May 5, 2008
02:50 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
At age 100, Elena Bautista became a movie star. For a woman who doesn’t even have a physical memento or photograph of her own mother, it's significant that Bautista, now 101, is the subject of her filmmaker granddaughter’s documentary directorial debut, Kuna Ni Nanang (My Mother Said).
The film was born when Jessica Sison’s family asked her in August 2006 to put together a slideshow for her grandmother’s 100th birthday the following April. She answered no. “Anyone can put together a slideshow,” Sison said to me outside of the Village East Cinema Theater in New York before the film’s final screening at the Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday, May 4. “I’m a filmmaker, and I have to do better.”
Sixteen film festivals later, the five-minute documentary has become an international success, from screenings at the San Francisco Independent Film Festival to the Women in Film Festival in Vancouver. “I wasn’t going to submit it,” Sison revealed, “Then my friends and other filmmakers said I should.”
Most recently, Sison’s tour of the film stopped in New York, where I had the great opportunity of seeing it for myself. The Tribeca Film Festival sorted through some 2,500 short films. Sison’s film was one of the 79 shorts picked. Sison admitted that she had no idea it was that competitive. “This film was only supposed to be for her birthday,” the 35-year-old filmmaker said.
Made on Final Cut Pro and using Bautista’s own voice to narrate the story, from her arranged marriage and emigration from the Philippines to her present life in California, the film covers Bautista life in a fraction of time. Sison’s blending of party scenes with her family and Bautista singing a short cadence in Ilocano (a dialect from the northern Philippines) strikes an emotional chord in the viewer’s heart. (You will want to call your own grandmother at the end of this movie. I certainly did.) One doesn’t see a frail 100-year-old woman. Instead, Bautista is strong and fearless, saying in the film that she doesn’t fear death, “because it happens to everybody.”
The film will have a few more screenings this summer, namely in Texas, Colorado and back in New York in July for the Asian American International Film Festival. Since it’s a five-minute film, DVD might not be the ideal wide-release venue, but Sison might release the film for purchase online.
“The whole online thing is really new,” the Filipina director said, “There are so many competing distribution companies that are startups. I don’t want to go with one until they are established.” She would be interested in releasing it on Apple’s iTunes, which releases and sells numerous short films, but acknowledged that they‘re extremely selective.
Sison might be selling herself a little short. For a film that stemmed from the idea of a slideshow and made its way to the Tribeca Film Festival, it seems to me that anything could be possible.
11:58 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Women’s lives are developing and changing drastically every year -- particularly the daily lives of mothers. Lifetime Networks just released data from their FemiNation Poll, a survey on mothers nationwide and their thoughts on Mother’s Day, work and life balance and relationships.
While Valentine’s Day is often viewed as marketing scheme by the greeting card industry, mothers are people we don’t celebrate enough. And, in case you haven’t bought a card or bouquet of flowers for Mother’s Day yet (or if you’re just remembering that its this Sunday while reading this), don’t worry. Those choices come second to what our mothers really want -- a simple “Thank You” will suffice for now. 73 percent of mothers indicated in the FemiNation Poll (which surveyed over 2,000 American moms), said that those two words of gratitude are what they want most on their special day. Gifts, of course, are welcomed (and hoped for) too. 82 percent of the surveyed mothers expect to get a gift of some sort from their children, but 15 percent doubted their kids will give them anything at all.
After the most desired gift, a card (which is far more personal than an e-mail, maybe even more so than a phone call), moms said they would like “a day of no chores or responsibilities.” So much for flowers and candy. (I’ve actually never understood why flowers are such a popular gift. They expire in days, and a meaningful Mother’s Day gift should be timeless.) But a fine dinner at a fancy restaurant ranked highest among gift selections from their husbands. From these selections, it appears that moms don’t need lots of bows and ribbons to know gratitude and affection -- just something from the heart.
While Mother’s Day is big business for card, candy and flower industries (and this country needs plenty more consumer spending right now), the sentiment behind the day shouldn’t be neglected. Mothers make countless, and many unseen, sacrifices. Despite the juggling act most mothers perform daily, over 75 percent of mothers believed that they are doing an above average job, and that they have a harder job now than their own mothers. (I’m curious whether moms feel advances in technology has helped or increased their workloads. Isn’t it easier to reach kids with cell phones these days? Or does that just make them more spoiled?)
