Wednesday, March 23, 2016

Kerry Cassidy is broke

        "We basically have run out of money," says Kerrynote 1 in this update video dated March 17th. The caption reads "We are totally out of funds .. please help." Well, that's straightforward enough, anyway.

        To me, the surprise is that this didn't happen years ago. In my opinion, running the kind of wild and woolly operation Kerry does, and expecting your audience to support you 100% financially, is foolhardy. It might work for PBS (just barely,) but PBS's audience is mostly professional people with what they call discretionary income. My picture of Kerry's core audience is of people who barely have jobs, let alone money to throw around to enable Kerry to jet off to Gobekli Tepe with her paramour and stay in a nice hotel.

        So she may have managed to swing the Gobekli Tepe boondoggle, but the more general evidence is that I'm right. Late last year Kerry announced an Indiegogo campaign, with a $100,000 goal. The campaign wound up on November 28th having raised $5,850 -- just 6% of the target. This despite the fact that a $5,000 contribution would get you a perk of a dinner with Kerry (Good luck getting a word in edgeways there.)

Down and out
        I'm not unsympathetic. It's tough being broke, and believe me I know. But I just think Kerry's ambitions are totally unrealistic. She works hard, no doubt about that, but her product really isn't very good. She claims to have done a year of film school at UCLA Extension, but I see very few signs of a professional approach to videography. Her IMDB page includes no credits whatsoever as director, producer, writer, editor or director of photography. It lists just two credits as "herself." (I won't brag about my own IMDB credits, but they're... er, a lot.)

        This 25-minute video from Kerry's May 2013 trip to Washington DC serves to illustrate Kerry's shortcomings as a videographer. She starts with a minute of establishing shots of the city, setting up the venue (The National Press Building.) OK, a perfectly decent idea. But what she gives us is a minute of the camera waving around, finding focus, passing over some recognizable stuff then moving right along. This is not what you do to establish a location. What you do, as a professional, is to capture enough scenes from the tripod to offer your editor so that he or she can cut together a montage of the appropriate length. You do not use the out-of-focus shots or the wavey-waveys.note 2 Then you write a script that fits the picturenote 3, record it, and dub it on. Optionally, mix in a little M&E (Music and Effects.)

        In practice the editor may be the same person as the producer and camera operator, as I'm sure it is in the world of Kerry. Makes no diff. And I'm not saying the occasional whip-pan or crash-zoom is verboten -- just that everything shouldn't be on the move all the time. It's dizzying, and it serves its intentions very poorly.

        Her framing during interviews isn't too bad, actually. I was trained to keep the interviewee's eyes between 2/3 and 3/4 up the screen height, and Kerry pretty-much follows that. But from 06:58 to 07:28 in this piece she keeps the camera trained on the interviewee's lapel as she introduces herself for half a minute. CHOP IT OUT, Kerry. A professional would never allow that dreck into the cut story. She doesn't shoot enough cutaways to edit the interviews tightly -- she seems to be content to let them drone on at full length, and that applies to her entire oeuvre as far as I've seen. To my mind, she simply doesn't have the instinct for what works to create watchable documentaries.

        Her pieces to camera run the range from so-so to frighteningly bad. She doesn't light herself, so we get an ultra-low contrast picture. She doesn't seem to believe in learning a script, or teleprompting one, so we get plenty of ers and ums, and she has the devastating habit of shaking her head every so often, as though getting her hair out of her eyes (check the appeal for support video, at 01:45.) Her editing is at times inaccurate (again, check the appeal vid at 09:57 for a double-cut.) I hear you say this is all part of her down-home appeal, but I don't buy it. UNPROFESSIONAL is the word that comes to mind.

Awake and Aware
        So my suggestion to Kerry would be to give up on it. Maintain your library of however-many-thousand over-length interviews you have, but stop prancing around the world making more of them and expecting volunteers to foot the bill. Perhaps stick to conference organizing — that surely generates plenty of cash. The punters who pay good money to attend the Awake and Aware conferences aren't interested in Kerry specifically, but in the speakers she comes up with. She's pretty good at that, and of course these days she could always have a great new career as an Uber driver.

Update March 24
        Since declaring that she's skint and cannot continue "this important work," Kerry has produced and released the following videos:

Same day: Richard Bartlett & Melissa Joy: Matrix Energetics (whatever those are)
A day later: Chris Kehler: Quantum Energy Healing (whatever that is)

And today, "The Brussels bombings were a False Flag." Oh yes of course they were. Everything tragic is. That way we can all admire Kerry's brilliant access to THE REAL STORY and forget about wasting sympathy on the 30+ fake families who are pretending to have lost fake loved ones. Terrific job, Kerry.

Update March 31
Announcements that tell their own story: Today Kerry announced that she's putting together a tour of Europe, to take place sometime this Spring. She doesn't say she'll be hitchhiking and staying in youth hostels, either.

If that announcement had come a day later I'd have thought "Yeah, yeah, Kerry. April fool, right?"

