Interview with the producer of Mad Hot Ballroom over the adventures of music clearance. Considering all the pitfalls, it's a miracle any documentaries get made.
Ha! Apple launches new product-unveiling product.
skrbl is a handy web-based whiteboard.
The NYTimes now offers a TimesSelect University Discount, free access to TimesSelect to those who have a .edu e-mail address.
Technorati Tags: Apple, documentary, humor, IP, movies, music, nytimes, web
The famed French film journal Les Cahiers du Cinema is now online in an English translation.
Roger Deakins has a website at which he fields cinematography questions on a bulletin board.
Technorati Tags: cinematography, criticism, film, journalism, magazine, movies
Winter quarter, first year film school, they own me. Just two more weeks to go, though, and I'll be back to a more humane schedule. For now, though, immersion is the word that comes to mind. Cheers.
Adobe plans to offer an ad-supported online version of Photoshop within the next half year. That's a better idea than Photoshop Elements, the neutered version of Photoshop. It will be interesting to compare revenues from Photoshop Elements (most of which is probably a bounty paid to Adobe by other companies who bundle PS LE in with their products) with ad revenues from an online version of Photoshop.
If you want to shoot slow motion, it's best to do it "in camera" as opposed to in post in Final Cut Pro or some other editing software. To see why, watch this video displaying the results side by side.
Useful tips from a former Verizon sales rep.
A great tip to speed up Apple Mail, and a follow-up on how to automate that process.
Final Cut Pro 6 on slate to be announced at NAB. Also rumored is Final Cut Extreme, a hardware-accelerated version of Apple's video editing software to compete with Avid. A few years from now, an interesting HBS case study can be written on the battle between Apple and Avid in the non-linear editing market.
Ouch.
Technorati Tags: adobe, anthropology, Apple, cinematography, email, evolution, film, Mac, mail, photo, photography, photoshop, howto, software, tech, tech, traffic, video, web
NBC.com has an extended high-def preview of Spiderman 3 up until tomorrow night, 9pm PST. Quicktime 7 required. I still am not a fan of the look of the special effects sequences in the Spiderman movies, especially when he's swinging through the sky from building to building.
Technorati Tags: film, movies, trailer
Children of Men was the most overlooked movie at the Oscars, not picking up a single trophy among its three nominations. That it wasn't nominated for Best Picture is troubling, but only, I suppose, if you regard the Oscars as the most important arbiter of cinematic taste. But cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki can take solace in having won the ASC Cinematography Award. Winning the Oscar gives you greater name recognition to the world, but winning an award from your peers must be satisfying in its own way.
Technorati Tags: film, movies, cinematography, puppy
The NYTimes recently profiled Intrade, a site that acts as a prediction market by allowing trading on political, financial, entertainment, and other events. The Iowa Electronic Markets didn't do so hot in the '04 election, as I recall, but I still have a fair level of confidence in the accuracy of prediction markets.
Intrade's most traded contracts are those for the '08 election, and as of today, the odds look like this:
Chance of being the Democratic Presidential Nominee:
51.5% Hillary Clinton
22.0% Barack Obama
11.7% John Edwards
7.0% Al Gore
0.7% Mark Warner
0.3% John Kerry
Chance of being the Republican Presidential Nominee
34.0% John McCain
26.8% Rudy Giuliani
18.6% Mitt Romney
1.1% Condoleeza Rice
As for the Oscars, according to Intrade it doesn't appear there will be much suspense on Oscar Night in any major categy except Best Picture, perhaps. The other categories seem locked up already (best actress and actor having been decided so long ago that to cut down on the runtime of the show they should probably just have Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker on stage to present themselves with the trophies):
Best Director - Scorsese is trading at 79.1%
Best Actor - Whitaker at 82.0%
Best Actress - Mirren at 91.5%
Best Supporting Actor - Eddie Murphy at 60.5%
Best Supporting Actress - Jennifer Hudson is around 77 or 78% in light trading
An Inconvenient Truth should have no problems in the Best Documentary category, either. The volume of trading on the Oscars is so light, however, that I'd take the absolute %'s with a grain of salt.
