Props? We got props!

June is coming up, the month in which we have LOTS to get done. Some quick notes on good sources for props, etc...

>foundelements.com: online collage source. Great for old paper and ephemera.

>mantofev.com: another great source for collage elements. But what's with that name?

>pololu.com: excellent laser cutting service. The plastic spinner shapes were cut out of black acrylic from a PDF file I sent by email.

>replicolor.com: good, fast, cheap source for making slides out of graphic files. Their java-based interface for uploading files is amazing.

>99 cent store: Good for small, cheap props. Replaces thrift stores which are getting expensive.

>ebay.com: most of our big props come from here including the time clock, printing press, mini tape recorder, etc.

>archive.org: fantastic source of public domain video footage and more.

>DVD 50 packs. From Treeline. 50 public domain movies for $16 available from Amazon.

>candhsales.biz: That's C & H Surplus to those of us in Pasadena. Their Colorado blvd store is a fantastic place to find cheap mechanical and electronic parts for perpetual motion devices. New hours means they're open only part of the week.

>winkflash.com Great for one-off cards, postcards and prints. Beautiful, high-quality printing.

>modernoptions.com Makers of the Sophisticated Finishes solution used to rust most of the props. Carried at Michael's.

>San Gabriel Mission. For tiny crosses, medals, cards and other wonderful Catholic paraphenalia. Beware the IKEA phenomenon--all those tiny, inexpensive purchases add up quickly.

>Collage Discovery Workshop: Make Your Own Collage Creations Using Vintage Photos, Found Objects and Ephemera
This book with the unwieldy title has lots of good ideas for aging and distressing items using craft store materials. Author Claudine Hellmuth's follow-up book sucks though.

>Schry-Way Cases 626 798 1166 Quality Hardwood Cases since 1953. Beautiful but expensive. For tools, medical instruments, etc.

Red room in progress

Here's a picture of the red room about half done. This will be used in one of the last scenes where Ben has gone off the deep end. It probably doesn't look like it but this room is in the basement of Ben's house right next to the green room that we use for the printing press scene (shown below):

Return of the revenge of the public domain horror film montage

(Cabiria, 1914)

My reviews of public domain witchcraft films are now done [view].

Draw Wars

Artists are typically drawn to visual solutions--as opposed to dialogue--to convey character and narrative. Here are four common strategies:

Expressing the inner life
Use of dream sequences, flashbacks and other devices to show a character's inner life, backstory, psychological state or thought process.

Mise-en-scene
While traditional film uses production design, artifacts, and other imagery to convey character, this technique was pushed to fetishistic extremes in the CD-ROM games of the mid 90's (Myst, FreakShow, Ceremony of Innocence, Buried in Time, etc.). What we can take away from these experiments is that this technique works, but cannot sustain long-term interest by itself.

Narrative unfolding in space (sometimes literally)
This is the George Lucas approach. Locations, (in Lucas' case, planets) serve as visual markers for the narrative: e.g, "if we're on the volcano planet, this must be the climax of the movie!"

Visualizing conflict
While conflict visualization is an important part of conventional filmmaking (think chases or fights), artists tend to visualize conflict via symbols, artifacts and images that function as signs.

Our project
In our video we're instinctively using the last three of the four techniques described above. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be much visualized conflict; the story seems to be about Ben, a solitary figure who has few interactions with other people. Yet, the project centers on his relationship with an unseen adversary and their extended conflict not with words, but with fire, sound, inventions and natural forces. What makes our project a little unusual is that the entire engagement, not just the final act, takes place without dialogue. This conflict, by its nature, isn't shot in real-time but is created in the editing.

A GREAT resource on public domain & fair use

Can you really include excerpts of other people's work in your documentary without paying? Do cease-and-desist letters often go beyond the boundaries of the law? The suprising answer is often yes! Check out this great resource on fair use from the Center for the Study of Public Domain at Duke Law School. It's a comic book drawn by a law school prof! [Download page]

Filmmaking as editing, George Lucas, and the old studio system

(Above: an abstract comic book page I made for fun. One way to think of our film is as an experiment in fusing abstract art with narrative.)

