The blog has moved!

Aloha No!

I have launched a new website with an integrated blog and social media at www.paradocsproductions.com

It's really great, come and check out all the projects, filmmaker tips and info, and fun that is going on.

Nothing more to see here folks... but no worry still plenty more going on at Paradocs Productions

Haku Inoa: To Weave A Name Funded by ITVS

(A recent stop by the ITVS office in San Francisco)


The third time was the charm for Haku Inoa to finally receive funding from the Independent Television Service's (ITVS) www.itvs.org LINCS initiative. I have been very fortunate to have had the ongoing support of both PBS Hawai`i www.pbshawaii.org as a partner and the support of Pacific Islanders in Communications www.piccom.org for all three times that I have applied to the initiative.

As I have been slowly letting the news out about the new funder people naturally ask me what the next steps are. So, here is a little outline of what my plans are in the upcoming months.

1. Early to Mid February - Finish a full length 3-column script outlining all sequences in order with narration, interviews, visuals, effects, music, ect...
2. March - pre-production
3. April to May - production and shooting for
4. May to September - editing.
5. September to January - grant writing and other paperwork type things to raise the last $50,000 needed for completion funds.

So that's the plan. It's very exciting news to release at the beginning of the new year, and there will be a lot of happening to update updates about the project, so stay in touch! You can join the Haku Inoa mailing list on Mail Chimp by clicking here



(Mom, Auntie Linda, me, and all of the Haku Inoa team at PBS Hawai`i)

THE ANIMATED ADVENTURES OF JUDO GIRL

This is a really cute documentary that is in Production at Making Waves Films http://makingwavesfilms.com/. Director Kimberlee Bassford has recently completed a fundraising trailer for the film, which is included just above in this post. Kimberlee and her camera were with Teshya and her younger sister Teniya in October when they both swept their divisions and won gold at the Infantil Pan American Judo Championships in Panama City, Panama. It was their first international tournament and first time competing on the USA National Team. Teshya and the film project were even featured in an TeamUSA.org article, the official website of the United States Olympic Committee.

Kimberlee wil continue to film Teshya and her family over the next two years as she prepares for the 2012 Judo World Championships. It's bound to be an animated adventure!

Free Screenings of film featuring an inspirational Samoan Minister

Free screenings of a great new film called "The Calling" which features a brilliant young Samoan American minister will be held in:

Long Beach, CA - Tuesday, December 28, 2010 6:00PM Location: Long Beach Public Library (see attached flier for more info)
Oakland, CA - Thursday, December 16, 2010 Doors Open @ 6:00pm Oakland Asian Cultural Center (see attached flier for more info)
San Francisco, CA - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 Doors Open @ 5:15pm San Francisco Main Public Library, Koret Auditorium (see attached flier for more info)

Here is a little more detail about the film:

Rob Pene, a Samoan, is busy studying at the Haggard School of Theology at Azusa Pacific University, working with a Presbyterian Minister in an upper-middle-class Los Angeles church, and mentoring poor teenage boys. All this is on top of a budding career as a Christian rapper, which he sees as his tool to minister to young people. Rob recently launched a new business focused on serving ministries, small businesses, schools, and mission-minded individuals.

Rob is just one of four characters (of different religious denominations) in the film on a path to the robe. The film follows Rob back to American Samoa during a difficult time, and speaks volumes to the unique, oftentimes difficult Pacific Islander experience in America when confronted with issues of identity, cultural preservation, and family. I really think that Rob’s role in this film will strike a chord in islanders living in the Los Angeles and Bay Area.

The film's website is: http://www.itvs.org/films/calling

Please forward on to anyone you think may be interested in watching and I hope some of you are able to get out see this film and show that Pacific Islanders are interested in seeing more of their stories in motion.

To Download Flyers for San Francisco go to: http://www.scribd.com/doc/45239426/Calling-FlyerSF

To Download Flyers for Oakland go to: http://www.scribd.com/doc/45239389/Calling-FlyerOAK

To Download Flyers for Long Beach go to: http://www.scribd.com/doc/45239465/LONG-BEACH-Large-Flier

Doc Talk: Surfwise

I watched a really great doc on the "first family of surf" the Paskowitz's last night, after coming upon the website and webisodes online. I was hooked, so I guess that campaign did it's job.

Even though this family is incredible they also reminded me in some ways of my own experiences growing up with my Father. He raised my brothers and myself as a single father starting from when I was eight years old. There were a lot of struggles disagreement and insanity, but in the long run I think we are all stronger for it.