Technorati Tags: acting, economics, film, movies, politics, markets
I meant to post this list earlier, but better late than never. Here are some of the things I'll remember from the year in movies. Some of these come from movies I didn't love in their entirety, but all are images, scenes, sounds, or ideas that will stick with me. I've left the titles of the movies out, but you can click through on the links to discover the movie referenced if it isn't obvious. Some of those are Amazon.com links, and any purchases will send some affiliate fees my way, something that's always appreciated!
"The name's Bond. James Bond." (DVD)
The lullaby, and The Pale Man, its eyeballs in its palms, playing a morbid game of peek-a-boo, and the wondrous puppet that is Pan. (Official website, Soundtrack)
Wind whipping through their hair, Colin Farrell and Gong Li glancing at each other as they race across the ocean in a "go fast" boat for a first date in Cuba while Moby's "One of These Mornings" plays on the soundtrack. By the way, let me add my confirmation to the hypothesis that a sure way to score with a girl is to take her to Cuba (in your speedboat) for mojitos and dancing. (DVD)
Lois Lane kicks off her shoes and steps up on Superman's boots. (DVD)
First appearance of the crawlers, seen via nightvision on a handheld camcorder. (DVD)
Forest Whitaker's one lazy eye and one bug eye have never had greater metaphoric power, one for each side of the charismatic psychopath that was Idi Amin. (Official website)
Abigail Breslin walks down a dirt hill to put her arm around her brother. (DVD)
Best movie trailer this year. Kate Winslet walking towards Jackie Earle Haley as he sits on a children's swing, his back to us. (Official website)
The quiet of early morning routines as an airport and a world wake up to the last day before that day. (DVD)
A young girl shakes her head when the Queen offers to help the girl place a bouquet of flowers amidst a sea of tributes to Princess Di. The Queen is hurt, then touched when the little girl corrects her, "These are for you." (Official website)
Chieko experiencing a night club with a unique clarity despite sensory deprivation...she is deaf, and between flashes of strobing dance floor lights, all is darkness and vibration. (DVD)
The dreamy rhythm of first chapter of the three, set to "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes." When Chang Chen finally tracks down Shu Qi, she can't help breaking out in a smile, and then a laugh. (DVD)
That long, unbroken take in the car. That second long, unbroken take, the one in which grime spatters onto the camera lens but the shot keeps going through war-torn streets, up stairs, bullets flying. (Official site)
The elevator doors open, and BANG. There were many differences between the original and this "remake," but Scorsese hadn't seen the original before making his version, and this moment in the elevator played out the same way, with the same timing, in both. (DVD)
Showdown in Chinatown. Okay, not in Chinatown, but in a restaurant, one that's left a little worse for the wear. (DVD)
In the face of a firing squad, everybody runs. Simone Signoret's face. Probably my favorite movie of the year. (Official website. When will this come out on freaking DVD?!)
Dan Dunne and drug dealer Frank have a chat by the street. The best movie I saw at Sundance in January, 2006. (DVD)
Footrace set to "We Belong" by Pat Benatar. Cal Naughton Jr. pulls open an invisible door and walks through as The Magic Man. (DVD)
Madonna's "Vogue" kicks in, and suddenly our heroine is racing through the streets rocking one hot outfit after another. (DVD)
Naked wrestling. (DVD)
Rob Lowe holds court in his office while wearing a kimono. (DVD)
Lucy Liu pops back in through the door to double check to see if Josh Hartnett has dropped his towel again. (DVD)
Ellen Ripstein twirls her baton in Central Park. (DVD)
"Who are you? What's you're name? Do you have a wife? A girlfriend? Because if you do, I'm gonna find her. I'm gonna hurt her. I'm gonna make her bleed and cry and call out your name. And then I'm gonna find you and kill you right in front of her. " Oh, those beady eyes. (DVD)
First glimpse of the creature, hanging off of a highway bridge running across the river. (DVD)
Robert Angier, walking through the snow through the forest, stumbles upon a pile of hats, all of them the same. David Bowie's face as Nikola Tesla. (DVD)
After a night of revels, Marie and others from her court wander out through the gardens in the earliest of morning light (DVD)
The year the Panavision Genesis HD camera broke out, being used to film Superman Returns, Flyboys, Apocalypto, and Click. Miami Vice was shot digitally also, Dio Beebe using the Sony Cine Alta F900s.