Of all the processes in filmmaking, editing is arguably the most analogous to drawing/painting and collage. Like painting, editing is a bricolage-like process in which one works out the relationships of the parts to the whole. The question for many visual artists then, is how do we foreground the editing process to turn filmmaking into something more like painting or collage?

The George Lucas solution is to literally conceive of filmmaking as a collage assembled both chronologically and spatially in editing. By creating his films mostly using green screen, he conceives of production as the activity of creating video and audio assets to be assembled later.

Curiously, there are similarities between Lucas' work process and the one employed by the old Hollywood studio system. In Making Movies, Sidney Lumet describes the old system which viewed production as the Lucas-like activity of creating video and audio pieces to be assembled by an editor:

...it was mandatory for a scene to be shot as follows: a wide "master shot," usually with the camera static, of the entire scene; a medium shot of the same scene, over his shoulder to her (the whole scene); over her shoulder to him (the whole scene), a loose single shot of her; a loose single shot of him, a close-up of her; a close-up of him. In this way, any line of dialogue or any reaction could be eliminated. Ergo, "pictures are made in the cutting room...." The same limitations applied to the audio side. One of the rules that developed was "no overlaps." This means, for example, that in a scene where two people were yelling at each other, one actor wouldn't speak, or "overlap," while the other actor was stil speaking. In fact, on close-ups, the actors had to leave a tiny pause between each other's lines, so that the editor could cut the sound track... All of the sets were stored on the lot, not taken apart until the OK was given. If rewrites were necessary, the writer was under contract and on the lot, as was the director. If for any reason, they were unavailable, others could be substituted.. The actors were all under contract and therefore available. If they were working on another picture, no problem.... Shoot it, show it, reshoot it if necessary.

Our film also aims to foreground editing. Like the studio system, we have locations and equipment on call for reuse. That's why I intuitively wanted to use locations that we could keep up for long periods of time (over a year in some cases). That's also the reason I wanted to own certain equipment. This makes reshoots easy, something essential when editing informs shooting. Our other concessions to this editing-based approach include the use of a small cast, the short running time and the lack of dialogue. Certainly there is language; not all concepts can be expressed purely visually. But the language, embedded within the audio and video collages, is designed to be manipulated after the fact as needed. And yes, the writer/director is always on call!


(More abstract comics.)

Crazy peoples' lairs

(Noise, red room final uncorrected, in production, 2006)

At the end of our film, Ben has gone off the deep end and the climactic exposition takes place in his den wallpapered with the ephemera he's been collecting: the typical movie crazy person's room. You may be able to see the Christmas Tree air fresheners hanging from the ceiling. This is a direct steal from Seven. At last they had a sense of humor: they were in the scene with the rotting away half dead guy. We also have a lightbulb (right side of the frame) since it's mandatory for this kind of production design. Also notice the tiny spots of light at the right of the frame. That's a Lowell Omni with a barndoor. Sloppy, sloppy. Problem is with all the junk on the viewfinder, it's hard to tell exactly what's in frame.



(Dark City, 1998)

I've always liked the crazy person's room in Dark City, but never believed it. It's too self-conscious like an Art Center Illustration BFA student's version of "outsider art." I also don't like the fact that it looks too aboriginal. I know Alex Proyas is from Australia, but the Pacific aesthetic doesn't jibe with the European, noir sensibility of the film.


(The Cell, 2000)

Here's the crazy guy's room from The Cell. This room isn't an important part of the film so it's more minimal than the other examples I've posted here. Notice the way they were able to make it look dark despite the fact that this scene takes place during the day.




(Seven, 1995)

Seven has a lot of nice ideas for crazy rooms, but like Dark City, they are a bit unbelievable as if the crazy guy studied interior design. Perhaps this wouldn't be so much of a problem if the movie didn't want you to take it so seriously. The hanging things are very photogenic. The lightbox is a nice idea for lighting. And of course, lightbulbs: pretty red ones.



