]]>With less than a month now to go before election Day and the country in a shambles, Obama is ahead in all the polls and even I am cautiously, against my better judgment, starting to hope that maybe, just this once, the shitheads will not win. Of course I’ve hoped this several times before, only to be sucker-punched and laughed at by the Shithead Nation. Which could well happen again if enough people secretly turn out to be racists behind the electoral booth curtain. Even if Obama does win, it still feels like a depressing confirmation of one’s most cynical and misanthropic suspicions that things finally had to get this bad—the country in ruin, mired in two losing wars and on the brink of a global Great Depression—before people would grudgingly consent to vote for someone intelligent for a change. It’s hard to believe we might actually have someone smart running the country again; as my friend Megan said, “It seems almost bizarre.” No doubt as soon as we’re at peace and running a surplus again the shitheads will vote for another hawkish, tax-cutting demagogue, like an alcoholic with a few months’ sobriety under his belt who decides that things are going so well that a coupla beers aren’t going to hurt anything.
]]>Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques of “enhanced interrogation” that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.
Now she said it, I didn’t. She said, ‘There’s a place in Hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.’
Albright’s quote was “help other women”, not support. Perhaps it’s not worth explaining the difference to the vacuous veep nominee. Words are complicated. At least candidates are now free to openly declare that people who don’t vote for them are going to hell. Combined with recent efforts to further entwine religion and politics, clearly America is headed to a fun place.
]]>I was convinced an Obama/McCain campaign would be measurably different on almost all standards. And to watch it become Bush/Kerry, Bush/Gore, has been one of the most dissatisfying experiences.
No kidding.
]]>I usually phrase that question as “What the fuck are these scope things? They look cool but I have no fucking idea what they do.”
]]>BARTLET: Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.
OBAMA: Which was?
BARTLET: A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.
OBAMA: And?
BARTLET: I was.
And this bit:
OBAMA: … They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m — wait for it — the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?
BARTLET: Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. … The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.
I know there are other ways of being exceptional than by being intelligent, but I still think that’s a large part of the problem. Every 4 years it’s a race to the bottom.
]]>So the point of bringing this up? Two things: First, SNL has actually created a somewhat funny sketch. It took a couple of minutes to suppress the wild hatred I have for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, but it actually gets funny. And it addresses what I talked about above. Honestly if they did comedy with even this faint level of insight more often, I wouldn’t get so annoyed when news outlets gushingly fawn over SNL’s “importance” in political comedy.
Second, the NY Times has done a piece on Palin’s time in Alaskan office:
So when there was a vacancy at the top of the State Division of Agriculture, she appointed a high school classmate, Franci Havemeister, to the $95,000-a-year directorship. A former real estate agent, Ms. Havemeister cited her childhood love of cows as a qualification for running the roughly $2 million agency.
Ms. Havemeister was one of at least five schoolmates Ms. Palin hired, often at salaries far exceeding their private sector wages.
Talk about change you can believe in.
]]>Short promotional trailers have been cut for some of the more prominent Honours and NHFM films from the last few years. I’ll see if I can’t get the clip for Gannets up on the site somehow.
]]>Then you see things like this: Commander Keen, looking down on you from a wall. Peering out from somewhere he shouldn’t be.
In a sense it should be mildly outrageous. It is, after all, graffiti. It’s vandalism. I personally hate graffiti but I recognise that’s largely because I don’t like the culture and the people who tag. This though, this appeals to me. Partly because I have fond memories of young William Blazcowicz II - Commander Keen was one of the first PC games I ever played - but a lot of it has to do with the non-sequiter nature of the image. Though the brand has all but faded from view, it is still a commercial image, but the placement of the Keens throughout Adelaide is almost anti-advertisement in nature. Keen isn’t trying to get in your face in the way that other graffiti and other advertising does. He’s down dingy alleyways. He’s around corners. He’s on rooftops. He’s watching over the city.
I bring this up because the Keen I passed every day on the bus is now gone. How boring.
]]>Option #2 reminds me of a piece I read the other day. I can’t quite tell if it’s serious. If it is, it’s a fairly unnecessary defense of the ‘redneck’. If it’s serious, it seems some degree of a subculture in the US has adopted the term as an inside endearment. The problem with this is that as applied to the people described in the article, it’s a misnomer. Not once in the article does the author mention the defining characteristic of a redneck: they’re racist, bigoted fucks. That’s what concerns people, or at the very least that’s what concerns me. That the next US election will be decided by closed-minded ignorant shits who have no business being the inheritors of the US founding fathers’ legacy.
Or perhaps, since Jefferson owned slaves, I’m the one reading it wrong.
]]>Personally I hope there are some speed and stability optimisations in iTunes 8, since the Genius recommendation feature couldn’t be less interesting to me. I have eclectic tastes. Last.fm can’t tell me what new music I’m going to like, Genius won’t either. I’m also not going to start downloading HD movies and TV shows from iTunes any time soon.
