Matthew Butterick, the typographer and writer behind Typography for Lawyers, took issue with the use of the Verdana typeface in Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, so he wrote the director a letter.

{% blockquote -Matthew Butterick, Typographer http://mbtype.com/pdf/bird-verdana.pdf Letter to Brad Bird, January 20, 2012 (PDF) %} Inapt typography is not uncommon in movies. But big-budget studio films employ scores of people specifically to worry about the details that ensure the on-screen experience will be seamless. Therefore, it’s incongruous to put all that care (and money!) into the frame and then overlay it with an inapt font, which in its own small way, breaks the illusion. It’s not Mission: Impossible — IKEA Protocol, is it. {% endblockquote %}

I had a similar reaction when the text showed up on screen, but I forgot all about it once I nearly lost my lunch during the Burj Khalifa scenes. This whole letter is gold.

UPDATE 01/25/12: Brad Bird Responds to Typographer

(via Shawn Blanc.)

{% blockquote -Michael Cieply and Edward Wyatt http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/technology/dodd-calls-for-hollywood-and-silicon-valley-to-meet.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all The New York Times %} “This is altogether a new effect,” Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing “an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically” in the last four decades, he added. {% endblockquote %}

One of the key points of contention I have with a lot of the mainstream coverage of the anti-SOPA/PIPA movement is that many outlets refer to it as the “anti-SOPA lobby” or something like that. What I think is lost on Chris Dodd and his cohorts is that there is no lobby. It’s not the MPAA vs. Google; it’s the interests of a few corporations vs. the voices of the American people. And I think we’ve made it clear where we stand on this issue.

The whole article, which is a great read on a smarmy character, will make you hate politics.

{% blockquote %} Under legislation passed in 2007, Mr. Dodd is barred from personally lobbying Congress for two years after leaving office. Hired as the consummate Washington insider to carry the film industry’s banner on crucial issues like piracy, Mr. Dodd ended up being more coach than player. He helped devise a strategy that called for his coalition to line up a strong array of legislative sponsors and supporters behind two similar laws — the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House, and the Protect I.P. Act in the Senate — and then to move them through the Congress quickly before possible opposition from tech companies could coalesce. {% endblockquote %}

Lobbying is against the rules, yet “everything but” is just fine. The legislation in question, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 is clearly useless.

Yesterday, Apple introduced a new education initiative focused around the iPad. iBooks 2 now supports media rich textbooks, and iBooks Author, a new free Mac app, allows anyone to create glossy ebooks to be sold through their iBookstore. It occurred to me, looking over the company’s press materials, that “textbook” is a stodgy word that doesn’t really cover the kinds of books filmmakers and students really need. iBooks 2 and iBooks Author could completely change the landscape of film education.

In When the Shooting Stops … The Cutting Beings: A Film Editor’s Story by Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen, something weird happens in the fourth chapter. While explaining the immeasurable contributions of Soviet silent filmmakers like Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Pudovkin, the authors devote six pages of text to describing the Odessa steps massacre in Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

The mob is bounding the steps in panic; they seem hardly able to grab each step ahead of them fast enough. Sometimes the camera moves alongside, sometimes it lets them pass. We see the flight from various angles; the pace of the cutting generates an awesome sense of fear. A glimpse of the white-jacketed soldiers moving down the steps in a rigid line, rifles braced, their long stark shadows advancing ahead of them. A volley is fired.

There is certainly some value to the editorializing Rosenblum and Karen bring to the table, like that bit about the editing generating “an awesome sense of fear.” Overall, however, it seems like it would be better to conserve pages and the reader’s time by sticking to analysis and letting the film speak for itself.

And that’s when I realized that in 1979, when the book was published, it wasn’t easy to get one’s hands on a copy of Potemkin, let alone have the ability to shuttle right into the Odessa bedlam. Today we have digital media coming out our ears. Not every film is universally accessible, but we’re getting there. Thanks to home video, streaming services and even the clipification of great works, students of cinema can assemble a fortress of knowledge in almost no time at all.

But does unfettered access to cinematic history mean that new generations are educating themselves? I think there is a stop-gap here; students may have access but they can’t always connect the dots between what is taught and what is viewed. Worse, it’s almost impossible to filter through the noise of web search, tagging, fan-edits and other information-age problems.

A search for “that famous Russian steps scene” might bring you to Eisentein’s sequence, but in what context? Similarly, getting one’s hand on a disc of Potemkin would allow for a full screening, but how does one disseminate the importance of the scene? Again, what is the context?

