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Andrea Bonsignore's Week #13 Cellphone Video winner -- "Whelk-Come Mat with Barry"

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Fairhaven's Roger Masson takes week #11 of the Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Cellphone Video Contest.

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Fairhaven's Roger Masson takes week #10 of the Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Cellphone Video Contest.

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Sebastian Ebarb's winning cellphone video for Week #8 of the Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Contest. This video was shot in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

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Art and Soul

Fully half of the human brain is dedicated to vision, so if you want to have an impact on the world, form, color, font and line are handy things to master. Graphic designer Hannah Haines and her colleagues at New Bedford’s mediumstudio use them as tools in service to both art and commerce and, they hope, to nudge us all towards a better place.

Haines’s specialty is conjuring up visual identities for abstract ideas and nascent products, for established firms and businesses still wet behind the ears. Her clients range from Cape and Islands NPR and the Buzzards Bay Coalition to The National Yiddish Theatre, the National Ovarian Cancer Coalition and Xerox’s XMPie Inc. She has helped remake the public face of New Bedford’s Zeiterion Theater, and she created the Buzzard Bay Film Festival logo that graces the top of this page. 

For Haines, success comes with a concept that communicates in an instant and reduces the distance between head and heart to zero in a flash. Inspired by designers Paula Scher, Tibor Kalman, and Stefan Sagmeister, she strives for intensity, humor and economy in her work. If a design is “overly complicated or decorated, then you're probably trying to compensate for the lack of an idea,” she says. “But if it's smart, intentional, thoughtful and fairly simple, then it's probably right.”

Haines begins by asking her clients questions, hoping to pinpoint what makes their project unique. She boils down the resulting keyword list to three terms that she then lets steep in her brain. "I do a lot of what I call ‘research,’ but it's really just meditating, looking at things and trying to be a sponge and just absorbing things that might inspire me visually, to let it kind of marinate so I can start seeing it."

The solutions pop into view on their own schedule, and she keeps a sketchbook beside her bed for those 2 AM moments when everything falls into place. “That's the time when my brain works the best, when I'm sleeping," she says with a laugh.

Haines started mediumstudio in 2003 with designer John Cox. There are now five people on board, all from the New Bedford area, and they share a strong sense of mission.

“It was a very conscious decision for everyone involved in mediumstudio to do this in New Bedford,” Haines says. While most designers hope to make it in New York City, San Francisco, or abroad, mediumstudio’s artists are committed to the region and work “to raise the visual culture here. It’s more than a paycheck -- in some cases there is no paycheck -- but it's something that really fulfills us.”

Adds Haines, “I think design contributes to a sense of place and pride. So it benefits us to keep everything progressing and moving forward and making this area reach the potential that it has.”

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Andrea Bonsignore's "Nude Descending a Spiral Staircase" snags first place in the sixth week of the Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Cell Phone Video Contest. This video was shot in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

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"Tender is the Gneiss"

Andrea Bonsignore's First Place Winner, Week #5 of the Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Cell Phone Video Contest. On the sound track, in addition to the birds, is Andrea herself playing Francesco Geminiani's "Sonata for Oboe".

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"Hadley's Harbor" Roger Masson of Fairhaven, Massachusetts, wins another week  of the Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Cellphone Video Contest.

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Rowing Ashore in Kettle Cove Filmmaker: Roger Masson Roger Masson's First Place Co-Winner, Week #3 Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Cellphone Cinema Contest

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Let the Games Begin! Filmmaker: Andrea Bonsignore Andrea Bonsignore's First Place Co-Winner, Week #3 Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Cellphone Cinema Contest

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Call Me, Maybe? New Bedford Harbor Filmmaker: Roger Masson

Roger Masson's First Place Co-Winner, Week #3 Buzzards Bay Film Festival's Shoot the Summer 2012 Cellphone Cinema Contest

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The Law Man

Showbiz folk used to be rare outside of big cities, but nowadays if you’ve got Skype, a ton of bandwidth, and a Swiss Army knife of skills, you can leave New York and LA far behind.

Consider media and entertainment lawyer Tom Swift. He works in a landmark building on a quiet New Bedford street, but he negotiates contracts between major publishers and authors and nurtures films and television programs that shoot and screen around the world.

For example, Swift recently secured a German distribution deal for a low budget film shooting in Chile that allowed the film’s New York producer to pay for special effects and editing; he hammered out contracts with Harper Collins for the autobiography of Rodney King twenty years after the LA riots, and he has signed on as production counsel for Off Season, a horror film slated to shoot on Martha’s Vineyard this November.

Swift grew up in California, but often visited his grandfather who lived in New Bedford. Ten years ago, he became a full time Southcoast resident.

Swift says that filmmakers need to grapple with legal issues long before their cameras roll. But with fees that can approach two per cent of the production budget, a lawyer is the last thing filmmakers usually consider. But Swift loves movies and the collaborative process, “so I work with young filmmakers a lot just to help them get organized -- if there's funding, they take care of me when they can.”

