Hey everybody,

The Boston League Of Women Wrestlers will be throwing down this Thursday night at Harper's Ferry in Allston. I'll be taking an extended hiatus from wrestling after this show, so I hope you can make it!

We also need video & audio crew members for this shoot, so if you are interested & have time, please let me know!

Best Regards,

Lorraine
617-519-1428

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Get a bug's eye view into the complex and intriguing social lives of ants, and meet six scientists who have dedicated their lives to studying them. CCTV and Project Documentary proudly present "Ants"!

I've been riding my bike for 6 days straight. I threw a DVD in the mail to you guys. It has some migrant farm workers on it. I hope you can decode it and the quality will be up to snuff...

It's the best I could do. Otherwise I'd have to go through hundreds of Mini DV tapes to find the footage.

Hope all is well.

Jamie

Hi Everyone,

After you are all super stressed out and tired from trying to meet the edit deadline, just give up! No, I'm kidding - Just take a healthy break and come see B.L.O.W.W. - the Boston League Of Women Wrestlers - throw down at the Baseball Tavern on Boylston Street near Fenway. YES - YOU DO HAVE TIME - BLOWW will go on at 10:30, so you have plenty of time to make it there and even kill your first beer (delicious beer) before BLOWW takes the stage (or floor, actually).

You won;t get another chance to see us until the Tumultuous Champ Re-Match happening at HArper's Ferry in September, so come on down!

C'mon, you deserve it.*

*feel free to circulate this flier

-Lorraine

Hi Everyone,

Sarah and I did a lot of work on warefare tonight - and then forgot to save.

So, Sarah plan on coming in tomorrow night, and knows exactly what she wants to do to get that sequence back to where we want it, and then some!

We downloaded a bunch of GORGEOUS images from Kari Ryder-Wilkie's site and incorporated them into the sequence, and boy are those mongers scary.

For Agriculture, the farm footage needs to be captured, the tape is labeled as "Train and Agriculture B-Roll (ants)".

Wow - we learned a lot!

I will see you guys on Monday - Good Luck this weekend!!!

Regards,

Lorraine

I added a folder of brain images and videos that Mario Muscedere gave me for use in the film. It's under the IMAGES tab. There are microscopy images of leafcutter and Pheidole brains, and couple nice videos, one that's a pan of an ant brain from front to back and the other a computer reconstruction of a 3D brain image.

I will have to fill in for Jason this week, with the oh-so-exciting class notes.

1.) Eli played us some music samples he has worked up, to go with various themes. Very cool. Rob requested some more salsa beat in one of them. Eli will continue to make more samples and put them onto a folder in our hard drive - he told us to feel free to use them as we'd like when editing the rough cut!

2.) Jason showed us the new wiki. We can use it to make edits to the script. Jason suggested making edits in a color font, so we can see where changes have been made.

3.) Over the next week, we will try to put together a rough cut. There is a project file on the hard drive we can all work on, using the script/wiki as a guide. We can make separate sequences for each section to make editing easier, but should keep it all in the same project file.

Editing Times:
Tuesday 6 - 9: Sarah
Wednesday 6 - 9: Rob
Thursday 6 - 9: Jason O.
Friday 12 - 3: Amy S.
Monday 2:30 - 5:30: Amy M.

4.) Additional B-Roll:
Amy M. will keep in touch with Stefan about MCZ. As of yet no permits (booo!)
Amy M. will also go check out a spot that may have aphids/ants
Sarah B. will take a camera this weekend to shoot human crowd scenes
Rob has some footage of crowds from BU commencement we can use
Amy. M will check in with Jaime/Lorraine about agriculture B-roll

5.) Rob is working on the titles - wants to make sure his sense of humor doesn't offend anyone, will post examples to blog

I thought it was better to work with McLurkin's application of what ants could do for us, and then move to why we should study them, ending with Corrie's statement of the value of just studying ants.

I'll also add this to the Wiki.

Agriculture Paper Edits

We had a fantastic presentation about film scoring by Eli Kao that included listening to some examples of his own scoring work. We discussed the mood and function of music in our documentary.

We are headed into full speed editing. Take a look at the notes here.

Cambridge Community Television's Project Documentary class brings an exciting sneak peak at a documentary that will be premiering this June about ants. Join us as we learn about ant warfare and agriculture, meet some of the leading myrmecologists in the world, and watch the largest ant species in the Ecuadorian forest. read more...

