Punchline

For your edification: A whimsical clown movie.

by me, Christian Panic & Fritz Hoepfner
Winner, Alamo Drafthouse Open Screen Night 6/30/05

You'll need QuickTime 7 to view this clip.

Tony Takitani

The Japanese Trailer for Tony Takitani.
Found Via GreenCine Daily

(Taking a break from the blog to work on some stuff, be back in a few days)

Guardian Unlimited books- The Whole Equation

J.G. Ballard's review of David Thomson's book The Whole Equation is, in itself, a nicely written indictment of Hollywood- executed with that "rubbernecking to study a fatal road-accident" fascination that Ballard does so well.

Hollywood, a cluster of metal sheds in the shabbier suburbs of Los Angeles, itself a suburb of nowhere, has created what is virtually the first religion devoted solely to entertaining its congregation. Hollywood has taught us how to behave when falling in love, standing up for our beliefs, defending our families and seeking a better life. Most of us, mysteriously, have accepted its guiding hand, in countless ways of which we're largely unaware.
Watch yourself the next time you kiss, or weep with emotion at a baby's birth. A Hollywood cue card is present somewhere. It's as strange as if we took our deepest beliefs and sense of a just life from Euro Disney rather than Canterbury cathedral. But perhaps we do.

Stay Free! Daily: How did Mad Hot Ballroom survive the copyright cartel?

A nightmarish story of an indy doc trudging through clearing rights to music. Documentary films should automatically be covered by fair-use for fragmentary usage of commercial music, in my opinion.

When Agrelo and Sewell were filming boys playing foosball after school, Ronnie at one point shouted, "Everybody dance now!", a line from a C+C Music Factory hit. Incredibly, the filmmakers' lawyer said the line had to be cleared with the song's publisher, Warner Chappell. The price? $5,000.

Link

I want to see movies of my dreams.

Eeeeegah.

Using cats selected for their sharp vision, in 1999 Garret Stanley and his team recorded signals from a total of 177 cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus - a part of the brain's thalamus [the thalamus integrates all of the brains sensory input and forms the base of the seven-layered thalamocortical loop with the six layered neocortex] - as they played 16 second digitized (64 by 64 pixels) movies of indoor and outdoor scenes. Using simple mathematical filters, the Stanley and his buddies decoded the signals to generate movies of what the cats actually saw. Though the reconstructed movies lacked color and resolution and could not be recorded in real-time [the experimenters could only record from 10 neurons at a time and thus had to make several different recording runs, showing the same video] they turned out to be amazingly faithful to the original.

pasta and vinegar -Jacking into brains and extracting video:

The Miranda Act

Craig Phillips has posted an interview with performance artist/director Miranda July at greencine.com.

Howl

Tamara and I caught a showing of Howl's Moving Castle last night. I definitely can't say that I disliked it, but it did dawn on me about halfway through the movie that it was, for all intents and purposes, the same film as Spirited Away.
A young girl gets sucked into magical world, falls for ambiguously gay 'magic boy', has to watch out for a powerful bad mommy type who somewhere along the way is rendered harmless and lovable. And then, at a randomly selected point everyone cheers, 'we win!' and it's over. hmmm...
Anyway, it's still light years ahead of any children's fare in this country and it's nice to see some traditional animation in an ocean of rehashed 3D CG toy tie-in movies.

Natalie Portman blows up Parlament

Watchmen may have been flushed, but evidently V for Vendetta is getting made. If comic book and video game movies are the only films that are permitted nowdays, at least this is a pretty good comic to adapt.
From the Wachowski Brothers, an Ingénue Who Blows Up Parliament - New York Times

Who Is On First? - Slamdance Festival 2003

Dave and Nathan's short Who Is On First? is viewable at the Slamdance website. Watch it and give it some good votes.

SXSW Presents

Nathan Zellner and I went out to Austin Studios last week to record a short chat about our movie Frontier which will be playing on KLRU's "SXSW Presents" (Probably in September). Matt Dentler hosts, and has a little more info on his blog.

Another clip

Another clip.
I shot this when I was staying in Munich years ago and did some audio/video tampering to it last night. It's probably too effect-y and not obviously "slo-mo" enough for the slo-mo festival, but it was interesting enough to post here. I really like the one-minute limitation of this festival. It's really liberating for some reason. Instead of sitting around worrying about plots or how to ask other people to help me work on something, I'm free to concentrate on a single moment or feeling, and make it as abstract as I see fit. After the slo-mo festival is finished I'm thinking of returning to making short looping DVD's of similar subject matter. Maybe I could even hand-make some packaging and sell discs from the site if anyone was interested in seeing them. It might also be interesting to fill a room with old televisions, each playing a loop...

Fantagraphics Blog

Fantagraphics books has launched their own blog.

Featuring Fantagraphics Books co-owners Gary Groth & Kim Thompson, FLOG! is a forum for commentary and discussion with the comic industry's preeminent publishers. Periodic contributors will also include PR Guru Eric Reynolds, and Master of Wholesale, Greg Zura.

Found via Boing Boing

Thinking about changes...

It hasn't been very long since the last big site overhaul, but I'm already feeling like there needs to be another one. Most importantly I want to take advantage of the new H.264 QuickTime codec that I've been using in the last couple of clips I've posted and make a new video page- presumably with some stuff on it that I've made recently as opposed to the same old crap from years ago. I'm also interested in posting some Quartz Composer creations (like screen savers or movies that have interactive elements).

Not sure when I'll get the chance to work on any of this though.

I try not to post much personal stuff on this blog any more, but it's been a hard couple of months for me. I feel like I really need to improve my life and start working full time on stuff that I love again. It's a hard order in this economy, but I know I need to go to art school and get into an interaction design program somewhere. It's almost all I think about now. On top of my current job though, I think it's going to be a lot of work. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to manage it.

The All New Sesame Street

Found via we make money not art

Another one.

Another slow motion movie. Again, you'll need QuickTime 7 to view it.

Oh my God.

Jenny Hart sent me this link with a note: "Why I want to live in France."

I concur. Be sure and click through all the pages. This was a giant surrealist marionette show about a a little girl that flies a rocket ship to a liliputian world and a royal court that lives in a mansion on the back of a giant elephant. I cannot imagine the work that must have gone into this.

More slo-mo

Here's another slow motion movie.


Yeah, these were made from an old tape. I'm going to shoot something else this weekend to work with.

(you need QuickTime 7 to view these clips)

My first slo-mo film festival submission

Here's my first submission to the Slo Mo Video festival. You need Quicktime 7 to view it.

Michelle Chang & Co in New Scientist

New Scientist Has an article today about location-based gaming that includes quotes from Michelle Chang, who spoke with me about mobile media at SXSW this year.

Paramount pulls plug on Watchmen

Paramount has pulled the plug on its proposed film version of Watchmen, Alan Moore's celebrated superhero graphic novel, Variety reported. Producers Larry Gordon and Lloyd Levin were taking the project, with British director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) attached, out to other studios, the trade paper reported.

Thanks Seth!

x86

I try to make a concerted effort not to blog about anything directly related to Apple on here, but the shift to Intel chips has too many wide-reaching ramifications to ignore. Here's the links I've collected so far:

Filmmaker magazine blog and Wired on how it will garner Apple the DRM'ed chips 'necessary' to create an online movie service.
SF Gate has a recap of the WWDC and talks about how adapting IBM's G5 chip to a laptop would have been "the mother of all thermal challenges".
Jon Siracusa gets all mopey about having to use the same chips as everybody else.
John Gruber simply states that the classic environment won't work any more on the Intel-based Macs, which is the least of my concerns.

All in all, I am undecided about how to feel about the switch. In two years I would be in the market for a new machine anyway, so I'm not too worried about the scheduled obsolescence of my current machine. As for (the dim possibility of) having hard-coded DRM on my home Mac, nobody has been able to confirm such a thing, and I have a hard time believing that Apple would just toss all our rights to the wind. If it allows us to have a vast downloadable movie service that lets you move media as you see fit on a home network, organize your current movies a-la iTunes, burn SD discs of your content or stream it to my hdtv, then it would allow more than I can easily, or legally, do now.
Mike Curtis has a huge ongoing thread about the switch, where he links to an article that says that DRM is not going to be used in the new intel Macs- his post is called, "It'll be OK".
Steven Frank has the final word.

Power Game Factory

Power Game Factory is a sidescrolling video game construction kit for OS X that looks very promising. The program will create stand alone applications from your creations that are not rights-managed, i.e. they're yours to do with as you wish. This is a neat tool for pixel artists who aren't programmers.
found via Pasta and Vinegar

Frame Enlargements from Stan Brakhage films

Link
Found Via Data is Nature

It's raining DVD's.

I would just like to profusely thank Chris Hughes and Chaise Magazine for all the awesome DVD's I got from them this week. I'm already making my way through the Chaise 2 DVD and it's great. This morning I got a package from Chris and I almost lost my mind... tons of absolutely amazing and impossible to find art videos and films. I just managed to look through the first few before I had to drag my ass to work..I can't wait to get home and have an impromptu film festival.

Viva Les Amis, 2nd run

From Nancy Higgins:

After two sold out screenings in May, the Alamo Drafthouse downtown will be showing Viva Les Amis (the documentary about Les Amis Cafe) again:
Tuesday June 7th 9:45 p.m.
Thursday June 9th 7:00 p.m.
and
Wednesday July 6th 7:00 p.m.
*Remember, you can always buy your tickets online to secure a seat!

Movie-List Forums - David Lynch Trailers (Misc. Oddities)

chugalug, originally uploaded by weevil.

Movie-List Forums - David Lynch Trailers and miscellaneous video
Found Via GreenCine Daily

Current & Click

From a SXSW Press release:

South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals is thrilled to announce that Current, the new cable network launched by Al Gore and partner Joel Hyatt, will be the official television partner for the 2005 SXSWclick Festival. The two companies will work together to cross-promote events through the summer. [...]
The SXSWclick Festival is a new event, a new online film festival that incorporates mobile technology. Producers will be able to submit their films through the SXSW web site at http://www.sxsw.com/film/click, and the deadline for submissions is June 10, 2005. The festival is open to all forms of graphic storytelling—from music videos to flash animation and beyond—but works must be five minutes or less. Submissions are accepted as DVDs, VHS tapes, or as .swf files on disk.

Current's site
SXSW Click site

Media That Matters

The Fifth Annual Media That Matters Film Festival begins today.