============================================
[1] For those who have NFI who Kerry is, here's a briefing.
[2] Unless you're Dennis Hopper. Sorry, Easy Rider is one of my pet hates.
[3] In the newsgathering business they tend to start with a narration track and cut to it. Fine, that works too (but in my opinion is less creative.)

28 comments:

Chris Lopes said...

It doesn't really work for PBS either. They get some of their funding from tax payers and from various foundations. Where Kerri gets her money has always been an open question for me.

expat said...

Quite right, Chris. "Viewers like you" only provide a minority of the total budget. All the more reason to declare Kerry's business model a non-starter.

Chris Lopes said...

Exactly. Even Hoagland tried to line up other sources of income(dvd sales, conferences, and whatever C2C was paying him) before begging for money from his fans. In the end, not he could make that work.

The guys making a go of it in this area our the folks who write books. Bara, for all his faults, has a good enough work ethic to keep turning out(really bad) books. Of course they are crap, but they give him a little cash and something to talk about at conferences. They also give him some credibility with gullible (or apathetic) TV producers.

expat said...

Updated

expat said...

Irrelevant comment from "Captain Novvak" disallowed

THE Orbs Whiperer said...

Do you feel there is a legitimate purpose to cover the subjects in programs they have produced, Patrick, and that the only problem is with the craftsmanship of the production, or should there be censorship, all together?

Dee said...

Expat wrote: "forget about wasting sympathy on the 30+ fake families who are pretending to have lost fake loved ones."

It might, in this case, point to a more psychopathic (narcissistic?) tendency: to construct a view which inhibits actual sympathy for the mindless suffering, waste and ignorance while elevating one where everything is rationally "controlled" and "staged", in some evil and hidden way. It's the typical flipped inside-out world view of a person trying to keep ones own intolerable suffering and desire out of sight by controlling those elements by endlessly restructuring them. And sometimes for good reasons: accepting would break down a fragile ego-structure, fragile in the sense of vulnerable when the fantasy story arch production would stop functioning.

It's all too human but so exaggerated in this case! And very sad how Kerry does not see how she's describing mostly her own panic, secrecy and conspiracy for the world to take notice. Endlessly self-therapizing, without solution since the hiding is the source of problem and as well the source of her current power, her current "way to be".

The fact this stuff still has some kind of audience, shows not only that there are others who resonate with her disposition but more that there's a market for the outrageous, repetitive and tantalizing speculation. Members of such audience might have complex and varying motives to remain (briefly) interested. There's in my view no easy answer, no handy category to put them all in. Not even "nut cases" or "woo crowd". Perhaps this is more like conspiracy p@rn? While in this case the director believing it's true art...

Dr. Dee

Anonymous said...

@expat

based on previous posts I know what a "pain in the nuts" Ripley can be but on the other hand it was always pretty funny,
entertaining and "informative" how she always seem to be able and willing to make a complete nutter out of her-selves.
So....a request to allow her comments every now and then....just for the fun of it ;-)

Happy Easter holiday

Adrian

expat said...

Theadora: ABSOLUTELY NO CENSORSHIP. Kerry has an absolute right to say silly things, just as I have an absolute right to mock them. Click on the little KERRY CASSIDY label at the bottom of my article to see everything I've ever written about her. Summary: It's both the content and the packaging I object to. If Kerry fails for lack of financial support, that's just what she deserves. But as I hinted in yesterday's update, she's just bluffing.

Dee: Your analysis is excellent. I fully agree.

Adrian: I did, see?

Erickson said...

For awhile I might have dreamed of a world where Kerry could not afford to continue her work, where she would not be able to visit "Captain" Mark Richards in prison because the vending machines in the visiting room raised their prices, or she could not travel around the world with Sean Morton (although future trips with Sean will probably have to be delayed in any event). It would be nice if her supporters simply decided that her quest for insider knowledge and conspiracy was not worth the price they were paying - not because of censorship, not even because of the risk of a scaler attack, but because people decided that whatever she had to say was just another false flag and they got bored.

But from your update, it does appear that it is just a dream.

Chris Lopes said...

She has an audience, just not a paying one. Hoagland has the same issue, but to a lesser degree. He has his own BS to sell, where as she's just selling other people's stories.

Those interviews really are awful. I saw the 3 hour one with Hoagie, and it was all over the place. Instead of trying to keep him on topic, she let him (and his ego) roam free. Truly bad.

Anonymous said...

@expat

Thank you...and I fully agree with your "...Kerry has an absolute right to say silly things, just as I have an absolute right to mock them..." reaction to Ripley's post. The world is going berserk with political correctness and the silly offspring it produced. There are to much [potential] narcissistic people around thinking they have the right to be offended for example. It is nothing more then a silly and childish whine. If we would or should allow such a right to exist they also should except its offspring...Having the right to offend.

So yes, excellent point

Adrian

expat said...

