I am producing a classmate’s film, Deathday. Producers have to write up quick summaries of the day’s labour — in the industry these go to the executives, ours go to our profs. Here’s mine.

Deathday Production Journal Day 1

Call time for day one was 2200 Friday. On Thursday night the pastor of our location, a church parking lot, called and said there would be a meeting Friday that he had forgotten about and we couldn’t shoot as the parking lot would be full. I convinced him to let us move the shoot back to 2230.

The script allowed for a wet night, but not necessarily a snowing one, for continuity. It snowed all day Friday, but had stopped by the time we were ready to shoot. Luckily, the church’s lot had been plowed and the storm had kept parishioners away from the church meeting — the lot was empty and plowed!

The shovels we had lugged out to the site were, therefore, useless.

There had been a car crash in front of our location earlier in the day, and the wrecked hulk had been dragged to where we wanted tech land. We set up beside the mangled shell, and chatted with the people waiting inside the car for the police to come.

The police presence affected our lighting and restricted our ability to start shooting until the cruiser left. I asked the officer to turn off his lights, but was rebuffed.

We started shooting an hour late, and shot all of our dialogue from five of our nine targeted setups. We had momentum and were moving through the shot list when the church lights all went out at 0100. We then re-set our lights to simulate the lighting environment from earlier when, at 0115, the outdoor electricity went off as well.

I called wrap for the day and sent everyone home. Generally all crew acted professionally. We had some issues around over-contribution of shot ideas (too much discussion slowing down production) but once we got our first setup we, as I mentioned, also got momentum.

TODO for next time: bring pocket warmers.

I am keeping a director’s journal of my short film production project as part of my mark on it. I figured I would make it public, so here goes.

—

D Minus Eight

It is eight days before cameras roll and a number of serious problems have cropped up:

Cons

1) Broken DP

My Director of Photography shattered his ankle last night in a motorcycle accident. As I write this he is in surgery (get well soon Shep!). He will probably not be able to shoot for me. This is bad because I would like to train up my DP on DSLR shooting, and this will take time, but see later.

2) Human Scheduling

Due to a scheduling SNAFU — I didn’t know my own dates and when I asked my producer he gave me the wrong ones — my actors are booked for the wrong dates, days when I don’t have crew. I have emails outstanding to fix this, but it was a problem that didn’t need to happen.

This ALSO effects the scheduling of my makeup artist.

3) Location Wants a Fee

The venue I re-wrote the script for wants a location fee to use their space. This isn’t so bad, because the location can be faked with movie magic, but it’s kind of annoying — fucking capitalism.

I am negotiating, but this is probably the end of the idea to use that location.

4) No DSLRs Allowed / Equipment Scheduling

I was going to go rogue and shoot using a DSLR, by the profs headed me off at the pass by banning DSLR withdrawals at the school’s rental shop. I need specific permission. Luckily I know what I’m doing, so I have a decent case to pitch that I, in fact, should use them.

A difficulty — or opportunity — is that we’ll be using off-camera sound, which introduces easily resolvable sync issues, but possibly also unforeseen recording issues. We’ll need multiple mics on c-stands into a mixer and from there into a recorder.

This is all equipment my producer and I need to schedule.

5) Script Problems

One of the people I trust most with creative criticism — Eric De Val — has asked me some tough questions about the logic of my script. Basically it all comes down to the third act: who are these characters and how does the dramatic action resolve?

The woman is a socialist-anarchist pseudo-sexual terrorist and the man is an accountant. They argue.

The problem with the script is that, with this setup, act III has to resolve the “capitalism versus socialism” fight — which is a lot for a student film to tackle. I need to break it down, and probably go for something humourous like Woody Allen does in these situations.

Pros

1) Equipment Tests AOK

My equipment tests have all gone very well, however DSLRs are extremely difficult to focus. This will require training my DP and possibly special equipment.

As a backup we can always use the HPX170s — I just feel like I might be able to stretch beyond it into something more professionally interesting.

2) My Lead Actress…

… apparently just killed a role in a production of The Trojan Women. I was a little worried about her during my cold read, but she did well on the important parts. Her reviews in the play have increased my confidence greatly.

