Reel Grrls Programming Update: Music Video Camp

Last week marked Reel Grrls' first-ever Spring Break Music Video Camp: new and experienced teen media-makers joined us over their spring break to conceive, shoot, edit, and animate music videos for four local bands - in only five days.

The videos are now up on our Vimeo Workshop Page - check them out! I think you will agree that the grrls were able to complete pretty amazing work in such a short amount of time. Many of the participants had never shot video on an advanced camera or edited on Final Cut Pro!

One thing we really enjoyed about the camp was the opportunity to introduce the grrls to amazing local (and female-anchored) acts Canary Sing, the Young Evils, the Nextdoor Neighbors, and Another Perfect Crime. Thanks so much to all of the bands for providing us with songs, and giving the grrls the creative freedom to run wild on the videos!



Reel Grrls participants, mentors, and staff all agreed that a huge highlight of the camp were the visits from local filmmakers (and music video producers) Zia Mohajerjasbi and Lynn Shelton. Zia brought along his friend Ben (also known as Macklemore). They showed their recent video for The Town, and talked about their process in creating it.



Lynn Shelton is best known most recently for her phenomenally successful feature film, Hump Day. But she has also produced a number of excellent music videos for Seattle artists, all of which are viewable on her website. Her presentation was incredibly informative - she walked us through her entire process, sharing with us her call sheets, treatments, and other preproduction tools. It was amazing!

When all was said and done, the grrls really blew everyone away with what they were able to accomplish in just a few days of shooting. One group even managed to shoot over three minutes of stop-motion animation with paper cutouts in just two and a half days! That was a lot of scissor work!



Here's their finished product. All of the music videos were just outstanding. We can't wait to run this program again!

The Next Door Neighbors: Liars from ReelGrrls Workshops on Vimeo.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Version Tracker

For this week's tech tip, I want to point you to an incredibly useful website called Version Tracker.

Basically, this website is a way to track the many different software releases coming out every single day. It provides links to up-to-date software/update downloads, user reviews and lists of the most popular current downloads. But it is so much more awesome than that!

Version Tracker lets you search for software by keyword and operating system. So you might go there and search for "audio recording" within "Mac OSX" and come up with a whole slew of different programs to choose from.

As you can see, the search return gives you tons of relevant info: A brief description of each program, whether or not it is free (!!), user ratings and how many times it has been downloaded. This way, you can make an informed decision about which software will work best for you.

Best of all, Version Tracker only posts download links that are safe and up to date.

Can you tell I am a total Version Tracker groupie?? After trying it, I bet you will be too.

Weekly Links Round Up!

Jenny Hagel has posted a new episode of Feminist Rapper! Go watch it now, it's hilarious.

Groupon has a great 50% off deal on one day passes to the Nation Film Festival for Talented Youth (NFFTY). But hurry, you have to buy it by the end of the weekend!

Speaking of NFFTY, Reel Grrls is sponsoring a panel on women and minorities in Hollywood on April 30 as part of the festival.

The Women's Media Center explains why Net Neutrality is a feminist issue.

One of our fave blogs, feministing.com, interviewed Reel Grrls Executive Director Malory Graham. Read it here.

X Factor Film is sponsoring a short film contest on Vimeo. Upload your short of five minutes or less and be eligible for faaaabulous prizes.

Our very first video blog!

Maile (the RG Program Manager) and I had a long conversation the other day about Bristol Palin and her now anti-teen pregnancy PSA. Then we realized, hey, we like making videos, let's turn this into a vlog! And so we did. Enjoy!





So what do you think of Bristol's PSA? Let us know in the comments!

Tech Tip Tuesday: Paste Attributes

This week's tech tip is for all of you Final Cut Pro editors out there. If you don't already know about pasting attributes on your clips, then get ready to jump for joy. This is one awesome tech tip!

