Old Joy – Review – Movies – New York Times. Why is this flick opening in Manhattan? Sounds lovely!
Federation Propaganda
DS9 and Galactica hooncho
Ron Moore on Trek in the NYT.
Nieuport
Extensive, interesting article on the production of the upcoming Flyboys, which, you’ll be unsurprised to note, has me in a tizzy of anticipation.
nearly wrapped
About 2 hours ago, we struck for the night. We have two pickups to bang out in the morning – I’m guessing around 11 am – and the shoot will be over and we pack it up and head home to Seattle. I am very happy with the results – the shots look great, we got good sound, and our actors’ performances were all we could have hoped for.
I was initially skeptical about the project and agreed to participate because I am interested in learning about fast-and-light filmmaking. the practice of which I believe poses a significant threat to the revenue dominance of major film producers, much in the way that the proliferation of cable channels has challenged the predominance of the US Big Three networks.
I haven’t looked at the shots and schedule we were working from since sometime on Thursday, but as I recall, this ten-minute film used about twenty shots and a bit less than ten setups. Last I heard, we shot two full mini DV tapes, which I think gives us 180 minutes of footage; generally we were trying to get three takes of each shot.
Greg and Joey and I worked together very fluidly, and in some ways the best was the way we developed the lighting for the setups. I hope that the dailies look as good as I think they do at 6 am after being up all night.
200 Distilfinks
NYT: For the Pennsylvania Dutch, a Long Tradition Fades.
200 of 800 Pennsylvania Dutch barn ‘hex signs’ remain.
Odd, I recall seeing these a great deal in the early seventies as our family drove around the lower northeast. Seems like there must have been more than 800 at one time.
More Trek Fan Film Coverage
NPR ran a five-minute end-of-the-hour feature on the New Voyages Star Trek fan film crew this morning. As is becoming par for these stories, passing acknowledgment was made that this crew is not the only one making these fan-produced episodes, but the entirety of he reporting was focused on Cawley’s project. This is likely as much a reflection os the snowball effect of that initial Wired story as much as a reflection of the skill with which Cawley’s assembled his media hook, which is that the project features the original series characters played by new actors with increasing numbers of professional Trek veterans appearing in the New Voyages episodes.
Another factor in the coverage, I believe, must be the continuing delay in release of Starship Exeter‘s new episodes; Exeter has been acknowledged as the inspiration for New Voyages and the Exeter creative team initially worked with the New Voyages team prior to the production of the first New Voyages episode. Personally, I found the initial Exeter episode to be a more successful translation of the original-series ethos than the first episode of New Voyages. I have been holding off on watching the more recent New Voyages pieces until Exeter releases the full second episode to be better able to compare the teams’ work.
However, the rate at which New Voyages has been producing episodes may well make this moot, as practice brings experience and soon the series may no longer be comparable in any meaningful way.
Pie Rrrrate
Some anarchist (I take it) examination of Pirate Utopias.
The film was pretty good, but not as great as the first, which has stood up well indeed. Viv and I just watched it yesterday evening and even as familiar as it it is now, there are repeated moments in which I shook my head in wondering appreciation of the spectacle laid before me.
The first film included a wonderful reimagining of the Buster Keaton gag wherein a house’s front falls just so, leaving Keaton wonderingly untouched. Verbinski recast this from comedy to destiny as Barbosa strides though the hurricane of battle, his falling mainmast raining rigging about him. In this film, I counted at least one direct Keaton quote and an indirect reference to Keaton by way of Chuck Jones’ roadrunner cartoons.
I did find myself rolling my eyes in a couple of places. For pete’s sake, can’t the filmmakers cast a person of African heritage in a major supporting role other than that of a mystical witchy woman?
Despite that, several of the action sequences were grandly satisfying, and the final image on screen of Captain Sparrow is likely to resonate with me and I imagine the rest of the culture as powerfully as the Wyeth illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson’s piratical did in establishing the contemporary visual idea of the 18th Century pirate.
I submit for your consideration, however, that Cthulu might well find the idea that a seaman driven to immortality by a broken heart is the elder lord’s primary aspect or incarnation earth – or under seas – demeaning.
Butchart Gardens
These fountains are animated and wave around and so forth. This is the floor of a quarry that was landscaped to form the heart of Butchart Gardens from the turn of the century to the forties, if I understood correctly. It’s hard to overemphasize how dramatic this fountain is – it’s a complex visual pun on the mind’s visual expectations on the way white water is seen in settings such as this, an upside-down waterfall in the midst of what appears to be a pocket lake in the northwest forest. Butchart Gardens may be the only time I’ve ever felt that I might have something to contribute to a critical dialog on the subject of landscape architecture.
ChatFX
ChatFX adds a miscellany of video effects to iChat.
I actually pitched a similar concept to a video-oriented software producer about two years ago but nothing came of it. The specific possibility I see for software such as this is not so much the predictable, silly uses of it. I see the possibility of adding an additional layer of composed meaning to the videoconference interaction. I visualize participants adapting cinematic techniques to the image – zooms, jumpcuts, wide-screen ratios, moody slow pans and the like.
Developing
Paul of A Crank’s Progress ruminates on the death of film, informatively and (despite his self-perception that the post is long) with admirable efficiency.
While I certainly understand the potential threat to our visible heritage in the disappearance of photographic prints from our patrimony, I myself celebrate it as one less burden to drag toward the grave. As someone who has seen the surfeit of family prints commonly available in any given antique store, it’s clear to me that people never intended to keep the images for the ages. As a member of a family that inherited a large shoebox full of unlabeled shots dating back to the 1840s and realizing we had no way of identifying the subjects, it’s equally clear to me that the archival problem had us beaten two generations ago.
Flickr, the visual future of our history is in your hands.