3) Trusting My Visual Interest

I have images in my head that I think will translate well to the screen — things that I find visually interesting. I’ve learned to trust this intuition for setting up frames, mise, and lighting. I’m confident here.

4) Org Porn

I’m getting organized — office supplies and paperwork are my forte. I am known as “the most organized person in class”, which if you know me well is actually a pretty hilarious joke-slash-commentary-on-creatives. Filling out crazy amounts of paperwork is, apparently, something I am quite good at (thanks, Accounting).

This is something I’ve been talking about with my therapist: actual creativity is harder than creative-industrial paperwork.

5) Evident Setups

The lighting setups are becoming apparent to me (eye highlights, background splashes, smoke lighting). Due to my mise en scène my sound guy is going to have a relatively easy job — mics will be planted on stands leaving him to just run the mixer and sound recorder.

TODO

1) Negotiate with venue.
2) Figure out equipment scheduling.
3) Figure out human scheduling.
4) Seventh script rewrite.
5) Start production package.

Here’s a quick 500 I just banged out for cinematography class:

“The Last Emperor” was the first film I ever purchased with my own money, on VHS, from a neighbor during a garage sale. I was barely pre-teen. I walked home immediately, watched it, and felt without understanding why that it was a visually staggering film.

The image of Pu Yi playing with the yellow silk banner before it lifts away to reveal receding rows of his eunuchs assembled in the massive courtyard of the Forbidden City remains a magical cinematic moment for me. To attempt to intellectualize that emotional experience I would argue that the change of scale (the young child’s play revealing oversized imperial formality), and, as mentioned in “Visions of Light”, the slow introduction of new colours to the palette, are the aspects of the sequence that most fascinated me.

At around 1:15:00 into “Visions of Light” Vittorio Storaro, the cinematographer of “The Last Emperor”, talks about how it occurred to him to use the gradual opening of the film’s palette to mirror the opening of Pu Yi’s mind to outside knowledge. The opening of his mind to the color spectrum matches the opening of his mind to the world outside the Forbidden City.

For example, we see red for the first time when Pu Yi cuts his wrists at the start of the film, which precipitates a flashback to a red palace door opening as the Empress Dowager’s servants arrive to take Pu Yi from his family – a symbolic death and rebirth into imperial power which, after his suicide attempt, is reflected in Pu Yi’s symbolic death and rebirth into Communism.

Storaro says of the scene I remembered, of the young Pu Yi playing with the yellow silk banner, that yellow is the color of the sun, or the Emperor, and that scene represents the “dawning” of Pu Yi’s knowledge of his own imperial power over his army of eunuchs. He also talks about how Peter O’Toole’s character, the Tutor, brings knowledge into Pu Yi’s life, as symbolized by the first occurrence of green – the color of the bicycle he gives as a gift to the young Emperor.

Color is an aesthetic dimension of cinematic storytelling I would like to explore. I find the most obvious use of colour is in films like “Schindler’s List” or “Sin City” which are desaturated before individual colors, or objects, are brought back for emphasis (for example, Spielberg’s girl in the red coat, or Mickey Rourke’s blood – red seems a popular color for this treatment).

Less consciously obvious to me, an effect that I will be looking for in future films, are usages like the green and blue tonal casts in “The Matrix” to help visually distinguish the virtual and real worlds, or the flashed milky-yellow of “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” which gave the film a turn-of-the-last-century photographic look.

Still less obvious to me are symbolic uses of colour like Storaro’s in “The Last Emperor”. His comments in “Visions of Light” opened my mind to the possibilities of the spectrum in the same way colours opened Pu Yi’s mind to the possibilities of knowledge. As I watch and create films in the future I hope to be more attentive to the aesthetic and symbolic uses of palette.

Some theorists on deliberative democracy distinguish it from negotiation in that participants need to give reasons for their positions. The reasons don’t need to be held by everyone else involved, but everyone else should be able to accept them. There are a few reasons for this:

to help find common ground

In a negotiation you may concede certain issues, either to conserve strength or in the hopes that your opponent will reciprocate. But if you establish that a position is mutually preferred, not just conceded, that will bring parties closer together.

to educate participants

In class, I’m continually criticising civic engagements that just act to educate people without giving them power, but I’ll accept that education about the diversity of viewpoints in a community is a great secondary effect of engagement.

to make the outcome satisfactory

In a negotiation, parties walk away from the table saying “oh well, that’s the best we could do with the cards we had”. That’s going to lead to hard feelings and attempts at reversing the decision down the road. Deliberative democracy should leave people saying “that’s the best of all possible solutions”.

