Greg recommended the powerful imagery of Alexey Titarenko - amazing, almost dreamlike stuff!
About the same time Jheri pointed to the "dancing video" that is making its way around. Take a look if you haven't seen it. A simple idea capable of bringing joy.
for those who like to look hard
(I only caught a few)
Four new indie films every two weeks ... this could be good.
The Danish Poet is something of a classic
Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf appears on PBS in an animated version - it looks like it has great potential!
Sukie found this youtube gem
But in a good way...
something fun for the weekend.
Doll generated imagery
Popular Science, June 1938
Some fans are upset at the decision to drop Peter Jackson from The Hobbit...
As a book The Hobbit isn't up to The Lord of the Rings ... we aren't talking high art, but Jackson has painted the definitive image for most people and deviating from that is likely to produce an expensive box office disaster.
So I broke down and bought Cars on iTunes.
My friend Jessica is a technical director at Pixar, so it seemed right to get a copy. Normally I could have purchased the physical media, but I wanted to see how the iTunes movie service worked.
The file is 1.39 GB and the download took 37 minutes (I wasn't counting seconds .. I'm rounding up to 37) on our cable modem service ... about 5.0 megabits/s average.
The movie looks great (at least the half hour I've watched so far) on my MacBook Pro. I'm reasonably happy, although there aren't many movies I watch enough to buy rather than rent.
Now computer generated animations are being seen as duds
Boring or fascinating is largely independent of the genre. I've seen wonderful, but simple, hand-drawn animation and horrible (once) state of the art CG (Final Fantasy comes to mind).
It's the story, stupid
I was looking for something to download to check out the video portion of iTMS. I won't buy anything from Disney as I'm currently boycotting the company, plus the pickings are very slim.
The claim was that movies and video are now 480x640 so I looked for hoppípolla .. a music video from Sigur Rós that I only have a low quality realmedia version. It does lurk on Apple's site. A fine and uplifting piece (hint -- older Icelanders ... perhaps counterpoint to glósóli)
But back to the experience.
The download struck me as slow - about 1.3 megabits/s on my cable modem which regularly sees 7+ megabits/s on unloaded servers with good connections. Perhaps iTMS is being hammered with people trying movies ...
The sonic quality is excellent on my headphones - as good as the CD. The video is 480x640. This particular video is shot a bit rough, so I'll pass judgement on video quality.
For a buck more than the track I'm happy.
I don't think I'd be happy with the $10 to $15 iTMS movies. The quality is sub DVD, you don't get a physical copy, you can't burn a copy to play in your DVD player, etc, etc. I won't say much about iTV other than my present experience (netflix and buying dvds) seems much better. iTV has the potential to be better than IPTV, but that is a pretty low mark.
But in the meantime I finally have a good enough copy of the video.
____
My favorite is still glósóli ... not on iTMS, but here is a free copy if you haven't seen it. ... borderline magic.
Sigur Rós is a music of texture and color. The best way to listen is a full album. Bits and shards, by themselves, may not make sense.
or youtube
A kit to help you make 2D animations - all you add is your talent.
a short tutorial (windows media) giving an idea how the program works
Potentially a huge toy for a certain type of person.
A german site devoted to monster movies...
don't worry if you can't read German - it shouldn't be too much of a barrier
(Thanks for the link Jheri)
Some years ago Larry Krauss penned a book or two on the physics of Star Trek - pointing out areas where science lurked and (more often) areas where there was a remarkable, although perhaps artistic, disregard for the subject.
When I changed jobs a few years ago I briefly entertained the idea of writing a physics book pointing noting issues with shows like Buffy which, although entertaining, are very frustrating for people who can't decouple the science of the real world and fantasy. I obviously didn't do anything, but someone has - an email noting Physics of the Buffyverse arrived today.
___
(to be fair I do enjoy too much unphysical fantasy, but it is also fun to note the holes)
Recently I saw a report aimed at the upper management of one of the larger tv/phone/internet providers. The message was that people loved to be entertained and, by providing them with entertainment everywhere, profits will be wonderful. There were details about securing the paths to the viewers (oddly enough IPTV is seen as making the viewers "active" rather than "passive") and making sure upstream datapaths from households are small, but the big message was "content is king" and there will be a revolution in content delivery.