Technorati Tags: 2006, dvd, film, list, movies
Pirelli has produced another short film/ad, "Mission Zero," directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Uma Thurman and the Ultimate P Zero tire. It's no Point Break.
Sasha Frere-Jones analyzes the appeal of Arcade Fire in this week's New Yorker. Their latest album Neon Bible streets March 6.
Technorati Tags: ad, advertising, film, movies, music, newyorker, products, video
I imagine the censors sitting around in the control room last night, looking at each other quizzically.
"Can we let that through? Anus and testicles?"
Shoulders all through the booth shrug in unison.
"Technically those are just anatomical terms, not curse words."
Technorati Tags: humor, movies, tv, video, youtube
Trailer for Tears of the Black Tiger
Preview the first 10 minutes of this Sunday's premiere episode of season two of Extras. Guest star Orlando Bloom.
Technorati Tags: movies, extras, trailer, tv
"David and Mamet" is a 91 second short by Alex Rose about two guys chatting David Mamet-style about...well, that's really the pitch, isn't it?
Ooh ooh. Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9 has leaked onto the Internet. Barney has always treated his films as limited-edition art pieces, and so bootleg DVD copies of his Cremaster Cycle were spoken of in the same hushed tones as holy relics in Indiana Jones movies. But the internet, the ability to digitize content of all types, and people's yearning for that content is one of the most powerful forces in the universe. Nothing, even the fabled Cremaster Cycle, can escape it.
[The last time I saw something by Matthew Barney was at Sundance. He directed the first segment of the movie Destricted, a series of 7 shorts about pornography. In Barney's segment, "Hoist," a nude man copulated with a giant Caterpillar truck. The man had a massive turnip growing out of his butt and flowers growing out of his mouth. Needless to say, the rarity of Barney films on DVD does not mean they're for everyone.]
Technorati Tags: movies, matthewbarney, video
This is how Emmanuel Lubezki captured the first of the jaw-dropping single takes in Children of Men. That is the craziest film car rig I've ever seen.
Technorati Tags: cinematography, film, movies, photo, howto
In this week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell examines the difference between a puzzle and a mystery and argues that Enron's business model and much of what U.S. foreign intelligence face today are more mystery than puzzle. To solve a puzzle, you simply need more information, but more information may only add complexity to a mystery.
Also in this week's New Yorker (a good one), David Denby does a diagnostic of Hollywood, the state of the business. The article makes mention, at the end. of the ArcLight, perhaps the nicest multiplex in the country, at least in terms of sight and sound.
Most sports fans already saw the highlights, but for the few who didn't, Boise State won the Fiesta Bowl using, among other trick plays, a Hook-and-Ladder and a Statue of Liberty play. Here's another angle which also includes the following: after scoring the game-winning 2-pt conversion, Ian Johnson ran over and proposed to his girlfriend, a cheerleader. He converted that one, too. Just an unbelievable game, maybe the most entertaining college football game I've ever seen. Here's a compilation clip of all of the 4th quarter and OT highlights. (Sorry about the clip quality--YouTube and its Flash video is really suboptimal for sports clips; let's hope that by the end of 2007 there's a high quality video streaming site for sports highlights).
How do you like your coffee? With a mushroom cloud drop of milk, please. Cool photo.
