14 Feb Icy Meadow
Feb 13- a snow storm locked Chapel Hill into place. The highway was stopped and the meadow froze over. Our borrowed dog struggled with the icy layer. ...
docs
19 Nov kickstarter and the gatekeepers
Last month I got the first copies of my photo book. It would not exist without kickstarter, and for that I am very grateful. It all began when I put some 20 year old mall pictures on-line. They went viral so I quickly threw together a kickstarter to make a book. I kept it simple, just using a music video...
17 Oct Drowning
On a Saturday afternoon in late September, I almost drowned. On this warm fall afternoon, my friend Caroline and I had impulsively decided to swim across a lake. It’s a big enough body of water that we had to frantically wave at several speedboats to make sure that we didn’t get run over as we crossed. It’s one of those...
17 Apr Outsiders
At Rumur we tend to make films that focus on people who go against the grain of the system. As we have matured, our characters have matured, but they are still outsiders who have difficulty going with the flow when the flow is going in a different direction than they think it should. Our very first film, "Half-Cocked" (1993), isn't a...
11 Apr Controlling the Narrative
Last week a good friend, and academy nominated doc director, gave us some great notes on our rough cut. He had seen a somewhat earlier version of the film so it was great to hear his notes because we had already addressed about 80% of them. At the same time, he asked a series of sharp questions about what we were...
04 Apr battle vs. malls on kickstarter
About a year and a half ago - when we launched our first kickstarter campaign to help fund Battle for Brooklyn (a doc we have been working on for 7.5 years), I did a great deal of planning. I took the game theory aspect very seriously. We knew that we had networks of people that we could tap into, and...
03 Apr The Number
This week, in addition to hustling to finish Battle for Brooklyn, we have been working on an EPK (electronic press kit) for a Danish singer named Agnes Obel. Agnes moved to Berlin to be creative, and over the course of a few years she put together an album of seemingly simple songs based around piano melodies and singing. I write...
20 Mar Mall Stories
When I was a freshman in high school, I became somewhat obsessed with photography. I was "that guy" who took most of the pictures for the school paper and the yearbook. I knew that I wanted to be a photographer, but I didn't want to go to art school, or journalism school for that matter. I intuitively knew that it...
11 Feb To close or not to close
This fall, as the pace of education"reform" in New York cranked up, I started to pay more attention to what was going on. With two children in my local public school, I quickly realized that the more I looked, the less I liked what I saw. I began to write about the subject to try to get my head around...
18 Jan The People United
If you’ve been to a protest in the last 10 years, you’ve likely heard the chant, “The people, united, will never be defeated.” The opposite is true as well. When the government pits community against community, as it is now doing in the process of promoting charter schools designed to compete with community schools, it's important to...
13 Dec The cloak of anonymity
The internet is a terrible place to discuss ideas and work out complex feelings. Yet, in our hyper busy culture we seem to fall back on it more and more. It's difficult to make time for a community meeting, but we end up having our days taken over by comment wars. Over the last couple of years I have followed...
07 Dec Wikileaks and the role of Documentary
Most of the films that we make are in some way about the flow of information. We tend to follow stories about people who butt up against the power structures. In general they seem to get treated poorly by the mainstream media. So when I see and hear the media piling on Assange, I try not to...