When artistic hipster Sean (Josh Tyson) decides to make a film, he invites his old high school flame, Emily (Samantha Soule), to help him write it. 15 years out of high school, Emily is now a successful partner in a law firm and the only person Sean—whose never stuck it out at any of his creative ventures—knows with the actual cash to bankroll his project.
When Jonah (Tom Kemnitz Jr.) and Maggie (Jennifer Faith Ward) move into their dream home in Orlando to start their family, things take a sudden turn for the worse when Jonah loses his job at the local paper. Then, as they’re trying to figure out how to make ends meet to survive their mortgage, Jonah is lost at sea in a mysterious camping accident. Now Maggie has to deal with her grief while trying to do everything she can to save money so she won’t lose the anchor that’s drowning everything in her life: the house.
Last year, with the release of the film, Hardcore Henry (which was shot entirely with GoPro cameras in first person perspective), we decided that we were going to look at the different cost-effective sport and mobile cams on the market to see which ones were worth investing in for our readers. The gold standard in this market has been GoPro, who kindly provided us with one of their HERO4 Black cameras for this extended research article...
When our affiliate, DarkestGoth Magazine, needed a cutting edge video talk show that pushed the boundaries of microbudget creation some years ago, we helped them look at the notion of making it an animated show. The concept of a real talk show that’s entirely animated hadn’t really been explored, so that’s the realm we pushed into for their flagship creation, Whiskey & Chai: The Silas & Ami Show.
Over the past four years, I’ve used CrazyTalk to help them create the show, starting with pre-composited backgrounds and human amalgamation avatars which then moved on to true green screen backgrounds (so that we could composite in Premiere Pro) and a more 2D cartoon style avatars.
Many of our readers know that I fight fiercely for the empowerment of women, not by diminishing men, but by arguing for the simple removal of artificial gender barriers like the glass ceiling and other cultural artifacts from the past. Without these barriers, the best person will (or at least, has a chance to) win out. While microbudget content creating can remove many of these barriers at our level, what happens when you move on to the next level, where more money is on the line?
The challenge is that, much like racism, gender bias is so built into our world that most of us don't realize it's there. (And it's not just men doing it; women often continue the gender bias inadvertently even when they are in positions to change things.)