100 things we didn't know last year. "In a fight between a polar bear and a lion, the polar bear would win."
I'm not usually one to make New Year's resolutions, and after being named Time's Person of the Year in 2006, I'm facing some brutal year over year comps, but one goal I have for 2007 is to be carbon neutral. It was easy to do while in NYC, when I took public transportation everywhere, but it will be a challenge in LA. There are a variety of Carbon Calculators on the web if you want to participate. It has been so warm in NYC this holiday break. Pieces of arctic ice shelf are breaking off or just plain melting. It feels to me as if the impacts of global warming will descend upon us quickly, perhaps not as quickly as this, but quickly enough that it's perhaps already too late for us to act. One way to start is by purchasing compact fluorescent bulbs to replace the incandescents you likely have in your household. I don't love the light of compact fluorescents, but I'm going to try living with it.
Technorati Tags: apple, design, environment, football, gladwell, globalwarming, photography, green, sports
The early critical response to Pan's Labyrinth was strong, and now that I've seen it, I can add my voice to the chorus of admiration. The audience word-of-mouth for this movie is going to be off-the-charts. It's magic.
One thing Guillermo Del Toro has shown in his film career thus far is an ability to conjure the sensual and the dark. With this movie, he's blowing up before our very eyes.
It's tough to shake that lullaby from the soundtrack from your head. You can hear much of the soundtrack by just clicking through to the official website.
Zudeo is a high-res content distribution system built on Bittorrent. You have to download a lightweight client to browse and grab clips. It's not going to cause YouTube any heartache, but for people who like their video content big and beautiful, like me, it's a useful supplement. They signed a deal with the BBC to put episodes of TV shows online at some point for some undisclosed fee. But there's some decent free content already live, like Luis Bunuel's classic surrealist short "Un Chien Andalou," based on a story by Bunuel and Salvador Dali.
Criterion is launching a new line of DVDs under the name Eclipse. They won't be the souped up DVDs customers are used to with the Criterion label, but Eclipse will help to rush many more movies that aren't currently available on video onto DVD. The first release on the label will be the 5 DVD Series 1: Early Bergman on March 27 of 2007.
Technorati Tags: dvd, movies, video
Among the numerous movies I've seen this holiday break, two have stood out thus far: The Queen and Children of Men. One of the immense pleasures at the heart of each is the performance of the leads. Helen Mirren is a shoo-in for a Best Actress nomination from the Academy, and Clive Owen is, as always, combines equal parts sensitivity and flintiness in a way that is wholly unique. He is, in that way, a sort of modern day Bogart. Both Mirren and Owen have an appealingly lean method of acting: precise, without a hint of fussiness. They never seem to seek the camera's attention, and because of that we can't take our eyes off of them.
Children of Men features two single-shot action sequences that will put cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's name on the tongues of film students everywhere. One is a car chase. I have no idea what type of rig the camera was mounted on, but I sure hope the DVD contains a making-of video that shows it because the camera seemed to be able to move all around the inside of a vehicle filled with actors.
The second is a single, unbroken shot in which a handheld camera chases Clive Owen for what feels like ten to fifteen minutes through an urban warzone, diving and ducking behind walls and rubble, into a building under siege by government soldiers, up stairs, down halls, in and out of several rooms. The longer the shot went, the lower my jaw dropped. The audacity required to try to shoot that sequence in one take fills me with glee. Give that camera operator a gold star.
It's too bad that Children of Men is only in limited release, and even in LA and NYC it is only in two or three theaters. Though it depicts a grim, dystopian future, it is a nativity story for our times and a thought-provoking Christmas film for adults.
Another movie I can't wait to see opens this Friday in limited release: Pan's Labyrinth. The trailer makes me giddy, though the voice of the voiceover doesn't feel right.
