A TV theme song should set your mind in the right mood for the show to come, like candles for a romantic dinner or Drew Brees' Marine-inspired team chant before the Saints take the field.
This oldie, backing the sudden freeze frames over medium close-ups to allow for the actor credits to unfurl with a glow effect, is a great example.
Quote from this interview with Neal Adams on Hulu:
If you scratch a French fellow who is interested in this sort of thing, he will tell you that America is responsible for three forms of art: jazz, musical comedy and, guess what, comic books.
What about obesity?! Is that not an art form?
The interview occurred in conjunction with the launch of the Astonishing X-Men motion comic on Hulu, the first miniseries being Gifted, scripted by Joss Whedon. The problem with earlier motion comics was that they were just a series of Ken Burns-esque pans against stills that seemed to have neither the benefits of holding a comic book (e.g. the ability to control one's pacing through the material, the fun of seeing how the artist uses the page layout to control the flow of one's eye) nor the joys of actual motion pictures (those should be apparent to all who love movies).
This new Astonishing X-Men motion comic adds an axis or two of motion (heads bob, lips move, eyes blink, etc). It is an improvement, reminiscent of some 80's cartoons (Voltron comes to mind) which weren't truly full motion but which contained just enough to qualify to be called cartoons.
Ann Shaff examines the ascent of the word "so" among this technology-raised generation.
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Pics from some lucky person who received the Mad Men season 3 press kit.
The season 3 premiere is this Sunday at 10pm. I will be planted in front of my TV then, yes.
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Can you measure grit? Maybe so.
Many books and articles have been written recently about how genius is overrated and hard work underrated, so that idea isn't the interesting point here. The idea that a survey can assess a person's grit with some accuracy is a bit surprising. Let's get this to be a standard test in the NFL so I can use the data in my upcoming fantasy football draft.
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My So-Called Life is on Hulu now. Among the most beloved of the "one and done" shows in my lifetime, I'm looking forward to catching up on it online.
Eric (our CTO) and I are both card carrying members of Sports Guy Nation. So it's extra special whenever he posts any reference or link to Hulu.
He tweeted about an episode of Miami Vice on Hulu:
Go to the 42-minute mark of this Miami Vice clip: http://tinyurl.com/lkfome ... Has there ever been a better use of a song in TV history?
With over 100K followers on Twitter, he has some influence, and so that ep of Miami Vice is creeping up our Most Popular Videos list, up to page 4 at last check, which is pretty strong for a random library episode of a show that isn't new to the service.
Here's a direct link to just the music reference he mentions:
This song was used later to end another TV episode to great effect, the "Two Cathedrals" episode of The West Wing. That was actually the season finale of the second season of the show. It's one of my favorite West Wing episodes.
Here is a reciprocal link for Bill Simmons: his new book on the NBA comes out this fall.
I saw Up in 3-D at the El Capitan last night. It's the richest, most moving script from Pixar yet. Animation lovers will love the references to Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Sky.
I will be curious, when it comes out on Blu-Ray, to see it in 2-D also, but this is probably the most polished 3-D movie I've seen to date. There is a level of control with digital animation that allows the 3-D effects to be extremely precise, with much less of the distracting blurring that makes other 3-D movies feel like gimmicks.
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So, did Susan Boyle win in the finals of Britain's Got Talent? Go see for yourself.
I keep forgetting you don't have to sing to be on that show. The finals are like America's Best Dance Crew vs. American Idol.
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Last survivor of the Titanic dies. I knew she was ready to pass on after she dropped that blue jeweled necklace into the ocean.
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Nadal loses at the French Open. Massive upset. This makes Robin Soderling the future answer to a trivia question. Djokovic is out, too. Federer, the door is open. This is your best, and maybe last chance, to walk down that red clay carpet and on through.
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In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert reports that we are likely in the midst of the sixth mass extinction in Earth's history. By the end of this century, nearly half of Earth's species may be extinct. The suspected cause is the pace of human activity.
