C215 interview
Ninja June 27th, 2008
Paris street artist, C215 can seriously cut stencils! Check out this interview at Banksy’s Cans Festival in London. You can see more of C215’s work on his Flickr page.
Related postsArchive for June, 2008
The Death of Independent Film
Penguin June 27th, 2008
Mark Gill, the CEO of The Film Department and former President of Miramax Films, declared provocatively, “Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling.” Speaking at the L.A. Film Festival’s Financing Conference, he starts with the bad news.
[O]f the 5000 films submitted to Sundance each year– generally with budgets under $10 million–maybe 100 of them got a US theatrical release three years ago. And it used to be that 20 of those would make money. Now maybe five do. That’s one-tenth of one percent.
Put another way, if you decide to make a movie budgeted under $10 million on your own tomorrow, you have a 99.9% chance of failure.
He continues on to offer a harsh solution, the one that we know deep in our gut, but wish there was an easier path.
A good title should have many of the attributes that a movie needs to embody now:
*Succinct & Descriptive: the film has to lend itself to brief encapsulation. A high concept is no longer the thing that studio movies do and independent films shun. In this age of info overload, it’s crucial for every picture to have this. Without it, your odds shoot through the floor.
*Distinctive: not the same story we’ve heard five times before; something that at least takes the cliche and twists it; not something we get too much of somewhere else in our lives (Exhibit A: Iraq movies; who wants to see more of that mess? We already get too much of it every day in the news media).
*Provocative: something that cuts through the clutter, stands out, gets attention; not “So then Phoebe sat by her mother’s bedside, suffering in silence for eight weeks.” Give us incident, conflict, excitement, ideally something that hits a cultural nerve.
*Memorable: this is essentially an accumulation of the other traits, or sometimes altogether separate. It’s the avoidance of cotton candy. The possibility of resonance. Something sticky.
*Not too dark: these are very dark times, for audiences the world over. Audience enthusiasm for dark films is as low as I’ve ever seen it. There are a lot of reasons for this, of course. But the one I hear almost nobody articulating and everyone feeling is this: in the western industrialized world, wages haven’t even remotely kept up with productivity demands, and that stresses us out.
[...]
If you want to survive in this brutal climate, you’re going to have to work a lot harder, be a lot smarter, know a lot more, move a lot faster, sell a lot better, pay attention to the data, be a little nicer (ok, a lot nicer), trust your gut, read everything and never, ever give up.
It’s stark sobering news and just a little discouraging. But just like everything else, if you’re in it for the money, you’re in it for the wrong reasons. My hope is that I’ll be able to continue learning and honing my craft so I can get the budget to make something worth seeing. That may take years, but like JFK said, “We don’t do it because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.”
-Penguin
Related postsPhotog Graffiti
Penguin June 26th, 2008
Wired: Gun Camera Adds Graffiti to Other People’s Photos:
Berlin based artist Julius von Bismarck uses his oddly named camera-mod to project images onto street furniture where they appear in the photos of strangers, but remain invisible to their eyes.
How? It’s simple. The device has a slave unit on top which is triggered when it sees a flash fire. This triggers his own flash, which fires through the back of the camera, through a film slide containing his slogan and then on and out through the lens at the front. This works because a camera is pretty much a projector in reverse.
I’m all for graffiti, especially things like Banksi. But there’s something invasive about it. Maybe because it’s the nature of photography that makes it really personal that makes me uneasy. It’s a good thing I don’t use the flash.
-Penguin
Related postsZeitgeist at the MoMA
Penguin June 26th, 2008
MoMA’s celebrating with Zeitgeist: The Films of Our Time, running from June 27 through July 23.
To celebrate [Russo and Gerstman's] ongoing success, MoMA presents a selection of works by critical figures in the company’s history and catalog—from artists they embraced at early stages of their film careers, including Bruce Weber, Todd Haynes, Deepa Mehta, François Ozon, Olivier Assayas, and Guy Maddin, to established masters like Agnes Varda, Yvonne Rainer, Derek Jarman, and Jacques Demy. This monthlong series includes several introductions and post-screening Q&A sessions with some of the filmmakers, along with appearances by Gerstman and Russo.
-Penguin
Related postsWhat Filmmakers Can Learn from Android
Penguin June 26th, 2008
From Wired: Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web:
[Android] is the re-creation of the Internet.
- Eric Schmidt
The internet is huge, powerful, awesome, useful; it’s been a boon for all content creators: filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers. Imagine where it would be if we understood this internet thing early on? The internet is still growing, it hasn’t even really come into it’s own yet. But as we try to capitalize on the internet, specifically through PCs, are we missing out on something bigger?
The mobile market is growing, adding 3 million users a year. When you leave your home, you bring 3 things: keys, wallet, cellphone. The iPhone, Blackberry, and other smart phones have made it so you can carry the internet with you. By extension, phones will eventually eclipse PCs in usage. I’m not saying they’ll replace PCs, but there are millions of people in the 3rd world who can’t afford a PC, but have a phone.