I don't buy it. Content has never been king - communication has been more important historically (nods in the general direction of Andy). People have limits - most won't happily pay more than $200 a month to have "convenient" movies available on their TVs, cellphone and computers. $2 songs on their mobile phones aren't going to cut it.
What encourages me is the growth of amateur activity
am·a·teur (ăm'ə-tûr', -tər, -chʊr', -chər, -tyʊr') n.
A person who engages in an art, science, study, or athletic activity as a pastime rather than as a profession.
I would modify this ... A person who passionately engages ...
Many (most) of those around me have some amateur activity where they actively grow. I was tempted to make a list, but I would miss too many people - I'm really impressed with much of the work I've seen. Photography is common, music for some, art for others and even amateur science (Sukie is a well respected amateur ferret medical expert). One person makes computer numerically controlled machines that are used to make more exotic machines, yet another makes guitars from scratch. Several are passionate about cooking as an art, a few are serious skiers, some make short movies and one is a B-movie actress. The list goes on and on. If you fund yourself you can not only live a dream, but stick with it and your skills will improve. These are all fascinating people.
I relax by attempting digital art and music. Don't be impressed. I'm astonishingly bad, but I'm the only audience and have a low threshold for quality. With help from a few mentors I'm slowly improving and the act of creation has fundamentally changed how I hear and see things around me.
For those who use computers, the tools are better than ever. My little twelve inch laptop may not be the best platform for doing art, but my desktop machine is just fine. A few thousand dollars gives me the same tools used by some of the best artists on the planet. This is the same amount of money we would be sending to our TV provider in a few years if we opted for high end entertainment rather than "lifeline" TV service.
I recommend this sort of activity to almost anyone - I haven't found any TV shows that are as rewarding as my low quality artwork - at least to me. (I note it is the act of making the items that is important to me - I generally destroy the results)
There are a few great things on TV and one shouldn't abandon the medium, but all of you have something more in your creative souls than being able to laugh along with a sitcom. Perhaps you can get together with friends and create your own show. Look at the beginnings of Rocketboom or some of the early shows on Adult Swim -- or SouthPark for that matter.
The Fall TV season and the relative inactivity of Winter are approaching. Forget that new HDTV. Give thought to scaling back your cable bill. Give yourself some tools and lessons with the savings. Your consumption of media may drop a bit, but when people at the holiday party as what you are reading or what you thing about some hit show, you can talk about your artwork, musical arrangement, homemade cosmic ray telescope, or whatever ...
_______
I apologize for the soapboxing, but there are richer activities than being passively entertained.
On this morning's walk I was listening to Studio 360's July 7th podcast on, of all things, Superman.
Did you know about the comicbook's Jewish origins? lots of other stuff.
the audio link (it should play all of the show segments)
Slashdot (oddly enough I think this is the first time in a month I've visited the site ...) notes fan and studio created commentary to accompany movies and tv shows. Much of it is in podcast format.
Check out sharecrow..
Being out of touch with most of popular culture, we have only now started watching Battlestar Galactica (thanks to NetFlix).
I'm surprised by how good it is. Great story telling and the sound track is often good and even amazing at times - very unusual on something made for TV. I do have a problem with bad physics and am constantly annoyed, but the stories are much better than what I had expected.
astonishingly bad physics though
Ten thousand dollars will provide a reasonably professional starter kit for making movies .. a HD cam, computer, Final Cut Pro ... And now Shake is available for $500 ... an amazing drop in price for very serious kit.
Of course it takes talent and enough resources, but the barriers are remarkably low. Even distribution is possible on a shoe string these days.
Cars
You really need to see the movie. (I'm biased for obvious reasons ... waves to Jessica .. but this is a great June diversion).
____
After the movie we spent a bit of time with one of the Intel based MacBooks. My concerns about the keyboard went away and the screen, at least in the Apple Store indoor lighting, was very readable. Clearly a desirable machine and probably a good value for the money. I wouldn't be too interested in a first generation model and anyone interesting in an Intel Mac should know that the demo models all had one gigabyte of RAM (don't put anything less on an Intel Mac!)
A surprising number of people I know have purchased or are purchasing MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Only a few people are waiting for the Mac Pros, but most people (Windows, Linux and OS X) seem to be more interested in laptops these days.
