30fps@140mph = f[(2*2.5GHzG5) + 3.5TbHD + FCP4.0 + 42in.HDTV + PS2 + IS300]
Got that? It also equals the most ridiculous incarnation of dependent filmmaking this year.
In the feat of boys-and-toys bravado that’ll surely earn them front row seats when the revolution comes, tech superpowers, pimped geeked out a Lexus IS300 with a full 30fps HD video editing system, including a 42-inch flatscreen you have to put in the backseat (oops, there goes the sound engineer and PA). [See specs and pics.]
At least the station’s on the passenger side, so you’re not tempted to cut the dailies while you obliviously cut off that school bus. full of handicapped orphans. that just drove into the lake. (Hey! Exclusive footage!)
Anyway, Wired reported on the rig at MacWorld, where the company sponsored “a competition to find the best short film about Macworld that was edited in the car.”
I would get American Standard to sponsor a competition for the best short film about a turd that was dreamed up on the toilet. Oh, wait. Michel Gondry already won that one.
Author: greg
From Abbot & Costello to Zulu: Movie Title Screens
Shill has a giant library of movie title screens. Not necessarily opening credits sequences–which are an artform in themselves–but a screencapture of the title card.
It’s connoisseur-comprehensive, with four versions of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, for example, tracking the nuanced differences in format and transfer quality for each film’s incarnation on laserdisc, DVD, beta dub, or (horrors) VHS.
One of my favorites is Safe, Todd Haynes’ 1995 film, and the main reason we can forgive Julianne Moore for Assassins [as for Laws of Attraction…]. Turns out Safe‘s restrained, ominous titles were designed by Bureau, the firm of artists Marlene McCarty and Donald Moffett. [via list.absenter.org]
Looking at Tall Buildings
A correction: Reading Herbert Muschamp’s review of MoMA’s “Tall Buildings” show, which includes the United Architects proposal for the WTC site. [The ‘Dream Team’ proposal is in there, too, but I’ve said all I’ll say about that.]
Coming after the pissed-to-be-publicly-accountable Meier, United Architecture’s proposal was surprisingly moving that morning in Dec.2002. They had made a video (it’s still on their site) with cuts of all kinds of happy shiny people looking up from the street, pointing at the new buildings, “like,” I said, “they used to do.” But it’s not really true.
Unless you were a tourist wanting to get fleeced, or you needed to get your bearings, you didn’t come out of the subway and look up at the World Trade Center, and you sure didn’t point.
Except on that morning. It just occurred to me that Farenheit 9/11 opened with shots of people staring, looking up, pointing. Like an uninsidious version of the Dream Team, United Architects unconsciously incorporated the attacks themselves into its presentation.
Conceived after September 11th, in case the world needed a reminder, “Tall Buildings” makes the complicated psychic and emotional power of skyscrapers as its jumping off point. Which is about as complicated a phrase as I can come up with.
[2018 UPDATE: In 2018 The New York Times reports that five women who worked with Meier, either at his firm or as a contractor, have come forward to say the architect made aggressive and unwanted sexual advances and propositions to them. The report also makes painfully clear that Meier’s behavior was widely known for a long time, and that his colleagues and partners did basically nothing to stop it beyond occasionally warning young employees to not find themselves alone with him. This update has been added to every post on greg.org pertaining to Meier or his work.]
The Startling Music of Public Radio
My wife is leaving for Japan this morning, so our alarm was set for 5:40 AM which, coincidentally, was the precise instant WAMU, the public radio station in DC, started running a promo for Latino USA. So instead of being rustled awake by subdued, overeducated murmuring, we got Tito Puente’s brass section as loud as a dorm room prank.
But this has happened before. The gentle piano intros to NPR’s Weekend Edition that practically brought your first Diet Coke of the day to your bedside are too-old school. Public radio is now trending loud.
WNYC runs the BBC World Service at 9 AM (thank you, I’m up by then), which used to start with no music at all, just the world-synching clock from Greenwhich to cue us and the news reader: “beep beep beeeeeep. 1300 hours, Greenwich Mean Time. BBC World Service. The news, read by Fiona Somebody.” Now, there’s a rousing brass intro with a rapid crescendo.
[I’m linking to these shows in the hope that you’ll know what the hell I’m talking about. This invisible-to-them music isn’t mentioned or credited, and who knows if it’s in the archived streams of the show? My head is full of untraceable music whose existence is not even acknowledged. Where did you go, BJ Liederman?]
But the most consistently startling so far (“We’re public radio. We don’t shock, we startle.”) while mercifully temporary, couldn’t have come at a worse time. WNYC ran promos ad nauseum for its May 7 broadcast of Bernstein’s Candide, which was being given a rare performance at Lincoln Center. As I commented impulsively on TMFTML’s review of the review, “#&^* Candide. The promos on WNYC for that thing blare the oh-so-famous prelude so suddenly, it scares our 2-mo. old and starts her crying every damn time it comes on.” What can I say, it made me feel better.
Like many people, I suspect, I don’t Listen To The Radio; I use it as a kind of aural carpet, the ambient track to my day. Encountering these Startling Themes is like stepping on a toy in the dark. Or it’s like (NPR People, now I’m talking to you) rearranging the furniture in a blind man’s house. A cranky, old, blind man, who lives next door and is always barking, “Turn down that music, you lousy punks!” Damn kids these days.
How To Be an Architecture Critic
[via archinect] On a day when the Times praises his shoplifter-friendly, open-air Prada store on Rodeo (a feature the real customers, who valet park in back, will never see),The Project for Public Spaces pokes a sharp stick in Rem Koolhaas’s eye for the deadened, bleak streetscapes he created all around his vaunted Seattle Public Library. Of course, when they hear “lively streetlife,” Official Seattle may still think lobster puppet-wielding WTO protestors burning dodwn the Starbucks, so it’s understandable.
And why believe the (nominally NYC-based) PPS? They praise, of all things, the Hugo Boss store on 5th & 56th, as if it created the lumbering t-shirted mobs who clog up our midtown sidewalks (and as if SUV-loads of people who don’t know how to walk down an unenclosed street are desirable in the first place).
So while their advice on influencing your local architecture critic screams undiagnosed Post-Muschamp Stress Disorder, their spot-on “Tips for being a do-it-yourself critic” reveal a touching truth: We’re all Muschampers now.
1. Have a sense of self-entitlement
2. Be self-conscious
3. Stare at others
4. Gossip
Start Drooling. Canon Releases the XL2
I’ve been a Sony man myself (VX-1000, PD-150), but plenty of festivals have been entered, reels filled out, and development deals struck with the Canon XL-1. Well, that’s all so much Fassbinder the bridge (it’s ok, I’ll wait…with me?) now. Canon’s released the Canon XL2, which, according to Gizmodo’s way-too-technical-for-me description, can sync settings between multiple cameras and “…there’s just so much to this camera, though, it’s sort of hard to explain.” It’s coming in around $5K. Time to dole out producer credit to “Amex” and “Visa.”
Canon XL2 product page
Are you sure Steven Seagal isn’t involved?
Police in the Sicilian town of Trapani clearly don’t read Gawker. If they did, they wouldn’t brag so blithely about spy-camming the Oceans Twelve “beach scenes [where litigation-happy, bikini-clad-photo-squelching] Catherine Zeta Jones swims in the sea at midnight.”
The cops went to elaborate lengths to justify this surveillance, even “arresting” 23 of their cousins for being in the Mafia and plotting to extort money from the production.
World Movie Magazine has the “official version,” but we know what really happened. I mean, come on, what Mafioso would make a move against Warners, which produced no less than five Steven Seagal movies (and don’t even get me started on The Sopranos)?
Related:
From Action Lama to Achtung Lama
Threads woven together, like the saffron robes of a reincarnated lama
How I Would Protest At The Republican Convention
Due to a work-related trip out of the country, I will miss the Republican Convention when it comes to town. If I were here, I would protest. I would not use signs, or puppets, or chants; I would protest by reenacting the shocked, dusty exodus from lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11th.
