AN OPEN LETTER TO DAVIS AURINI AND JORDAN OWEN UPON THE RELEASE OF THEIR FIRST SARKEESIAN EFFECT TEASER
Hey guys, big fan here.
Just watched your Sarkeesian Effect teaser video. An outstanding job! Even though this is, I know, a rough and unfinished trailer using raw footage from the first couple of days of shooting, it’s clear that this film – this epic journey into journalism, if I might coin a phrase here (you can totally use it!) – will more than live up to your earlier work.
And that’s saying something, as I don’t think I’ve ever seen a ten-minute libertarian suit-wearing-ninja parkour dance fight film better than Davis’ “Lust in a Time of Heartburn.” And obviously – obviously – I’ve never seen such a gritty depiction of YouTube jackass despair as Jordan’s minimalist masterpiece “Dude Lying On Couch in Messy Apartment Complaining That People Aren’t Giving Him Enough Money.”
I just wanted to give you guys some “notes” on it, as I know it is still early in your process.
First off, the production values are a-maz-ing. I realize that after spending money on airfare, hotel rooms, rent, samurai swords, white turtleneck shirts, and whatnot that you probably only had about $25 left to make the actual film. Well let me tell you this: every Canadian penny of that $25 is there on the screen. It’s RIGHT THERE.
Second, SOUND. I will admit you’ve made a bit of an unorthodox choice here. Most documentary filmmakers obviously go for “clean” and “crisp” sound in which you “can actually make out what people are saying.”
But you guys! You zag when everyone else is zigging!
Not since Birdemic: Shock and Terror and, of course, Davis’ own “Lust in the Time of Carpark,” have I seen such an innovative use of sonic muddiness. You guys know that in real life you can’t always tell what other people are saying. Especially if you have a lot of wax in your ears. And fellas, listening to the interviews in your film I felt like I had a whole beehive’s worth of wax in my ears. And possibly a bee or two, though I think that might be a problem on my end.
Ok, I’ll be honest, that’s definitely a problem on my end. I might as well admit it: My apartment is full of bees.
Third, the CINEMATOGRAPHY. Again, the zigging and the zagging. In a time of cheap digital cameras, it is easier than ever for even the most incompetent filmmaker, or, say, any 14-year-old filming a friend lighting his farts, to achieve pristine image quality.
But, like David Lynch, who turned his back on the latest digital technology to make his confusing surrealistic masterpiece Inland Empire with a cheap, consumer grade standard definition digital camera, you have eschewed pristine picture quality in favor of well, let’s just say that it doesn’t look like trained professionals had anything to do with it.
I don’t know if that was what you were going for but if so, NAILED IT!
Oh, and I wouldn’t worry about the blurry white smudgy stuff in the edges of the shot in that Justine Tunney interview. NO ONE WILL NOTICE IT. Seriously, it’s like a five-minute static shot, why would anyone notice anything in the edges of the frames. Was that vaseline? I think Bob Guccione at Penthouse was known for his vaseline on the lens technique. You guys weren’t using the camera to film porn earlier in the day, were you? I kid! What a question! Of course you were.
Speaking of static shots, your choice to film most of the interviews as static two shots – another brave choice. Most people filming interviews would have given us closeups of each of the people in the interview, and cut back and forth, and thrown in some of what the snooty cinephiles call “reaction shots.” You guys boldly went for static shots of two people sitting in chairs.
And that time when you cut from one static shot of two people sitting in chairs to another static shot of the same two people sitting in the same chairs from a slightly different angle? YOU GUYS BLEW MY MIND WITH THAT ONE.
It was also super cool when you did one interview in one particular room with two chairs and followed that up with another interview in the same room with the same two chairs, almost as if you had booked the room for the day and were just running people through it without bothering to change anything up or even move the camera or anything.
That’s the kind of PURE FILMING EFFICIENCY that’s going to enable you to bring this masterpiece on budget. Like Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash used to say: REAL ARTISTS SHIP!