Deliberative democracy is also supposed to be better at incorporating diversity than representative democracy. But what if your participants are so diverse that they use completely different methods of reasoning? Examples:

• scientific evidence versus anecdotal evidence
• oral history versus ownership-by-cartography
• evidence gathered while dreaming or hallucinating

I think the most we can require is that each participant’s system of reasoning be internally consistent: all proclamations of the machine elves are given equal standing. But I’m skeptical of the ability to assess the internal consistency of other peoples’ systems of reasoning. It appears that deliberative democracy requires us all to become social relativists?

The paper I discussed earlier also mentioned some potential problems with deliberative democracy:

• Citizens can deliberate to make a decision, but can they monitor its implementation? You could argue that representative democracy also suffers from this issue, because the sensationalist press doesn’t help voters hold their representatives to task. But I agree with Kim Campbell: you’re not voting for a set of policies to implement, you’re voting for someone who will think on their feet.
• What about the use of power (eg: class differences) within deliberation? Who has time to show up to deliberative sessions? Who knows how to be convincing in those sessions?
• Can The Powers That Be set up deliberation to skew the results? For example, by the time it came to make a recommendation, the BC Citizen’s Assembly on Electoral Reform were no longer lay citizens, they had been educated up to being experts on electoral systems.
• Will a few people with a lot to gain or lose overpower many people who have less direct interest? Not-In-My-BackYardism is the most well-known style of this.
• If deliberation is done on a local level, how do you deal with larger geographic issues? This is a huge problem in representative democracy, that proportional representation doesn’t do much to solve. Liquid democracy is the only solution I’ve ever heard of…
• Aren’t most people (except the NIMBYs) too apathetic for this to work?

I’m come to learn that there are a lot of things that people call “deliberative democracy“. So this paper focuses on a particular kind of deliberative democracy: “empowered participatory governance”.

practical orientation

Deliberative democracy should focus on “concrete concerns”. eg: One of my issues with the Transition Town movement is that it’s too abstract to accomplish much.

bottom-up participation

Diversity and local knowledge is more useful than expert training. eg: Degrowth was off the table in Victoria’s community planning session because it was inconceivable to the economist chairing the discussion.

debate

Better decisions will come out of giving reasons for things and debating rather than just voting or negotiating. To encourage dissent, of course.

devolution of power

The state must give power to the deliberative mechanism. Without power, it’s just a study group (another issue with Transition Towns).

centralized supervision and coordination

The state should guide and support deliberation by developing structure, training participants in skills like budgeting, and possibly setting limits to protect human rights. Without centralization, it’s just anarchy.

transformation of state institutions

Don’t fight the power but also don’t try to survive by carving out a niche that the powerful ignore. The whole point of this is to make the state work better, not to overthrow it or check out of society.

I’d suggest for any civic engagement or movement you come across, compare it against those criteria. If it doesn’t measure up, make sure you’re not falling for the appearance of engagement or wasting your time.

Cass Sunstein, the legal scholar, wrote this before he teamed up with Richard Thaler to write Nudge. I had to read the first half of it for class. It obviously worked as a draft for some of the ideas that went into Nudge, but the first half is not worth reading itself. I get the feeling that the book is a paper that’s been padded out to book length.

Sunstein’s core idea is that in group decision making, people’s private information is supressed. There are two possible reasons:

• The decision-making process is not deliberative. For example, when you get a new doctor and they read your chart, it shows previous doctor’s decisions but not their reasoning. There’s no way to tell if a previous doctor recommended a treatment with reservations or confidently.
• People have goals besides optimal group decisions. The most problematic is the goal of social cohesion. When a group is making a decision, members will withhold private information if they believe the benefit of revealing that information is lower than the social cost of dissenting.

