Want Your Art to Be Timeless?

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Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in a romant...

Then avoid referencing contemporary pop culture in your work. Lady Gaga. Transformers. Charlie Sheen. Rickrolling. Twilight. Chewbacca. Bieber. Game of Thrones. Clay Aiken. Metal Gear Solid. Parachute Pants. Stop! Just don’t. I’m sorry, did I distract you from my post?

If possible, avoid referentiality altogether. References divert audience attention away from you and toward the things you reference. Heaven forbid the viewer is not familiar with your reference, or he or she will be alienated further. Drawing attention to anything outside your movie, book, painting, game, etc. does little (or absolutely nothing) to help you connect with audiences and tell your own story.

Want to be timeless? Stay within the world of your story. Do not risk incorporating or drawing attention to a pop culture trend that may fade tomorrow. The teenies of today do not remember musical group Hanson – and that was hardly a decade ago. Do you? If you need to draw attention to something beyond the immediate world of your story, then mention something that has matured and continues to survive public memory. Timepieces like war films are at an advantage in that they can reference authentic trends that continue to stand the public awareness test of time. Steven Spielberg can get away with a James Bond reference in Catch Me If You Can through a scene set in 1963 because three generations now have connected with the character and the 007 phenomenon exists in the world of the character’s story. No inside jokes, just straight history.

Do not let your jokes, characters, or narrative depend on other works that future generations may not understand.

Bootlegging Yourself (Marketing Controversy 101)

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A few days ago, a bootlegged version of a red band trailer for David Fincher’s latest film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, hit YouTube with a vengeance. Before Sony Pictures pulled it for “a copyright claim,” the video had nearly 2 million hits after only two days. There is speculation that Sony launched the trailer themselves to kick-start a viral marketing campaign. Whether or not this is true, the video’s premature release certainly did not hurt Sony or the film. The leak was awarded widespread coverage in press and online. If audiences were not aware the hit novel trilogy was being adapted for the American screen, they definitely are now.

I find the entertainment industry’s preoccupation with piracy amusing. Sure, I am a filmmaker and can appreciate revenue lost to piracy. But as veteran studio executive Bill Mechanic once pointed out to me, “Pirating means that people want to see your movie.” As I see it, stolen entertainment media suggests one of two things: your content is not good enough to pay for or too difficult for the average consumer to find. Both problems are your fault and worth solving. iTunes rivaled music piracy by promoting easier access to music: it became easier to buy a song on iTunes than steal it from a torrenting site. With bandwidth evolving and platforms like Netflix and YouTube on the rise, movie studios are running out of excuses not to open their libraries. Simple: help audiences consume the entertainment they want to consume. Most people will gladly pay for that. And pirates will help spread the word in the meantime.

But I digress. In a world saturated by media noise, it has become necessary for marketing materials to have unique stories wrapped around them. The Dragon Tattoo leak promoted three levels of discussion: the bootlegging of the trailer in the first place, whether or not Sony released it on purpose, and finally the irresistible quality of the content presented. Trailer discussion spread the word and inadvertently spread the message: “She’s coming.”

Movie studios should bootleg themselves more often. And you should too.

The Official Craig Ormiston Update

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This entry marks my 100th blog post on www.craigormiston.com. Three months, 22,845 words, 10,295 readers, all 50 states, 116 countries, and 164 hours of writing later (according to Google Docs), I am well on my way to posting every day until the end of the year. But, as good friend David Fox pointed out in an email, I have penciled very little on the topic to which my blog is actually named: myself. Craig Ormiston.

On the whole, web analytics have suggested that the majority of my audience cares less about personal posts than posts with general interest or advice. Therefore, I have written little about me and instead use my life only for appropriate context and examples. That said, I forget sometimes that many of you are close friends and family. And I also forget that some of you know next to nothing about me. So here it is. To celebrate this milestone for my blog, here is an update on my life:

Enter Craig Ormiston:

First, my background. My name is Craig Ormiston, and I grew up in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. I was born and raised in the same house where I lived until I left for college. With a fierce determination to direct and produce motion pictures, I pursued the film industry in Hollywood by first attending the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. I milked my education for all it was worth: I attended inspiring classes, produced a dozen films, built long-lasting friendships, networked with countless professionals, and helped engineer the future of the movie business. While it was extremely expensive, I am thankful for my days at USC. I learned a lot and met great people. To save money and get a head start, I graduated one semester early in the Fall of 2009.