It was funny though because it did spark a bit of debate between my boyfriend, Ryan http://ryangraber.com/, and I. After the film he said that he was glad that he wasn't raised like that because it seemed like there were so many opportunities that were cut off for the Paskowitz children because they had never received a formal education. This is true, and some amount of bitterness around this does come up in the film. However, I think it is a little more complex than that. It seems like for some of the opportunities that were closed off to the family, there were also many unique opportunities that came to the Paskowitz clan. Ultimately, I think it is very hard to compare the value of the upbringing of these people with anyone else in the world, since these nine people are an extremely unique group case.

Personally I believe your family is your family and for the most part people love their families no matter what. Given that, I would rather have an interesting family than a boring one.


(A picture of my Dad, me, and my youngest brother Will from a few years back. Looking as imperfect as we are. Ha ha)

Washington DC - Haku Inoa Screening

I know the Smithsonian screening at the National Museum of the Native American was a while ago now, but truthfully I moved and I misplaced the disk with the pictures from the Q&A. I was being stubborn and I did not want to put up this post without the picture. So now that I have found it, here we go! The screening was really great. I thought that the programming was intelligently crafted by Melissa Bisagni she paired Haku Inoa with Heart of the Sea which is the documentary bio-pic about surf legend Rell Sunn. My film lead really wonderfully into Heart of the Sea because that film begins with the explanation of Rell's Hawaiian name which is Kapolikaehukai which essentially translates to Heart of the Sea. The beginning of the film shows very briefly shows how important a name is to Hawaiians. In some sense the rest of the film is really an illustration of all the different ways that Rell fulfills the meaning of her name.

As a part of screening at the Smithsonian I was able to have a personal tour with a cultural interpreter, she was basically a guide to the museum. My guide was named Zandra it was really fun to get to know her and check out the museum. She knew so much about all aspects of the museum. Including the architecture, which was really interesting to me because my father is an architect

Overall I really enjoyed DC and the museum. I can't wait to go back again.

Tech Stuff: Creating Droplets in Apple Compressor

On my most recent project for the California Immigrant Policy Center on the California Budget www.caimmigrant.org I am mixing footage from the Canon 7D camera and a Panasonic HVX200. It is really easy to combine these two formats into one sequence in Final Cut Pro. I was skeptical, but my DP Topher Osborn www.topherosborn.com assured me that it wouldn't be a problem.

With a little research online using the keywords (transcode, canon 7D, FCP) I was able to find a good work flow using the program Compressor to turn the 7D files into ProRes files. I even picked up a little trick for making droplets with Compressor from this video tutorial.

Webcasting for Rapanui Fundraising Event

I have been going crazy this week trying to figure out how to use Ustream with my MacBook Pro for next week's Being Rapanui fund raising event. I would definitely recommend against attempting this. The details are a little tech-y and not very interesting unless you are trying to figure out webcasting for yourself. If you are interested you can send me a message and I will tell you all about it. Ultimately I scrapped using a Mac and went to a PC.

The good thing is that since everything seems to be in working order the panel discussion from the event will be broadcast live over the Internet at this channel: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/being-rapanui

The "Save Rapa Nui" event will be an evening of film, music, art, food, and discussion of the indigenous people of Rapanui also know as Easter Island and their current struggle for sovereignty.

The event will be next Thursday October 28th, 2010 at the Barnsdall Art Theater in Los Angeles. The program will being at 6pm. Tickets and more information can be found at www.saverapanui.org

We will be showing the film Being Rapanui - but this will not be screening over the webcast, so if you are local to the Los Angeles area you have to buy a ticket and come out. But if you are outside the Los Angeles area please do tune in to the panel discussion.

Girls to the Front - History of the Riot Grrl Movement

I was just sent a link to a project called "Girls to the Front" by a woman that I used to work with as a Camera Assistant in New York City Mary Billyou. The project is a online collection of videos, like the one above, of women speaking about their experiences with the Riot Grrl movement. The videos are an online accompaniment to a book written by Sara Marcus, who is also the woman in the video above. Her book is a history of the movement.

Check out what Vainity Fair has to say about the book -

"Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front is not only a historical rockument of the revolutionary 90s counterculture Riot Grrrl movement, which birthed the DIY feminist punk scene, but also a rousing inspiration for a new generation of empowered rebel girls to strap on guitars and stick it to The Man." — Vanity Fair

It's not Hollywood or Bollywood, it's Nollywood!

The poster for Reggae Boys, which stars two of Nollywood's most famous stars.

The Nigerian movie industry also known as Nollywood produces about 2,500 movies a year. Which is about two and a half times as many films as Bollywood and over five times as many as Hollywood. The average Nollywood film costs between $17,000 and $25,000 US. The Nigerian film scene is fiercely low budget and DIY, but what makes it extremely interesting is the authenticity of the movies. This authenticity and proud African point of view is explored in depth in the documentary "Nollywood Babylon". This doc is one of the best written that I have seen in a long time.

