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----------------------- February 2004Class started meeting in January. People come up with documentary ideas and pitch them to the class. Goetz talks about media literacy and pirate radio. Knaus talks about a bird watching guy. Parker talks about farting exhaust pipe cars and admits he wants to work on. Goetz calls Parker and asks if he wants to translate his techno music and farting exhaust pipe car film to Italian motor scooters. The idea might work. Knaus raises an eyebrow, still none of the three are behind a project. The three talk a little more. Knaus comes up with the record store idea. Goetz is interested. Parker shakes on cinnamon. Knaus thinks the record store doc would be a little better than the scooter idea. That settles it. 2.27.04 Shoot at ATX records. Interviews with verdon, DJ scuba gooding sr and folks in attendance at the Ritz Upstairs. ----------------------- March 20043.02.04 Shoot at Jim Caliguiri's house. Man, this guy wrote the cover story in the chronicle about Sound Exchange closing. This punk rock establishment sat at 21st and Guadalupe on the drag. Besides writing features Jim also reviews CDs, books and shows as a free lance writer for the Chronicle. 3.03.04 Shoot at Tower Records. Dave Muholland sat in a chair and talked for us for a really long time. 3.04.04 Shoot at Cheapos. Interview with Kevin McCorkle. He has worked at the store for 5 years and has been in retail most of his life. The drive by truckers play the music that he likes best. What is roots music? 3.14.04 Shoot at the Red Eyed Fly. Annie Lin plays her Mary Lou Lord / Liz Phair folk for the crowd at this SXSW interactive www.fray.com event. She presents as part of a panel where musicians sound off on MP3s at the convention center on the 16th. 3.16.04 Shoot at the Austin Convention center. Interview with Annie Lin after she presented with a panel entitled: Drop that MP3, Musicians Sound off on the web. 3.18.04 Shoot at Antones Records. Anne-Marie Akin came all the way from Chicago to sing. This founder of Swamp Flower Records played some fast ones, some slow ones and a few well known ones. Eve (I've got to look up her last name) ran the crowd through some blues numbers. I was stomping my foot and would have been spittin' on the ground but I was in a record store. Shoot at Mekong River. Magnatune and creative commons hosted a party at this Vietnamese restaurant on 6th street. Interview with John Buckman, CEO and Founder of www.magnatune.com. Licensing music does not mean you loose control of your material. Out of print becomes out of the question as this alternative music distribution group cuts even deals, 50 / 50 with the artists. 3.19.04 Shoot at Tower Records. The Winks are a talented Shoot at Cheapos. Petty Booka are a Japanese ukulele toting duo who put a Polynesian twist on popular tunes ranging from the Ramones to The Beatles. Shoot at Waterloo. Frank Jordan rocked the butt of of a llama. I asked the lead singer, Mike, if he was named Frank Jordan. I am not telling you what he said. Mike didn't know if the music should be filed under "F" or under "J". We decided on "F" since Pink Floyd goes under "P". More at Waterloo. The Coachwhips made a late apperance and set-up in the back of the store. They played and sang through a stack of amps. The signer had what looked like a harmonica mic wrapped in ducktape in his mouth and may or may not have brought it up on top of a rack of CDs as he walked, breaking CDs and parts of the rack as he played guitar. This was much better than Cats and I just might watch the tape again and again, or just once to get the fact straight on whether he was singing and playing on top of the CD rack. 3.20.04 Shoot at the convention center. Interviewed Scott Feldman, the national promotions manager for www.rock.com, the official site of rock music. Scott talked about radio stations on their site and a cross marketing deal with a movie coming out about an LA DJ. Scott goes to Tower on the boulevard and to Aeomba Records almost daily in Hollywood. More at the convention center. Interviewed 3 guys from the UK. Record stores aren't a place of encounter there. The employees are mainly locate CDs but their main function is no to recommend music to customers. Shoot on 6th street. Interviewed drunk people, sober people, homeless people, Austinites, visitors, a woman from the Austin American Statesman and recorded the Swedish Pavaratti in the foyer of the Driskill. ----------------------- April 20044.1.04 Presentation in class lab. A lot of footage has been logged and captured. We didn't sort out a whole lot of it. We have a few quotes and some instore performance footage of The Winks, Petty Booka and the Coachwhips. The final cut project has tons of clips in it of the best quotes out of our 11 hours of footage. 4.3.04 Paul Knauss put a lot of time in editing. There are a lot of quotes now and some of them are tied together. The project does not have a real arc and flow. Things are disjointed and do not follow each other for a reason. I am planning on putting more time in Monday or Tuesday working with Ryan Parker editing. We are scheduled to pick up gear on Tuesday. I am feeling that that is too soon. I would like to have a tighter edit before going out with a camera again. We meet with Stekler on Wednesday so that will help with the focus. 