I’d like to stop for a moment here and clarify what I mean when I say film education. I do not mean “people who go to film school.” Anyone with an interest in the subject and the patience to approach it from an academic standpoint can be a student of cinema.

Famously, the French New Wave filmmakers learned cinema by gobbling up anything that was playing on a screen near them. In his personal letters, a young François Truffaut is seen writing his dear friend Robert Lachenay with updates of the piles of movies he was consuming. That was film education for at least the first half of the medium’s existence.

But times change. Not every city has a repertory or arthouse theater, and those that exist are having a rough go competing with the cacophonous offerings at multiplexes. It’s far more expensive today than it ever has been to go and see a single film, let alone a dozen in a week. As video rental stores shut down across the country, the discovery process is becoming ever more strained and streamlined.

In this digital era, it’s important to meet students where they are, on their devices. Younger audiences still go to the theater, but they have no problem watching films on ever-shrinking screens, like televisions, tablets and phones.

I’ll never forget Stephen Fry’s closing remark in his 2010 Time Magazine piece on the iPad:

One melancholy thought occurs as my fingers glide and flow over the surface of this astonishing object: Douglas Adams is not alive to see the closest thing to his Hitchhiker’s Guide that humankind has yet devised.

He is referring not to Adams’s novel, but the device described within it, a small computer with the words “Don’t Panic” on the front that contains all of the knowledge in the universe. When accessed, it contains not only explicative text but graphics, videos and interactive demonstrations. Fry got it so right: that’s the iPad.

In the context of learning film, authors have found innovative ways to illustrate the finer points of cinema on paper, but no film education is complete without extensive screenings. iBooks Author makes it simple to incorporate video into a piece. If When the Shooting Stops were released today on an iPad, the six page description of the Odessa steps could have been replaced with a clip of the actual sequence. Perhaps photos of each cut in the sequence (or most of them since there are 157 per the book’s authors) could have been arranged in a gallery, each with an explanation of its intellectual significance.

There are many rules in filmmaking, some of them seemingly esoteric until you actually put them to the test. Take something like the 180-degree rule which is usually explained with a birds-eye view illustration of a film set. It is very difficult to introduce this concept to students. No matter how many times you explain the overarching concept, it is worthless until a student sees it in action; they must see a scene done properly and one done improperly. Even then, it isn’t until one begins shooting and editing films that the concept really solidifies and becomes second-nature.

If a book could embed not only videos, but exercises on how to apply these high-level filmmaking ideas, it would cut through some of the toughest stumbling blocks of learning cinema. Imagine being able to read about the 180-degree rule, then seeing it play out in a scene. Then you could even be given a group of shots to quickly assemble into a scene right on your iPad. It’s a very different process than sitting through clips in a classroom, then firing up an editing application and getting started on a test project.

There are countless examples worth exploring, but here are some filmmaking concepts that could benefit from this kind of interactivity:

• How to load a film camera.
• The basics of matching action in editing.
• How to arrange lights for specific effects.
• Scene breakdowns.
• Embedded screenplay examples.
• Comparison of written screenplay to finished scene.
• Scenes from films in discussion.

Apple didn’t invent embedded media in ebooks, and their newest software even has some controversial aspects to it. Still, they make the prevailing media tablet of the moment and are positioned to reach a wider audience than any other company. There is no reason that filmmakers and movie lovers can’t benefit from these new tools, which will hopefully only get better. One day, I hope, a student will be able to send a film, either in its entirety or in clips, to their television while they follow along to a lesson on their iPad.

But we’re just getting started. Let’s see where this goes.

{% blockquote Stephanie Condon http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-57362675-503544/pipa-vote-postponed-in-the-senate/ CBS News Political Hotsheet %} Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced today that he is postponing Tuesday’s procedural vote on the Protect IP Act (PIPA), the controversial anti-piracy bill that inspired thousands of websites on Wednesday to go dark. {% endblockquote %}

Very happy to hear this news, but this is still only the beginning. SOPA and PROTECT IP aren’t going away, they’re just being put off until Hollywood’s lobbyist can find a more convenient time to push this through.

Make sure your Senators and Representatives know there is no convenient time to break the Internet.

In a post titled The next SOPA, Marco Arment suggests that the MPAA’s clout in Washington is a campaign finance problem. He paints a bleak picture of how we will always lose a battle against them, unless…

The MPAA studios hate us. They hate us with region locks and unskippable screens and encryption and criminalization of fair use. They see us as stupid eyeballs with wallets, and they are entitled to a constant stream of our money. They despise us, and they certainly don’t respect us.

Yet when we watch their movies, we support them.