(Manchurian Candidate, 2004)

David always did have good taste. He suggested that I see the Manchurian Candidate, and indeed, its crazy man's room is the best of the bunch. The drawings are both believable and artistic and the overall design is not so tasteful as to exclude lightbulbs.



(The Omen, 1976)

I saw the original The Omen at a theater. I would never have thought that it would turn into a cultural icon. One of the few scenes I recall was the crazy priest's room papered in bible pages for spiritual protection. Apparently I remembered it all wrong. In my mind, the priest is cowering in the room in a high angle shot as scary things happen around him. As it turns out, the room shows up after the fact as Gregory Peck and cohort investigate. This room breaks the rule that crazy people's lairs should be lit by lightbulbs or flashlights (see David's post below). However, there is the requisite crazy writing this time in Latin!

My niece's boyfriend said that my preliminary designs for one of the walls reminded him of a scene in A Beautiful Mind so I also checked that out. It's a pretty minimal affair with about 20 pieces of paper scattered on the floor. Not so much crazy as a bit eccentric maybe.

Audio exposition - [example]

At the end of our film there is the big exposition that takes place when Ben cuts up visual and audio files and pieces them together into coherent sentences. Here's the audio file that I gave to Dan as an example. Now he's going to take the basic idea and run with it. Listen to mp3. My brother-in-law did a great job with work on some of the source audio. The rest of the stuff is public domain source from archive.org.

I was afraid Dan wasn't going to go for my idea of putting in the "cheesy" instructional slide show music at the beginning of the exposition but he didn't have any problem with it feeling it fit into the "musique concrete" sound design approach. However he said that the non-diegetic audio is pretty difficult. I think he means that it's hard to write something that functions within the "mood-creating" and other specifications of the film without using cliches. Plus it's hard to piece together the audio into a coherent whole that is not placed here and there purely for effect. I told him welcome to the world of design. By the way, I had to look non-diegetic up. It means "represented as coming from a source outside the story space" as in film music.

Widescreen--quotable quotes

The other day I was telling Ben and Erik how I still feel awkward composing for widescreen. I was speculating that with the growing standardization around widescreen (e.g., HD format), maybe kids in the future will be making art on 16 x 9 format drawing pads and find the proportion totally normal.

Anyway, every once in a while I drop in on former Xena director Josh Becker's website (beckerfilms.com). This guy is even more curmudgeonly than me. The site is like a long rant about how films have gone downhill since the 50's. He even hates widescreen, seeming to prefer the 4:3 format. His interview with Quentin Tarantino (having just directed Reservoir Dogs) turns into a commentary against widescreen and is pretty amusing:

J.B. You shot the film wide-screen.

Q.T. Yeah. 2:35 ratio.

J.B. That's posed problems for filmmakers since it began in the fifties. There are certain things that are naturally wide-screen, but a lot of stuff just isn't.

Q.T. I thought wide-screen was perfect for this movie.  When people think of wide-screen they'll think of westerns, or of... 

J.B. ..."LAWRENCE OF ARABIA"... 

Q.T. ...Or deserts, or Death Valley.  I think wide-screen makes things more intimate.  It's so big and takes you so close. It takes you inside the people, inside their space.

J.B. But if you do a close-up you have two-thirds of the screen empty. 

Q.T. But I think that's great. 

J.B. Although you say you have a theatrical release, the life of a movie these days is on video.  What do you do with your wide-screen? 

Q.T. I don't give a damn. I don't even remotely care about the video release. As far as I'm concerned this has got two lives that are important for me: theatrical release and laser disc which will be letter-box. Forget the video. 

J.B. Fritz Lang said that the only thing wide-screen was good for was snakes and high school commencements.

In a section on screenwriting structure, Becker takes another jab at widescreen:

In the 1950s the movie business began to fall apart.  With the looming threat of TV (mainly shot live in New York at that time), Hollywood, with a predictable lack of foresight, went into a total panic.  Instead of saying TV is just like movies -- actors saying lines on sets recorded with a camera -- so we'll just make TV shows here in Hollywood, too (which is what ultimately occurred), the moguls decided that movies should be bigger, longer, and wider.  Thus came the glut of wide-screen, sword-and-sandal epics.  As Darryl Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century-Fox, told David Brown, the head of the story department, "I want stories that are wide, not deep."