Technorati Tags: acting, film, movies, cinematography
The black and white sequence at the start of Casino Royale was shot on Kodak's Double-X film stock. That's the same film stock I shot my first quarter student project on (The 35mm version of Double-X, used in the Bond movie, is Kodak product code 5222, and the 16mm version, which I used, is 7222).
I was after a particular look, especially given that my location, a cafeteria on campus, wasn't exactly the most gorgeous setting. Double-X allowed me to work around the drab colors inside, and the film stock handled hot sunlight with aplomb. Shooting with the Double-X also allowed my makeup artist to achieve a dramatic, almost vampire-like contrast for my actress' face, the pale skin accented by near ebony eye shadow and lipstick.
One movie I had in mind when thinking about how I wanted to shoot my movie was John Cassavetes' Faces, also shot largely on Double-X. I had my DP shoot handheld, and I tried on a smaller scale to have my actress channel the emotional instability of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence.
Another way I could have gone, especially if I'd wanted to preserve the option of showing my film in color, would have been to shoot on color stock and drain the color in post production. Some of my classmates shot on Kodak's Vision2 500T color film stock (5218). It's decently fast, simplifying the lighting, and if you're going to release the movie in B&W then you don't have to worry about the blue tint it will acquire when shooting in sunlight (the T after the 500 indicates that the film is designed to be shot under tungsten lights).
Good Night, and Good Luck was shot on 500T. Selling off the rights to a movie in Japan these days requires shooting in color, but that's not why they chose to do so on that movie. A lot of the sets, I've heard, were painted in shades of grey anyhow because Clooney knew he wanted the movie to remain B&W in every format.
Shooting color and and then desaturating in post is what many digital photographers do now. Shoot in color on your digital SLR, then use the channel mixer in Photoshop to create a black and white print. The only problem with that is that it's difficult to achieve the high contrast look and grain of shooting in B&W film in the first place. I find that many photographs shot this way contain too much in the midtones, requiring extra work in Photoshop. There's something ironic about trying to use cutting edge camera hardware and photography software to create the same look you could create with an older film camera and film stock with much less work.
Technorati Tags: film, filmschool, movies, photography
Consider this the white flag on, among other things, my e-mail inbox. I used to try to return all my fan mail within a day, but then this matter of my first quarter of film school came flying in like a defensive end from my blind side annihilated me. I feel as if someone tied a rope around my waist while I wasn't looking and then attached the other end to a giant parachute that they tossed up into a raging gale. One minute I'm standing there, and then suddenly I'm yanked off my feet and dragged through the forest, struggling the whole way to detach myself, to no avail.
I moved to LA and had about three days to unpack and settle in before school started, and the rest has just been a blur. For some reason, perhaps stupidity, I didn't anticipate the first year of film school being so packed wall-to-wall with class. Morning, afternoon, evening, even Saturdays, we all seemed to live at school. I've never lived in a city for so long and seen so little of it. I've worn a deep path between my apartment and the school parking garage, and that's about it. I don't even know the entire campus; the only portion I'm really familiar with is the section where the film school is.
Yesterday I threw out about five-foot tall stack of unread Sunday NYTimes, only to discover another stack of equal height behind it. The newspaper stack is flanked by two towers of magazines, the whole thing resembling a sort of Petronas Towers of print media. The good thing is that if there's a nuclear winter, I should be able to keep warm for months by using it as kindling.
This last week, my classmates and I have grown more and more exhausted as hour upon hour of editing on the flatbeds have begun to take their toll. I can't recall another week in this century when I've strung together so many nights with just a few hours of sleep. The other day, I wandered from the sixth floor of my parking garage down to the third before I found my car because I couldn't remember which level I'd parked on. I couldn't even remember parking it at all.
Editing on 16mm film on a flatbed is one of those experiences which we'll speak of fondly in hindsight, but when in the midst of it, more than one of us nearly succumbed to frustration and despair. More than one of us has had to field a phone call from a crazed classmate and to talk that classmate back from the ledge. Having learned to edit on a computer, I had an especially hard time getting used to the idea that cutting in a single piece of footage could take ten minutes as opposed to 20 seconds.