The curved iPod nano looks nice and all — I prefer the tall form factor to the short they went with last year. Whether the curving of the screen will cause distortion is a worrying question. The inclusion of the accelerometer is interesting, if only for the slightly dissonant control scheme. Switching from portrait to landscape also realigns the controls. Not a huge deal, but how intuitive it turns out is yet to be seen. Also, Apple can tout their efforts to create as environmentally friendly a nano as they can, but as long as they’re the #1 marketshare holder on a popular consumer product, Greenpeace is going to slap them for publicity.
The new nano’s are at 8gb and 16gb, at unsurprising prices. Which sadly suggested that the late rumour would be true: no iPod touch capacity bump. I shouldn’t be too disappointed, since the capacity I’m after (32gb) is already there. The internal speaker and physical volume buttons are greatly appreciated features. No GPS, which always sounded like a wishful feature (that I wasn’t wishing for). No camera, a wishful feature I was wishing for. They’ve stuck with their shiny iPod-ass too. Bastards. They also didn’t include a mic, but have introduced a new set of overpriced headphones with inline mic and controls. So that’s mixed. Maybe this will allow a Skype on the touch. Maybe not.
In general it’s a pretty routine round of updates. Not terrible, but not particularly interesting either. What was Apple’s “big news”? I can’t see anything there. The emphasis on iPhone/iPod touch as a gaming platform was curious, but just saying you’re competing with the DS and the PSP doesn’t make it so.
]]>Drew has provided artwork for over 150 film posters as well as many classic album covers, advertising, and book covers. He is best knows by his poster illustrations for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises and can count film makers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg among his biggest fans.
It’s inevitable given the reduction in cost and production time, that the Photoshop hack-jobs will usurp the old illustrated posters. It’d be nice though to see the style return to use, outside of deliberate attempts to invoke nostalgia.
]]>Edge Church International (can’t you just feeeel God’s love in the name?) was founded by Danny Guglielmucci. It’s a member of Australian Christian Churches, like Hillsong and The Compound. Turns out Mr. Guglielmucci’s son Michael has been getting into a little trouble. He told people he had a terminal illness. On the back of this claim he released a single. Turns out he was full of shit.
It’s okay though, the explanation actually makes a lot of sense. Michael Guglielmucci doesn’t have cancer, he’s just addicted to porn. That’s why he said he had cancer. Porn addiction. That’s why he went around with oxygen tubes in his nose. Porn addiction. That’s why he led his family to believe that he was dying. Porn addiction.
I’m pretty sure the porn industry would like to tell Guglielmucci - both the lying dipshit of a son and the father who tosses off this explanation as if it makes a lick of sense - to go fuck himself. Maybe he can watch some more porn to get some ideas.
]]>Today was mainly reviewing the 8 minute cut and working from that. The opening of the film has been reworked yet again, making it a little longer and adjusting the story slightly, but it works a lot better now. It’s pretty good when you can take a chunk of footage, shift it around, and effectively repurpose it.
We also did some more work on the escape sequence. Since starting that sequence it’s been a process of just cutting it down further and further, making it faster and faster. Part-way through this process we got some music from Dane, which prompted an even faster sequence of cuts. The music changed the tone of the edit, I believe in a good way. Without the music the nature of the sequence is a little ambiguous - the character is running for his life, but how exactly is the audience supposed to respond to this? The music really helps make the response clear. I’m pleased with this segment, it being the first time I’ve really attempted to create a fast-paced edit. In doing so I’ve tried to keep in mind Murch’s comments, as well as quick-cut sequences such as that in Raging Bull (though of course, this scene is not as intense as the fight scenes in that film).
In making these quick cuts, one of my main considerations has been in the treatment of spatial relationships on either side of each cut. In particular I’ve tried to avoid what the director and I have called “student film” cuts. Really what we’re talking about are jump-cuts, where character(s) within the scene move substantially, but the viewpoint does not. For the bulk of the escape sequence we could avoid this pretty simply and effectively, as the different takes were shot from vastly different angles. When assembling the two viewpoints I typically tried to keep the actor’s motions coherent, not overlapping but trying not to make the cuts jump too far. Later in the alternate takes, the shots became too similar to apply this technique to the same effect. Rather than invoking a sense of freneticism, the technique just ends up looking showy in a fashion not consistent with the tone of the film.
By my original timetable, the final cut should be cut by end of work tomorrow. I think we’re pretty close to that point, but I’m not sure I’ll be satisfied with locking off tomorrow. This won’t be a huge problem, as my timetable allowed an extra week, ostensibly for grading, but also for added cutting time.
]]>Presumably this will lead to a dramatically different stage presentation by Mr. Jobs.
]]>]]>But here’s something I hadn’t actually seen before: Kubrick porn. In The Sexxxing, a 2005 quickie from Danni.com, a young woman named Miss Torrent applies to be the winter manager of a porn company’s offices—and the place turns out to be haunted by horny, fake-breasted lesbians. Orgasms ensue.