Dining room shoot [footage] + lighting tip of the week

Tonight's shoot went well. Gracie and Ben were really well prepared. Gracie looks terrific on camera and intuitively understood what we were after. You can see some test footage HERE. I'll probably have to grade the dining room footage to make it look more unpleasant. See example HERE. For another grade done in AE (overlaly layer, + levels adjustment on top layer) click HERE.

Some notes on the shoot:

Method acting
Ben and Gracie were eating the $1 Banquet Salisbury steak TV dinners. It certainly didn't hurt their performances since they're not supposed to be enjoying dinner. However, Ben said he liked the food.

Post production acting
I speed-changed the example footage to 85% (see the post on making video look like film).

Lighting
We were noticing how nice the light from the existing but unseen Nelson Bubble lamp looked during the lighting tests. One of us had the great idea to just put a higher wattage bulb in the fixture. Once we switched from the 60 watt to the 240 watt bulb the shot looked nice and natural. So that's the only lighting we used. The higher wattage buys you better color and lower grain. A good tip for the future: just use practical lights with higher wattage bulbs.

Walls
If I had been smart I would have switched the set and shot Gracie and Ben's medium shots against the yellow wall. Now it looks like they're in a yellow theatrical environment and then in an actual house.

TV
Last night I tried shooting the light projected from an actual TV set. Not enough wattage by far. So what you're seeing in the TV-watching shot is Erik controlling the Omni light using a $9 dimmer switch. You can actually buy a gadget that does this flickering for you. Cost: $675-$2790! See magicgadgets.com.

Sex or Food?
When I went to OSH today to look for the dimmer switch they were having a promotional event going on (they didn't have the dimmer by the way, I had to go to Home Depot) . There was a line for the free food but no line for the Laker Girls signing autographs. I'm not sure whether this says something about the Lakers, Mexican food, or the people who shop at OSH.

Eardance (1982)*

In 1982, I remember seeing an ad in Keyboard magazine for a group called Eardance. The ad touted the group's stellar academic music credentials and I sent away for a demo flexi-disk (I think). Whatever the case, I heard some of their music. Yuck. It sounded like 80's polyrhythms with a soaring operaesque vocal. It was one of those "let's try to elevate pop music to the level of classical music" type of efforts. There's nothing worse than academics trying to work in popular genres. I'm not too concerned about that with our project. But it's amusing for me to think of Noise as the cinematic Eardance of the new millenium.

*This is not the same group as the recent Eardance that creates jazzy muzak.

Schmudos to Netflix

Last week I gave kudos to Netflix for seemingly un-throttling my account. This week they get schmudos. The class-action suit against them has been revised to automatically turn off after the month of expanded service has ended. The former settlement left the expanded service "on." This is a good and important change to the settlement. Schmudos because the subject line for the email message from Netflix reads:

***SPAM*** Amendment to Class Action Settlement. New Chance to Get Class Benefit.

So it's sure to go directly to your spam filter-enabled trash.

Schmudos, also, because one of the links to the settlement sign up page in the message is dead. Here's the correct link:

www.netflix.com/settlement

The music of sound

Had a good meeting with Dan today. We went over the entire structure, talked over specific areas and spotted music. We're taking a slightly unusual approach to the audio/music. Typically music is spotted after the film is edited. However, a lot of our film is audio-based so we're having to plan ahead. Sound is carrying important narrative and plot information. Further, a lot of the video events are designed around audio events. The bird attack was influenced by a Trevor Wishart electronic composition that Dan played for me. One of the 'spinner attacks' is a dissonant audio event. And the final exposition is a complex sound design piece based on some of Dan's C-Sound work with vocals like Blackbird Fly. By the way, if you want to hear Dan's music, check out his site here.

Dan brings a kind of mathematical logic to the entire film structure. Various events occur in threes (he thinks in threes he said. Maybe they should have another kid?). Certain audio and visual themes appear and reappear through the video. The question: how will everything function together when the audio is so purposefully foregrounded? I told him that some of the audio needs to function like regular movie music, but I've also tried to create interesting and sensible rationales for the more experimental audio sections.

One of the issues that often comes up when I talk to Dan is the way that pop music reinforces a "chunked," modular approach to composition. Music is seen as chunks that can be stacked vertically (e.g., guitars get stacked on the bassline which gets stacked on drums) or in time (e.g., the chorus gets repeated throughout a piece). Dan partially uses this metaphor. But as a trained composer, he primarily thinks in terms of development in time. He writes by conceptualizing music as a linear flow that explores and develops a musical theme. The musical theme changes as it "experiences" preceding sections. So composing is not primarily the process of arranging "chunks" but is a matter of developing musical implications that are then fulfilled or challenged. These implications are really sophisticated, not just things like "call and response" patterns but implications steeped in compositional literacy. This is just another way of saying I have no idea what he's hearing in music half the time. But I believe him when he says something's there.

I remember reading a Keyboard magazine article awhile ago that was insightful. The author suggested that electronic music is the folk music of the present. That sounds right. Folk music of the past is banjos and washtub basses and dobros, but today's folk music is made in Garageband and strives to sound like something off the radio. The chunked, spatial, pop music approach to writing music is so pervasive and ingrained in our thinking (mine anyway) that I always find myself falling into it, even as Dan is working in a musical world that is very different: highly historically- and theoretically-aware. And while I'm primarily hearing the mood or feel of a piece, he's also paying a great deal of attention to the way musical structure reveals itself over time. Despite this background, Dan is really conversant in film music grammar and cliches and he doesn't blanch when I say things like "Dan, this is the part where they'd usually put in high strings to build tension." I'm looking forward to seeing what he comes up with.

More dining room tests

Top: using our normal table enables us to frame tighter. Middle: using Erik's parent's table requires us to go wider. Bottom: color-corrected by adding colorized green layer and reducing its opacity + recomposed.

Some notes: finally found the tripod fast-release. That's good. Went to buy another one and found that the fast-releases are not standardized, so I'd have to specifically look for a Manfrotto which probably means going to Samys and either being ignored or talking to one of those guys who doesn't want to be working there. Also good news: Banquet salisbury steak TV dinners were on sale for $1 each at Ralphs. A perfect meal for our yellow dining room. I bought six. Shooting rescheduled for Saturday. More good news: David C. said he'd make the tape-of-thousand-pieces prop. Also known as the prop no one else wanted to make. He also had some great ideas for films to watch: The Conversation (for the sound/tape sequences), Manchurian Candidate (2004 version for the crazy guy) and Existenz (now I forget why).

Memoirs of a Geisha: I was able to make it about a third of the way through. Doesn't matter, I rented it mostly to look at the cinematography which I heard so much about. I guess people seem to like that soft, diffuse look which apparently reads as beautiful--a lot like the films I've been writing about lately. Everything seems to glow as if lit within. The stronger light sources are often hidden projecting light out to the side. Layers of light and shadow, light and shadow. Day always looks overcast or rainy. Strangely, the film looks very small as if it were filmed on tiny sets. You never once get the feeling that there is a whole world beyond just a few houses. I wonder if that comes from Rob Marshall's theater background. You establish then just work on a stage.

Ben was gushing about Secrets & Lies today so I checked out the preview. He warned me it was the kind of film I wouldn't like: no spectacle. He liked the acting with a capital-A: ACTING!. Sometime I'd like to see it just so I can understand his sensibility a bit better, but lately I'm not very good at forcing myself to sit through these things.

No one cares about your stupid dreams

You are special you're the only one
You're the only one like you
There isn't another in the whole wide world
That can do the things you do
--Barney

The idea behind Barney's song is that what makes us special is our uniqueness, our subjectivity. And presumably, that's what makes art interesting too. Art is the subjective counterpoint to scientific objectivity.

