What it’s like being an AD in a movie set June 28, 2009
Posted by Mario Sundar in Miscellaneous.Tags: scary-cow
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For those wondering what these pictures were all about. This was at a test shoot for a scary cow documentary, that I was a part of earlier today.
Scary Cow is an independent movie co-op that brings together amateur talent (such as myself) in pursuit of creating a movie, documentary or short film. Unfortunately, I can’t share much about the documentary I’m a part of right now, but I’ll continue sharing tidbits on the movie making process in subsequent posts of mine.
How are movies made? Here are my first impressions from today’s shoot: 1. There are three key people running day-to-day operations of a shoot. We’re a small crew so this is just a microcosm of what one would experience on a feature film’s shoot. Today’s shoot had three key players ably assisted by the crew: a. Executive Producer who also plays a key role in the documentary. b. Director c. Director of Photography or DP The DP is supported by x number of camera operators who are helped by production assistants (admin stuff – tracking time, etc.)
The AD is the key liaison who helps connect these different individuals on the day of the shoot. I was helping the AD today and have also volunteered to help with various aspects of promoting the film. 2. The devil is in the detail: Seriously, this is key to the success of a day’s shoot. Period. It’s the role of the AD to plan a day’s shoot well in advance, being the administrative lead on keeping every team informed and aware of what’s happening (talent, DP, and others) both before and on the day of the shoot. 3. Murphy’s law rules: If something could go wrong on a day’s shoot, it will. Given that we’re doing a documentary there were problems with sound, obstacles in your line of sight, etc. but none too serious. That said, planning helps mitigate problems and deal with them effectively. These are my initial thoughts from today’s shoot and I wish I’d taken more pictures, but hey, when you’re on a set, it’s go-time and there’s not much time to goof around. Stay tuned for more from the world of movie making in the months to come.
How I learned to quit “blogging” and love Posterous June 26, 2009
Posted by Mario Sundar in Technology I Love.1 comment so far
I guess the simplest answer would be that I'd lost my passion for "blogging".
Part of the problem was "writers block" which I fought and lost regularly – a condition that worsened with each passing day. To complicate matters, Twitter and later Facebook (when they copied Twitter) opened my eyes to the real-time ecosystem of micro-posts rather than the essay style blog posts I'd grown tired of. Plus, looked like my attention was fragmented across four or five social networking sites and I could no longer I keep track of which sites I had posted to and which ones I hadn't.
Enter Posterous
Posterous can be viewed as the "one ring to rule them all". It's the one site I create content on that can then be re-routed to all other channels seamlessly. To me they have taken the stress and hassle out of cross-platform content maintenance while letting you focus on content creation as you go through your daily life in real-time.
Still confused? Here are my five reasons for switching:
1. Seriously, I wasn't "blogging" and it was becoming more difficult to get back on the bandwagon.
2. Ease of use – email any type of content (text, pics, audio, video) – just anything to post@posterous.com and boom! it's published after formatting.
3. Multimedia – The future is in real-time user generated multimedia (pics, audio, video) creation. And the future has arrived with the iPhone 3GS. Now, Posterous makes it painfully simple to email the video / picture you take with your 3GS phone, formats it for you and posts it on your Posterous site within seconds.
4. Cross-posting capability – This is killer. Posterous allow you to automatically populate your twitter, facebook, friendfeed, youtube, flickr and blog so you don't have to worry about cross-posting it across these different channels.
5. Participation – they have facebook and twitter connect on posterous, so your friends can leave a comment on your posterous site through their twitter / facebook feed. You can also choose to feed that status update or tweet back through those respective sites.
In its most simplest terms. It's easy creation of real-time multimedia creation that attracted me most to Posterous. Now, all I have to do is buy the iPhone 3GS.
Can Corporate Culture be changed? June 26, 2009
Posted by Mario Sundar in Marketing.Tags: corporate-culture
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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about company values and culture. Our new CEO (Jeff) and founder (Reid), shared LinkedIn’s mission and values at a recent all-hands (pics here – http://is.gd/1dTtD).
Defining corporate culture is an extremely arduous task: part art, part science, part mystery. And redefining corporate culture may well be the Holy Grail in organizational management science.
Can it be done?
HBS’ Peter Bergman thinks it can be done – with stories. Yes, stories! As community evangelist, my role encompasses external evangelism. For e.g. letting our users communicate how LinkedIn has impacted their professional success, which we then chronicle on the blog –
http://blog.linkedin.com/category/success-stories/
And, Peter’s suggestion indicates that internal company culture can be changed with such stories.
“To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:
1. Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
2. Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them.”
Corporate Blogwell in San Francisco June 25, 2009
Posted by Mario Sundar in Conferences, Corporate Blogging.Tags: corporate-blogwell
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Thanks to Andy Sernovitz and team for the invite. It gave me an opportunity to meet Lionel from Dell, Ken from Intel, Mark from SAP, and Kira from Intuit. Too bad I missed meeting Nicki from Yahoo! Next time, maybe.
Google brings Sexy back with a Wave! May 29, 2009
Posted by Mario Sundar in Technology I Love.2 comments
Bringing Sexy Back to technology! And, you thought that was solely Apple’s prerogative. Today was one of those “I was there” moments. It took me back to the day I watched Jobs demo the iPhone, when he had us all at “scrolls like butter“. Yes, I’ve watched that demo quite a few times since then.
Today, Google demoed a technology that has been 4+ years in the making to an adoring crowd of 4000 developers. A collaboration and communication platform that makes traditional email look like the abacus in terms of instant gratification. So enough with the teasing, you say.
Surfing a Google Wave?
Participating in a Wave is a little like an email chain, and a little like instant messaging; you can embed documents, Google Web Elements, photos and other multimedia, and the whole bailywick is presented as one stream of conversation. People can jump in or jump out at any time, and they can track back in conversations to see where things got started. [Source: Fast Company]
What Google continues to do is completely turn on its head the traditional understanding of a mainstream technology (with the iPhone it was stuff like visual voice mail and with gmail it was threaded conversations and tagging) and provide us with a radical, new way to get stuff done.
But, I digress. So, let me cut to the chase and outline for you the 5 key moments in the really long demo below that had 4000 developers cheering like they had just heard Steve Jobs announce the next version of the iPhone (read Arrington’s great piece on Google’s impeccable launch timing). Key portions in the video are highlighted after the jump.
Yes, at an hour and 20 minutes, the video is way too long. So if you’ve five minutes and want to catch the most interesting parts, check out the following timestamps in the video. And, could somebody slice-and-dice these clips together to create a succinct 3 minute video.
The Basics
5:05 – 7:05 The philosophy of Waves
The Components / Demo
7:35 – 12:05 The metaphor of hosted conversations. Quick usage scenarios on how a Wave takes multiple elements and fits it into a Wave.
10:10 – 12:05 How a real time conversation within a wave mimics Instant Messaging
15:20 – 17:20 Sharing multimedia. How it’s done in a wave.
27:30 – 33:05 Inline discussion, content collaboration and the playback button. Oh, yae! it’s pretty cool.
35:05 – 37:42 Multiple individuals collaborating real-time on a single doc. It’s even better than what Google Docs does today!
And, two more things…
44:00 – 46:04 Spell checker. It’s different this time. Pretty impressive!
1:12:00 – 1:16:00 And, one more thing. Real time translation demo, followed by (what I think was) an extended standing ovation.
So, I’m way past my bedtime having taken a couple of hours to revisit the video embedded above. And, one thing’s for sure, Google put on an Apple’sque show today and totally wowed us all with what they believe is the future of communication. I can’t wait to try out the product.