Pasting attributes is when you take something that you have added to or changed about a clip (like filters, motion, audio levels etc.) and paste it on to one or more other clips. Here's how you do it:


• Step 1: Select the clip that has the attributes you want to use on your other clips. Copy that clip.

• Step 2: Select the clip or clips to which you want to add the attributes (you can do many clips at once).

• Step 3: Right click anywhere on your selected clips (or if you don't have a dual-click mouse, click while holding down the "control" key), and choose "paste attributes" from the pull-down menu.

• Step 4: In the dialogue box that pops up, click the boxes next to each attribute you want to paste.

"Basic motion" refers to scale, rotation and location (center & anchor point). Keep "scale attribute times" checked if you are pasting keyframes to clips of different lengths (it keeps the keyframes scaled to each clip, meaning that if you're pasting from a longer clip with keyframes at the start & end, the shorter clip you paste to will have the keyframes scaled down to its beginning and end). If you don't have keyframes to paste (or don't know what they are), uncheck that box.

Note that you can also paste the levels and pan for your audio. This is a great help for audio equalizing!

• Step 5: After checking all the attributes you want to paste, hit "OK."

• Step 6: Jump for joy at all the time you've saved!

Tech Tip Tuesday: Target Disk Mode!

Reel Grrls Technical Director Lila here, with my first Tech Tip Tuesday for you!

Many of you may already know about target disk mode, but I wanted to share it with you just in case, because I use it ALL the time to transfer data! Plus the first time I learned about this tech tip, it totally blew my mind.

Target disk mode is when you connect two Mac computers (laptops or desktops, although some much older desktops don't support it) directly to each other via a firewire cable. If you have a large amount of files on one computer and need to transfer it to another computer, target disk mode is a great way to do it without having to go through the time involved in using an external hard drive, in which case you have to copy the files twice: once onto the hard drive, then again onto the other computer. Why bother? Just use target disk mode! Here is how you do it:


• Step 1: Find the appropriate firewire cable
The newest Macbook Pros have one firewire 800 plug (which takes 9-pin firewire plug-in), Mac desktops and older laptops have either just one firewire 400 port (which takes 6-pin firewire plug-in), or one of each. (Unfortunately, currently Macbooks don't have firewire ports at all, but that's another story.)

• Step 2: Connect the two computers via the firewire cable

• Step 3: Restart the computer that you want to use as a disk while holding down the "t" key. Don't let go of "t" until you see this image on the restarting computer's screen:

The computer with the firewire image now showing on its screen should show up on the other computer just as if it were an external hard drive. You can now transfer data from or to the disk mode computer's hard drive directly. Yay!

Feminist Rap

You don't really hear enough about feminist rap, do you? But it's definitely there, a little under the radar. There are some incredible women in hip hop, kicking ass and taking names.

A few years ago I was always reading gushing reviews of Northern State. This video for Girls For All Seasons from 2004 does already seem surprisingly dated, but it's pretty rad, none the less.



Here in Seattle there are the amazing ladies of Canary Sing. They just released their first video a few months ago- check it out!




And then there is this great new web show that prompted me to write this post. Feminist Rapper, created by Jenny Hagel (and partially shot in the neighborhood I grew up in on Chicago's north side) is absolutely hilarious. We can't wait for the next episode!



For more feminist rap, check out NOW NYC's list of 220 feminist rap songs!

Reel Grrls Recommends: My So-Called Life

A long time ago, I was a teenager in a time period we historians like to call "The 1990's." It was a strange time, that era. One of the top singles of 1990 was Poison by Bel Biv Devoe, a song which included this wonderful piece of advice about women: "never trust a big butt and a smile." But within just a few years, the grunge explosion happened in Seattle, and 60 miles south in Olympia, the Riot Grrl movement was blossoming. By the middle of the decade "girl power" became relatively mainstream, and marketers started to notice that women and girls were surprisingly interested in cultural products that didn't patronize them. Weird, right?