David Lynch said that as the screen size reduces, so does the experience. When I watch Youtube or any other online video, I have very little patience for the short or video to hook me. If there’s nothing compelling in the first 30-60 seconds, I move on. Cell phones are even smaller, so the attention span will be even faster. The fact that it’s mobile also changes the way things are utilized.
I love my Nintendo DS. I use it more than my Playstation 2. But the only game that I really play is Tetris. Tetris is a great game because each time I play is localized. There’s no ending, so I can stop playing at any time. I don’t have to worry about a story or where I need to go or do after a week or two of inactivity. I don’t have to worry about saving, so I can play while I wait for people and just close it when they come.
The mobile market will teach us new things about filmmaking. Video will be there, but we may not be able to tell the same sort of stories or tell them in the same way. But we can’t miss this opportunity.
Newspapers are dead. Magazines are dead. DVDs and CDs are dead. All have been replaced by the internet. And when information is free, we need to figure out another way to make money.
Google’s model is to build a killer app, then monetize it later
- Andy Rubin
Our killer app is our content. With so many content producers out there, it’s increasingly harder and harder to differentiate our product (our films) from the noise. It’s not just the stories that we tell, but how we tell them. When I’m browsing videos, I can instantly tell by the editing, titles, shot composition, or even color-correction if the video will be any good. As important as the story is, the presentation of that story has to be just as good, if not better. This requires resources in the form of money and talent. These are either financed, or we get that little break to begin to monetize our content.
How do we monetize content? I wish I knew. The MPAA doesn’t know, that’s why they’re holding on to DVD. The TV studios are starting to understand with things like Hulu, but the ad placeholders are annoying enough to force me back to bit torrent. My gut says the solution is to take it offline.
- Connect with your audience and provide them with an experience they can’t get online. It would be an extension of your film, bringing characters to real life or bringing set pieces for the audience to participate in.
- Make the DVD special, include things that can’t be copied for free.
- Other merchandise that ties into your film. Sometimes it’s t-shirts, sometimes it’s something else.
As indie filmmakers, we need to be pioneers. We need to understand where technology is bringing us and learn from what business and other content creators are doing with it. Yes we’ll make mistakes, but we make plenty already with our films.
-Penguin
Related postsWeezer covers Radiohead
Ninja June 26th, 2008
Weezer covers Radiohead’s Creep at a Hootenanny in Portland.
Weezer cover Radiohead’s Creep, live in Portland from Dave Allen on Vimeo.
Renée French’s blog
Ninja June 26th, 2008
I’ve been meaning to mention Renée French’s blog that she started earlier this year. Every day, she posts a new, delightful drawing!
I especially enjoy her bunny drawings!
I was completely smitten when I first saw her drawing of Glenda, the bunny mascot for Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
Short: The Website is Down
Penguin June 25th, 2008
The Website is Down is a hilarious trek through IT hell. If you’ve ever worked tech or know anything about it, this is basically real life condensed.
And funny enough, their website actually did go down due to the traffic they were getting.
Enjoy
-Penguin
Related postsMovies Have to be Believable
Penguin June 25th, 2008
Everything in movies is fake. That’s understandable considering the nature of the medium. But in order for a story to work, it needs to be believable. That’s where knowledge comes into play. This is especially true when you look at your premise.
Take Iron Man for example. The key to powered armor is energy. The solve this problem early on with the mini arc generator. They don’t even bother explaining how the arc generator works because if they did, all the engineers would be able to poke holes in it. Just by telling us, and then showing us that it generates massive amounts of energy is enough. We buy it.
Then you look at something like Untraceable. The premise is a killer who can’t be traced through the internet. Even basic understanding of how the internet works would show that it could never happen.
But “reality” is different in every movie. Something that could work in Star Wars may not work in Apollo 13 because they have different rules because they exist in different universes. Certain things like physics, math, etc, are still true because we accept them as universal. But there are aspects that we believe because we understand that Star Wars is a fantasy.
The moment your audience says, “No way!” with disdain, you’ve lost them. Any credibility you’ve built is out the window and they’ve written off the entire film. This is especially true with your premise. If no one will believe your premise, you’re fighting them the whole way.
So do your research. Make sure you stuff makes sense so your audience will believe the lie.
-Penguin
Related postsReview: Iron Man
Penguin June 25th, 2008
Rating: 4/4 stars
Iron Man is fantastic. It’s about a multibillionaire, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) who develops powered armor to fight terrorists.
What makes Iron Man so good is how tight the story is. It’s a great example of telling the story on the cut. We get just enough of each scene that it develops the characters and progresses the narrative. You get a real sense that Tony Stark is a real guy which makes it seem like a real movie, not just another comic book movie.
Iron Man has everything, action, comedy, and heart. And unlike most other movies, especially comic book movies, Iron Man’s second act is really strong. It doesn’t drag or ever feel slow. It develops naturally, bringing us into the third act and the final battle almost seamlessly.
If you haven’t seen Iron Man yet, go see it.
-Penguin
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