And yet, subjectivity isn't all that interesting. If you doubt that, recount the dream you had last night to a friend and watch how fast his eyes glaze over. Or watch Nothing But Trouble (1991), a film Dan Akroyd said came straight out of his mind. Or consider the movie the Grinch Who Stole Christmas. OK, I admit I never saw it, but I *did* read the children's book based on the screenplay of the film influenced by the TV show made from the original book (talk about an authoritative critique). Most of the film consists of the filler-like backstory of the Grinch and how he came to be. Director Sidney Lumet calls this the "rubber ducky" school of drama: "Someone once took his rubber ducky away from him, and that's why he's a deranged killer (pg. 37)."


(Two strands seem to weave through this blog: The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and Estelle Winwood.)

For me (subjectively speaking of course) what's interesting about film is not character or backstory or individual quirks and complexes, film's dreamy or mythic quality, the act of storytelling, or the subjectivity of the director's vision. No, I don't really have any stories to tell. What's engaging is the underlying narrative.

Borrowing from Jerome Bruner, I think that narrative is a way of understanding the world. It is a way of saying "this is how things work." It's the "how," that's more important than the "why." As humans, we are continually creating and trading narratives to help us come to grips with the complexity of our everyday experiences. So making a film is not the act of projecting subjectivity onto the world. It's a way of participating in process of collecting, trading and appraising narrative understandings. Narrative baseball cards: now that's a good idea.

BTW, who are you?

If you read this production diary/blog often please add a comment! I'm curious who's actually reading this thing.

More-on humor

Last week I wrote about my obscure-to-the-point of non-existent sense of humor. Here's another example. I was thinking that it would be funny if in the opening scenes where Ben was putting together the spinner, part of the spinner's internal hardware would be made of an old tuna can. The idea is that unknown to Ben, part of what makes the spinner work is the left-over mercury from the tuna. You know, like in alchemy? Yeah, Ben didn't think it was funny either.

Exposition

I've been thinking about third act expositions--you know the end of mystery movies where everything gets tied together. A bad example would be Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow. I remember watching the long exposition at the end thinking "will this thing ever stop?" A good example would be the ending of The Sixth Sense in which the exposition is fast, to the point, and part of the story. The narrative of Citizen Kane is the building of an exposition bit by bit. Then there are expositions about expositions like Neil Simon's Murder By Death (there goes Estelle Winwood again!) in which the final exposition is a commentary on Agatha Christie's expositions.

There's something about a long third act exposition that seems so artless. There's one in our film and it's important to understanding the narrative. I think we have an interesting way of presenting it, but it's a bit embarassing to put it there in the first place.

Postscript: I found out why Estelle Winwood keeps popping up in so many films. Her career as an actress lasted 71 years (including the theater). She was 101 years old when she died in 1984. Murder by Death was her last film.

Two tickets to Paradise

(This is why I don't surf.)

This summer, there's a good chance that Ben and Krissy will be in Hawaii at the same time I'm there. I'm wondering if there's a way to take advantage of that? Talk about production value! Ben in a dream sequence walks on a moonlit beach with a Mai Tai! OK, maybe not. What would work better? Help me guys. The problem is that these arcane-killer-cult movies tend to be a little old world, more of an Atlantic Ocean sensibility. But the Pacific Ocean? Now we get into an East-meets-West thing. Maybe there's a way to make use of that?

A tension!

I'm wondering if what makes a film work are constant arguments. Consider the test images from the dining room set (original left, color-corrected right). I had in mind to light it flat and bland to express the lifeless state of the characters' marriage. But when I first lit the scene it just looked too dead. Absolutely lifeless. So I put a little more hard light to animate the scene a bit (shown above). This test shot is a bit sloppy so it's hard to tell what stays and what goes. So apparently, here's the goal of this shot: create a lively shot that expresses lifelessness. Great, how am I supposed to do that? The lighting references I consult don't talk about stuff like that. They all talk about hard and soft light and creating volume. I need a lighting book called "Lighting and Meaning." Where can I find that?

So maybe what makes lighting work is a series of arguments between the director and the DP. The DP wants the shot to look beautiful. The director wants it to be meaningful. And somehow over the course of things, the shot ends up being meaningful yet artistically lively.