I never wanted a normal day job. I spent six months after graduation trying to package feature films, engineer products, start businesses, and avoid employment. I’ve always wanted to do my own thing and change the world. But after six months with little progress, I resolved to meet with a few people and expand my options. One of my USC directing teachers, Tripp Reed, tabled for me an opportunity I could not refuse: helping him launch the New Media division of Alloy Entertainment (producers of Gossip Girl, Vampire Diaries, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and more in the teenage girl niche). Charged with producing television-quality pilots for the web, we have successfully launched four original shows and are well on our way to making several more. It has been one year this week since I started working with Tripp for Alloy. I have learned a lot about producing, the Internet, leadership, and about myself. While it may be the day job I promised myself I would never have, I count my blessings for the opportunity and experience. I have interviewed for and been offered a handful of jobs since, and none of them could rival the freedom, responsibility, respect, and pay I have been awarded here. I share a spacious apartment with two USC friends three blocks away from my office in Hollywood on Sunset & Highland and walk to work almost everyday (unheard of in Southern California). As much as I despise the Los Angeles urban space, I enjoy the pedestrian nature of the Hollywood area and walk almost everywhere I need to go.

What little free time I have after a hard day’s work is spent doing four key things. First (and most important), I eat. For those of you who know me, I am obsessed with food. Cooking, dining out, experimenting, sampling, you name it. I spend far too much money on nice restaurants, fancy cocktails, and crazy dishes. Eating out with friends is my favorite pastime. Fortunately, I do not yet have the pounds to show for it. The best part of Los Angeles for me is the range of authentic cuisines. With Thai Town, Koreatown, and Little Tokyo less than 10 minutes away, I am never far from the best. And as crazy as it can be, living blocks away from downtown Hollywood helps keep me young with swanky tasty spots open until wee hours of the night. My gluttony knows no bounds here.

Beyond eating, I have rediscovered two very important things: reading and sleep. I never read growing up (probably because I had to for class and hated it). Now, I can’t go a day without scraping the news, catching every blog post, and putting big dents in books on my Kindle. I read between 90 and 180 minutes per day and cannot stop. Mostly nonfiction. I am constantly studying the Internet, technology, marketing, business, politics, and science. In the past year, I feel like I have thoroughly covered the first chapters of an MBA and Computer Science degree alone. I continue to learn crazy new things every single day and cannot stop. I’m obsessed. The third pastime (and perhaps my healthiest) is sleep. I was notorious in high school and college for not sleeping at all. I’ve gone four days without a single wink of sleep before. Not healthy at all. And I pay for it to this day, suffering noticeable signs of memory retention loss. Without question, I get my eight hours per night now and even track it to make improvements.

My final pastime is much more broad and complex. Readers of this blog know I am not happy with the current state of the movie industry. As Sunday’s post alludes to, I am becoming impatient with movie studios recycling old crap and idling by as consumers rip the whole charade apart the way of the music business. My sights have realigned toward technology and the web. Therein lie companies that need to stay one step ahead to compete and that cannot survive by recycling ideas. I am in awe by daily news from the tech sector and am very interested in making a career shift that direction. I spend a great deal of free time designing and collaborating on web-based projects with hopes to launch them as legitimate businesses. With little background in computer science, it has been extremely difficult to land interviews with these companies. It seems I will need to build my way in from scratch. A challenge? Yes please!

I have no intention of living in Los Angeles much longer. Be it to Denver, the Bay Area, or New York, I need to make a big change sometime soon. I have been saving up to buy myself the time to build things and aim to be gainfully unemployed in no more than two years’ time. Feasible goal? We’ll see. Here’s to the future!

Newton’s Three Laws of Parenting

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Isaac Newton

While the rules of physics define the physical relationship between objects, I find them particularly relevant when studying the psychological relationship between human beings. Take Newton in regards to parenting:

Law 1: Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Every child on a chosen path with remain on that path unless an external force intervenes. Watching your son or daughter turn to the dark side? Do not trust in time to cure all evils; you may need to step in. Watching your son or daughter struggle to meet their goals? Friends, laws, cash flow, distractions, and many other “external forces” will slow your child down. Be involved and give him or her an extra push when necessary. Obvious, no?

Law 2: Acceleration is produced when a force acts on a mass. The greater the mass of the object being accelerated, the greater the amount of force needed to accelerate the object.

The greater the pressure exerted on a child, the more likely he or she will “accelerate.” Having trouble waking your child for school in the morning? Getting him or her to do homework? Stop playing video games? Avoid hard drugs? Come home before curfew? You can push harder and harder on your child to get the results you expect, but the hounding may have consequences we will explore in Law #3.

How about peer pressure? The more friends goad or tempt your child, the more likely your child will go along with it. Or what about motivation? Some children need a brighter spark to inspire them. Why would some children need a bigger nudge? Physics would tell us it’s because they have greater “mass.” Nothing to do with obesity, I think the “mass” in this equation has a lot to do with your child’s individuality. If he or she is true to him or herself – a defined individual with defined interests and characteristics – then he or she will be much less swayed by you or others. Some children may be stubborn and defiant, others down to earth and cultured. In either case, children with richer individuality are much more difficult to sell.

Law 3: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

My favorite rule of the three, and the one I think baby boomers overlooked the most: if you act on your child, expect a reaction. Discipline is difficult for every parent. Depending on how you do it, you can make things much worse. Without justifying your demands in terms your child can appreciate, be prepared for him or her to fight back or deviate further. The more force you exert on the situation (screaming, violence, etc.), the greater the reaction you should expect. Explicitly forbidding your children from doing things may be a recipe for disaster.

I have seen it a handful of times: alocoholic parents punishing their children for drinking underage. The result? The children lose respect for their parents and drink harder. For punishment to be effective, you need to hold credibility with your child. Personal experiences, stories, and statistics all help your case better than “go to your room” or “give me your car keys.”

Children usually know when they make mistakes and punishment is usually superfluous. Teaching consequence is important, but make sure consequences are related to the infraction. Eating a cookie before dinner has nothing to do with watching television. When children do not believe they did anything wrong, it is senseless to yell and accuse them of it – they will just villainize you for it and refuse to see your point of view. Find a more clever way to make your point. Or expect an equal and opposite reaction. Physics, baby.

Regressive Culture and the Decimal Improvement

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Most businesses operate and finance on a perpetual study of what has been profitable before. Makes sense, doesn’t it? “This product worked well for us, so let’s keep producing it and continue to make money from it.” Risks, if ever taken, are informed by thorough analysis of previous ventures. The result? Only marginal improvements to products and a gruelingly slow roll-out of human progress. Version 1.1 instead of version 2.0, because any business person knows that they can milk extra money out of every marginal improvement between 1.0 and 2.0.

Sure, this practice is brilliant for driving revenue and safely building businesses. But it’s regressive for human progress. It involves a constant study and reincorporation of what has already been done rather than what has never been done before. It promotes recycling culture, recycling ideas, and holding human potential back. Hollywood has become notorious for this.

We’re stuck on old models, old cash cows, and the golden hens of yore. Our world could “go green” if gas and vehicle companies stop preventing that progress in an effort to perpetuate profits. Our world could connect with other worlds if financiers see space exploration as more than an “investment.” Our world could cure disease indefinitely if pharmaceutical companies surrender their lust for the daily medication business. Our world could do so much more if money wasn’t tugging at our reins. We could do so much more together.

The few making blind leaps of faith are independent entrepreneurs and inventors, working out of their garage after hours to compete for the next big thing. These heroes of our future are pushing buttons few large players dare push. Inventors have played an instrumental role in American history and will continue to define our future. Strapped for cash and time, these men and women really need support to push their visions forward. Unfortunately, they often look to the worst place possible for help: big companies. Why the worst place? The big boys swoop in to buy and ingest the little guys, taking control of the invention and platforming incremental versions to maximize market potential. We fall back where we started.

The entrepreneurs of today are trained (mostly by business leaders, mind you) to have an “exit strategy” – sell your company, publicly or to a larger company. We have been trained to give up our ideas and business in exchange for cash. We have been taught to sell away the future we are building for mankind. Many companies today have become dependent on acquiring small players and have completely disbanded their research & development departments altogether. These companies don’t even bother developing incremental improvements while they wait for the next great purchase. In the good old days, big companies had all the resources AND the best talent to produce great product. Now, the best talent invents on the outside and struggles for capital while companies stockpile all of the resources necessary to produce meaningful change. Herein lies a tragic disconnect that also stunts our progress forward.

Thankfully, the world of financial support is changing. Initiatives like Kickstarter connect projects with needed capital. True change can happen if we stand together and support each other. Vote with your purchases, donations, and investments. Set profit and politics aside. Build a better world. Our children depend on it.

Two Reasons People Hire You

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Reason 1: You can save them time, energy and reputation.

Reason 2: You can do something better than they can.

A job hiring for reason #1 alone is mostly clerical, mindless, and redundant. You are a cog in the machine and mostly expendable. Avoid this kind of work if you can. I know you have more value to the world than that.