Some thoughts on the performances.
Jordan Owen was completely Jordan Owenish. I totally bought his character. Jordan, you are a MASTER of whatever it is that you do. Keep it up!
But Davis, you sly dog, I should have figured that someone who looks like a budget version of Anton LaVey would have some tricks up his sleeve! Or should I say “his white turtleneck?” Yes, that’s my way of saying that the costuming was PER-FEC-TION. Not every Anton LaVey impersonator can pull off a shiny suit and white turtleneck but, wow! That’s all I can say: Wow!
As for the performance itself, again some counterintuitive choices here. Most interviewers try to react to their interview subjects a little in an attempt to show “empathy.” Your decision to instead sit stock still and stare relentlessly at your interview subjects was a little jarring – but a good kind of jarring. That’s how you get the good stuff out of your interview subjects! And murder suspects. Stare them into submission!
One of my cats has a similar technique when she wants food, or attention, or, well, let’s just say she’s gotten me to confess to a couple of murders, if you know what I mean, and what I mean is NO I DIDN’T MURDER ANYONE WHY DID I EVEN SAY THAT, CRAP, HOW QUICK CAN I PACK, IS THERE GAS IN THE CAR?
Also I think it was a good idea to mix up the sitting and staring stuff with that whole “erupting into unnatural and exaggerated laughter” schtick. Totally sold your character as some sort of primitive cyborg trying to pass as a human.
Also, amazing prop work with that disposable coffee cup. You gripped it so hard I really BELIEVED that if you let go of it you would have flown off into space — you know, like George Clooney in Gravity. Oh, whoops, SPOILER ALERT.
This is how good your film is: I’m comparing it to freaking GRAVITY. I’m comparing it to freaking Davis Aurini’s “Lust in the Timer of Clambake.”
Oh, and the foley work was spot on as well. That … sound that happens at about 6:10 in? You know, the thing where it sounded like someone was dragging a large rock over cement just out of shot, or maybe like you had swallowed your microphone and your stomach was having troubl edigesting it? That sound is going to haunt me for weeks. I don’t even want to know how you did that. Sometimes mysteries are best left unsolved.
Anyway, outstanding job. I really can’t say anything about any of what your interview subjects were saying, or even remember any of their names except for Justine Timberlake the Slavery Lady. I think it was a combination of that wax-in-ears sound quality and their complete inability to say anything interesting in response to your stupid questions.
But with everything else going on in this film – the static shots, the white turtlenecks, that white stuff at the edge of the shot in that one interview that NO ONE WILL NOTICE, I PROMISE THEY WON’T EVEN SEE IT … well, anyway, with all that going on in the film no one is even going to care what any of your incredibly boring interview subjects said or who they are or why on earth you decided this was a good subject for a documentary or why you even thought you were remotely capable of making an actual professional quality film.
Anyway, I’m sure all of the people who gave you literally thousands of dollars of their own money because they assumed you might actually come up with something that looked vaguely professional will be very proud of you.
I’m assuming, of course, that your final film will be about 4 minutes long, and that half of it will be libertarian suit-wearing-ninja parkour dance fighting to the sounds of Yakety Sax. If not, yeah, no one is going to be able to sit through this crap.
In other words LOVE IT!
Sincerely,
Your Biggest Fan
For brain bleach, I went and re-watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which is a fantastic documentary in which the filmmakers are almost completely absent but the film nevertheless tells an amazing (and at times heartwrenching) story. That’s because skill and planning were involved.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi was fantastic. Highly recommend.
The best documentary I’ve seen in a long time: The Act of Killing. Just mindblowingly good.
This brings up an interesting question – have either of these fellas ever watched a documentary? Like, ever? Or an interview-style show… 60 minutes, perhaps?
I’ve decided I will donate to their project if they change the name of their documentary to The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
This is what happens when you give 20k+ dollars to a bunch of wannabe documentations/ artists with no education or experience in that field. .
