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Favorite Film Directors of Mine and Their Best Films

I had difficulty selecting a single film for some directors; therefore I selected more than one. These are all directors who have consecutively put out great films; I'm not going to list any directors who have only made a single good film (there are lots of those unfortunately).

Anyway, here are my favorite directors and their best film(s) (in my opinion):

Steven Spielberg:

Best film(s) - Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Martin Scorsese:

Best film(s) - Taxi Driver

Nicolas Roeg:

Best film(s) - Walkabout

Ridley Scott:

Best film(s) - Alien/Blade Runner

Gus Van Sant:

Best film(s) - Drugstore Cowboy

Stanley Kubrick:

Best film(s) - A Clockwork Orange

Werner Herzog:

Best film(s) - Stroszek/Aguirre, the Wrath of God

George A. Romero:

Best film(s) - Martin

David Cronenberg:

Best film(s) - The Dead Zone/Videodrome

Krzysztof Kieslowski:

Best film(s) - Dekalog (TV series)

Tim Burton:

Best film(s) - Ed Wood/Edward Scissorhands

Quentin Tarantino:

Best film(s) - Reservoir Dogs

Jean-Pierre Melville:

Best film(s) - Le samouraï

Frank Darabont:

Best film(s) - The Shawshank Redemption

Hayao Miyazaki:

Best film(s) - Spirited Away

George Lucas:

Best film(s) - Star Wars (episodes IV, V and VI)

Roman Polanski:

Best film(s) - The Tenant

(*NOTE* This blog-post was extracted from this thread of mine on the HikiCulture forums.)

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Unexpectedly Cold Mountain

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Stanley Kubrick: Taming Light Poster

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Startup founders: Does your board ask the right questions?

We had our first board meeting today. It was quite satisfying. Not just because the board agreed with what we presented but because of the quality of questions the members asked us.

Founders can pick a board that drinks all the kool-aid given to it. It is quite tempting to exercise total control over the board.

Or, for the love of their startup, they can pick a board that asks tough (& purposeful) questions while strongly sharing the founders' vision of the product & company.

As one of our board observers rightly noted, asking the right questions is not easy. It needs a keen appreciation of the product as well as a genuine concern about the welfare of the company. Compare these two (hypothetical) questions in a board meeting:

• "Why should your product succeed when the space is getting so crowded?" (back to checking emails in the meeting)

and

• "From your presentation I can see that the product proposition is strong. But do you have specific plans to get an early foothold in this fast crowding market? Why haven't you identified an MVP (minimum viable product) yet? Let's discuss this further after the meeting."

Q.E.D.

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Seeking Soleil...

Stacey Soleil wears many hats (both literally & figuratively speaking). She's a performer, a spokesperson, a social media junkie and a self proclaimed "TrekkieTechGirl" (due to her addiction to NextGen reruns). Yet behind the whimsical demeanor you will find a solid entrepreneurial backbone. For the past several years, Stacey has been the proud owner of Soleil Marketing & Promotions whereby she strategizes and implements all of the sponsorship deals, digital placements, online promotions & grass roots marketing campaigns for her broad range of clientele. Stacey garners more than 15 years of sales & marketing experience within the general entertainment, music, and non-profit organization forefront. In early 2005, Stacey shifted her focus to the web upon recognizing the necessity for new media marketing campaigns that would reach the latest generation of web and mobile savvy users. Stacey currently serves as the Director of Social Media Strategy with Karma Media Labs and has served as the Director of New Media Marketing & Promotions for both Toucan Cove Entertainment & Arthropoda Records. She also participated in a tour wrap sponsorship program for artists such as Killswitch Engage, Mudvayne and Static-X. Furthermore, Stacey launched grassroots marketing endeavors for various websites such as iLike.com, garageband.com, & handheldcomedy.com. Stacey’s creative approach to marketing & branding has created partnerships between musicians and major athletic figures as well as co-promotions with big brands such as DirtBag Clothing for tour sponsorship. During her stay as Director of New Media Marketing, Stacey helped Toucan Cove Records secure top billing as the #1 independent label during 2008. Ms. Soleil's most recent endeavors include NextWeb64, Girls In Tech OC, as well as community outreach for The Angela Shelton Foundation. Soleil Marketing & Promotions is conveniently based just outside of Los Angeles, allowing Stacey to meet directly with a majority of web, mobile & entertainment headquarters throughout southern California.

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World Class Clusters 2009 • Gerd MEIER zu KOCKER

©2009 www.pixographist.com

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"creative inspiration" - thoughtful stuff from one of best directors in the biz

I stumbled on this today. Was exploring some director work out there and I was on prod comp Smuggler’s site, and I re-checked what I would argue could be the best director reel in the business right now, from Smug’s newest director Ringan Ledwidge. I don’t know that much bout him (cuz haven’t worked with him yet) but I hear he is a good guy, and a very fair guy to work with.

But man, along with his diverse, engaging work, does he ever give a thoughtful response to the “Where do you get your creative inspiration??” question.

That is so awesome, that question, when it answered great. And then hearing it from an imaginative authority such as Ringan— refreshingly inspiring. But I think that many of us out there may not think we deserve to answer that question. Yet everyone has creative inspiration. So it could be, basically “Where do you get a sense of vigor for the world??” For me it is that which is not just what is close to me, it is that which makes me love the whole damn place that is the world. Take the world, and apply imagination— or see the imagination that is the world.