In 1994, Winnie Holzman, a successful television screenwriter, created My So-Called Life. The show told the story of 15-year-old Angela Chase, played by Claire Danes (who, unlike most actors playing teens, was actually 15 when the show was made). Angela dealt with pretty normal teen stresses: growing apart from old friends, crushing on unattainable boys, feeling like your parents will never ever understand you. But the show was groundbreaking in so many ways- it had a female main character but was popular with both guys and girls, it was the first series to feature a gay teen as a main character, it treated the teen experience as real and important, the parents stories were just as vital as the kids, and it never sensationalized any of these experiences. Plus, the 90's fashion and music can't be beat. (Oh my god, there is. So. Much. Flannel. On this show!)

The show had an instant cult following among teens. I fondly remember my own obsession with My So-Called Life. I was in 7th grade, and I had to ensure I was home every Thursday night to see it, since this was long before you could catch up on TV with a DVR or the internet. I was still trying to figure out who I was, but I was pretty sure I wanted to be exactly like Angela Chase- or maybe even Rayanne Graf, her really cool, new best friend. Everything on the show seemed to be exactly mirroring my own experiences- it was the rare example of media that actually helped me understand my world better. A decade later, during my senior year of college, a boy named Peter bought the DVD box set, and for a few months, a group of about 20 people gathered late at night in an empty lecture hall to re-watch what had been a formative piece of our collective adolescence.

Despite My So-Called Life's popularity among it's target audience, it didn't last very long. It aired opposite four of the most watched sitcoms on TV and the ratings stunk. After only 19 episodes, it was canceled, and it ended in a cliffhanger! The teens of America shed a silent tear in protest. Four years later, Dawson's Creek went on the air and the explosion of teen dramas began, and it continues today. Maybe if Angela Chase had been a tan, muscular boy on a fledgling network that never expected very high ratings in the first place, My So-Called Life could have stayed on tv a couple more years.

If you've never seen My So-Called Life, I cannot recommend it to you enough. Or, if you enjoyed it as a teen, I emphatically propose re-watching it- it's even better than you remember. Lucky for you, it's all available for free on Hulu!

Wednesday links round up

Free Press invites you to contact your representatives in Washington to stop the Comcast-NBC merger.

Girl Power is a new book about 90's revolution of women in music. We really enjoyed this review by 13-year-old Tavi, fashion superstar behind the Style Rookie.

PBS is sponsoring a contest for youth 13 and up to create a video diary about their lives. The best entries will be selected to air on April 11th alongside Masterpiece's presentation of the Diary of Anne Frank.

Shortie Fest is coming! The film festival for students ages 7-18 is accepting entries now through April 9.

Bad news: the opportunities for women directors in Hollywood has actually gone down since 2008. So, despite our excitement over Kathryn Bigelow's best director nod, Women & Hollywood says 2009 was no year of the woman in Hollywood.

Sociological Images did an excellent (and hilarious) round up of stereotypes of masculinity.

Join us for the 2010 Reel Grrls Oscar Party!

Have you heard the amazing news?

This fantastic woman filmmaker has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Director!


Yep, Kathryn Bigelow, director of The Hurt Locker, is the fourth woman ever nominated for Best Director in the 81 year history of the Oscars. No woman has ever won this award. Getting more women in film and changing this has always been a huge part of the Reel Grrls mission.

Kathryn's been raking in the awards around the world- she already won Best Director at the BAFTAs and from the Directors Guild of America. As for the Oscars... Right now we can only cross our fingers and hope with all our might that Kathryn is going to win. But do you know where the best place in Seattle to be when she wins is going to be?

Why, at the Reel Grrls 2nd Annual Oscar Party, of course! You know us reel grrls are going to go bananas when Kathryn walks away with that big, bald statuette.

We've got an amazing night planned- a red carpet, gourmet food, fancy outfits, great short films from our grrls, and awards for Seattle women in film. You'd have to try really hard to not have a good time at this thing.

Click here to buy your tickets now!