Here is a good example of videomaking where the sofa is a consistent dominating feature from one video to the next. I would watch this video on a repeated loop over any of the Two Bronies* videos any day.
* an attempt to leverage off the Two Ronnies. Not sure this was entirely successful as I am explaining the joke in a footnote.
http://youtu.be/TUT39op2Pp8
I didn’t spot any vaseline either, although I did skim a lot of the clip. I thought those blurry white parts were the walls of the café, reflected in the windows. The walls themselves being cropped out in the hope that it would look like a relaxed, spacious office overlooking a park, and not a café at a quiet time of day.
So now I’ve watched the updated video here, of the actual project. I can’t even.
So talking to these people that are willfully obtuse libertarians means what now?
Did you hear the one woman talking about how taking money out of politics from the “productive” sector just leaves things in the hand of the media?
WTF.
Media might suck, but it’s because of their money influences (not a conspiracy theory, listen to Cenk explain his time at MSNBC) but media is democracy. There’s no democracy without it, and there sure isn’t democracy with money influencing politics. This is just one thing that stood out, but interviewing these women that don’t have two clues to rub together, and interviewing this guy that says the threats aren’t credible does what? This is just so far, a documentary of highly argumentative things you can read in a you tube comment section.
I don’t know anything about camera quality or pixel numbers, but I do know that there’s no angle or amount of cropping or zooming that could remove the pizza box from behind that dude’s head. A tight shot would make it look even weirder.
I *almost* feel a little sorry for these guys. I’m just imaging them uploading the teaser, all proud of themselves for filming actual interviews like grown-up filmmakers, then seeing the feedback and realizing they’re in over their heads.
I’d love to know how they proposed to go about getting a theatrical release. I’ve worked in theatrical distribution, and filmmakers are required to provide a whole host of what we call “deliverables” as part of the contract – “master copies to a minimum technical standard” is just at the top of a very, very long list.
In fact, thinking of the other non-negotiable items, I wonder whether they’ll be able to provide release forms signed by everyone appearing onscreen in more than a brief background-shot capacity? Any bets?
I think this is the point where they’re reading this and about to go frantically google “what is a release form”.
There’s quite a lot of paperwork involved. Release forms are just the tip of the iceberg.
Although this is all completely hypothetical as there’s no way in a billion gazillion years that anything this amateurish is going to come close to a theatrical screening, unless it’s a documentary film festival in the middle of nowhere that’s inexplicably desperate for submissions.
That’s exactly it. I’ve no idea what their actual premise is, or how you’d even write a logline for it (though what you wrote would work!) Why were they discussing the Occupy movement?
I was really confused about that too. Apparently, they are going for some sort of huge expose on Social Justice folks across a broad domain, to show how SJWs are parasites that latch on to legitimate groups and inject their own politics like a xenomorph face hugger.
Which… yeah, I actually see what they’re talking about now. SJ stuff is about the dynamics between people, and pushing for representation of groups that lack the power, voice, or visibility of others. It basically does apply everywhere because it’s intragroup. These dudes view that meta-discussion about the people as outside invaders rather than internal voices finally speaking up.
@Tracey, I did a search for “Sarkeesian Effect” which directed me to the Patreon page, which had this to say:
So,
1. it looks like the documentary will be predominantly about gamergate. It will be outdated before it’s even finished, as well as being a piece of filmmaking that will be ripped to pieces by critics, if anyone can be bothered to see it once it’s released.
2. it will be full of shit. No-one is demanding “perfect diversity”, just that there is some diversity. So somehow asking for diversity means that we don’t get diversity, which we don’t have now, so we should just sit with the status quo and diversity will magically appear, like unicorns.
3. there seems to be some misunderstanding of what victims are. And under this magical redefinition of victims, people who are not actually victims will whine about how they have been (not) victimised. Like, for example, having their hobby critiqued from an academic perspective.
4. people who critique games are unscrupulous. For some reason. But not the gamergates who doxx and threaten others. Maybe because the gamergaters are the true victims, under the new definition of victim.