So, what stimulates you to embrace the world, what are the things or the moments or the signs? Where do you find creative inspiration?

Ringan’s stuff is the simple— though it does evince an accomplished sense of curiosity— and he creates, on top of creations. He answers modestly: a conversation, a pal, a thing (art, music, film or otherwise), a moment, someone who is uniquely genius.

I gotta try this. Cuz I am distinctly not a creative authority, as is Ringan, but I know I get struck not rarely by some of the same types of things that Ringan gifts us with in this simple piece.

Here it is, the 2nd link on this link, Ringan's bit. Zoom in on it and have a read, an interview from the Brit biz mag Campaign:  http://smugglersite.com/news

And here is his reel for kicks, don’t miss the last spot on it: http://smugglersite.com/video/126

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Designer’s Portfolio

Designer’s portfolio features a unique fullscreen xml website template with great motion, a clean design and deeplinking support.

via featuredfolios.com

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weirdest thing

I feel like for a good bit (yrs) I have been voicing with others how important a producer-led model may be for our new age of commercial content. I have done this over lunches with EP’s and content cats like D Locatell at radical. Its about the evolution toward more complex productions and multi-layered asset needs and development-led projects-- so, lots of plotting and planning.

But on Sunday on my run— and aside from how freezing it was, I had some shit go down Sunday— I was thinking that maybe the new model will be especially director led. The shifting demands in time and some of the new patterns in creative output— whether it is “docu” or longform, proj oriented, etc— make it so that some directors are more adapted (or choose to be more adapted) to these conditions than others. Or at least they are the best suited to carry the torch.

It is and should remain a talent-led biz, no matter where it starts from a proj development standpoint. I lament that perhaps some of the same directors out there that I have loved and marveled over may not be attracted to the shifts in some of the content needs in marketing. There’s obvious things of course like digital work— though those same shifts will provide the new opportunities for some of these same directors and filmmakers. But they will need to be adjusted to the demands that are associated with this new landscape. And sure, in some cases that may mean “faster” or “cheaper,” though not always.

(And I think it will prove to be less about cheaper-- but maybe faster will need to prevail, cuz it more about shifts in the manner of the messaging itself. For instance, the message itself may only be as effective as the speed of its creation— immediacy as intrinsic to the message, not a byproduct of some sort of reckless process.)

But I have found that sometimes as we create our work and adjust to more “real time” needs in content creation, it becomes more and more important to be very synched with our directors. Basically a preconditioned understanding that currents from director through to the producers and the creatives on up to the cd’s, and clients also. We already tend to heavily rely on this trust. I kid with B.Buckley for being as strong as any EP we work with, an acting cd at times for us, and then his day job as such an accomplished director for us. HM is very adapted to our “model,” and it is Buckley led, and I believe he is committed to it because he uniquely gets the purpose of how we’re shaping things. Several others do as well, luckily for us. And they help us a great deal— and keep us in check as we move along.

So I think that our agency has found its greatest success through its director-relationships. And I confess it in general does sway much of our director choices (in plainer terms, there’s a shared loyalty). They understand our work, the shifts our work may need to take. All agencies have it, I just suspect it may become even more important.

Shifts in the marketing marketplace have led to shifts in the production marketplace. There are many directors out there that are very well adjusted to this. Those directors and their leadership will be key to how our biz succeeds from here.

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I don't know about you, but I got grounded for Cs

I've been on a search for a more efficient and relevant way to evaluate employees' performance. Most performance evaluations I have come up against are homogenized so much that they aren't revelant to individual disciplines, and provide little room for insight. Almost all of the systems have a rating attached, and more often than not that rating system is: poor-fair-good-verygood-excellent.

"Poor. Fair. Good. Very good. Excellent." There's the problem. Those five ratings create many more questions than they answer. Most groups follow a bell curve, which means most people should be "good." However, if you have properly screened your hires, then you probably only hired "very good" or "excellent" candidates. Hmmm.

Senior managers will tell you "If you're doing a 'good job' you should be regularly meeting and exceeding expectations and that earns you a 'good.'" As you hand over a piece of paper marked "good," you see another story in your employee's face:

"You gave me a 'C?' You only think I'm doing 'C' work? WTF?'"

Any of us who grew up in the US school system are all-too-familiar with that five-point evaluation. And nobody thinks a "C" is a "good job." The graphic above represents an idea for a system that is based on 12 basic criteria or skills for a discipline. These skills are customized for that discipline but fall into macro-categories that may apply to more than one job title. This was designed to be an interactive application for performance reviews or goal "check-ins." An employee's seniority determines how many "credits" or points they have to distribute into their skills. These points are doled out into the individual's core skills, just like creating a custom player in EA's Madden Football, or an avatar in World of Warcraft. This limited number of "credits" force employee and manager to make some critical decisions about the story they want to tell with this "print." It also prevents someone from making high marks in all of the categories (which is so rare that no provision is needed for it in this system.)

After this is completed by employee and manager it provides a simple, descriptive graphic that is a visual representation of an individual's skills. Each skillprint is unique to it's owner and can be collected and viewed together to see an aggregate skillprint for a group of people, or even an entire organization.

No more grades. Just things for two people to discuss. The seed to a living conversation.

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