This is how nearly all major motion pictures were edited for years and years! It's almost as difficult to fathom as the stories my dad used to tell me about programming a computer by feeding it punch cards. I hadn't thought about how slow the editing process would be when I wrote my script consisting of back and forth dialogue for about three minutes straight. As a result, I had to make nearly 40 cuts. You bet I looked on with deep envy at those folks who had films consisting of four or five long takes spliced together.
At the same time, I now understand why certain filmmakers, like Scorsese and Spielberg, held out as long as possible before moving to digital non-linear editing (in the case of Scorsese, it was his editor Schoonmaker who made the switch, but he went along begrudgingly). For one thing, there's a certain discipline and care that working with actual film engenders. Being in a dark room with a trim bin filled with hundreds of feet of film, working on a flatbed machine the size of a compact car, feeling the film run over your fingers...at no other point this quarter did I understand as clearly that filmmaking is a craft as much as it is an art. Sure, a dish prepared in a microwave oven is going to be ready faster than one baked in a real oven, but you also taste the difference.
Making a cut that works is much more satisfying on the flatbed. By the time I finished cutting my film, I'd gained an intuitive sense of how many frames I needed to add in or pull out to get the timing I wanted. You can build a similar sense of timing on a computer, but with film, the relationship between time and linear distance (the length of film in your hand) is fixed.
That bright semicircle of light? That's the end of the tunnel. Thursday we screen our movies on the big screen, Friday we meet with faculty for the end of quarter evaluation, and Saturday I fly back into the arms of NYC for the holidays.
Yesterday I spent a couple hours capturing foley for my film. The clicking of a woman's heels on linoleum, the scraping noise of a wooden chair being pushed back or pulled forward against the ground, the rustling of a woman searching through her purse, even the chafing of fabric against fabric as jackets are put on or removed. I projected my movie on a large screen and sat in the recording booth while a classmate outside would walk in heels in time to the movements of the actress on screen, or sit down and stand up while putting on or removing jackets of various fabrics.
Professional foley artists have one of the most fun jobs around.
When I went back in to add the foley to my sound mix, every sound that matched the action on screen gave me a silent thrill. The engaging sense of hyper-realism that comes from watching a Hollywood narrative film comes in large part due to the clean sound from foley, something that's difficult to capture with the mics on location or on a camcorder.
Today I finished my sound mix. I had to go back to my Nagra tape and recapture a take because my actress's lines got clipped when I transferred to CD-R. The Nagra is an old sound recording device, analogous in age to the flatbed in editing. We used the legendary 4.2, pictured below. I believe it was in the third episode of season one of The Wire when McNulty or one of his peers complained about still having to use a large, clunky Nagra taped inside his shirt to do surveillance when the FBI had moved on to stealthier, more compact, wireless recording devices.
The Nagra is bulky and heavy, but it has one thing going for it. No matter how hot the sound, it's nearly impossible to cause the Nagra to distort. It has an amazingly wide latitude and forgiveness and can capture the most dynamic ranges of sound with ease. But transfer to CD and you bump heads with the lousy dynamic range of digital sound. A shouted line that sounded beautiful on the Nagra clipped when I transferred it to CD, and so I had to recapture with a lower input level on the CD Recorder to remove the distortion in the line reading. Digital sounds has its conveniences, but it's still trying to catch up to analog sound in quality.
Thursday all of our movies will show on the big screen at school. I'm excited to see everyone's work projected large. The improvement in home theater technology this past decade has been great, but I'm not one of those who prefers watching movies at home just because of the cost or inconvenience of going to a movie theater, dealing with lines and rude people talking on cell phones. Seeing a face projected twenty feet high fundamentally changes your experience of the movie, and so does seeing it in the company of others.
Technorati Tags: film school, filmmaking