4.7.04 Meeting with professor Paul Stekler. We have the first tapes logged and the good quotes digitized. Some of these clips were collected and layed end to end in the tineline. It is hard to transition from one to the other but some sort of frame work is materializing. We checked out gear yesterday and I think it is premature to start shooting again when we don't know what we need or where we are going. 4.8.04 Shoot at Antones Records. Videotaped Forrest who has worked at the store for years. He held up a record and asked "Is this ones and zeros". Forrest mentioned that the audience for vinyl is getting younger. 4.9.04 Shoot at Waterloo Records. I started off by giving an employee a VHS copy of the Coachwhips doing an instore performance over SXSW. They immediately pt it in the VCR and people congregated around a TV and watched it. Some commented that it was the best thing they saw that whole week. I agreed. John Kunz, store manager talked to us for 40 minutes and then we did a little walking and talking around the store as he explained the different areas. He held up a record and said "This IS ones and zeros." Just kidding. He talked about the history of instore performances and told us why he has CD-R media for sale. He sells what music fans want to buy. 4.10.04 Shoot at 21st Street Co-op house. 91.7 KVRX Austin DJ Major Obscuro (AKA Andrew Ward) sat at his computer and talked about his music listening habits. At one point while surfing we found a chance to buy a CD at an online retailer. When Andrew clicked on the link we found that the item was not in stock. It was an organic, in the moment, these guys could never make this stuff up, whiz bang, case in point 10th level botisatvaic Platonically extruded example of a reason to download. 4.11.04 Shoot at a Hyde Park studio apartment. 390 a month, no shit. This guy named Lucas Anderson shot the shit with us for half an hour. He used to be a KVRX DJ. He has been traveling the world and plans to continue. Soulseek and news groups provide good sources of music. I can't think of a damn single thing that he said right now. We have 19 tapes of footage, so that's like 15 hours of stuff. It's all real blur. I know he will make the final cut because we had the bad purple gel on the wall behind him. 4.12.04 Shoot at Tower. Dave Mulholland, round two. I hoped to get a little more off the record with Dave or reach back to the March 3rd interview we did with him. This interview will hopefully provide a contrast to the first interview and we want to play them off of each other to drive the story. Dave told some great stories about Henry Rollins and about working at a record store in Seattle in the early 90s that Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love frequented. After the interview we stepped to the curb to interview people passing by. We got a few takers. "Could you spare some change for a digital video cassette?" "Could you spare some change for a sound guy that doesn't suck?" 4.19.04 I just logged the Antones interview with Forrest, the Waterloo interview with John and the interview with Lucas, former KVRX (91.7 FM) DJ. This was about 3 hours of footage. I am making notes where we have great comments. Some comments tie really closely with what other folks are saying. Some comments are the exact opposite of what other have said. Paul Knaus has put in a lot of time logging, digitizing and laying out clips. Ryan Parker wrote a really great script. We have been editing according to that. Last week we met with Paul Stekler and he suggested we start at the beginning and line out how we are going to start. I see this as a start to the level of inquiry or scale of scope that we want to have as we take on our subject. Tomorrow evening I meet with Ryan to edit, we will show some of our edit on VHS in class on the 21st. Oh yeah, I have been transferring the DAT audio to CD so that Ryan can continue to cut together audio montages of different parts of our story. We recorded some audio to his hard drive and then used the DAT when his computer was unavailable. I am going SPDIF out of the DAT into the digital in on an Edirol uA-5 run to a computer running N-Track studio. I am burning data CDs for Ryan. 4.29.04 A general update here. Paul and I put some time into editing. Ryan has learned final cut pro and he has been editing as well. His work has given the project its first semblence of order. We start off with people on the street talking about downloading. Next we go to the record stores to see how bad things are. This is the "bad record store" section. After this we cover entitlement and the logic of why people download. at some point in the film the tide will shift to downloading being benefitial to some bands. I just stopped and read the article in POV (the journal of the austin film community) on Paul Stekler and Last Man Standing, which played at SXSW. In his words, "editing a documentary is like taking a big piece of stone and chipping away at it to discover the film that is inside." ----------------------- May 20045.1.04 Ryan has brought in a friend, Josh, to work on some of the editing. In class last Wednesday we played a five minute edit. In talking about it Ryan used the word "I" 7 times and the word "We" 8 times. I pointed this out and he wasn't very happy. Yeah it was a cruel comment but it makes things difficult to work together. Our project is full of "time re-mapping". This effect allows one to have a clip that plays at a variable speed. This has been used extensively in editing in TV shows for the past 3 years. That's when I first noticed it. It looks cool and has a pretty good feel. If Ryan has the perspective he wants to take on the project then I have no problem helping where I can. I am not used to people telling me not to touch things though. 