Here’s how I would do it:
– start downtown, maybe even below Canal street
– wear expendable business attire.
– set up a step ladder on the street and,
– using a mesh tray like they use for goldpanning or a handsifter, even, I would have a friend cover me with dust.
– It would be chalk dust, or line chalk from a football field, rosin, baby powder, or some other fine, whitish, grayish non-toxic dust.
– I would cover my mouth with a handkerchief while doing this, snd keep it with me to wipe my sweaty, dusty face.
– I would offer to cover as many thousands of my fellow protestors in the same manner.
– Then, I would start walking north.
– Or I would start walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, en masse.
– I would let verisimilitude and photogenics dictate my route more than proximity to Madison Square Garden.
– I would be eerily, even unsettlingly, quiet and orderly.
I would take seriously my responsibility as a New Yorker who lived through that horrible day, and take its symbolism back from the politicians who ignored the warnings, did nothing to prepare, sat or flailed wildly when it happened, sowed fear with it ever since, used it to falsely justify a war of misplaced vengeance, put us all in even greater danger than we were before, and who are now coming to town to usurp the most widely shared monument to their failure.
But maybe that’s just me.
The Best D.C. Art isn’t in D.C.
In the late 1990’s the artist Donald Moffett began making extraordinary paintings that seemed like a departure from the politically charged work that first garnered attention–and controversy–in protests against the Reagan/Bush-era AIDS debacle. Seductively minimal paintings where it seemed the material itself was the subject: oil paint extruded–somehow, the technique is hard to grasp–into lush carpets, finely woven nets, menacing razor-like bands. These highly aestheticized paint objects have a powerful physical presence.
Then last year, in a show at Marianne Boesky, Moffett completely transformed his paintings by projecting video–of The Ramble in Central Park–onto their silvered surface. The intricacies and painterly effects were still there, but deliberately harder to read. Meanwhile, the uneven surface of the canvas lent the slightly distorted video loops a ghostlike, immpermanent air. Questions of furtive, hard-to-pin-down identity filled the bucolic, elegant works.
Now through Saturday at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, Moffett is showing D.C., a similar body of paintings-and-projections, and it feels like one of the art world’s veteran protestors has come out of retirement, to show a new generation how it’s done. D.C.‘s projections feature the FBI building, the White House, Watergate and other loaded symbols of power. Definitely check out White House Unmoored, one of the few works where the artist used a handheld, rather than a fixed, camera. And read Moffett’s interview with Kultureflash; he’s one of the nicest, gentlest people I’ve ever met, but boy, does he sound pissed. [US pissed, angry. Not UK pissed, drunk. just to clear that up…]
Riding the Dependent Film Gravy Train
Matador Records released the ten winners of, well, a $1,000 budget to make an Interpol-related short for the band’s upcoming new album launch. The finished films are due August 15.
Top on the list: Gregory Brunkalla, whose couch-slugs-in-spandex short was one of the funnier installments of Nike’s Art of Speed series. Nice work if you can get it.
Related:
The Rise of Dependent Filmmaking
Interpol film contest
Art of Speed reviews
How to Make a Guerilla Documentary
NYT Magazine previews Robert Greenwald’s latest documentary, Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War On Journalism, which starts showing this week. It’ll be rolled out via selective and massroots screenings organized by MoveOn.org and the Center for American Progress. It’s the same model that quickly sold 120,000 copies of his last film, Uncovered, the critique of a certain Iraqwar-mongering administration.
The production details for Outfoxed are kinda cool, if you have access to a lot of volunteers and interns: Greenwald set dozens of DVD recorders to capture Fox News 24/7 for about six months. MoveOn orchestrated volunteer monitors to watch the network and note the exact time of footage that showed any of a dozen or so distortion techniques that Greenwald wanted to document. Then teams of highly paid editors became teams of low-paid editors to sort and structure the narrative.
All this was done without obtaining clearances from Fox. I guess when Larry Lessig’s your permissions guy, you get a little crazy on the ‘fair use.’