One Voice: This is No Ordinary High School Musical

I am lucky enough to have Director of One Voice Lisette Maire Flanary (Lehua Films) a writing mentor, so before writing this entry I met up with Lisette at IHOP in downtown LA (my suggestion) to ask "Would it offend you if I described your documentary as Spellbound meets Native Hawaiian soul?". Her eyebrow raised and she shot up straight in the booth "No way! That's exactly how we pitched it."

One Voice follows a group of teenage chorus directors as they compete for the honor of their young lifetime. To represent their class and compete to take home the grand prize trophy in the Kamehameha Schools song contest. The contest is a unique amalgam of Hawaiian language songs, intense vocal arrangements, with a healthy pinch of band geek. Which, is totally hot now thanks to Glee.

This is Lisette's third film destined for public television broadcast, and is her most emotionally gripping documentary to date. While watching One Voice at the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival the audience in the Director's Guild Theater, completed absorbed in the action, applauded enthusiastically along with the proud onscreen parents after the song performances.

One Voice will be airing next year on Public Television, until then the film will be screening at film festivals domestically and internationally. You can see the trailer a www.onevoicemovie.com

Inciting Incidents

I have be struggling with finding a launching point for the 2,500th revision of this treatment I am doing. The major sticking point seems to be finding a inciting incident that really begins the quest for my name. I haven't found it yet, but I feel like I am getting a little bit closer at least thanks to this awesome blog entry from on the New Doc Editing website called "Launching the Protagonist's Quest"

Pacific X-Change Participants

I just got back yesterday from Oahu. I was there for three days for a filmmaker conference, and I met a lot of cool people. I have another blog entry that is being posted on the ITVS website about the conference itself, which is reposted below. But I thought it would be good to showcase some of the other filmmakers that I met while I was over there because there is absolutely a budding community of filmmakers all throughout Polynesia, which is very exciting for me to see. Here are just a few:



Jacob Holcomb - lives on Oahu and is currently working on a documentary about the revitalization of the art of Tongan Tatooing. I also got to see the vampire film that he made. It was an official selection of the 2008 Louis Vuitton Hawai‘i International Film Festival. He is working on making the feature. You can see the trailer and more at: www.hawaiivampire.com



Keoni Kealoha Alavarez - is from Pahoa, Hawai‘i his current project is about Hawaiian burial grounds. You can learn more about his productions here: www.hawaiianislandproductions.org

The Pacific X-Change ITVS blog entry

Below is a little taste of the article I wrote for the ITVS blog. If you would like to see the entire thing and leave a comment that is great. Just go to the ITVS blog Beyond the Box.

Blogging for ITVS

I will be attending and blogging about the ITVS Pacific X-Change conference in Honolulu, Hi from August 27th - 30th. More to come about that.

Seattle Fundraising Screening Tickets

A name is a name... unless its 63 letters long.

Central Cinema
1411 21st Avenue
Seattle, WA 98122
July 15th, 2009
6pm - 8:30pm
www.central-cinema.com

Haku Inoa: To Weave a Name is the deeply personal story of filmmaker Christen Marquez’s journey to heal her family relationships, which have been devastated by her Mother’s mental illness. Driven by the desire to to learn the meaning of her enigmatic Hawaiian name. Christen attempts to unite her scattered family and come to terms with her estranged mother, because her mother is the only one who knows the true meaning. However, learning her name proves to be more difficult then Christen first realizes. The film brings up deeper questions about surviving in a family with mental illness, and the modern cultural identities of “on-island” and “off-island” Native Hawaiians also called Kanaka Maoli.

I will be screening some very old work of mine, and the very newest. I will also be dancing hula there too, so that should be cool.

BUY TICKETS HERE: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/69035

If you cannot make it to the screening you can still donate to the project here by clicking on the yellow donate button: http://www.paradocsproductions.com/haku_inoa_donate.html

Dark Material

Here is a cool short doc on the theme of Hope and Fear by my Reel Grrl buddies up in Seattle. Check out all of the other short films on the site, and vote for the ones that you like.

Here's the link

Fair Use Free Speech

A video produced by the Center for Social Media about best practices of fair use for documentary filmmakers. They also produced a really great document called The Documentary Filmmaker's Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use you can download it and find other fair use resources at: www.centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse

Media Database for Documentary Funding

I have found this website for documentary film funding called the Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media. http://media.gfem.org/ There is one requirement for entering your projects into this database is that you ave at least one foundation or government funder.

I haven't fully investigated all of the aspects of the site yet, but I have started the profile for my film, and I poked around and found this other interesting project called The Salmon People. I liked it because it is also another personal journey film dealing with family relationships and cultural identity.

You can check out that film's profile here at The Salmon People

VIMBY - Fast Friday

It was really great meeting you Dave. Always love to see a DIY film like this have success. Best of luck in LA! Hope to see you around.

VIMBY - Fast Friday