Rather than real-world examples, most of the evidence given for these issues is from a single set of economics experiments:

The experimenter presents an urn that has three rocks, either two white and one black or the opposite. Each member of the group secretly examines one rock and then announces to the group a guess of what rocks are in the urn. For example: if the first examiner guesses that the urn contains two white rocks and the second examiner sees a black rock, then the second examiner knows that there’s an even chance that it’s either kind of urn, but they must guess two black rocks to pass the right information to the third examiner. It’s like bridge.

Sunstein’s conclusion from all this is that dissent is important to improve decisions but also prevents consensus. I didn’t get to the part where he recommends what to do about it, if there is such a part. For example, I can imagine a decision making process that starts out anonymous to encourage dissent then moves to face-to-face to encourage consensus.

I’ve just started reading Bowling Alone for class, so this isn’t a full review but rather some initial thoughts.

Bowling Alone popularized the concept of social capital, one of the four main factors of production:

natural capital

land

physical capital

stuff

human capital

knowledge

social capital

who you know and who knows you

You can’t measure social capital directly, so Bowling Alone is an attempt to measure it indirectly. It’s based on the thesis that society’s stock of social capital has been dropping in the last few decades. Putnam believes that community organization membership (civic engagement) is the strongest generator of social capital. The title refers to the statistic that the demand for bowling went up while membership in bowling leagues went down.

Notes and thoughts about social capital:

• Civic engagement peaks in middle age, does that mean middle-age people have the most social capital?
• Social capital is a private good with public externalities: people accumulate social capital for their private interest, but society benefits as a side-effect. Has the private value of social capital decreased? Should society subsidize civic activities?
• Social capital, like other forms of capital, has no moral value. Putnam gives examples of the KKK and terrorist cells as community organizations.

I’m taking a course called “Deliberation, Civic Engagement and Public Policy”. The two main textbooks are specifically about “deliberative democracy”.

Deliberative democracy is contrasted with liberal democracy: elected representatives passing laws constrained by a (judicially-interpreted) constitution. Citizens are responsible for voting and monitoring their representatives. Liberal democracy is criticized using the public choice model: representatives are lobbied by various special interest groups, and the interests with the most influence get the policy they want.

But having read the introductions to the textbooks I’m not clear what deliberative democracy is like:

• negotiation, where citizens go in with established goals and determine a solution that maximizes everyone’s utility;
• debate, where citizens make arguments and weigh reasons for solutions;
• or is it both?

If it’s negotiation, then we must assume that citizens have coherent positions but they don’t necessarily need to explain them. If it’s debate, then arguments are what matters and deliberators can arrive at a solution based on the process without having coherent positions.

What are the qualities of good deliberators? Is flashy rhetoric a threat? Do they need to be open to other people’s points of view, or just open to negotiating a compromise?

And when we talk about representatives “deliberating” in parliament today, which activity are they doing? Or are they just posturing for the press?

The first assignment I submitted for my economics class was based on this post on the economic irrationality of voting. The final assignment is to go back and criticise that.

Neoclassical microeconomics does not give enough emphasis to transaction costs. In particular, calculating which behaviour is optimal has a high cost. Gathering all the data and doing all the math to choose the right option costs time and resources. If we tried to make optimal economic decisions, “analysis paralysis” would result.

Instead, economic agents use heuristics to approximate solutions under bounded rationality (“satisficing”). For example, voters could use a loss aversion heuristic: the cost of living under a bad government is higher than the cost of voting, so even though the chance of a bad government winning the election is low, it’s worth voting just in case.

Social costs and benefits are also glossed over in neoclassical microeconomics. For example, you’ll see your neighbours at your local voting place – this could be an opportunity for social interaction or members of your social group may notice if you don’t vote. Decreasing voter turn-out could be caused by a decrease in geographic social ties. If you admit to not voting, there may be social penalties.

Finally, neoclassical microeconomics assumes the possibility of static equilibrium. But economies may be dynamic systems that never settle on a state. For example, the marginal value of voting may be close to zero, but if everyone but me chooses not to vote, then my vote has a huge value (I can elect myself dictator). As the voter turn-out drops, the value of each vote increases: so more people should vote.

Mandatory voting could increase the cost of not voting. Tax rebates for voting could increase the benefits of voting. But I think the psychology of behavioural economics has a lot more promise for increasing voter turn-out.