Posts tagged film

The BBC Approves this Camera Via the British Journal of Photography: Canon has today announced that its Cinema EOS C300 camera “has met the standards the BBC requires from cameras tested to the EBU recommendation EBU R118.” The approval allows both internal and external BBC production teams to use the EOS C300 “for the production of a variety of programmes to be broadcast on the BBC’s range of HD channels.” In a separate article the BJP writes about the camera’s technical details and how it was created.

The BBC Approves this Camera

Via the British Journal of Photography:

Canon has today announced that its Cinema EOS C300 camera “has met the standards the BBC requires from cameras tested to the EBU recommendation EBU R118.”

The approval allows both internal and external BBC production teams to use the EOS C300 “for the production of a variety of programmes to be broadcast on the BBC’s range of HD channels.”

In a separate article the BJP writes about the camera’s technical details and how it was created.

explore-blog:

How a book is made today, using traditional printing methods – lovely short vignette from The Daily Telegraph. Also see how books were made over the ages, from the middle ages to today, and the fascinating Books: A Living History.

(↬Coudal)

The Secret Lives of Fact Checkers

Fictional magazine Dictum has a crack Fact Checking Unit that’s on a mission to see if Bill Murray drinks warm milk before going to bed.

Starring Bill Murray, Peter Karinen, Brian Sacca, Kristen Schaal.

Directed by Dan Beers.

H/T: Slate.

BLAST OFF!

NASA releases hi-def footage from cameras mounted on Space Shuttle booster rockets in advance its DVD/Blueray film, Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle.

This video follows a shuttle as it blasts off, enters space at almost three thousand miles per hour, then releases its booster rockets and follows those rockets’ descent back to a splashy ocean landing.

Sound mixing and enhancement is done by Skywalker Sound.

Run Time - ~8:30 very worthwhile minutes.

Temporal Distortion

Time lapse video of the night sky over South Dakota, Utah and Colorado by Randy Halverson with a soundtrack by Bear McCreary.

“What you see is real,” writes Halverson, “but you can’t see it this way with the naked eye. It is the result of thousands of 20-30 second exposures, edited together to produce the timelapse. This allows you to see the Milky Way, Aurora and other Phenonmena, in a way you wouldn’t normally see them.

“In the opening “Dakotalapse” title shot, you see bands of red and green moving across the sky. After asking several Astronomers, they are possible noctilucent clouds, airglow or faint Aurora. I never got a definite answer to what it is. You can also see the red and green bands in other shots.”

H/T: The Atlantic.

Visualizing Film

With the Academy Awards this evening we thought we’d take a different look at analyzing films.

Created by Frederic Brodbeck for his graduate project at the Royal Academy of Arts, Den Haag in the Netherlands, Cinemetrics breaks films down scene by scene to determine their overall structure and prominent characteristics.

Via Brodbeck:

Information such as the editing structure, color, speech or motion are extracted, analyzed and transformed into graphic representations so that movies can be seen as a whole and easily interpreted or compared side by side…

…[T]oday there are already a lot of information graphics using meta-data related to film and cinema (budget, box office data, awards won, relationship between characters etc.). That’s why I wanted to use the movie itself as a source of data, to see what sort of information can be extracted from it, to find ways of visualizing it and to create the necessary tools to do this.

Brodbeck’s released his code for the project over on GitHub.

For more film visualizations, check out the results from Information is Beautiful’s “Visualise Hollywood Challenge.”

The competition provided designers and developers with a dataset of every Hollywood film from 2007 - 2011 (the dataset is here and worthwhile to check out on its own). The winning entries create a gallery of great interactive visualizations of what’s happening on the big screen.

We also need an insurgency of theater owners, distributors, marketers, and moviegoers. Yes, the film business is in flux, caught between dwindling box office and fledgling alternative distribution platforms, but maybe it’s time for the biz to start taking notes from the art. Throw away the boxes, stop pretending there are rules, take some risks. Stop worrying over what documentaries should be, and instead find ways to champion what they can be. Stop treating them like the veggies when they’ve become the main course.

Eric Hynes (via this Slate article)

Of the more than 800 feature films released theatrically in America last year, more than 300 were documentaries. (At premiere marketplace festivals like Sundance and Toronto, the ratio is similar.) Yet at the Academy Awards, where the film industry lavishly celebrates itself, all of those films compete for one measly award: best documentary. By comparison, dramatic features get 20 chances for an Oscar. While it’s technically possible (and eminently justifiable) for documentaries to receive nods for technical categories like editing, cinematography, and sound, in practice it hardly ever happens. And in 84 years, no documentary has even been nominated for best picture.

Great read on the attention documentaries don’t receive, and why.

Everything is a Remix: The Matrix

Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker, and friends have been working on a four-part video series called Everything is a Remix.

Here, to demonstrate their point, they juxtapose scenes from the Matrix with films that it drew inspiration from. For example, as we move along the timeline:

  • 0:27 - Fist of Legend (1994)
  • 0:38 - Tai-Chi Master (Twin Dragons) (1993)
  • 0:44 - Fist of Legend (1994)
  • 0:48 - Tai-Chi Master (Twin Dragons) (1993)
  • 0:53 - Drunken Master (1978)

Click through for other influences that range from a Philip K. Dick speech (1:45) to Total Recall (2:30) to Alice in Wonderland (3:24).

Magnum Contact Sheets An exhibition called Magnum Contact Sheets is currently running at The International Center of Photography in New York City. In a series that stretches from the 1930s to the present, the exhibit functions as a behind the scenes look at how Magnum Photographers arrived at their often iconic images. Via ICP: The images featured—both celebrated, iconic photographs and lesser-known surprises—encompass more than 70 years of history: from the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, the 1968 Paris riots by Bruno Barbey, and the war in Chechnya by Thomas Dworzak, to René Burri’s filmic sequence of close-ups of Che Guevara, classic New Yorkers by Bruce Gilden, and Eve Arnold’s famous portrait of the charismatic and image-savvy Malcolm X. “The contact sheet embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality,” said ICP Associate Curator Kristen Lubben, who organized the exhibition. “It records each step on the route to arriving at a particular image, and thus provides a unique window into the creative process.”… …The exhibition functions—in the words of Magnum photographer Martin Parr—as an “epitaph to the contact sheet,” marking the end of the analog film era and the rise of digital photography. Image: The contact sheet for René Burri’s 1963 photoshoot with Che Guevara, via ICP. Click to embiggen.

Magnum Contact Sheets

An exhibition called Magnum Contact Sheets is currently running at The International Center of Photography in New York City.

In a series that stretches from the 1930s to the present, the exhibit functions as a behind the scenes look at how Magnum Photographers arrived at their often iconic images.

Via ICP:

The images featured—both celebrated, iconic photographs and lesser-known surprises—encompass more than 70 years of history: from the Normandy landings by Robert Capa, the 1968 Paris riots by Bruno Barbey, and the war in Chechnya by Thomas Dworzak, to René Burri’s filmic sequence of close-ups of Che Guevara, classic New Yorkers by Bruce Gilden, and Eve Arnold’s famous portrait of the charismatic and image-savvy Malcolm X.

“The contact sheet embodies much of the appeal of photography itself: the sense of time unfolding, a durable trace of movement through space, an apparent authentication of photography’s claims to transparent representation of reality,” said ICP Associate Curator Kristen Lubben, who organized the exhibition. “It records each step on the route to arriving at a particular image, and thus provides a unique window into the creative process.”…

…The exhibition functions—in the words of Magnum photographer Martin Parr—as an “epitaph to the contact sheet,” marking the end of the analog film era and the rise of digital photography.

Image: The contact sheet for René Burri’s 1963 photoshoot with Che Guevara, via ICP.

Click to embiggen.

Subject: Innovation — A $200,000 Filmmaker Challenge

Vimeo, GE and Cinelan have joined forces to launch Focus Forward, a short form documentary series about technology innovations changing lives and industries from medicine to education to energy and beyond.

Via GigaOm:

The series launched in January at the Sundance Film Festival, and some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking — including Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame) Gary Hustwit (who made Helvetica and Objectified) and Jessica Yu (who won an Oscar for Breathing Lessons), among others –are signed up to make Focus Forward films that will premiere online and at film festivals throughout the year.

But to me the most exciting thing is that the project, which is hosted on Vimeo, will also be open to submissions from the general public. People who submit videos to the contest, which is called the “Focus Forward Filmmaking Challenge,” will be up for $200,000 in cash prizes, including a $100,000 grand prize. Submissions will open during the Tribeca Film Festival this April, and the prizes will be handed out next year at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival.

So, if you’re a filmmaker fascinated by innovation head over to Focus Forward to learn more about the competition and submitting your work.

The Morning Reminder: This is where we Live

Time lapse photos taken from the International Space Station from August to October 2011.

Edited by Michael König. Music by Jan Jelinek. Images by Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center.

Life in a Day

Last winter, Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and executive producer Ridley Scott screened Life in a Day at the Sundance Film Festival. True to its name, the film followed a day in the life of people throughout the world. 

To achieve this, Macdonald crowdsourced his footage via YouTube and had anyone and everyone upload clips shot during one summer day in 2010. 

YouTube has now released the 90 minute feature. Our recommendation, bookmark it and give it a watch when you have the time. The film itself is great. The idea that thousands could come together to create it is amazing.

H/T: YouTube Blog.

Spike Jonze’s Stop Motion Short for Book Lovers

Via Open Culture:

It all started when filmmaker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Where the Wild Things Are) met handbag designer Olympia Le-Tan and asked her to create a Catcher in the Rye embroidery for his wall. She asked him to collaborate on a film in return. And so Jonze and Le-Tan, together with French director Simon Cahn, spent six months writing a script, then animating 3,000 pieces of felt cut by Le-Tan herself. The result is Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), a short stop motion film set inside the famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, and it features a skeleton, his lover, and some famous book covers that spring to life.

A Q&A with Jonze about the film can be found on Nowness. A video of the making is available on Vimeo.

But Who Will Play Steve Jobs?

Ready for his close-upOne measure of our culture’s esteem for its visionaries is which celebrity is chosen to portray them in the motion picture versions of their lives. 

bohemian.com