainly every year there are a dozen or so “celebrated” documentaries that have gotten the attention of the culture at large that I see out of duty or interest.

And through this mass of documentaries, I see a bunch of cliches or common choices that I think of as needless and weakness. They may represent, possibly, inherent flaws in the medium. Just like heavy makeup is often required to make people look a certain way under the lights used to shoot professional television shows, perhaps these shortcuts are simply endemic to the process. I call them “manias”, because the filmmaker seems to be overcome with them in the deep throes of the editing room, faced with a piece of dead space and trying desperately to make the film compelling where it might not be.

I’m sure a lot of these are already covered in some manner out in the wide world of film criticism, but I’ve built these up in my own mind, and as a result, I have my own terms for them. They are:

Perp Walk, Monkey Dance, Picture Postcard, Clown Show, and Razzmatazz.

I’ll cover them and then be on my way.

Perp Walk is where the interviewee is shown walking down the street, or down a hallway, or any sort of general location. It’s nearly always accompanied with a voiceover by the interviewee. In some cases, it might be a way to mask a problem with the original footage of the interview, but more often it’s just to be able to fit in some pleasant shots of the outdoors into a film that might not have them, like an in-depth documentary about an engineer or an overview of politics. You see the person, looking down, looking away, and down the street they go. Sometimes the camera is still, sometimes it follows them or walks ahead of them like a stalker. Extra bonus if the person you’re making walk doesn’t actually seem to do much walking in their spare time.

Monkey Dance is filming the interview subject “doing what they do”, even if it makes no sense that they would be doing things. If they do work with crime-solving, they’re shown looking through a microscope. If they’re a computer hacker, they are shown typing something at the keyboard. It feels stilted and weird, and oftentimes you can see the look on their face as being somewhat distant or confused, since in point of fact they are not actually doing anything. Dance, little monkey, Dance.

Picture Postcard is a meaningless shot of a vista, a landscape, a place, with no commentary, or commentary unrelated to what you’re looking at. They’re often shot beautifully, with just the right hint of sunlight and blue skies or interesting buildings, but they’re not actually of a place that exists within the story, they’re just general shots that could have been purchased off-the-shelf from a stock footage company. Maybe they even were.

Clown Show is the use of someone who is not really related to the subject at all for the purposes of being “unusual” or giving comic relief. If you pull a homeless guy aside and aim a camera at him and ask him stuff he couldn’t possibly know about, you’re going to get some pretty “funny” footage. If no homeless are conveniently located near your studio or house, you can just do “man in the street” interviews and ask people questions. Since most people aren’t interested in your subject at that exact moment and are unlikely to be thinking ahead of time with answers (since they were, by definition, on their way to somewhere when you stopped them), their answers will be inaccurate, misguided, smirking, and, in some fashion, comedic. This is, basically, a slight of hand trick, replacing time that could be spent going over the subject with a knowledgable person with someone who is neither interested nor prepared to discuss the subject with you. It is not difficult to make anyone seem like a clown. And it fills time nicely.

Razzmatazz is the most alluring and easy of the shots, actually part of the same family as picture postcard: long, lingering closeups of some object vaguely related to the story being told, shot with loving caress by the lens to give you a different perspective about the subject, but really just filling space. Maybe if you’re doing something on the space program, you look at a close-up shot of an LED counter clicking down, or maybe you see a slow-motion shot of water dripping into a cup while someone describes the murder that went on in the house. Either way, you’re looking at the beauty of the shot and not really what’s being covered.

When I shot my documentary, I intentionally crippled myself and filmed no monkey dances, picture postcards (although I did take photos) or perp walks for any of my interviewees. I just couldn’t stand the idea of making these nice people “do things” for fame and fortune (which a good portion of them neither want nor need, and my interviewing them was a gift to me, not the other way around). The camera can make people agree to a lot of stuff they normally wouldn’t, and that influence should not be taken lightly.

The question, of course, is how many of these I will fall into as I edit my own work. Razzmatazz is kind of unavoidable, although it is my hope to stuff the documentary so full of information that multiple viewings will yield additional facts and figures that you didn’t get the first time through. Clown Show might happen, although more because someone said something amusing than because they know nothing about BBSes or textfiles; everyone I interviewed either knew what a BBS was or knew what I was doing.

Next time you watch a documentary, especially the short ones on TV that were done under a very tight budget or schedule, see how many of these little short-cuts they’ve peppered even with a 20 minute segment. It’s stunning. I hope I didn’t spoil your next dozen hours of viewing.

Also, while I’m ruining Christmas, watch one of these “reality shows”, or documentary-like series, and ask yourself the one question that tears down the suspension of disbelief like the flimsy wax paper it is:

How did the camera get there for that shot?