Revenge of the public domain horror film montage

(From The Golem, 1915)

We're in a bit of a lull since our dining room shoot has been moved to next week. So I've been viewing assumed-to-be public domain horror movies to find clips of medieval sorcery (or similar) that I can use in the film. I have a plan to integrate these clips in an interesting way into one of the final scenes.

The Magic Sword, 1962
A bizarre action-comedy with some witchcraft and a nifty dragon with classic Star Trek style red-gelled lighting. Stars Gary Lockwood, also from Star Trek (Where no man has gone before) and made-for-TV actress Estelle Winwood. Screens like a sitcom, complete with goofy audio stingers.

Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, 1922
Incredible combination of visual effects, practical effects, animation and live action. You'll swear you're looking at the big "S" himself. Certainly deserving of being Criterionized. Probably too iconic and too beautiful to use for our project. Maybe I can use After Effects to create something like that mechanical hell at 5:01 (1968 version).

L'Inferno, 1911
This visual effects spectacle is a sincere attempt to film the Divine Comedy, but looks like your elderly aunt's vacation movies if she took a trip to hell. Amazing: carnal sinners blown about by gusts of wind (17:41); funny: Cerebus the 3-headed dog; cool: Demons (43:45); yuck: Tangerine Dream score on the 2004 version.

Touch of Satan, 1971
What movie doesn't need just a little "touch of Satan?" Like a farmer's daughter joke gone horribly wrong. The 1800's burning-at-the-stake scenes look straight out of, uh, 1971.

Merlin's Shop, 1996
I'm only going to see this if I get desperate.

Witch's Curse, 1962
This one screams "1960's Italian cinema" and as usual, the culprits are the women's hairstyles and makeup. That and the Italian bone structure. The hero's journey through hell looks a lot like a sideways scrolling video game: he runs, jumps and leaps over obstacles while killing creatures. The hell set looks great, almost as if they were able to find a real volcano interior in which to shoot. Also features a classic 'burning the witch at the stake' scene. Guest appearance by Prometheus, who in accordance with the myth, is having his heart eaten by an eagle.

The Golem, 1915
Downloaded from archive.org. A beautiful film with expressionistic influences. Some great magic sequences. A keeper.

Cabiria, 1914
Incredible spectacle. Frequent use of dolly shots gives this nearly 100 year-old silent a film a surprisingly contemporary feel. Notable: erupting volcano, temple of Moloch (23:19), burning hand (24:49), sacrifices to the gods (26:00), spatial montage dream sequence (1:34), superimposed animation sequence finale (2:05).

The Undead (1957)
Directed by Roger Corman. Watch for: bats on wires turn into Allison (Attack of the 50 foot woman) Hayes and Billy Barty; Satan presents a modern interpretive dance with three female minions (48:57); "'thee," "thou," and "thy"-filled King James style language; three witches beheaded by a hooded executioner (1:07); fantastic sci-fi score by Ronald Stein.

kudos and schmudos

A random rant and rave. Ever since the complaints of Netflix's practice of throttling high-volume users hit the news, they've been much much better. They now receive my returns the next day ( it used to take two to three days before). At the same time, Amazon has apparently been throttling items purchased with free shipping. What used to take just a few days to receive now takes a week or two. Other sites have also reported this slow down since Amazon's expedited shipping program began.

More on production design

Today I added an exposed phone line to the dining room set. Just that made a big difference. I was also going to add an electric cord covering moulding. But with that, the whole room looked like a tenement. Too much. I found a good cheap book on production design: TV Scenic Design Handbook [Paperback] by Millerson, Gerald. It has a lot of good tips like how to age a room (e.g., paint in grime near light switches).

Goddamn it, just leave Isaac Newton alone

(From Revelation, 2002. At least the motion graphics for the computer screens are nicely done.)