Hey team!,
Check out the production stills from all of our past shoots:

To view higher resolution pictures, visit our Flickr page.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ant high quality stills

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ants

http://home.att.net/~B-P.TRUSCIO/STRANGER.htm Good list of similarities

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/ants/ MIT project on robots: Includes MPEGs

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jamesm/ Ant Robot Guy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A85TskjfGxo Time lapse of ants digging

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE4t6lk1fOk Ants eat mashed potato

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA7Bibh6Mnk Ants eat in time lapse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCphoGhRoxo&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGTVoAd10wk&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH3KYBMpxOU&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3u_R1vTQxc&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPso1hLeUOg&mode=related&search=

First, I want to congratulate everyone on all the hard work over the last two weeks. The class' determination to make a high quality piece is clearly evident in the posts on this blog.

We did a lot of detail work in the 5-14-07 class including updates on venues, interview transcripts and more.

Check out the linked notes and good work everyone!

Our first interview is 'In The Can'!

We shot our interview with Megan Frederickson on Wednesday, 5/9 in CCTV's big studio. Check out pictures at our Flickr account. Aida, Jason O. & Amy S. crewed on this hour long interview and the video looks and sounds great. Great job! Amy and Aida shared interviewer duties and they covered a broad range of topics with Megan. read more...

I'm supposed to be working on a paper right now (shh, don't tell my advisor). But searching through journal articles reminded me of these fine examples of weird science. Yes folks, someone got a grant to study this stuff!

Communal Peeing: a new method of flood control in ants
The title really just speaks for itself on this one.

Directed aerial descent in canopy ants
Most amusing is the methods. And of course the videos.

Ballistic jaw propulsion in trap-jaw ants
Again, it's all about the videos and more videos!

Attached Microsoft Word file of Amy Mertl's questions:

I will be posting production stills from our project to this Flickr account. Check out some stills from our shoot last weekend at BU. Send me any production stills that you take so that I can post them to this account.

On Saturday we shot over 2 hours of footage in Amy Mertl's lab at Boston University. There were six members of our team that were able to make it our for this shoot: Sarah Brett, Jamie O'Brien, Jason Ong, Amy Steptoe, Amy Mertl and myself. We got footage of the leafcutter ants demolishing a branch of leaves, as well as really beautiful close-up footage of the ants through a microscope. People should feel free to stop by the station and check out tour footage! And for people who have some time to spare, it would be great to start logging and capturing this footage.

I have some suggestions for the team shooting next week: read more...

I did a little research on copyright rules and found the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use from the Center for Social Media at American University.

Our use copyrighted material (i.e. clips from the movies "Antz", "Them!" and "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids) would fit nicely into Category #2: Quoting copyrighted works of popular culture to illustrate an argument or point. There is no concrete time limit for the use of these clips, but they must be properly identified. I envision us using these clips to illustrate human/ant interaction.

I am going to start collecting some movies that we could use as B-roll. Forward me any other suggestions for movies feature ants.

Great class everyone. I feel like we really made some progress. For those who couldn't make it, check out the notes from the class. We scheduled a lot of shoots and assigned a lot of tasks to class members. If you want to help out with any those things listed in the notes, get in touch with those people who are in charge.

Put any updates onto the blog, or comment on other folks' posts to add to the threads.

Again, great class.

Here is a link to the notes.

This is really just an excuse to test out our blog. But while I'm at it I thought of another possible forum to screen our final project - check out www.nerdnite.com.

It's a night of science themed talks, music and beer that runs every couple months at a bar in JP. I don't think they've had a movie before, but they are always looking for new things. And they get a big crowd!

Stefan Cover: Curator of the world’s largest ant collection
Gary Alpert: interactions between ants and other insects, pest control
Corrie Saux Moreau: ant evolution
Megan Frederickson: studies ant/plant interactions
E.O. Wilson: world’s most famous myrmecologist!
James Traneillo: professor of sociobiology
Kari Ryder Wilkie: studies ant diversity and conservation, ant-themed digital
Mario Muscedere/ Noah Frank: study ant brains
James McLurkin: swarming robots modeled after ants

Welcome to the first class of the Project Documentary: Ants. This is the second edition of Project Documentary. Last year, we produced a film about Citizen Journalism that has been featured at Harvard's Citizen Media Conference, Lucy Parson's Bookstore, CCTV's Web Channel and Cable Channels, on-line and more. We are excited about the possibilities that this class presents.

To watch last year's installment, view: