Niki and I at Fantastic Fest

FF09-Fantastic-Feud-dhill_08D7895, originally uploaded by fantasticfest.

Photo by David Hill copyright 2009

Amazing high-dexterity robot hand

Silver Pines - Psychic Surgery

I think I mentioned in an earlier post that I was working on a video for The Silver Pines, a San Marcos/Austin band I'm friends with. Well, I had been having problems working with the footage I shot, which was essentially me shooting alone with one camera and a couple of members of the band, on one of the hottest days of August, outdoors. I also wasn't doing a good job of cutting what I had to the song that the band reccomended I use.

On Saturday I went back out to the location, with a lot more people, including Nick Smith, who directed the Diagonals 'Clones' video and Thomas Humphries (black magic rollercoaster), who ran second camera and helped with direction (I should pretty much never be allowed to direct action, since I have a hard time being demanding enough). Nick is a really close friend, so I was more comfortable kicking him around and making him do stupid, uncomfortable stuff for the benefit of the camera, which helped a lot.

I'm really happy so far with what we got- it has a much better sense of humor to it, and I had enough coverage that I didn't have to resort to my usual crutch of after-effects vomit to cover up not being able to cut footage together. And best of all, since the tone is so wildly unlike any of the current Silver Pines recordings, they are going to record a new song to the video instead of the other way around. That should be an exciting experiment. I'll post the results when they are ready.

More Bay Area 'Sorry, Thanks' Screenings

From Dia Sokol:

we are SO excited to announce that SORRY, THANKS will be screening 3 times in the Bay Area. [...]

Information about the screenings below:

MILL VALLEY FILM FESTIVAL
Sunday, October 11
9:00 PM
Sequoia Theatre, Mill Valley, CA

Monday, Oct 12,
9:30 PM
Smith Rafael Film Center
TICKET INFO



CINEMA BY THE BAY
Saturday, October 24,
9:00 PM
Landmark's Clay Theatre.
FESTIVAL INFO
TICKET INFO

I'll be at the Cinema by the Bay Screening, and I know that the first Mill Valley screening should have a lot of Cast and Crew in Attendance. If you're in the SF Bay Area, I hope you'll come see the movie and say hello!

MVFF 2009 | Sun. Oct 11th, 2009 - Sorry, Thanks @ Sequoia Theatre - 25 Throckmorton Avenue, Mill Valley, CA 94941

Sorry, Thanks will be playing at the Mill Valley film festival on October 11th.

First rule to becoming a better person: Admit that you are someone of highly compromised ideals. Max (played to wry comedic perfection by Dazed and Confused's Wiley Wiggins) would like to believe he's a good guy, even when his actions, or lack thereof, dictate otherwise. Kira, lost in a sea of self-doubt after a bad breakup, would like to believe in her inner idealist, too. After a one-night stand and a game of shadow puppets, Max finds himself drawn to Kira, despite already being in a long-term relationship. Kira hesitantly keeps the flirtation alive, while juggling both a new career and a burgeoning relationship with someone else. Setting the action in San Francisco's own vibrant Mission District, director Dia Sokol (producer of indie faves Mutual Appreciation and Nights and Weekends) and co-writer/producer Lauren Veloski offer up a terrifically smart, hilariously dry and emotionally honest portrayal of young lives in flux.
—Joshua Moore

Link

Michael Berryhill : Basement States Sep 10 – Oct 10, 2009 | Horton & Liu

If you are in New York, check out Michael's show at Horton & Liu!

Michael Berryhill : Basement States | Horton & Liu:
The gallery is pleased to present the New York solo debut of Michael Berryhill. Entitled Basement States, the artist’s recent series of paintings invite the viewer to engage in an open-ended dialogue of inventiveness and misinterpretation.

The Windmill Movie - Wed 16 Sept 7:00pm, Alamo Ritz

From Andrew Bujalski:

Apologies for a mass e-mail. Generally I don't do this due to being either (a) respectful of your inboxes or (b) not supportive enough of fellow filmmakers (take your pick), but I wanted to shill for The Windmill Movie which will be doing one screening only at Alamo Ritz on Wednesday 16th @ 7pm.

Dick Rogers was the first film teacher I had in college, initiating me into the culture & aesthetic of that particular program which continues to be a massive influence not only on the work I've done since but also, for better or worse, on the way I've comported myself into/through adulthood. He died in 2001 just before I began shooting Funny Ha Ha & it will always bother me that I never got to show him that film & seek his approval for it.

As per the blurb description in the AFS notice below, a few years after he died, another student of his, Alex Olch, set about taking decades worth of autobiographical footage Dick had shot & giving it a shape that Dick had never been able to find for the material himself. Without a doubt, my experience of The Windmill Movie was a very personal one, but I'm confident that it's objectively an extraordinary film. A friend of mine who saw it compared it to Synecdoche, NY, and while it's of course a very different species of film, nonetheless after I saw it I knew exactly what he meant--there are levels of complexity and invention and wit to which most contemporary documentaries wouldn't bother aspire.