Even Mother’s Day, however, can’t escape the presidential election madness. Lifetime’s Every Woman Counts poll discovered that more women would want to introduce their moms to Hillary Clinton (28%) than John McCain (25%) or Barack Obama (20%). It’s hard to dispute that with the success of a child like Chelsea Clinton, the New York senator deserves a nice Mother’s Day gift this year. Who would you bring home to meet Mom this Sunday?
08:37 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Redesigning a magazine's layout doesn’t just update it – it revolutionizes it. Luke Hayman, an art director with the design firm, Pentagram, spoke to an audience of about 50 students and professors at the final meeting of the Delacorte Lecture Series at Columbia Journalism School on April 24. Hayman explained that any redesign has to be a careful process, as a magazine represents a brand and a particular audience base.
“Part of the magazine is pacing and making sure you don’t jar anyone,” Hayman said, “It's a delicate balance of variety and sameness.”
During his design career, Hayman has worked on the redesigns of magazines such as Brill’s Content and Travel + Leisure, and most recently he worked as a design director at New York. Rather than offering advice on how to break into the business, the British-born designer described the nitty-gritties involved in art direction, including how fonts exude particular emotions and appeals, and the importance of good photography.
For example, most of the identity of Travel + Leisure (whose target audience, Hayman said, is “wealthy, 50-year-old women”), comes from its simple typeface. In addition, he and his fellow designers made sure that the editorial distinguished was from advertisements by a white border around the page. “If you have good content, good photography, good imagery, you don't want to compete with it,” he explained.
Hayman also explained why a redesign is so valuable (not to mention, expensive) for preserving a magazine nowadays. Readers often flip through pages, he said, and an eye-catching design is essential to keeping a reader from tossing the magazine aside after a quick glance." Visually, things get tired,” Hayman said. “Some of it is expression. They get stale.” With New York, in particular, it was all about adding little bits of detail and fun, while trying “capture tone and smartness.”
He cautions however that it is important to preserve the heart and soul of a magazine throughout the redesign, since a layout can define a brand.
Editorial content can get cut to make room for art’s sake, which can be good or bad, depending on your personal tastes. “It’s really hard because you can be there with an editor, and cutting 500 words is hard, but if the page is solid gray, you'll have less people reading,” Hayman said. He also warned that a magazine layout shouldn’t come off looking like a brochure. But with every magazine, he emphasized, a magazine’s purpose is to provide essential information, and typography and art design involves a great deal of work weaving all of the pages together.
Within a magazine, there are several mini-magazines,” Hayman explained, “They all have to fit together well.”
April 4, 2008
12:21 pm | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment
Three weeks ago, he drunkenly told a reporter from The Times of London that he once pushed a man off a cliff (which he later retracted). Last Thursday, Felix Dennis, chairman of The Week, appeared (sober, I think) at the Columbia Journalism School to by far the largest turnout for our weekly Delacorte magazine lecture series. Occasionally, the lectures draw some outside reporters in.
Dennis alerted his audience right off the bat that he knew a few reporters were there purely for a scoop on the scandal. The brash British magazine exec, however, disappointed them, steering clear from the subject for the rest of the evening. Dennis, dressed in a black suit with white shirt under a red and white tie, a blood red handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket, and his brown glasses hanging low on his nose, did not hold back on blasting other frank opinions, possibly to the dismay of his American staff/entourage in the front two or three rows of the audience. His key point on the future of magazines: Don’t change them.
“Readers on the whole don't want innovation,” Dennis said frankly. “What they want in their magazines is the same for any in the world. They want to be informed, and they wanted to be entertained simultaneously.”
The founder and former publisher of the men’s magazine, Maxim, advised the professors, students and reporters in the audience to “relax” about the explosion of new media and the possible end of newspapers. While we might be in the “autumn of the glory days called paper,” Dennis said in a haunting voice reminiscent of a narrator on Masterpiece Theatre, the web only requires “a change of mindset, and the young are pretty good at that.”
“During the infancy of the web, my company made two crucial decisions: we refused to throw money at this new media,” Dennis recalled, “Instead we would grew our web presence as the web grew. That was a brave decision at the time. Editors were running around like chickens with their heads chopped off throwing money at the web."