Toy Story 3 teaser trailer. What jumps out at me now is not the technology of the digital animation, which is commonplace, but how quickly we recognize our old friends Woody and Buzz and friends. Consistency of character is the magic sauce here.
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Cool--Hulu Desktop made it into Uncrate. I have a secret list of ambitions for Hulu, and most of them consist of getting Hulu featured in things I follow in my own daily life. Some others: getting mentioned on The Simpsons, by Oprah, by the President, and in the lyrics to a hip-hop song. Getting Jason to get one of those black and white dot photos in the WSJ.
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Useful little site: copypastecharacter.com
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Mad Men Season 3 episodes may be squeezed by 2 minutes to accommodate more ads. Damn this recession.
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Eastbound and Down Season 1 is coming to DVD in June. Can't wait. I love me some Danny McBride, like I did Will Ferrell before his overexposure.
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How they shot those Where Amazing Happens commercials for the NBA where classic plays are gradually painted in, one player at a time.
Kottke posted a great dissection of the Kobe to Shaq alleyoop spot, noting how it contains evidence of just how dysfunctional Kobe and Shaq's relationship already was at that time.
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Jeffrey Toobin profiles Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in The New Yorker. Toobin opened my eyes to just how much Roberts has already shifted the Supreme Court right during his short tenure. Roberts may be Bush's most unpublicized but lasting legacy.
Still, there is no disputing that the President and the Chief Justice are adversaries in a contest for control of the Court, and that both men come to that battle well armed. Obama has at most one more chance to take the oath of office, and Roberts will probably have a half-dozen more opportunities to get it right. But each time Roberts walks down the steps of the Capitol to administer the oath, he may well be surrounded—and eventually outvoted—by Supreme Court colleagues appointed by Barack Obama.
I loved Toobin's book The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
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If Obama is Spock, then is Kirk John McCain?
ABC is joining Hulu. It's a thrill for us to welcome them and a big day in our company history!
Between that deal, and our TV campaign, and the concurrent development of many projects for Hulu, and staying up late to communicate with some of our developers in China, and an add-on session of two months of physical therapy for tendinitis of my Achilles, my posts here have been few and far between. May, I promise, will be better. 2009 has assaulted me like a young Mike Tyson and it hasn't let up.
My last physical therapy session (or at least I hope it will be so) was yesterday. I am still not 100%; when my therapist asks me to balance on one leg and do calf raises, it's clear which leg I suffered the injury on. But I am going to attempt to start running again. The NY Marathon is Nov. 1, and my goal is to finish it. I can't run even one mile today without my Achilles flaring up, and the weakness in my left leg calf and ankles has led to shin splints on just that leg, but I'm not ready to throw in the towel on any activities.
The one year anniversary of my Achilles rupture is coming in just over a week. It has been a tough year. You don't realize how much being active contributes to a healthy and happy state of mind until you're knocked out of commission for so long. At therapy yesterday, I jumped up and hit the ceiling at the office. It felt like a celebration.
I am convinced that a big reason for the rupture last May was that I had just completed a two week dosage of the antibiotic ciprofloxocin for a sinus infection. I went to run the Santa Monica 5K on a Saturday, then to play basketball on Monday, and pop went the tendon.
The FDA has since issued a health warning regarding the increased risk of tendon rupture from the usage of the class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones: Ciprofloxocin and Levofloxacin being the two most well-known, along with Ofloxacin, Pefloxacin. They cause something called tendon cytotoxicity--in layman's terms, they weaken your tendons. I wasn't told this when I was given my prescription at the drug store, but do a search on Google on this topic now and you'll find plenty of documentation.
If your doctor prescribes one of these for you, I'd first ask if another antibiotics are really necessary. If so, ask if an antibiotic that's not in this class is a reasonable substitute. Doctors like fluoroquinolones because they're broad spectrum, but ask me if I'd rather have a lingering sinus infection or a year's worth of pain and immobility and lingering tendinitis and weakness from a total Achilles rupture. If you have to take one of those fluoroquinolones, I recommend swearing off any physical activity until a few weeks after you've completed your dose. You'll feel fine and think it excessive, but believe me: it's not worth the risk.
How did I get from ABC joining to Hulu to issuing health warnings? You can tell what's top of mind for me these days. Let's treat both of these as good news: Hulu adds a valued partner, and I'm out of therapy and back on the road to health, running shoes laced.
Recently someone posted about how the ubiquity of cell phones has neutered movie plotlines dependent on lack of communication for dramatic suspense (if someone knows which post I'm referring to, let me know; for the life of me I can't remember where I saw it). For example, Romeo and Juliet would've never ended tragically if the two of them could have texted each other rather than having a messenger try to deliver the news of the faked death ("Drnking drug to fake death for 2 and 40 hrs. Not rlly dead! Meet @CapuletCrypt? <3<3<3 -J")
So screenwriters depend on poor cell phone reception or destroyed cell phones to try and extend the useful life of communication barriers as a plot device.
The plot device that bothers me the most is the use of old-school answering machines to incite conflict. Every time a character comes home with a loved one and then presses play on one of those old-school answering machines, unwittingly playing a suspicious or incriminating message out loud before they can hit the stop button, I picture a lazy screenwriter at the laptop thinking of how to squeeze a plot turn into one page of script. I barely know anybody who still has a landline, let alone one of those answering machines. Mobile phone voicemail just isn't as convenient for a screenwriter, though, so the answering machine lives on.
Sasha Frere-Jones reads in recent concert ticket bonus offerings the completion of the transition of recorded music from standalone product to mere advertisement for concerts.
If you buy a top-price ticket to one of No Doubt’s upcoming shows (between $50 and $150, roughly), you will receive a free download of the band’s entire catalogue. This makes sense, as touring is the one verifiably healthy part of the music business. Prince will release a new three-CD bundle on March 29, available exclusively at Target for $11.98. That may seem like a rollback to bargain prices of yesteryear (even though one of the CDs is by Prince’s protégée Bria Valente), but it’s more likely that Prince is seeing into the future—again. In 2004, he gave away a copy of his “Musicology
Voltron, Defender of the Universe! If I could go back in time to speak to my elementary school self, I might tell him, as he sat there in the living room after school, watching an episode of Voltron, that someday he'd work at a company that would bring the show to another generation through the Internet.
Also new to Hulu, Felix the Cat.
The best part of the interview below is when Ryan Seacrest asks one of the young kids from the Slumdog cast a question, and he doesn't reply. Another boy standing in the back row explains, "He doesn't speak English."
Ryan Seacrest then asks, "Can one of you translate?"
Another of the actors jumps in, "He doesn't speak English."
The other critical information revealed in this interview is that Freida Pinto is single and hasn't been asked out via her agent despite the movie's popularity. Sadly, I did a search on my iPhone for "Freida Pinto agent" and got zero results.
Complaining about the Oscars is some sort of national pastime, but one that's always exasperated me. If you don't like the Oscars, the movies they nominate, don't watch! The Oscars, like the Hall of Fame in baseball, are voted on by a select and insular group of people, so if your tastes don't align with those voting in each category, it's futile to expect anything to change. Saying you don't like the Oscars doesn't earn you any exclusive indie cred; that bandwagon is full every year and has been for years.
Honor the movies you enjoy by going to see them and telling people you know to see them. I grew up watching the Oscars with my family and have always looked forward to them. It's one of the few events left on TV outside of sporting events that people gather to watch live. I am sad when they show the montage of the recently deceased, excited to hear familiar musical cues from famous scores or see montages of classic movie scenes, and happy when someone I admire wins the golden naked guy statue. Sure, there's plenty of room for improvement in every telecast--what was with the odd acting award presentation process this year?--but there are usually enough fun moments (Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman dancing, Ben Stiller channeling Joaquin Phoenix channeling Ted Kaczynski) to keep me coming back for another dose the next year.
The new tv show Lie to Me is based on the real-life research of Dr. Paul Ekman into facial behaviors, or how muscles of the face reveal underlying psychology through microexpressions that are nearly unconscious or involuntary.
Ekman's system is called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and its companion is the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID). I first heard of Ekman's work through a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker titled "The Naked Face".
You can purchase the training system for $260. Maybe it will pay for itself through your weekly poker game?
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Chase Jarvis offers 5 tips for shooting better pictures with your iPhone. He also recommends two apps for the iPhone, CameraBag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), both of which I use and enjoy.
I put the prices there because I know some people don't like to pay for any apps, but if there's one thing I urge people to do this year it's to pay for things that provide value, even if they're things you can obtain illegally for free. Whether it's software or music or movies, with the Internet it's easier than ever to reward people directly for work you appreciate. When apps for the iPhone cost less than a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, there's really no excuse. Do the right thing, fight the recession, reward people who do great work that improves your life.
Two other iPhone photography apps that I recommend: Photogene ($2.99) and QuadCamera ($1.99). The iPhone camera is not going to win any prizes for picture quality, but the use of these apps should improve your snaps noticeably. Your Facebook and Flickr friends thank you in advance.
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Speaking of iPhone apps, I've reached the nine page, 144 app limit. I don't use all the apps all the time, so it's not a problem to delete a few, but the limit seems somewhat arbitrary, and at some point in the near future I can see having more than 144 apps that I'd use semi-regularly, or at least often enough that I wouldn't want to have to be deleting and installing apps all the time.
Paging through nine pages of apps doesn't exactly play to the iPhone's interface strengths (some ability to group apps or nest them in folder would be handy) but it's certainly not unusable.
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Amazon's Universal wishlist feature allows you to add products from other websites. Not sure when this launched, but it's an idea I recall being bandied about at Amazon many years ago.
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Metacritic compiles top 10 lists from movie critics across the land (they need to fix their HTML header as it still reads 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists in my browser tab). I'm still waiting for their year-end compilation graphic that assimilates all these top ten lists into a master best-of list. I'm not sure if they're producing it again this year, but I hope they do.
The one advantage of running a Super Bowl ad in this day and age is the availability of near instantaneous feedback through the internet.
Text messages, tweets, e-mails, and phone calls started rolling in as soon as our ad aired on Sunday.
Just tonight, our ad ran again on American Idol. I happened to be home when it came on, and as soon as it was over I did a quick search on Twitter for hulu. Eight of the nine newest tweets were about the ad:
Short comic strip on Lost that sums up the seemingly fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants scripting which gives so many viewers a love-hate relationship.
I've long since given up hope for any explanation that ties all the seasons together and that explains all the oddities on the island. I just hope this season doesn't get so bogged down in time travel machinations that it transforms potentially interesting characters into chess pieces. Last season redeemed the show by recalling my empathy for the core characters, but thus far this season I sense reversion to the tactic of mythology misdirection which feels like an artificial way to extend the series.
From Sports Guy's running diary of the Super Bowl:
9:26 -- Neil Rackers' PAT makes it 20-14 with 7:33 remaining. So long, Steelers' cover. In other news, congrats to Hulu for landing a Super Bowl ad. My baby's all growns up! My baby's all growns up! I love Hulu. Any video channel that streams complete "White Shadow" and "Miami Vice" episodes is good by me.
Hulu's first TV commercial, the first TV ad I've ever worked on, debuted on the Super Bowl tonight. It's the capper to what must be the most memorable weekend of my life. It feels like I've lived 7 days in this weekend, perhaps because I've gotten a total of 2.5 hours of sleep the whole time.
I'm going to go collapse now in the airport shuttle.
Check out this year's Super Bowl ads at Hulu, and vote for your favorite. I have to do this myself! Below is a new widget our DP team built that you can use to watch the ads here, if you'd like.
Lionsgate (with an assist from AMC) inked Matthew Weiner to helm two more seasons of Mad Men in a deal estimated at $9 million.
Worth every penny.