What's next from Pixar Disney...
Paris, restaurants and rats - Ratatouille. You can find a teaser here. My monitor is large enough for the 1080p version, but our US standard (slow) cable modem connection takes awhile to bring down the 129MB file.
Interesting comments on the making of Cars.
RealClimate looks at Al Gore's new movie and gives it a qualified thumbs up...
There are a few scientific errors that are important in the film. At one point Gore claims that you can see the aerosol concentrations in Antarctic ice cores change "in just two years", due to the U.S. Clean Air Act. You can't see dust and aerosols at all in Antarctic cores -- not with the naked eye -- and I'm skeptical you can definitively point to the influence of the Clean Air Act. I was left wondering whether Gore got this notion, and I hope he'll correct it in future versions of his slideshow. Another complaint is the juxtaposition of an image relating to CO2 emissions and an image illustrating invasive plant species. This is misleading; the problem of invasive species is predominantly due to land use change and importation, not to "global warming". Still, these are rather minor errors. It is true that the effect of reduced leaded gasoline use in the U.S. does clearly show up in Greenland ice cores; and it is also certainly true that climate change could exacerbate the problem of invasive species.Several of my colleagues complained that a more significant error is Gore's use of the long ice core records of CO2 and temperature (from oxygen isotope measurements) in Antarctic ice cores to illustrate the correlation between the two. The complaint is that the correlation is somewhat misleading, because a number of other climate forcings besides CO2 contribute to the change in Antarctic temperature between glacial and interglacial climate. Simply extrapolating this correlation forward in time puts the temperature in 2100 A.D. somewhere upwards of 10 C warmer than present -- rather at the extreme end of the vast majority of projections (as we have discussed here). However, I don't really agree with my colleagues' criticism on this point. Gore is careful not to state what the temperature/CO2 scaling is. He is making a qualitative point, which is entirely accurate. The fact is that it would be difficult or impossible to explain past changes in temperature during the ice age cycles without CO2 changes (as we have discussed here). In that sense, the ice core CO2-temperature correlation remains an appropriate demonstration of the influence of CO2 on climate.
For the most part, I think Gore gets the science right, just as he did in Earth in the Balance. The small errors don't detract from Gore's main point, which is that we in the United States have the technological and institutional ability to have a significant impact on the future trajectory of climate change.
RealClimate is a great resource ... commentary on the science of climatology from folks who actually do it. The replies can be a bit weird as more than a few crackpots jump in, but there is also an attempt at patient education.
Last night we rented Good Night and Good Luck
watch it ... beautifully acted and directed and timely
I've been noticing that some of the indie folks have been producing very interesting music videos for their sites that sometimes border on the stunning.
Try this one from Sigur Rós for the track Glōsōli from Takk...
We watched Howl's Moving Castle last night.
I'm a big fan of Hayo Miyazaki's artform and loved this movie - much of the stuff from Studio Ghibli is great story telling.
highly recommended!
A piece in the New York Times on verbal white space in movies - notably its (good) use in animation.
I'm a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki (which also means I'm a fan of John Lasseter, who is heavily influenced by Miyazaki) and this white space is one of his key tools.
... But the most famous example of Mr. Miyazaki's nonverbal storytelling occurs in "My Neighbor Totoro" (1988), recently released on DVD in a new English dub.While their mother is hospitalized, 10-year-old Satsuki and 4-year-old Mei move with their professor father to a ramshackle old farmhouse. Late one afternoon, the sisters go to meet their father's bus in the rainy woods. Time passes slowly: shots of a frog in a puddle and of water droplets slipping from pine needles capture the feeling of a summer storm. Mei falls asleep and Satsuki has to hold her. When Totoro, the benevolent, furry forest spirit, joins the girls there's no chattering, no fanfare and no song. He just walks up and stands quietly next to Satsuki, watching over her and her sister. The sequence lasts almost seven minutes, but has just over 100 words of dialogue: it's one of the most magical moments in any recent film, animated or live action.
A confession - I'm not a huge film/video fan (although Sukie is). There are things I like, but they tend to be small budget and poorly distributed ... the sort of thing the Internet might fix.
Sundance has grown well beyond the scale of the nominal indie filmmaker - perhaps it represents the middle part of the long tail. Jheri (a huge film buff) recommends Blogging Sundance to follow the news.
A bit of poking around turned up some important news ... apparently a new Wallace and Gromit is at the conception stage.
In any event it would be nice if movies made on $50,000 to $500,000 budgets could find enough distribution to make that area of the tail more important (arguably DVDs have helped enormously - Netflix has a good selection and their delivery mechanism often has higher effective bandwidth than Bittorrent and the average user's network).
Thanks to everyone who sent me recommendations of a Boing Boing link to the 1946 film Despotism on Brewster's Archive. recommended!
I've mentioned it several times before, but go back seventy years and read Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here if you missed it in school. Just read it
A proposal for a remake of the classic.
Snakes on a Plane
It says it all - plot, setting and genre.
I don't think I'll see it, but it is great to see movie titles aren't completely broken...
Tools exist to make stop-motion animation fairly easy ... at least some of the technical aspects of the sport.
We've mentioned iStopMotion for OS X. I used it for a small project shortly after getting an iSight camera for my Mac. I tried a few tests with the current version yesterday and can report it is greatly improved.
A friend spends about half his time at a remote company location. The place has become very boring to him and he decided to make stop motion videos using his PowerBook, iSight and iStopMotion. He has a plywood board that is used as a stage, mounted lights and a camera mount that slides around the board. Some of his work is remarkable ... not at the level of Aardman Studios, but much better than Gumby.
A great tool for being creative and learning the ropes of something that few do. If you become skilled there are higher end versions to support dSLRs.
The half VGA (240 by 320) size that Apple is using for the video store is VHS to sub VHS (I would argue the later). As such you probably won't see them make any inroads on movies, but TV is another matter. I wonder what would happen if they started distributing shows before they aired? One can imagine people paying for other content - shows aired in other countries (the new Dr Who comes to mind) and, of course, the unmentionable that Apple will not carry. And then there are the TV shows with small rabid fan bases - $1.99 an episode may be enough to support some of them.
It is also interesting to note that iTunes will play H.264 that has been compressed elsewhere. It is very easy to compress the DVDs you own (full size - not this half VGA silliness) and add them to iTunes. Of course you will want quite a bit of disk space to build a library, but I find compressing DVDs to about 500 MB per hour of content with H.264 gives amazingly better results than DivX compressions to similar file sizes. If you compress at around 700 MB per hour you probably can't see the difference between the original.
If/when people start doing this, we will probably see .mp4 files (H.264) in p2p exchanges and DVD-R trades. While Apple won't condone this, it would increase the popularity of Quicktime and the iTunes player.
An hour ago I was watching a H.264 copy of a DVD we own on my 20 inch LCD display through the iTunes player. The visual quality is much better than our 20 inch TV (the quality of the screen is much better and the compression level is not visually degrading the content).
When Steve Jobs proclaimed 2005 as the year of high definition, a few short examples appeared on their website.
In the past week a few dozen HD movie trailers have also appeared.
These are guaranteed to make you see the value in a faster Internet connection - you also need a monitor large enough to render the shorts in HD.
So I'm willing to try many new things if they are reasonably cheap.
Apple has a video section in the iTunes Music Store. Some TV (don't watch much and can't imagine paying for it), music videos (people who know me would roll on the floor) and some Pixar shorts.
I love Pixar shorts. $1.99 doesn't seem too bad, even though they tend to be about 4 or 5 minutes long. There are a half dozen choices and I pick my favorite ... 'Bounding (this wonderful piece has strong visual elements from the area between Great Falls and Chouteau Montana ... home)
The download experience is just like buying an iTunes track. No complaints.
Watching is another thing. The screen size is approximately tiny (320x240 I believe) ... waaaaaaaay too small to be watched. This is the video equivalent of listening to bad shortwave radio. Doubling the screen size produces lots of nasty pixelization. Moving to full screen is unwatchable.
There is very little value here. It might have been worth it if the movie had four times as many pixels (at a minimum), but I clearly won't make a repeat purchase.
(see - I didn't like it and I didn't even get to the evilness of DRM)
A friend in London sends this photo associated with the opening of a certain movie.
Brian points to a discussion of the filming of Tim Burton's Corpse Bride.
...Corpse Bride is Jonathan Lucas’ first feature as a full-fledged editor. A Guild member since 1993, Lucas has worked as an assistant on more than 20 live action movies, including Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 101 Dalmatians and Sommersby. It was his work as first assistant editor on last years’ Troy for Warners that brought Lucas to the attention of Corpse Bride producer Allison Abbate. At press time, he was still editing the film at Three Mills Studios in the Bromley by Bow section of London, England, where the production also took place.
“ A lot of folks think our footage is CGI,” says Lucas. “It’s so smooth it looks computer-generated. The Canon still cameras are amazing; the quality is pretty unbelievable. If I have to, I can blow it up by 30 to 40 percent without showing degradation.” The immediacy of digital technology speeds the editing process. “I’m editing new footage three hours later, maybe quicker,” says Lucas. “It’s almost instant gratification.” As footage is edited, it replaces storyboard images and slowly the movie gets built.
...
neat ...
A nice way to experiment with this is iStopMotion -- last December I made a movie of a desk light on a rampage in the living room. It wasn't Pixar, but it was fun.
There has been much mention of the BBC Creative Archive project.
great stuff and we need more!
Archive.org has the full serialization of Radar Men From the Moon ... for those of you who think Plan 9 is as bad as it gets.
I lasted through about 10 minutes
Thanks John (I think)
Ed Wood's Plan 9 from Outer Space is available on Brewster's archive.org under a CC license.
If you haven't seen it, note that this is cult-level badness ... enough to inspire an operating system/
Three people have written to tell me about this fantastic movie called March of the Penguins in the past week.
Apparently it is seeing success.
People I really trust are saying see this one and easily the best film of the summer
I haven't seen it yet, so ymmv
OK - I'm hopelessly behind in my film watching and this is several years old, but if you have not seen Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, do yourself a favor and watch it soon. It requires at least two viewings.
Wonderful stuff ... the animation is magic.
Physics departments sometimes offer public lectures on the physics of (something out of science fiction). Larry Krauss of CWRU popularized this with a fairly successful and very well written book on the physics of Star Trek.
A glance at the calendar as well as searches on Google and eBay suggest light sabers are "hot" these days (at least today). Howstuffworks has an April Fool's piece on the subject.
Actually this type of thinking is fun and useful. Much of the supporting "physics" of scifi and cartoons is just wrong. I used to teach introductory physics (the mind numbingly boring part on statics) by looking at how the movies saw it. Seeing something really screwed up is a good start for appreciating how the world really works. Of course some artistic misuse can be used to great effect ... Warner Bros cartoons were often brilliant.
______
A bit more than a decade ago I was detailed by the researchy place I worked for to spend time with futurists working on a community of tomorrow in a certain piece of Florida swampland. This must have been very exciting to them as most of the people I met with over a series of ten meetings were vice presidents or directors of the media company that spearheaded the effort. It was astonishing how bad these people were at science and technology. The ability to separate what was possible and impossible was just missing at a level where they should never have graduated from High School.
My friend Robyn got me to watch Donnie Darko (she is seriously into the movie)
What a great cult film! The Director's Cut DVD set is great and seriously superior to the original DVD I looked at. What is amazing is the use of the cult fandom that has grown up around the film. Normal things like a production diary and the most inspired dvd documentary I've ever seen == #1 Fan: A Darkomentary.
This shows the way to handle a film that has moved to cultdom - harness the fan base and add what they produce.
recommended
I begin by noting I'm a great fan of Douglas Adams. I was very worried about how a movie could be done in such a short time and have been avoiding reviews.
So we finally saw it this afternoon.
It soared in the in the same manner a pile of construction rubble does.
It might work for someone who has never read the books.
In the meantime ..
OK - tomorrow is the US release of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.
I'm worried, but will go anyway. It is remarkable how a book or the spoken word can create a much more vivid experience than any movie. (the original BBC Radio version of HHGTTG from '78 is wonderful)
The deadly missile attack resulted in the untimely creation and sudden demise of a bowl of petunias and an innocent sperm whale..A shortened record of the thoughts of the sperm whale from creation to death is as follows. "Ah.! What is happening? Who am I? What is my purpose in life? Wow! This is really exciting.so much to look forward to! And wow! What is this thing suddenly coming towards me very fast? It needs a name.ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?" This was followed y a sudden wet thud. The only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was "Oh no not again". Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.