And so! If you've got nothing better to do on Wednesday evening, I recommend it...

Link

Make: Online : Giant Peggy-based LED display

Make: Online : Giant Peggy-based LED display

Eyeballz

Eyeballz
Originally uploaded by weevil

District-9

To start out, read Scott's wrap up of the current criticisms of the film here: Filmmaker Magazine Blog: District 9

I left my thoughts in the comments to that article. To rework them a bit here, I liked the movie as a goofy-yet-richly-backdropped action flick, but if you'll check my earlier post, the trailers, and some of the director's shorts, really highlighted the use of non-professional, naturalistic performances (I refuse to use the belittling term 'non-actor') in a way that made the SF elements much more immediate and believable. I am always on the lookout for this; Some of my favorite films are Science Fiction by suggestion alone, leaving out sets and special effects, and using narratives solely to transform the world and the people already around us into strange-but believable- new frontiers. Found worlds are obviously more 'real' than fabricated ones, and it generally just takes a few tiny tweaks to turn the familiar into the surreal.

District 9 seemed to lose sight of its biggest asset, those performances, (and that feeling of Jamais vu they create), and fell into a more easily sustainable, standard-SF/action-movie rhythm (that's not to say that there is anything 'wrong' with the performances. Sharlto Copley is very good in the film). District 9 was very competent as the action film it ended up being- But I felt like Blomkamp could have landed some really heavy blows, maybe even while retaining the film's unexpected sense of humor, if he had focused on the immediate realism of non-professional actors, like in his shorter works, instead of letting them clash against his narrative as nothing but scenery.

Interactive goodie updates

Processing and Flixel both saw updates today. Flixel is also getting a workshop event at the upcoming GDC in Austin, Texas. I'm thinking of going, despite the fact that I don't know a ton of actionscript yet.

A stupid thought too long to put on twitter.

If you were ever going to self-annihilate/disappear/jump in the ocean, it might be an interesting last gesture to re-route all your incoming email, twitter messages, etc. to automatically publish back out in-full on all your various online presences, so that instead of leaving a sudden vacuum, your online identity would still be as active as the energy people put into it. Also, all the information that you kept segregated between different groups of people would all suddenly become open and transparent, but you wouldn't have to deal with the repercussions.

“make visible what, without with you, might never have been seen.”

Device Volume II - Reconstructed

Device Gallery:

"Featuring 16 internationally renowned sculptors whose compulsive craftsmanship, distinct vision and mechanical fascination makes for an imaginative and arresting collection of work.

Using popular culture imagery and objects to explore such themes as mythology, nature, inner fantasy and technology. Artists featured include Greg Brotherton, Steve Brudniak, Christopher Conte, Nemo Gould, Stéphane Halleux, Tom Haney, Kris Kuksi, Mike Libby, Paul Loughridge, Michihiro Matsuoka, Jeremy Mayer, Rich Muller, Olivier Pauwels, Andrew Smith, Lewis Tardy, and Jud Turner, with the forwarded written by Gareth Branwyn."

My friend Steve Brudniak has 14 sculptures in this beautiful book by Device Gallery.

Canary's Wringing Future-Is-Now Dystopia - Village Voice Movie Review

In Adams's bleakly comic vision, organ harvesting is an open industry and ad execs plot to position the Canary corporation as 'the Coke of organ redistribution.' If that calls to mind a genre piece along the lines of Parts: The Clonus Horror or Repo! The Genetic Opera, Adams's decentralized narrative elides anything as obvious as kidney-swiping or body-slicing. Instead, the movie concentrates on the world ignored in those films: seemingly random glimpses of workplace behavior, rendered with pitch-perfect realism; domestic scenes in unsubtitled Russian and German; vignettes of conversational one-upmanship—all of which take on an eerie cast whenever a white-jacketed Canary employee (Carla Pauli) materializes wordlessly in the crannies of the frame.

New York Movies - Canary's Wringing Future-Is-Now Dystopia

My thoughts on monster horror movies, or, Why every Alien movie has been exponentially worse than the one that preceded it:

The Monster is just an unreasoning external pressure that we cook our characters with, and in doing that we see how they tick. Back when movies were more familiar with people than with monsters, this worked. The less the monster was seen, the more powerful it was. You could make out its shape in the realism and depth of the character's reactions. The creature in Alien occupies a tiny fragment of screen time, but it looms over every frame through the performances of the cast.

Now we no longer populate these movies with humans but with fodder. We've learned how to show the Monster but forgotten how to show people, and they become increasingly flimsy, predictable and mawkish- to stare at them too long is to get bored while waiting for them to be eaten. Instead we fetishize the Monster, and in staring at it too long, it loses its power too- everything has its depth stripped away, nothing means anything, and we've diffused or at least ignored our fears by shining a flashlight on every menacing shadow in the room. These movies have lost the capacity to connect to any real fear, and instead only appeal to our infantile desire to break our toys against each other.

Image by Till Nowak.