A job hiring for reason #2 alone is more privileged, thoughtful, and independent. You bring a lot to the table as an accessory and may be missed when gone. This kind of work earns more respect and is far less expendable.

A job hiring for both reasons is more appreciated, integrated, and reputable. You are important to the operation and can damage the greater whole if you leave. Your stress and accountability to others may be greater, but your value to the company can leverage higher reward.

Know why you’ve been hired. It’s important to contextualize your value to the company.

Understanding New Media [Film Friday]

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Few people inside or outside the movie business can really explain the “New Media” trend. The term “web series” has developed an underestimated connotation, suggesting handicam YouTube videos, goofball kids, and poor craft. While a large share of the 3 billion videos uploaded daily are casual video, the professional web video industry has exploded. Many companies (including the one I work for) are spending millions and millions of dollars to produce for the Internet, embracing gear and talent normally resident to major motion pictures. The web is the new frontier and everyone is boarding the train.

Producing video for the web does not necessarily make it “New Media.” If that were true, all movie trailers, skits, and press material released online would qualify. But we often separate this type of material into “marketing” or “publicity.” So where do you draw the line? Having worked in “New Media” for over a year now, I feel safe taking a crack at it.

I am going to spend the next several Fridays exploring this topic. I will take cases I have heard and wrestle with them. With any luck, we will come up with a suitable definition for “New Media” in a few weeks.

Tune in next week for a debate about “producer’s intent.”

Table of Contents for this series:

Rules Destroy Imagination

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Disney's adaptation of Stephen Slesinger, Inc....

As children, sky was the limit. The word “impossible” never slipped our lips. I vowed to build a spaceship in my backyard. I knew, without question, that I would be the first six-year-old in orbit. With scrap cardboard and colored pencils in hand, I set to work.

As we grew up, we were taught rules: the laws of physics, etiquette, mathematics, morality, sexuality, language, health, justice, economics, politics, and responsibilities. We were told what to do and how to do it. Worse, we were told what NOT to do and threatened with consequences. Sure, we were being educated. But that education undermined the innumerable liberated conceptions we had as children. I’m sorry, child, you cannot defy gravity. You cannot live forever. You cannot leave the house without wearing pants. 1 + 1 never equals 3. Things cost money you cannot afford. No this. No that. No, no, no. The endless list of constraints continues to grow everyday of our aging lives.

I realized how tragically detrimental these rules could be to your imagination as I nostalgically revisited a Winnie the Pooh cartoon on YouTube. When I was young, this scene terrified me to the bone. I feared falling prey to the beasts and maligned physics Pooh suffers throughout his dream. Watching it for the first time in 15 years, I felt some of those visceral reactions come back:

But then, reality sunk in and this video was not terrifying anymore. I now know that hovering and transforming on this level are not feasible in the physical world, and that such creatures do not exist in nature. The boundless scope of my childhood imagination enabled these possibilities in my mind and allowed me to fear the things I did not understand. But my adult mind, constrained by rules of the natural world, can dismiss this scene as psychedelic fiction.

Would our lives be better without rules? No, of course not. Rules will always exist whether we want them to or not. I do not think anarchy or ignorance make the world a better place. But I do think it would liberate mankind’s imagination a little more if we understand rules as surmountable obstacles to our dreams, instead of barriers we cannot pass.

The best thing my parents never did was tell me “no.” They let me play in the backyard until my heart’s content. I figured out on my own that I could not build a spaceship. But because no one I respected ever tried to stop me, I never gave up. I signed up for the movie business to get me closer to orbit, closer to building that spaceship, and closer to the stars – if only through models and effects. I fight the rules every day and refuse to let anything stand in the way of my dreams.

Go out and fight the rules. Never say never. Dream big.

Imagine the possibilities.

Life Goals

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Photo of an open fortune cookieBring people together.

Build a home.

Separate culture from money.

Raise children.

End the culture wars.

Spend time well.

What in life is most important to you? What are your values? Can you spin them into goals that drive your life?

Self worth stems from purpose. Purpose stems from goals. Goals stem from values.

Wrap your goals into fortune cookie-sized mission statements. If you are not willing to tattoo these statements to your body, your goals are not developed well enough.

Live the change you want to see in the world. Live the change you want to see in your own life.

But first, know thyself.

I Would Die For You

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But only if you stand to impact the world better than I can.

Some people throw the phrase around lightly. “I would die for you.” Really? Would you?

Sacrifice is a big deal. Think really hard. Are you honestly willing to surrender your life for someone else?

Only say it if you mean it.