___There is an art, it says, or rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss. Pick a nice day, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] suggests, and try it.
The first part is easy. All it requires is simply the ability to throw yourself forward with all your weight, and the willingness not to mind that it's going to hurt.
That is, it's going to hurt if you fail to miss the ground. Most people fail to miss the ground, and if they are really trying properly, the likelihood is that they will fail to miss it fairly hard.
Clearly, it is the second part, the missing, which presents the difficulties.
One problem is that you have to miss the ground accidentally. It's no good deliberately intending to miss the ground because you won't. You have to have your attention suddenly distracted by something else when you're halfway there, so that you are no longer thinking about falling, or about the ground, or about how much it's going to hurt if you fail to miss it.
It is notoriously difficult to prize your attention away from these three things during the split second you have at your disposal. Hence most people's failure, and their eventual disillusionment with this exhilarating and spectacular sport.
If, however, you are lucky enough to have your attention momentarily distracted at the crucial moment by, say, a gorgeous pair of legs (tentacles, pseudopodia, according to phyllum and/or personal inclination) or a bomb going off in your vicinty, or by suddenly spotting an extremely rare species of beetle crawling along a nearby twig, then in your astonishment you will miss the ground completely and remain bobbing just a few inches above it in what might seem to be a slightly foolish manner.
This is a moment for superb and delicate concentration. Bob and float, float and bob. Ignore all consideration of your own weight simply let yourself waft higher. Do not listen to what anybody says to you at this point because they are unlikely to say anything helpful. They are most likely to say something along the lines of "Good God, you can't possibly be flying!" It is vitally important not to believe them or they will suddenly be right.
Waft higher and higher. Try a few swoops, gentle ones at first, then drift above the treetops breathing regularly.
DO NOT WAVE AT ANYBODY.
When you have done this a few times you will find the moment of distraction rapidly easier and easier to achieve.
You will then learn all sorts of things about how to control your flight, your speed, your maneuverability, and the trick usually lies in not thinking too hard about whatever you want to do, but just allowing it to happen as if it were going to anyway.
You will also learn about how to land properly, which is something you will almost certainly screw up, and screw up badly, on your first attempt.
There are private clubs you can join which help you achieve the all-important moment of distraction. They hire people with surprising bodies or opinions to leap out from behind bushes and exhibit and/or explain them at the critical moments. Few genuine hitchhikers will be able to afford to join these clubs, but some may be able to get temporary employment at them.
Here is a paper on a fairly simple technique for colorizing black and white movies with some very high quality examples.
I prefer to leave the old stuff untouched (although it needs to be preserved).
(check out fig. 7 in the document for a frightening choice of color)
A trailer has shown up for the upcoming movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie.
I'm afraid I've been spoiled by the BBC Radiophonic version - Marvin is wrong, Zaphod is very very wrong, the Captain of the Vogon Constructor Fleet is wrong ...
sigh
I'll go to the movie anyway
Brian points out the Kong is King.net.
An amazing place. A few large quicktime entries are posted every week. I spent over an hour looking at a bit of it this morning.
recommended!
The BBC has been running a project where the public can submit one minute videos.
Some are cute
So dust off your creativity and grab that camcorder
Steadicams are spendy as well as difficult to learn - the results are dramatic enough that they have found solid use for decades. Over the years a variety of third party devices and homemade versions have appeared. The $14 Steadicam has been around for a few years, but the designer now sells a finished model for less than $50.
Check the videos - this seems to work very well. I imagine a cheap video monitor at eye level would make it even better.
It doesn't make sense for me to offer a review. I just note that this is Pixar's best piece of work by a long measure and something that stands up very well to regular films.
Just go see it!
They have also finished the delightful little short Boundin' - straight out of Montana with an appearance by the Jackalope.
Did I mention you have to go to The Incredibles?
GO
Jessica, who is the render lead for the next Pixar movie Cars points out their first trailer.
(I'm really proud of you Jessica!)
I struggle to understand how a movie of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy will work.
One is due for release in 2005 - here is the first trailer.
By the way. If you want to play the old Infocom game give this link a try. There is also a flash based version.