Saw the 2002 Romulus film Revelation tonight. This $7 million movie was released in theaters in Britain and here on DVD. It's a da Vinci code-like mystery filled with pentagrams, secret codes and an history-shattering plot. Actually the main idea is pretty good, but the film screens like a movie of the week. I'm not quite sure why. Maybe it's the almost good-looking enough leads or the almost good-enough visual effects. And there's something odd about the entire package like the DVD extras that linger on run-of-the-mill visual effects like compositing and green screens. The whole thing smells foreign like those 80's Mentos commercials. The BBC said it was "so buttock-clenchingly awful, so utterly bereft of redeeming features, so hilariously and manifestly incompetent that a critic can only look on, slack-jawed in bemusement." Romulus films is an old British studio known for making The Odessa Files and Day of the Jackal among others. Romulus is also the home planet of the Romulans on Star Trek.

Like the da Vinci code, an Isaac Newton reference appears in this film. I wish they'd just leave him alone. There's no real reason to refer to him in either of these films. He's just thrown in because of his association with alchemy. It sort of ruins it for the rest of us who are trying to use him meaningfully.

I don't think anyone will see it because apparently my sense of humor is so dry as to be non-existent. But our film is a sort-of satire of these films and funny in a certain way. Revelation and the Da Vinci code are just so damn serious. And the clues are so self-consciously arcane with their references to the Knights Templar and monks and the Vatican. Give me clues hidden in a kid's menu any day.

Play misty for me... not!

(Above: scene from Heaven's Gate. Even outdoor scenes shot in bright light seem diffuse and gauzy.)

I was thinking that the green-screen film problem can be traced to well before the recent crop of green-screen films. A good example is Heaven's Gate (1980), the film that has become an icon of corporate excess and artistic megalomania. I tried to watch it again, but I just couldn't. The film's look made it every bit as oppressive and suffocating as Mirror Mask. In Final Cut, an account of the making of Heaven's Gate, former UA executive Steven Bach echoes the sentiment:

It was an orgy of brilliant pictorial effects, and no one who sat in that theater would ever again question where the money had gone, for it was there to see; the sweep of the movement of the camera, by the camera, spectacular effect following spectacular effect until there couldn't be any more, but there were, and still more after that. But little by little the anxiety of anticipation gave way to satiety, then to a sense of claustrophobia induced by the inundation of image and effect. We became disoriented, victims of sensory overload, deafened by undifferentiated sound tracks: the jingle of brides; squeaks of boots, thwacks of hatchets in flesh; concatenation of foreign tongues and accents all talking at once, or more, all singing at once, keening folkloric ballads, mournful dirges for vanished lives and approaching deaths. And still there was more. The battle, the pandemonium, the chaos, the terrorized animals, the blood, the cataracts of dust and debris and explosives were relentless, and the brain numbed, waiting for the last moaning immigrant to fall in the swirling dust, for the last brutal death to be done, for the last wave of picturesque fuller's earth to blow across the last unblinking lens, and when the last fading image--as exquisite as the first--ran through the projector, I felt bludgeoned by vainglory and excess, surfeited by style, sound, and fury (pg 338).

Later, he writes...

The "look" of the thing subsumed the sense of the thing and implied a callous or uncaring quality about characters for whom the audience was asked to care more than the film seemed to. Whether those characters were well or ill conceived, they seemed sabotaged by their creator's negligence of them as he pursued the "larger, richer, deeper" things that surrounded them, obscuring them, making them seem smaller, poorer, more shallow (pg 416).

Pretty much the same thing can be said about any of those green-screen films I've been talking about lately like Sky Captain or Mirror Mask. It's also not a surprise to find out that Heaven's Gate director Michael Cimino has an MFA in painting from Yale. Kerry Conran's (Sky Captain) degree is in animation from Cal Arts and Dave McKean (Mirror Mask) went to Berkshire College of Art and Design. There's something about having an art background that tempts directors to think of film as modern art--sculptural, beautiful, yet impenetrable. The misty, overly-constructed quality of these films makes the image opaque suggesting that unlike painting, film is inhabited and not viewed.

Postscript: for a great send up of Heaven's Gate see Irreconcilable Differences (1984, VHS only). In the film, Albert Brodsky's (Ryan O' Neal) career as a director tanks when he creates a Civil War musical starring love interest Blake Chandler (Sharon Stone). Also features a young Drew Barrymore.