Sirkka, a former DER intern, married Nick Bertling. Their beautiful mugs here. She has this to say about her experience at DER:

The editorial experience that I’ve had with ADL [Art Deadlines List] and the research experience that I got at DER have served me very well in graduate school. The department was very impressed with my experience when I applied. I’m also working half-time right now as the Assistant Editor for American Studies, a scholarly journal that is published at the University of Kansas. It’s been a wonderful opportunity, and I think that I’d like to continue in this line of work.

Need music for your documentary? Try magnatune, a music company that uses the shareware model: try before you buy. And they appear to offer very good licensing arangements for use of their artist’s music in film projects.

The Society of Visual Anthropology has announced that it will be presenting A Lifetime Achivement Award to John K. Marshall for his 53 years of dedicated film and development work with and for the Ju/hoansi (or Bushmen) of the Kalahari.

The official ceremony will take place in the context of the American Anthropological Association annual meeting to be held in Chicago November 18th to the 23rd 2003. His most recent epic, 5 part, 6 hour film, A Kalahari Family will be screened at the Chicago Hilton on Thursday November 20th from 9:00 am to 2:50 pm with discussion and breaks scheduled at 10:30, 12:30, and
2:50.

Esquire’s Tom Junod reports on a photograph by Richard Drew. In the photograph a man is falling from one of the World Trade Towers, Junod discusses the circumstances surrounding the photo:

They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves. They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all floors above and around the building’s fatal wound. They jumped from the offices of Marsh & McLennan, the insurance company; from the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the bond-trading company; from Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors—the top. For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands. They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, one prays, in soul. One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman’s body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was embraced as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.

Should a photograph of that make its way onto the pages of a newspaper?

Dan Coplan reviews why it’s important to potect your highlights. Don’t miss LAFCPUG’s other fine tutorials on Final Cut Pro here.

Stephen Schleicher writes a thorough overview of lighting transparent and semi-transparent objects. He provides a step-by-step tutorial that helps to light the perfect scene. His previous tutorial, Lighting 101, here. Many documentaries suffer from poorly set-up lighting, reading these tutorials will put you ahead of the curve.

For those new to editing, there’s a lot to know about the technology involved in video. Adobe provides a great overview of digital editing in a 42 page document entitled A Digital Video Primer here (PDF). You might also be more interested in BBC’s free online course, originally designed for BBC staff, on digital documentary production. The online course here.

Extra technical information about digitial video tape formats from Adam Wilt here. Digitial video camera reviews from DV & Firewire Central here. Extraordinary helpful digital video filmmakers forum at Creative Cow here.

A good article on using simple digital video tools to make a documentary from Sam Burbank, a National Geographic videographer, here (registration required). And lastly, Lorre Fritchy’s experience in making documentary video here.

Covering war as a journalist and getting shot at is the subject of Orville Schell’s New York Times essay:

When a soldier on a U.S. tank shot a Reuters cameraman, Mazen Dana, last month while he was filming the aftermath of a terrorist attack at the American-run Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad, he became the 17th journalist to die in Iraq. Given that there have been fewer than 300 U.S. military casualties since the war began last March, this is a startlingly high statistic.

Even more startling is the fact that five of the dead journalists have been victims of ‘’friendly fire.'’ And unlike past wars where such casualties were most often caused by land mines, firefights, snipers or artillery, these five died after they or their offices were made direct targets.

What is evolving is a form of conflict not characterized by armies of ‘’good guys'’ and ‘’bad guys'’ or ‘’liberators'’ and ‘’oppressors,'’ one covered by journalists who come from or identify with one side or another. We have instead a new, almost gravityless, world of conflict in which the American military can kill journalists without causing great alarm and ‘’the enemy'’ can blow up U.N. aid missions and other ‘’soft'’ civilian targets without remorse. All that journalists have to steady them in this bad dream is grit and a stubborn refusal to serve any of the contending masters. What gives their work meaning is a defiant commitment to independence, accurate reporting and an almost existential belief that no matter how debased the world and politics become, the ‘’real story'’ somehow still matters.

Well known for his National Geographic cover photograph of a young Afgahnistan woman, documentary photographer Steve McCurry has a web site of his most well known photographs ranging from Angkor Wat to Tibet here.

Who among you knew that Stanley Kubrick made a documentary and why did no one inform me? The Seafarers.