Shoddy legal work can sink a film, Swift says. For example, distributors won’t touch a film without rights releases for not only every actor, extra and crew member, but for locations, copyrighted artwork that appears on walls, onscreen commercial products, for a clean ‘chain of title’ to the story or screenplay rights -- in short, for everything and everyone that makes a creative contribution to the project. A typical feature can require hundreds of releases; once filming is finished, it’s almost always too late to correct mistakes.

Swift has simple advice for anyone interested in media law: get some real world entertainment experience. Swift himself was a full-time rock and roll artist for twelve years and had a hit single with his band “Duke and the Drivers.” That armed him with enough industry credibility and contacts to find work once he completed his law degree.

Filmmaking, though, has different demands, Swift says. It’s “a heartbreaking process, and the dedication and perseverance that it requires only come from people with a certain type of mental and physical character.” So after a camera, a script, and, of course, a lawyer, what do filmmakers need?  Says Swift: “An unshakeable belief in their story and a cultivated ability to never accept no for an answer.”

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Where do You Wear Your Buzzards Bay Hat? 

A Continuing Series --Episode 3

B. J. Hart, deckhand and one of the planet's great human beings, sings about Buzzards Bay on Florida's St. Johns River Ferry.

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Post It Notes

Some people say that social media is ushering in a new age that will line our pockets, save our souls, and encircle the world with rainbows. But too often putting up all those posts is just a bothersome time suck that demands tons of effort for little return.

Filmmaker and Buzzards Bay Film Fest adviser Nick Francis, however, is making Facebook and Twitter pay off. “I’ve never placed an advertisement anywhere,” he says. Instead, he boosts his business with a flood of posts (5,038 tweets and counting); not infrequently “someone sends me an email and says ‘Hey, I see you always talking about this and that and I need a video or I need a website.’  Just one of those a year makes it all worth it.”

I spoke with Francis in late March, when he was in pre-production for a ten-day shoot in Beijing and Shanghai for Rosetta Stone, the language-learning software company. A native of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, Francis is the founder of Franchise Studios, which offers brand development and marketing services for web, video, film, print, and social media. His work has appeared in the Short Films Corner at Cannes and flashed across NASDAQ’s 10-story Times Square LED screen. He’s finishing up a documentary about the last Azorean whalers, and with Jeremiah Hernandez, owner of New Bedford’s U.G.L.Y. Gallery, he hosts “Make It Happen,” a one hour radio show about local culture and events that broadcasts every Sunday at 10 AM on WBSM-AM 1420.

Francis says that the social media space has become so crowded, with so many innumerable Facebook ‘Likes’ and re-re-re-posted links, that savvy strategy is key. His own tweets form a kind of correspondence course, a cascade of tips, links, and advice intended to show “we’re active in the space and that we know what we’re talking about. We focus on other businesses and strategies that our peers might find interesting to employ themselves.” He also throws in an occasional joke or picture from his daily life, so that he pops up among the tweets on website design, Facebook strategies, cool apps, and hot startups, as someone that his followers can trust and like. Once that hurdle is cleared, he says, he can “work toward the end result: making someone else’s business successful.”

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Finding the Heart of It

Making videos for three of the most influential departments in a 9,000-student university is not easy, but Buzzards Bay Film Festival advisor Don Burton seems to have found the key.  Burton is in the midsts of a second season of UMD Stories, a video series for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s advancement/alumni, public relations and admissions departments. The videos profile students, faculty and alumni, all to boost fundraising and recruitment. Burton says he set out to “find what’s in the heart” of the onscreen subjects. “Whether it’s a student studying nursing or art, or a professor working in oceanography, there’s a passion and an honesty, and the best thing that we can do is to try and bring that out."   Burton graduated from UMD in 1997 with a sculpture degree but soon moved to LA to work in film. In 2003 he started collaborating with The Post Studio, a production company specializing in marketing for the entertainment industry. If you’ve ever seen a behind-the-scenes featurette on a DVD from Hollywood, there’s a chance The Post Studio made it. In April of 2010, Burton’s friend Jennifer Raxter, UMD’s Director of Annual Giving, asked him to help edit a two minute fund-raising video that she had made -- for free. "It was a way to give back. But that’s also something you do a lot of during any creative career,” Burton says, laughing. “There’s always an abundance of free work out there.” The favor paid off, though -- soon the school asked for a proposal for an expanded series.  Working with Raxter, Burton included all the departments’ major players while planning season season two. "They were really happy about being asked and being part of that process.” Burton and Raxter found their on-camera subjects through the school’s social media and from recommendations from faculty and staff. The videos are teamed with a blog written by students and alumni. The blog and videos create their own type of conversation, he says. Building dialogues seems to be in Burton’s DNA. In New Bedford in April, 2008, he made Homeland, a film about post-9/11 paranoia and our individual lives. In 2009, he premiered the film at “Building Bridges to the Homeland” an art and film festival at the city’s Zeiterion Theater that drew 600 people and dozens of cultural partners, sponsors and guests from both coasts. The festival launched BridgeThink.org, an initiative that sponsors events which connect creative communities. Burton has brought the same goal to the University videos: They’re designed so their subjects can speak with their true voices. “We chose them because of their sincerity, their honesty,” Burton says. “We should be invisible and that person should shine.”

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