On the dislocation of airports
Like the road, the airport is a nonplace, something encountered on the way to going somewhere else, better measured in time – always too long – than in square feet. Now that it is unsafe to hitchhike, and affordable to fly, the terminal makes a better canvas for transition or self-discovery. As such, it is the setting du jour for our narratives of romance, longing, adventure and intrigue.
“It’s unlegislated territory,” Mr. Iyer said. “It’s a psychological limbo that becomes a meeting place of the human and posthuman – people are meeting loved ones, sending them off to war, meeting for funerals, all in the midst of a network of Body Shops, Sharper Images and other stores whose names even speak of displacement.”
-John Leland, “Unchecked Baggage: Our Airports, Ourselves”, NYT
Related: Souvenir (November 2001) Shooting Day 1: Charles de Gaulle
Blogging From Inside Project Greenlight
Art director Scott Smith is a directing finalist on the third season of Project Greenlight. He’s keeping a weblog of his experience over at agency Coudal Partners, whose new slogan is either “we put the ‘cou’ in cool,” or “no, our stylesheet’s not broken.”
The weblog may go on for weeks, or, if he gets dinged, it may end tomorrow. For Smith’s sake, I kind of hope he takes a clean second, earning enough recognition to get a real deal, without having to put up with all the documentary shenanigans. Besides, the two Greenlight movies to date have done about as well as Ben Affleck’s latest gigs. [Maybe it’s Kevin, not Scott, Smith, that needs Chris Moore’s brand of tough producer love.]
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over here and burns some Triggerstreet bridges…
White House Production Notes: Summer Blockbuster Edition
From: Scott Sforza, Head of Production, White House Studios
To: Karl Rove, CEO,
RE: Summer Schedule
As requested, sir, an update on this summer’s production/release schedule. It’s filling out quite nicely, and there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind it’ll go well. That said, it IS a lot of work for one man. I would ask you again to rethink the NO INTERNS policy; we could really use an extra hand down here.
– The Sidekick/Mentor/Villain is still causing trouble, and not testing well, either. We could finesse recasting, no problem. First, though, I recommend The Gyllenhaal Strategy: float the idea of replacing him with look-alike for the sequel. Looking good in a uniform‘s nice, but remember: we can always stuff a sock in the jumpsuit. We just need someone with a temper who knows his way around a combover. And who can swear like an oilman. [via boifromtroy]
– Release date for the ‘Foreign Production’: It’s exciting to hear we’re buying the rights to a new war picture, even if sellthrough on the last one is underperforming in both domestic and foreign. Still, I have some serious reservations about the release date–“the 26, 27 or 28 of July”??
I’m know this has serious tentpole potential, but HAVE WE EVEN SEEN THE ROUGH CUT? With all due respect to the many studio execs who came back from the set saying, “This is great stuff!” and “It’ll be done on time, no problem!” I’d feel more comfortable if we had some people in the editing room for this. Never mind, I’m told it’s being taken care of. Sorry. I still have that “They’ll shower us with flowers” song stuck in my head. [via Talkingpointsmemo]
– The Broadway Musical: What can I say, it’s costing more than we budgeted. I still don’t understand why we couldn’t shoot this in Toronto instead. The unions are whining, surprise surprise. Can’t wait for that scene in the sequel where we ship’em all of to Gitmo. haha. Bloomberg’s dealing with the leafblower-extortionists on the set problem, though. Sending them to the park or something. The “extras” are ready, and we’ll have a fleet of Prius’s ready to shuttle anyone who wants to see Hairspray, undetected. The set will look fabulous.
At Least They Got The Font Right
David Dunlap has a nice story about the typeface used for the inscription on the Freedom Tower cornerstone. Inspired by the sign on the Port Authority bus terminal, the typeface was designed by Brooklyn native Tobias Frere-Jones, whose name for the font, Gotham, was not just serendipity. [Read an interview with TF-J where he cites the WTC destruction as an inspirational facet of the design.]
It’s part of a larger Frere-Jones family conspiracy–watch out Jake and Jen!!— to totally own any creative endeavor with a city-related name.
Meanwhile, Curbed (safe. for now.) reports on the best/only way to actually catch a glimpse of the cornerstone.