Despite his now-kicked cocaine habit and a reputation for being a loose cannon, Dennis has had an enviable career. He’s worth over a billion dollars, one of the 100 richest people in Britain, and has bought and sold hundreds of magazines since he was in his thirties. Some of his journalistic firsts include being the first reviewer of the debut Led Zeppelin album, first biographer of both Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali, and even the founder of a “poverty-cooking column.” Sadly, it was probably born before the web and didn’t show up on Google.
Being the businessman he is, Dennis took the opportunity to share his new “anti-self-help” book, How to Get Rich, which he described as “how to be richer than the chump sitting next to you.” My neighbor and I glanced at each other suspiciously and giggled. Speaking to a crowd of journalists in a time when much of the media is doing nothing but losing money, the title was a bit laughable. But since its advice coming from a self-made billionaire, it couldn’t hurt to peruse the book.
11:47 am | 1 recommendation | Be the first to comment
On the first truly warm evening of spring, last Thursday, about 50 journalism students, including myself, sat inside the main lecture hall of the Columbia Journalism School. We listened to Susan Lyne, CEO and president of Martha Stewart Living, recount the high and low times in her career. From founding and editing the now defunct Premiere magazine for eight and a half years to running one end of Martha Stewart’s empire, Lyne iterated that key to a successful magazine is producing a product with a new concept that “somehow feels right,” that has a voice and that has an approach to its topic subject manner. And of course, it has to be unique.
Her perspective on the future of magazines and the Internet: a magazine can’t survive without a decent website. “We've tried to do something different,” Lyne told the audience full of budding journalists, “We look at our content with fresh eyes for a web user. It is organized around categories not around our brands. We produce a fair amount of original content, but its really about repackaging and rethinking content libraries that is more intuitive for an Internet user.”
MSL isn’t meant for your average housewife and there is a definite high-end, highbrow approach to the layout and content of the magazine. “What she (Martha) was able to do was serve an audience that was underserved,” Lyne said, “It was for the homemaker, for a woman who saw her work not as drudgery but with pleasure.” Indeed, while the content and stories filling the pages (well, the spots without full-page photographs or white space) the magazine has an exquisite layout and talented art direction team. (is this sentence missing something?) My magazine production class has even copied the fonts!
The magazine was so successful that it spawned a television show, versus Oprah Winfrey, whose show spawned a magazine. The company has produced several other magazines since, including Everyday Food, Body + Soul, Martha Stewart Weddings and the now closed Blueprint, a magazine targeted towards younger audiences, who Lyne said researchers never found. Several daytime television personalities have tried to spawn magazines and create a brand for themselves. Lyne said the difference between MSL versus Rosie O’Donnell’s defunct magazine is that “[O’Donnell] though it was a magazine about her, and that whatever she was interested in was what the reader was interested in.” A successful magazine has to cater to its readers’ interests – not be a mogul’s platform.
While in college at the University of California, Berkeley, Lyne said it was there that she realized she wanted to be a journalist. After graduation, she got her first real job at City Magazine, Francis Ford Coppola’s attempt at a New York magazine in San Francisco. In 1978, she moved on to being the managing editor at the Village Voice until 1982. She briefly got involved in the movie industry, and, in 1987, pitched Premiere to Rupert Murdoch. After describing in detail her days working at Premiere (although, several people around me and myself were quite unsure if she ever mentioned the movie magazine’s title until brought up in the Q&A session), she noticeably glossed past talking about her time at ABC. Perhaps since it was a lecture for magazine students, she didn’t feel it was relevant. Or just maybe, she didn’t feel the Disney magic anymore.
12:22 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
I admit it: I fell into the American Girl obsession/love fest/cult when I was nine years old. Times have changed since 1993. The brand has exploded from a few stories and dolls to an empire of stores, teashops and even hotel packages. American Girl will even make its Hollywood debut this summer with the company’s first, full-length feature film. The brand would appear to be unstoppable, leaving one to wonder what they could possibly do next.
Last week, when a friend of mine (who happens to have Molly and Samantha dolls from her childhood) was booking her trip to visit New York from California next month, she came across a number of American Girl hotel deals. While it is increasingly tricky to find an affordable hotel room for just a human in Manhattan, not so for the American Girl doll. For instance, at the New York Marriott Marquis in Midtown, American Girl hotel packages come with a number of “surprises” for child and doll, as well as a travel bed to take home after the trip. Rates start at $314 per night, but your American Girl doll will sleep and be well rested for her day at the salon and tearoom.
