stuff’n thing
I’ve been insanely busy. The deadlines are looming and about million new ideas per day boil my head to the point of brain-bleed. I’m possibly about to embark on a year-long commitment project an that, as you might imagine, requires careful decision making. Not an easy thing with a breeding brain.
What I now know for sure is that I will be in Liverpool between 30 of April and 2nd of May for the Oggcamp10 shenanigans. This year it’s going to be even bigger, better and more subway sandwiches! Oggcamp is an open software & open culture un-conference (festival?), part barcamp, part piss up, part music gig (we’re kicking off on the 30th with the Rathole Radio CC music night).
If all luck permits we will also be showing the R.I.P Remix Manifesto movie, which is well worth seeing on a big screen with fellow geeks and geekettes. I’ll keep you posted on that matter. I might also share few ideas about open culture and open cinema, time allowing.
That would be it for now. I leave you with this gorgeous trailer for “Exploding Girl”…
…rather hysterical trailer for RSO [Registered Sex Offender]…
…and a link to the very good Kitsune Noir Mixcast no 26, so far my favorite out of the lot.
see ya.
for the compulsive need to explain myself…
Decent stationery is the little consolation one gets in a solitary, underpaid and under-published life of a writer – hey, at least I scribble on this nice paper, and hell aren’t the covers aesthetically pleasing.
For example, here is my new love, fieldnotes books. They are just under $10 for 3 books, 48 pages each (i’m into the short model now, none of my project lasts that long these days, and who needs a tail of memories to follow them from one endeavor to another?). I can live with that price. Except the company is USA-based and international shipping costs $11.
If I could stash on them for a year to come and ship the whole thing at once… yeah, that would work. But did I mention underpaid? There’s very few writers who can spend like J.K. Rowling (and I’m pretty positive she buys a new laptop every time she starts a new shopping list…).
Yes, there’s absolutely nothing for you to take away from reading this post, except maybe some understanding to that crazed person, who will get offended if presented with a notebook with a smiling cartoony tiger on the front cover and red-line marked margins inside (ewwww!). Trust me, for them it’s not ‘just stationery’. It reminds them of how far they have to go, to get anywhere near where they want to be.
hand cut, head made
Film School Rejects‘ (as your attorney, I advise you to put that on your list of film blogs) Neil Miller wrote a post about Sundance idents from this year’s festival. All the videos are stop motion animation and there is a lot of hand cut, or indeed torn, papery feel to them.
This is a trend I’ve seen before, some of my work colleagues favor it as well. The CGI (computer generated images) craze is slowing down… at least in some places. There’s avatar, two billion dollars, etc on one side, but there’s also Fantastic Mr. Fox on the other. The theme of 2010 Sundance was Rebelion – you can figure it out from here.
I know a lot of animators who are going back to the roots, if you like, getting their hands dirty with clay and scissors. It’s something to look out for.
Here’s my favorite and you can check out the other videos on the original post. You might want to watch it in full-screen mode, as it’s been designed for a movie theatre screen and lettering is rather small, while text in this one is quite important. And yeah, dare to tell your own story.
Sundance Pitch sml from Neil Miller on Vimeo.
iWhatever and more interesting things
I gave it some thought, about 20 seconds worth of it. A 4th generation of that thing might well be laying on my coffee table, waiting for when I feel like reading some RSS feeds, watching some soup.io TV or checking what’s left in my fridge. That’s when I’m a. rich enough to own a coffee table and not rent it with the flat, b. rich enough to splash on a coffee table dedicated Apple device. And that might never happen.
As I’m now fond of illustrating everything, I looked through some related visuals and decided this one fits impossibly well
I hope the author doesn’t mind me reposting it here (usually apologizing later is easier than asking permission up front in instances like this). You should check out the rest of his tumblr and his portfolio, a very elegant affair, so good it can be forgiven for small fonts.
Who cares any way! The grander scheme of things came knocking on our doors. There’s much sadder news in the pipe. JD Salinger has died and from purely egoistic point of view this means the hope of any new book from him is gone for ever. I’m also pretty uptight about the possibility of Catcher in the Rye film getting to be done soon, as the rights usually go flying once the author is no more holding onto them. At the present time I can’t really conceive of a screenwriter + director combination that could make a good job out of this… (any ideas?)
In other obituaries, MiraMax is no more. Fore those of you who have been hiding in a cinematographic cave, MiraMax was the film studio founded by the Weinstein brothers, which pretty much brought us Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith (more in the wikipedia article). Whatever its drawbacks it has induced a new quality into Hollywood film making and, perhaps even more importantly, made a lot of people feel that you can want to be a film maker and get away with it. It also gave the world Pulp Fiction and everybody knows that is priceless.
Oh, the irony – MiraMax is closed by Disney, who bought it nearly 17 years ago for $70 million. This is not the day indie film died, but an era is definitely over. With the Avatar taking most of the major film awards this year one can’t help but wonder where is this circus going… Let this be a motivation for the up and coming indie film makers – if we don’t get there fast enoug, we might one day wake up with our faces painted blue and an obligatory Celine Dion song stuck in our heads. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you I don’t know what will.
The Winsteins have apparently said that they will be aiming at reclaiming the name.
Lazy Sunday: video
Starting strong – Banksy. Say what you want the dude never loses class. Yes, make a film, yes show it at Sundance (and appropriately turn the place into your own playground). And then refer to it as “world’s first street art disaster movie”. Say what you want, you cannot not love him. Plus it is quite in line with my opinion on citing reviews in movie trailers.
As far as unusual film trailers go, here’s one for Spike Jonze’s, Absolut drenched short, “I’m here”. The dreamy haze gets me every time. You can check out the pretty cool website here, if you can handle in-your-face advertising, that tries to be not in your face.
And now for something (not so) completely different. At least aesthetically somewhat similar. This is really cool and it should also teach you once and for all that you should not move your camera unless there’s specific purpose to the move.
And lastly, since it’s Sunday, here goes something to make you perversely day dream about the beer-fetching possibilities of the future. As Surfstation’s Tom Dolan commented: File under “No F-ing way” and “how much?”
PS. Were you ever to compile a similar post you would notice the insane superiority of vimeo over youtube. It will not only make you understand how far we’ve gone as far as beautiful and creative visuals are concerned. It will also teach you what good user interface looks and works like. Go join. And let’s be friends
Best Pictures of 2009
Oh the powers of soup.io, the graces of tumblr! Many a sleepless nights we spend together, cruising, preparing – for the day when all known monetary systems will collapse and the dollar will be replaced by funny pictures.
Not for nothing, but I had a methodology here. I went through film + funny, my dearest, ongoing collection of the funny, quirky and periodically film related pictures from the whole year. I chose the most spectacular ones, or ones representing something special about the year. Then I eliminated first load, and chose few runner ups for each of the catchegories (which are, of course, totally made up). Then went through it again and chose the winner. Neat, huh?
Most of the times I don’t know/remember the source or it’s impossible to figure out due to the fact that it was about 30th repost that reached me. I promise to be better next year!
hot girl of the year
Eva Green. There were few runner ups in this cathegory. for your enjoyment there’s Zooey Dechanel here and Juliane Moore here.
fuckyeahhotboy of the year
Jarmie Dornan. This was a tough choice, but it had to be made. Obviously some runner ups in this category: Josh Beach, Sam Riley and this dude, whomever he is.
photoshop of the year
The Kiss Pandas. Enough said.
badass of the year
Runner ups here: this young lady, this gent.
best meme
commentary of the year
I was also tempted by this one
best lolcat
(I mean, come on, you know why)
I like Pandas, obviously, but this has been hit with all my friends. Runner ups: my thoughts exactly, live LOLcats by ohjezebel on flickr, where the…,10 points for reference,broken minion, look of the year.
animated gif of the year
Tough competition in this one. I suggest you do check out the runner ups after the winner.
cyanide and happiness
(yes, they have their own category because they rock). the toughest choice. you should check them all out over at explosm.net
cool of the year
These three dudes are mates.
instant laughter of the year
So many nominees! Gallery below the winner.
WTF of the year
seriously, wtf?
no mercy of the year
I do love internet for the lack of mercy.
oldie of the year
Because God knows there is a queue.
quote of the year
I leave you with this one. Happy collecting in 2010!
Have a year!
20 years of Empire magazine
Simon Pegg & Nick Frost, phot. Sarah Dunn
Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman, phot. Keith Bernstein
Jack Nicholson phot. Sarah Dunn
Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint phot. Matt Hollyoak
Question of social games
It’s a hot topic, since games are slowly entering the world of non-geeks, which in practice means mass market. My housemates want to buy a PS3. Granted, I will be the only one playing Modern Warfare, while they are after RockBand, Singstar and Buzz (or whatever the quiz game is called). Due to years spent on civilizations and theme hospitals I’m still miles ahead in any of the unholy, time-consuming facebook games. But the point is my friends play them at all. Geeks, hipsters and others alike (I’m using the lose generalizations just to show it’s generally group-independent). Obviously, these are people who are facebook users to begin with, I doubt they’d go out of their way to buy a farming game in their local mall, but that is also the point – it spreads through different platforms. It’s becoming main stream.
Today I’ve read a short piece by Jeremy Liew (Managing Director at Lightspeed Venture Partners) about the attraction that social games have for investors. He makes a point: making high class gaming platforms games is not unsimilar to making a big studio movie:
1. investment is huge, between 30 and 50 mln dollars,
2. distribution and promotion costs are insane; accordin to Liew “Modern Warfare 2 had a launch budget of $200 million”
3. returns are huge on hit games ($550 mln made in first 5 days of selling CoD Modern Warfare 2), but only few games become hits (and if it’s a miss you’re looking at pretty much no return),
4. development takes log, sometimes 2 to 3 years,
5. you need a big crew of specialists of all sorts working on a single title,
6. it takes a while to figure out whether the title is indeed a hit or miss,
and for all of the above reasons only big publishers, like big studios, can take the risk and pull all the resources into making several titles for one or two of them to hit the back of the net, make money and keep all involved happy and fed.
Gaming has not, as of yet, undergone the technological democratization that is currently revolutionizing the movie making industry and causing panic everywhere. The death of indie cinema was proclaimed high and wide. Whereas I personally think that it’s actually beginning of true independence and traditional movie making business is not dead either, just has to make space for the new model of production-distribution and share (sharing is death for some, apparently) – the fuss and mess is obviously present.
As we’re often told ‘anybody’ can now ‘pick up a camera for few grant and make a movie on zero budget’. This is not strictly true: few grant is no ‘zero budget’ and making a good film demands more skills than shooting your cat hanging upside down on the doors for youtube. But the technological divide is definitely smaller, it’s easier and cheaper to get a film made. I imagine shooting Clerks would now cost kevin Smith one or two maxed out credit cards less, than it did 15 years ago. However this also means that more films are made and it’s more difficult to get them distributed and seen.
Not so much in the gaming world. Yet. It’s a matter of time till coding and graphic design becomes more available to non-professionals than it is today, although the industry relations are a bit different, than in film. Camera manufacturers had obvious interests in making them more masses friendly. No such entity or obvious interest in coding. Still, I think it’s going to happen.
Until then the indie cinema of gaming world are social games start ups, such as Zynga and Playfish. Their main chance is still getting picked up by the biggies: Clerks got bought by Miramax and Playfish is now bought by EA Games. But they can do, what class A game makers can’t:
1. production costs are more in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars,
2. distribution through platforms like facebook is pretty much free and the power of viral spread works to game’s advantage (vide farmville); all of the facebook games have several mechanisms to encourage users to drag in friends,
4. development is short and sweet,
5. therefore a team of people can work on several titles at once (the game mechanics aren’t really that sophisticated and putting context of a farm or a restaurant or a fish tank on top of it is not much either),
6. being relatively cheap to make they’re also cheap to try out – beta tests are a universal practice and producers can quite accurately predict whether a game will hit the spot before they pull in all the resources.
Yes, the point number 3 is missing. How do social games earn? That is the question. As far as I understand:
- facebook pays application developers, as they drive in traffic. But how much?
- the in-game offer-based advertising model (go to an outside site and do/buy something to receive points you can later spend in game) has been hugely criticized and Zynga had to back out of it after its title Fishville was blocked by facebook. It’s still causing them some trouble.
- games sell in-gmae cash via micropayments - you can spend on special in-game items. But buying them is not necessary for game play. How many people actually pay for them?
- then there’s banner adds income, potentially big due to huge amount of traffic (according to the article I cited “Zynga now has more than 100 million unique visitors per month”. But banner advertising is just about now proving insufficient to sustain online news publishers, so where is it going to provide for game makers?
Similarities with indie film are not strict enough to predict future of gaming along the lines of film industry development. Also the times, as we know, the are changin’. I’m no expert, definitely not on online revenues, to be honest I hate the subject and tend to avoid it (the ‘yes, but what’s the business model?’ question is the biggest kill-joy since the Grinch, who stole Christmas). This is now biting me on the ass, because for once I find this particular case interesting. If you can shed some light on the matter – please get in touch!
Sheffield Doc/Fest
OK, admittedly this post is going to be a bit of cheating. I already wrote it in Polish, which took all too long because I was emailing and yp-yapping online at the same time. It’s now almost 6 pm, I have an hour until the Bill Hicks movie screening and I’m running out of the boost 2 XXL cappuccinos gave me. So I’m going to more or less translate it and hope there’s not many people who follow both binarylife and zyciebinarne (as far as I know not many follow either, so I’m not too worried, really).
I have been working as the festival’s minion for past 3 days, but today and tomorrow is indulgence time. Yay! So much for that though; I went to the editing master class with the editor of All tomorrow’s parties, then crawled to the delegate center and been sat here ever since trying to get the wilderness of unattended online life under control. In short then:
There are two things I can easily make out from my chaotic notes (they’re in big lettering and capitals):
AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT and
MOVE TO CANADA
Audience engagement is one of these magic phrases of the festival, which everybody is very keen on, but few understand what it means in practice. Perhaps with the exclusion of the Shooting People folk, who ran the digital bootcamp yesterday, about which I’ll write more later. The other magic combination is cross-platform. It had its own summit on Wednesday, rather disappointing when it comes to anything concrete (rather than the statement of good intentions from the BBC North about the Media City etc). But it’s early days. At least Steve Johnson was funny at times. He was talking, among other things, about Twitter changing the way we live. On that occassion we were giving festival goers copies of Times June 15th issue (screw you imdiacy of digital media), in which he wrote about the sam thing. Cover as follows:
We didn’t hesitate to tweet about it too. I believe this is one of them things poetically related to as a mild “mind-fuck”.
The story with Canada is that, from what I can make out, it has the best and biggest funding for documentary filmmakers and cross-platform doers. The rest of the world is less generous.
So far the best movie I’ve seen was Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam, thing about, well, yeah – muslim punk rockers. Again, I will write more, for now watch the trailer:
I will also be looking for an ocassion/excuse to have this screened in Poland. Should you have any ideas (even vague ones) – email please ana(at)abnarylife(dot)com
I will attempt writing about these and other things in more detail once I’m back in Warsaw. There is about 1 to 3 odds that I will make my plane, judging from previous achievements. I don’t have a video camera on me – this is how it is, kids, you either film it or you live it and I’m rather selfish. I’ve got a photo camera, which works on 35 mm film (shock! horror!), so the photos will take a while to come out. I might shoot a bit tomorrow with my famous G1 phone. I might not. So for now no rich multimedia coverage. I suggest you do, however, follow my witty ‘live’ coverage here or others’ updates tagged #dfsheffdocfest (isn’t this the most awkward official tag.. erm, ever?)
So details in few days. Really, I write this now just so that you’re jealous.