With the assembly out of the way it was time today to start making each scene perfect. The incremental nature of the cut confounds me sometimes. I try to get every cut right, sure, but I always feel like everything is going to be revised in the near future anyway. Especially at the start of the edit, when so much of the cut is still up in the air, much of it feels vaguely inconsequential.
That aside, I’m pretty happy with where things are at the moment. To work with the project I’ve split it up into the previously mentioned 5 segments and I’m working with those separately. I can see already that the bulk of my work will be in getting part 1 just right. It’s the longest segment of the film, so there’s the worry that poor pacing will just turn off the audience straight away. There’s a lot of dialogue, but nobody wants it to end up all talking-heads. The scene also features all of the characters in a small room. This is also where the characters really get established, and where the film tells the audience exactly what kind of story it’s telling.
Part 1 isn’t much past the assembly point yet. I did some work on the prologue (which is so simple I’m afraid I’ll break it), but most of my work was on part 3, the death scene. It takes place in a very confined space, so I tried to reflect this with the shot selection, avoiding the wider shots, and sticking with extreme-low or -high angle shots. I liken this segment as a little dream on the way to death, and as such it takes on an odd feel. I think the sound design/music will be particularly important here. I cut it to an Angelo Badalamenti track from Twin Peaks.
Part 2, the chase, presents an interesting challenge. It features easily the most frenetic sequence of the otherwise languid film, and so I’ve consciously tried to cut it differently to the rest of the film. I kept in mind what Murch said about the relationship between the cut and the thought. Throughout the film Dougie is dull-witted and slow and the cuts reflect that. Here though his mind is abuzz with activity and energy. The action shot was filmed multiple times in long takes, so I’ve spliced the takes together to up the energy and distinguish the sequence from the rest of the film. It can still do with some adjustment but I’m pretty happy with it so far.
]]>The bulk of my work today was in building the assembly. I’ve never been great at reading marked up scripts, and I’m even worse at reading chicken-scratch handwriting (my own included). I stuck to the notes as much as I could but often I had to rely on just building each scene as best I could to match the script and have it all make sense. In the end the assembly came out at around 11 minutes, giving us a good 5 minutes to trim off. I don’t anticipate running time to be any major concern.
]]>The film was telecined over the weekend in Melbourne. In the process, Luke and Sian also had them do most of the grade, taking it from colour to black & white. It looks excellent. I may still have to do some adjustments at the end, but it won’t be major. This gives me a little more time in the third week if I need it for the main edit.
My previously discussed issue with clip management was resolved pretty quickly. I found the third way. Basically I do what I did with the non-nesting method, but instead of copy-pasting from one sequence into my work sequence, I drag the linked clips back into the project bin. I then have a new clip with the synced sound that I can use as if I’d captured it with sound in the first place. Huzzah.
Given more time to experiment with methods, I wouldn’t mind trying out something that assistant editor Nick suggested, which was to capture the tapes as single long clips and then break it apart into each take, and then make new synced clips from that. Essentially what I did last year on Hats, but with individual clips at the end. We weren’t sure though that we’d be able to properly organise the clips that the end of it. Capturing each take individually, I knew exactly what I’d end up with, so I went with that. I’ve now got a pretty damned organised project, so much so that at the end of the day (literally) I was able to just drag the clips straight from the project browser into a timeline to produce my 50 minute preview video. The whole film from start to finish.
Since I’m not working in that abomination of a format known as HDV, it only took me 5 minutes to export the video from FCP into DVD Studio Pro. Unfortunately I had to leave before I could also burn the preview DVD to disc. So at the end of day one I’m only 10 minutes behind schedule. Not bad.
Tomorrow morning I’ll screen the rushes on a projector. Sadly not the lovely HD projector in N409, but the less-impressive one in the DOS lab. After that, lunch. But after that, assembly!
A vastly improved workflow for working with audio and video captured separately. In addition to figuring out what seems to be an optimal way to manage the clips, I also learned how to properly use markers to make syncing the a/v to begin with a whole lot easier. It’s still a chore, but thankfully a fairly brainless one at this point. Especially helpful today given that I felt half-dead the whole time.
I wish the clapper board were some supernatural object which never went out of focus, never blew out, and never drifted out of the edges of the frame.
I wish all continuity notes could be recorded directly onto a laptop. As it is I haven’t copied the notes into the clip info, though I may get Assistant Editor Nick to do this later in the week. It would be interesting I think to look at the paper edit in terms of shot compositions.
I wish we had graphics tablets in the edit suites. Those things are too awesome.
I wish I were cutting on Avid. It’d mean learning all the little niggling bastard details over again, but I’m beginning to get a sense of why FCP often isn’t taken too seriously.
]]>I have a hard time with telemarketers. I hate the practice, but it’s unfair to direct that hate upon the person calling. They’re doing a job. It’s the jerks hiring these companies who deserve the vitriol. Oh, and my sympathies don’t extend to the callers based overseas who insist that they’re “John from Perth”. Once you start lying to me … well you can guess the rest.
]]>Thanks Youtube. Thoutube.
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