Originally, there were only four girls; now there are nine main characters along with four supporting roles you can also squander your child’s college fund on (not counting American Girl’s expansion to baby dolls and stuffed puppies and kittens). Although the brand has expanded into the live-action realm with made-for-TV movies for Felicity, Samantha, the Victorian girl with women’s suffrage ideals, and Molly, a girl living on the home front during World War II, American Girl will be hitting the big screens nationwide on July 2 with the release of Kit Kittredge, An American Girl, based on one of the more recently released dolls. Kit’s story is of a young girl who aspires to be a journalist and is set during the Great Depression.
My personal favorite was Felicity, the spunky Colonial girl from Williamsburg, Virginia. Behind the book collections, the American Girl doll collection has always had a plethora of (expensive) accessories to tag along with the dolls. Back then, as much as I wanted the $100 wooden 18th-century English-style wardrobe meant for Felicity’s vast amounts of attire (albeit I only had two outfits for her), the biggest accessory I could receive from my parents was a faux-Colonial American embroidery set. (I can still barely sew a button.)
Don’t get me wrong – I love the idea behind the American Girl collection (promoting strong female characters from an early age) and I love teaching young girls about history through vibrant and motivating stories. But I think some things have gotten out of hand, as do most brands aimed towards children in America. For those of you who grew up fixated with the American Girl collection, had a sister who did, or if you have a little girl now, you’re probably familiar with the American Girl store. With locations in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, you can find yourself in a sea of little girls screaming with delight, whining for more toys or begging their overwhelmed parents for one of the très chère amenities available for dolls. For those interested in taking their toys to the salon, prices go up to as high as $25 to pamper your doll’s hair to the fullest, while I spent $35 on my last haircut at the Aveda salon on 114th and Broadway. It’s your call.
04:35 pm | 2 recommendations | Be the first to comment
News typically doesn’t get blended in with art. Nor does the information in a lot of paintings, sculptures or other forms of art usually incorporate statistical or cerebral information. But an innovative new exhibit on display at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in Midtown Manhattan does just that. Yesterday, my info graphics professor took six of my Columbia J-school classmates and I on a “field trip” (yes, in grad school, we still get to take field trips!) to the MoMA in Midtown Manhattan to check out one of their seasonal exhibitions, Design and the Elastic Mind. Modern art museums haven’t really been my thing in the past. The most modern art form that I tend to fancy is impressionism. Yet, this exhibit blew me away.
Most of my classmates and I huddled into the first room off to the right of the entrance. Though the room was a bit dim, thanks to the darkly painted walls and slowly depleting light from the tiny skylight, the designs of computer-simulated origami from the early 1990s and sketches playing with DNA jumped brightly off the walls. Before departing the enclave, a trio of enlarged black and white sketches done by British children caught my eye. In No Robots Please (2007), Alan Outten, the designer, asked a group of British schoolchildren to draw future artifacts. My personal favorite was the future antique: the iPhone – makes me wonder why I have mine now if it’s just going to be chucked in a time capsule.
The really brainy stuff is in the back, maybe so as to not scare anyone away. Along a dark painted room with little light, except some from a giant neon green light sculpture shaped like a tree and a few LCD screens displaying digital games of chess, there are several projects incorporating statistical and analytical information with cutting edge design. One that immediately stood out was a giant black canvas that from far away looked like random words lighting up and bright lines flying from word to word. As I got closer, I realized the text was from Alice in Wonderland. TextArc (2002), by W. Bradford Paley, uses the rubber band effect, pulling the words in certain directions based on their placement within the story as well as the text being larger or smaller, depending on their importance and/or repetition. (An algorithm was used to eliminate nonessential words like articles). Naturally, “Alice” was in the heart of the diagram, with “Queen” far off to the left and “mouse” far off to the right.
With only an hour and a half at the exhibit, I didn’t get to see much else, thus I absolutely must go back again and check the rest of the show out before it closes on May 12. Lucky for me, a friend from Philadelphia is visiting in a few weeks, and I intend to make this our first stop on her New York tour.