Jessica points to a new trailer of the Incredibles -- it looks like a fun movie.
There is quite a bit of noise about the move to three d movies - complete with polarized glasses. The stated goal is to give the audience something to make them return to theaters willing to pay $10 for a 2 hour experience and $7 for grim food that costs 30 cents to make.
The real reason, IMHO, is that this is extremely difficult to copy (at least at this time) ... essentially a 3d digital rights management. If the experience is compelling and only available in theaters, it is worth a huge amount of money.
But my experience with media is that people rarely care about quality once it passes a minimal level.
stay tuned... it will take a few years for standards to settle and movies to film. Maybe 2007 or 2008...
I was going through Nature and came across this piece on Adam Summers - a scientific consultant for Pixar's Nemo project.
NPR did a piece on the Triplets of Belleville to celebrate the Oscar nominations the film and soundtrack have received.
Check out the samples!
What have you done recently?
All it seems to take is raw talent and a few readily available tools to make one of the white hot films at Sundance.
It is surprising to see a full length film made with iMovie. Many full length films are made with Final Cut Pro, but that would have added $1000 to the price. Horrors .. a $1200 movie.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow - a movie that seems to be made for Sukie and Steve (in Illinois).
Actually not from me. I love The Lord of the Rings, but The Hobbit is very so-so by comparison.
A fan has stitched together some footage into a trailer for a non-existent Hobbit film.
Take a look.
We saw Looney Tunes Back in Action the other day.
Recommended (at least if you are a Warner Brothers fan) There are references to nearly everything.
The BBC Dr Who fandom website has animation segments of a screenplay by Douglas Adams. This series has very cheap production values ... listening to the audio track may be the best way to experience it.
People are starting to suggest actors to play the next Doctor now that the show will be returning. My candidate is Ellen DeGeneres -- she would be perfect.
____
I really miss Douglas Adams. The Earth isn't what it should be - the mice must be furious.
It is hard to believe, but I think Rocky Jones Space Ranger is worse than the classic Plan 9 from Outer Space.
Both are really terrible and therefore somewhat desirable, but I cast my vote for Space Ranger because it was a series as well as major characters named Winky and Rocky.
Their explanation of gravity and orbital motion is worth the price of a rental.
For those on a quest there is always Plan 10 from Outer Space. We have a copy and the review at the Sundance Festival sums it up ... Nancy Drew on Acid...
Some time ago my sister and brother-in-law gave very positive reviews to Les Triplettes de Belleville, which they saw in Copenhagen. (a trailer exists on the Apple site)
Another review from a friend in Europe came in:
If there's any justice in the world, French animator Sylvain Chomet will be handed the Animated Feature Oscar in February for this fantastic little film. It follows none of the rules (see every Disney cartoon feature ever made) and forges an all-new narrative and visual style that's so winning it lingers in the mind long after the credits role (and stay to the end for a punchline)
The film's release date for NY and LA is November 26. This appears to be a must see.
Corinne and Jeff recommend The Triplets of Belleville as a must see. I'm afraid I haven't (and haven't seen it around here). They are in Denmark and are getting ready to see it for a second time. I trust their taste and the trailer looks very interesting.
Speaking of films from Sony Classics, Jacues Perrin's Winged Migration is a wonderful movie and is in the top 5 for more than a few reviewers -- not the top 5 of the year, but since film has been around.
Jessica notes a new teaser from Pixar. (which was shown with Nemo)
Yet another movie to look forward to - a bit more than a year away, but this one looks like it might be worth the wait. One of the nice things about Pixar movies is that they actually tell stories. About five or ten minutes into them I forget that I'm watching an animation.
Several people have noted the Rustboy site with some rather impressive amateur 3d work. Tools are now powerful and cheap enough that dedicated amateurs can produce very professional results.
The similarities to Stainboy, a Tim Burton creation during the height of the dotcom era, are remarkable. It turns out that Rustboy appears to have come first.
It is interesting to speculate how far a sum like $500k would go assuming you had a great story. As talent emerges it would be interesting to see if low end producers with an eye to talent and story will emerge to fund movies that don't require a huge success at the box office to be very successful. Perhaps movies wouldn't be as dull, predictable and safe as is the norm today.