Even if we don’t watch their movies in a theater or buy their plastic discs of hostility, we’re still supporting them. If we watch their movies on Netflix or other flat-rate streaming or rental services, the service effectively pays them on our behalf next time they negotiate the rights or buy another disc. And if we pirate their movies, we’re contributing to the statistics that help them convince Congress that these destructive laws are necessary.

Marco suggests a boycott of Hollywood movies, at least those made and/or released by the six major studios that comprise the MPAA. No more buying tickets, discs, streaming subscriptions or downloads (legal or otherwise). This is the nuclear option, our Doomsday Machine. Pull the trigger and Hollywood is done.

I don’t advocate this tactic. This is in part because I don’t want to harm the filmmakers whose films move cinema forward from within the system, but I also have a vested interest in the movie business succeeding. There actually are a lot of jobs at stake in this industry, mine included.

Which wraps back around to why Chris Dodd and the MPAA should listen closely to what Marco is saying, because I’ll bet you he’s not the first person to think up an all out Hollywood boycott. The studios should be more afraid of losing their core audiences than they are of piracy.

As more online outlets pop up and enterprising filmmakers get savvier, the studio system may see more attention (and dollars) being spent elsewhere. Then they’d be in much worse of a pickle than piracy could ever provide.

Dodd and friends: it’s time for damage control. When the people start considering putting down your product and looking elsewhere, you’ve done something horribly wrong. Don’t pursue “the next SOPA.” Instead, make amends and find a way to be great again. This may be your last chance.

This could be huge.

{% blockquote The Official YouTube Blog http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2012/01/global-search-for-worlds-best.html %} Starting February 2, you can submit your short, story-driven videos (15 minutes or less) on Youtube.com/yourfilmfestival. Entry is free and open to people 18 years of age and above, and all genres and formats are welcome: live action short, animation, documentary, web-series episode, TV pilot — you name it. Your video must be story-driven, and cannot have been publicly shown or distributed prior to January 1, 2010. Full rules are available on the Your Film Festival Channel.

From there, the Scott Free team will select 50 semi-finalists from across the globe by June 2012. YouTube users will then vote for their favorites to select 10 finalists, whose videos will then be screened at the 2012 Venice Film Festival. A jury led by Ridley Scott will crown one grand prize winner, who will receive a $500,000 production grant to work with Scott’s team to create a new story for the world to see. {% endblockquote %}

{% blockquote -Smithsonian Newsdesk http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/ancient-popcorn-discovered-peru %} Some of the oldest known corncobs, husks, stalks and tassels (male flowers), dating from 6,700 to 3,000 years ago were found at Paredones and Huaca Prieta, two mound sites on Peru’s arid northern coast. The research group, led by Tom Dillehay from Vanderbilt University and Duccio Bonavia from Peru’s Academia Nacional de la Historia, also found corn microfossils: starch grains and phytoliths. Characteristics of the cobs—the earliest ever discovered in South America—indicate that the sites’ ancient inhabitants ate corn several ways, including popcorn and flour corn. However, corn was still not an important part of their diet. {% endblockquote %}

But when did they discover artificial butter flavoring?

{% blockquote Jason Noble http://blogs.desmoinesregister.com/dmr/index.php/2012/01/18/developer-seeks-state-aid-for-field-of-dreams-development/ Des Moines Register %} The proposed $38-million project is still in its early planning phases, but developers and local officials told lawmakers on Wednesday they envision a 193-acre development featuring 24 youth baseball and softball fields with professional-quality turf, an indoor “sportsdome” facility, dormitories, an amphitheater and a ropes course.

The original baseball field and house featured in the beloved film “Field of Dreams” would be preserved, and all the diamonds on the site would be built into cornfields. {% endblockquote %}

You know what? If they built that I would go. I’d hand over my money without even thinking about it, for it is money I have and peace I lack.

{::nomarkdown}

{% blockquote Smaller Is Better: New Models for the Indie Film Market http://turnstylenews.com/2012/01/19/smaller-is-better-new-models-for-the-indie-film-market/ TurnStyle %} “I just think audiences are getting tired of what is at the multiplex,” says Poritsky. “They’re tired of paying so much to see a lot of the same movies.” {% endblockquote %}

A certain Noah J. Nelson interviewed me and a few other people about the state of indie cinema. Fun chat.

{% blockquote -MG Siegler http://pandodaily.com/2012/01/18/assclowns/ Pando Daily %} The iTunes model for music has proven that people will pay for content. You just have to make it as accessible as possible. That means both price and distribution points.

Instead, Hollywood has lost its collective mind. And its way. They want legislation that will puncture the fabric of the web. It’s insane. {% endblockquote %}

Seconded.