So critiquing games is a meanie poo-pants SJW activity that ruins games for everyone. Because they say so.
And brought to you in Techno(logically challenged)Colour and (we couldn’t work out how to have sound anything remotely like) Dolby.
Because Occupy is a thing that people have heard of and it’s something that “SJWs” are generally pro, so having someone who was part of it gives them… credibility… somehow? WHO KNOWS.
Chevrolet:
I almost feel a little bit sorry for them too. Thing is, there’s nothing wrong with being inexperienced or ignorant when it comes to basic film-making, or anything else. Being an amateur does not mean that you have nothing worthwhile to say.
However, there is something wrong with stubbornly refusing to acknowledge your inexperience or mitigate your ignorance while simultaneously soliciting large amounts of money to fund your project, while making ludicrously ambitious promises to your supporters.
Like, these guys inexplicably do have fans. From reading the comments, at least one of them (who seems to have decent knowledge of film production) offered to help them out for free. He was ignored by Aurini and got a “nah, we got this” from Owen. Crowdsourcing expertise and equipment is a brilliant way to cut down on overall production costs, but the Dynamic Duo rejected it out of hand because… why, exactly? It’s such a colossal waste of their supporters’ money.
Hmm.. I could be wrong on point 2. Maybe in their universe, diversity means that white actors who voice multiple game characters have more differences in their vocalisations between their characters.
BTW, if any voice actors are reading, you’re awesome. I really appreciate well-voiced characters in the games I play, as well as in the (few) animations I watch. I cannot imagine how difficult it must be to stand in a recording studio and inject emotions like humour and pathos when there is no other acting happening, and you are possibly being recorded by yourself so there isn’t even another actor to play off. I’m also impressed by actors who do well in front of green screens, for pretty much the same reasons.
Absolutely. Ten grand should easily cover the services of a professional camera operator and sound recordist for a sufficient length of time, especially if they’ve organised their shooting schedule sensibly. And if people who know their shit (or who are at least more technically competent than they are) are offering to work for them for free and getting turned down, that’s just arrogance on stilts.
And in doing so, they’ve demonstrated that they’re so profoundly ignorant that they don’t just know what’s required of them, but they don’t know that they don’t know.
I still don’t understand how anyone could possibly be victimized by social justice. What exactly are gamergaters victims of? Apparently some claimed that they got fired for participating in it while at work. But that’s probably got less to do with SJWs and more to do with employers not allowing employees to use the internet for personal things. Facing consequences for your actions is not the same as being victimized.
@WWTH: some employers also have requirements re the content of what their employees write online. Mine does, there is a particular topic area (nothing to do with feminism) where I am not permitted to comment online, even under a nym and in my own time, and this is an instant dismissal-level offence. So I read those types of online articles/posts and I don’t comment.
wrt the whole victimisation vs. freedom of speech, there also seems to be this ongoing misperception from gamergaters and their ilk that:
– freedom of speech has no limits, and
– freedom of speech means freedom from consequences of speech
We see this over and over again from the keyboard warriors. Lack of basic, and these two elements are incredibly basic, understanding of rights and responsibilities, which I can only put down as intentional misunderstanding. I’ve seen the gamergaters whine that having comments removed on sites that have a commenting policy, and the comments are against the policy, is censorship. Because calling individual people gendered slurs, amongst other insults, is apparently what freedom of speech is all about.
@thebewilderness, It was a joke. of course I know what this blog is about. I was agreeing that this “documentary” is a pile of crap.
It’s because Justine Tunney (Red Bull Lady) was involved in Occupy NYC, and ran its twitter for a while, before going full neoreactionary.
(And I’m not using “neoreactionary” casually there, she’s active in NRx.)
I made this, but I don’t know how to post images here. I even tried to google it. So if this is just code, I’ll go get the other code they give, and apologies in advance as there is no preview or edit here.
sigh.
Can someone please tell me how to post an image here?