Lest any readers think I'm exaggerating the attitude of conspira-droids (not just Kerry) to domestic tragedy, here's a quote I stole from Metabunk, who were in turn quoting from the NorthernTruthSeeker blog:

"WHY are there still shills out there in the alternative media and the so called "truth movement" trying to push the lie that Sandy Hook was real to this very day? Honestly, even with the other frauds including the San Bernardino fraud, the Virginia fraud, the Boston Bombing fraud, etc, etc, staring them right in their faces, they still have the nerve to say that Sandy Hook was real? It would not surprise me that they were paid off (estimates are that the criminals involved have given each person participating some $666,000 in blood money for perpetuating the lie...) and are now stuck with their lies.... I honestly wonder how they can live with themselves?"

THE Orbs Whiperer said...

No censorship, Patrick? Well then, call it obstinacy. You dismissed my first comment on this thread, even though it pertains to that Dick Hoagland, who also deleted my comment on the same subject.

Now watch, he's going to do just as I preDICKted, and start ranting about the incoming comet having a companion under intelligent control, and 39 more nerds in Nikes are liable to wash down a fistfull of sleeping pills with vodka and castrate themselves all over again.

I'll say it right here and now, their blood will be on your hands, because you can't handle the truth.

THE Orbs Whiperer said...

Or do you think that the Heaven's Gate suicide pact never happened, and that it was all just a show, with actors playing dead as they were hauled out on stretchers to the ambulance? Maybe they drank vodka that had been dosed with knock out drops, and then they were castrated? At any rate, that Dick Hoagland and Art Bell were like Orson Welles doing, War of the Worlds.

To this day, they remain unrepentant about their complicity in driving those impressionable audience members to their deaths, even if it was all staged. Hoagland and Bell wouldn't have had inside information about it all being an act, would they? Hoagland did go so far as to say that he heard that Marshall Applewhite was a CIA operative.

At any rate, what are the odds that three comets would be headed towards Earth, flying in formation, equidistant apart, as if three lights on the starboard side of a gimoungous triangle? It must be another fake picture from NASA.

Trekker said...

What three incoming comets? Comet 252PLinear flew by Earth on March 21st, followed by Comet P/2016 BA14 a day later, and both were keenly observed by comet watchers. There WAS no third one.

THE Orbs Whiperer said...

I count THREE!
Objects 252P/Linear, P/2016 & BA14

Amateur comet watchers don't hold NASA accountable.

expat said...

Please pay attention Theadora:

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observing/p2016-ba14-closest-comet-in-almost-250-years03162016/

THE Orbs Whiperer said...

If you noticed, Patrick, they ASSUME that the object is a comet, because it has a tail, and that the two companions are chips off the old block. In any event, we are being desensitized to the possibility of ETs, so as to mitigate the potential damage to cultural impact upon society, as cautioned by Margaret Mead's contribution to the so called, Brookings Report. Otherwise, if NASA knows for certain that the object(s) are a comet, then they would state so uncategorically, instead of qualifying the description.

Trekker said...

P/2016 and BA14 are one and the same comet, NOT two separate ones!

Look at the caption of the photo of the 'three' green comets.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/03/18/comets-brush-earth/81974318/

It's nothing more than a composite photo of ONE of them - P/2016: "The STACK of telephoto exposures was captured on March 16 from Penwortham, South Australia".

THE Orbs Whiperer said...

There is a subtle inference that the objects might not be a comet. Why the ambiguity?

Furthermore, notice the un-natural, symmetry. The two trailing objects following an equal distance, starboard of stern, from the lead object.

expat said...

Discussion of these comets is now closed.

expat said...

Comment from Novvak/Theadora attempting to extend the comet theme disallowed.

Dee said...

Planning and announcing tours could perhaps supply quick financial relief as interested fans often need to book and pay these "exclusive" opportunities in advance or in some cases lump sum advances might be paid by the organizing parties. Not sure about cancellations though. Does event insurance exist?

Dee

expat said...

Utterly irrelevant comment from Novvak/Theadora disallowed

Trekker said...

What's she on about now? https://twitter.com/projectcamelot

She's channeling some guy called 'Faily' (appropriate) who failyed in his attempt to warn us of all sorts of calamities on the 7th.

http://projectcamelotportal.com/2016/04/06/13047/

expat said...

Sheer raving lunacy. It's hard to believe that even her most devoted fan would give that rubbish any credence.

Dee said...

"ANNOUCEMENT [sic] posted here for simplicity" -- That's a gem already.

Nothing simple about it. The announcement is unsurprisingly riddled with factual errors and incoherent usage of various technical or formal terms, showing the source, human or not, has little exposure to the topic apart from what's gleaned from various similar blogs.

It doesn't come as a surprise though as it's known that in times of high stress, the schizophrenic personality retreats in the self, dissociating to the extent of feeling "others" speaking, but mostly just facilitating through the act some "safe" environment to deal what must look like an extremely dangerous world ready to explode (and in some ways, that's always somewhat true, just more vividly so for people in this state).

Sometimes this can provide some creative or at least amusing output. Not in the case of Kerry though. Perhaps inspiring to other crazies who are less creative or able to write coherent sentences? How can this increasing collapse ever end well?

Dee