5.9.04 Still going. I edited a little part on ATX records. Ryan steamrolled it. Our project has not benefited one bit from my editing skills. At one point I thought I was a good editor. 33 Degrees announced they were closing the other day. They opted not to be in the film. Our film is pretty timely. The screening for this project will be Sunday May 16th from 3:30pm - 5:00pm in studio 4D of the CMB building. Come see it and the other 7 or so films produced this semester. 5.15.04 Remember the Ides of May. Paul shot some Super8 film. He got it developed and telecined. It looks great. We used shots of Baja Fresh, former home of Sound Exchange, Tower Records and the building where Jupiter was. Ryan stopped by the studio where I work, at Concordia University and we got into Adobe Audition (formerly known as Cool Edit Pro) to tweak some audio. The noise reduction helped but we couldn't get around the fact that the audio on 6th street was so loud that it overloaded the microphone. The problem was not a digital clip that could have possibly been restored. I bought a 160GB Western Digital fire wire hard drive two days ago. I mirrored our project yesterday afternoon. We had to return the drive that we had checked out from RTF. Ryan mentioned going over to Tower Records in a couple of weeks and videotaping the final days. We also could go over to 33 Degrees. I was at the latter store last night. Everything is 30 percent off and fairly well picked over. I used to shop there a little but liked Jupiter more. I didn't say anything to the clerks after I got a 3 dollar Aquabats CD. Went to Sound on Sound, the new record store on North Loop. I had read in the paper that the guy who opened it cleared out a record store in Ohio to get most of his stock. Being from Ohio myself I asked him where. Athens. Home of Ohio University. I digress. What did I learn making this film? Well, it's good to have a little focus that you adjust as the project moves along. We kept moving down the road and through interviews keeping the questions wide and diverse. This detracted from hitting a half dozen topics well. During the interviews we wasted time on synchronicity rights, computer literacy and Austin coffeehouses. It was hard to tell what we had on tape. I made window dubs of the digital video tapes. I hoped the group could pass them around and log tape in the comfort of their own homes. Ryan never watched them. He had another style of logging, he had a lot of audio on either his laptop or on DAT. He built out audio montages like that. Come to think of it that sound like a pretty good way to do it. Back in 1998 I interviewed the news chief at NASA in Washington, DC. for a project. We talked about public relations. I did an audio cassette recording of our discussion. Before I started my paper I transcribed the entire conversation. It was 9 pages single spaced. This was the best way to see what I had. Working on this project I found 3 or 4 places where I connected ideas, where people were saying the same thing. A few examples, Lucas Anderson, former KVRX DJ, talked about companies keeping up with technology. Andrew Ward, current KVRX DJ, talked about downloaders outmaneuvering laws. John Kunz at Waterloo talked about people eventually buying the CDs of the music they like. We have 2 other people echoing this same idea, Andrew Ward and local musician Peter Keane. I couldn't triage any of the connections I made through hours of watching window dubs. ----------------------- The End of TimeDave Mulholland 1.9.2005 I was so impressed by the amount of info these guys crammed into a 12 minute film. Aside from talking to those of us in the industry, I'm glad they talked to random people on the street. It clearly shows the general public's attitudes on downloading and burning music, and why record stores are dropping like flies. I am very thankful to the makers of this film for giving so much time to Tower Records in Austin. For years, we were perceived as being some sort of evil entity, but in reality, we are all just people who made our love for music our source of income. This film showed Tower Austin as victims of this ever-changing industry, just like many of the local independent stores. The makers of this film were able to present a side to this story that the local media seemed to miss. Great job! |
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February 2004 |
March 2004 |
April 2004 |
May 2004 |
The End of Time!!! |