Revised shot list

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DESERT LOCATION STAND IN

Ben gets cut
CU of hand
Ben looks at hand


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WORKROOM MORNING
Finding the broken spinner
Different approaches to fixing the spinner
Covering the spinner up wide
Covering the spinner up POV

Dolly to Ben as he draws map

dolly out spin of Ben interacting with pages
Ben's cut gets really bad




RED ROOM OR EQUIVALENT
More specific tape assembly


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WORKROOM NIGHT SECOND UNIT

Orange workroom
Dolly of perpetual motion images

Night workroom
Surveillance cam of breaking spinner.




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MISC
Subway shot? Ben going to work.
New store exterior

The extent of my knowledge of film grammar

To emphasize: push in
To reveal: dolly or pull out to reveal more elements
To see more detail: go to close up

The Call of Cthulhu & Able Edwards

Saw The Call of Cthulhu today (not to be confused with the gay-themed Cthulhu indy film). Call is a 40-minute short shot on DV and then given the old film treatment. It's extremely well-done. Good acting and directing. But there's a kind of sterility about it, as if it were some sort of exercise in craft. There was lots of care lavished on the project and an obsessive attention paid to period detail. But Cthulhu groans under the weight of self-consciousness making it a film less about cults and mysterious islands and more about itself. The source is fossilized and the homage becomes a fetishized presentation of effects.

Like Cthulhu, Able Edwards is the creation of folks on the periphery of the film industry. Cthulhu's director, Andrew Leman is a creature/prop designer for film and theatre. Able Edwards' Graham Robertson is a set dresser for film/TV. Able Edwards is a mashup of Citizen Kane and Walt Disney that doesn't stray too far from its sources. There's a sensitivity and sincerity at display here and the film has some nice (if contrived) moments. The overall effect of watching this all green screen production is like watching an extended pre-viz. With all the fake grain and desaturation, they might as well have shot it in a garage; the fact that it was shot on an actual soundstage doesn't come across. Robertson also buys into technology hype. The operative idea here is that with the right software you can do anything! So Robertson gives us spaceships, crowded throngs and large-scale destruction, most of the time not done particularly well. Plus, there's no match-moving so the camera is bolted to the floor sometimes with comic results (the actors fake tracking shots by walking in place). Well, I guess they deserve some technology hype: apparently this film holds the Guinness record as the first all bluecreen film!

With some money behind it, this project would be a decent if melancholy movie of the week. Like Radius and a couple of other indy film projects, there is a companion book (Desktop Cinema by Graham Robertson).

Information, efficiency, editability

I'm still trying to piece together a production theory for directing that makes sense to me. First, what I don't want/like—

Typical coverage shooting same scene over and over again from different angles: shoot wide, then CUs, then reverses, etc.
Why: inefficient, hard to maintain energy, don't like the way it looks like made-for-TV movies.

Editing in the camera: have everything previsualized and then shoot
Why: too hard, I don't think that way, not enough editing options

Standard A/B roll appproach
Looks like cheap video

Assumptions:

>Visually-driven
>Not dialogue driven

Helpful concepts to date:

Information: make sure that you shoot what's important for a sequence. A good example is the dead spinner shot. The first time I shot it, I did it as two shots: one of the dead spinner and one of Ben looking. This didn't work. It's important to see them together since that's the point of the shot: Ben sees the dead spinner. At a certain point, you just have to make sure you're shooting the information needed.

Efficiency: use as few shots as possible. Like Stu Maschiwtz' analysis of the shot from Close Encounters in which we pan over from men looking at planes to a new shot of Francois Truffault. Just one sweeping shot instead of a bunch of little shots.

Editability: shoot to give yourself flexibility in editing. Actually this can contrast with efficiency. In the above described Close Encounters shot, you're stuck with the timing of the shot unless you want to do an ugly cutaway. So that's where you might get something like the Spielberg "hinge shot." Example: Raiders of the lost ark. Camera pushes in to Harrison Ford grasping at idol. Cutaway to assistant. Now camera pulls back out. The hinge is the cutaway. There's flexibility there because you can go to the cutaway, but don't have to cut there. So editability means shooting but keeping in mind places where you can cut in and out. Maybe you have someone walking by to create a natural wipe. You can cut there or not. Or maybe there's a sound to cut on, like the shot in Dr. Zhivago where the doctor drops the washer on the microscope >clink!< and then we cut to a streetcar. So what are the audio/visual points where it might make a nice cut and won't just look like you're going to b-roll?

Television simulation

Does the above image look like old TV to you? I found an old article stating that extremely high-contrast makeup was necessary for TV in the fifties. I took the image from the article and corrected it to the point where the makeup looked normal. I then took this correction and applied it to the image above.

The Toll of the Sea

I was captivated by the look of this film done in an early version of the Technicolor process. You can find it on one of the American Film Archives DVDs. Features Anna May Wong (above).

Shooting eating

I'm lazy when it comes to shooting this perfunctory stuff, just shooting coverage and sort of hoping it will cut together. But when shooting Ben eating I realized that you have to think about what's filling the frame, not only about the mundane content. In other words, if you're showing a plate that fills the screen, you have to treat it like an important activity. When something is that big, you've got the equivalent of an action scene with forks and knives and you have to know how it's going to cut.

The Shanghai Gesture, Fabulous World of Jules Verne

Skimmed through The Shanghai Gesture. It was fabulously exotic. Note Ona Munson as the Medusa-like dragon lady Madam Gin Sling above. The acting and blocking were incredibly awkward, especially in the big climax. I was surprised to find it was directed by a name director—Josef von Sternberg and that it was released in 1941 (I was thinking no-name director with a suprisingly big budget released in the early thirties).

Is it possible for an artist to be too far ahead of his time? Karel's Zeman's The Fabulous World of Jules Verne looks like a contemporary music video created in After Effects. The idea was to recreate 19th century prints in film. So engraving lines are everywhere, actually painted into the scenery itself. The so-called Misti-mation process seems to be a combination of post-production effects, glass effects, stop motion and live action. Imagine L'Idee + Larry Jordan + live action. This is one of those projects that's like a Stuart Davis painting; you see so many copies that the original starts looking like a copy. We've seen these effects in After Effects so many times that some of the mystery of the film has vanished through no fault of its own.

Pickups of the pickups

Yesterday I reshot the wide shot of Ben eating breakfast. I put blinds in the window which makes the shot look a lot better. Part of the problem was the lack of texture and modulation on the walls. I also shot the insert of the clue map. I was just going to dissolve from the map to the desert but Ben said it was too unceremonious. Plus he said it takes up too much mindspace to ask an audience to make that leap and that in fact, if you underscore everything, it doesn't read as being obvious. It just makes things clear. So we need to have Ben's character pointing or drawing a line to where he's going on a map. Ben is right. But now I have to do pickups of pickups. Whine, whine, film is so literal, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Also, my quandry is figuring out how to level the shots. They always look crooked. Do you level the character? The background? Split the difference? These dining room shots are problematic for any number of reasons.

Clue map

This is the map that tells Ben how to get to the desert shrine. It's an altered map that I found in an old scrapbook I bought. Today I'm going to Ben's house to double-check on using his backyard to substitute for the desert.

Memorial day shoot

Today we shot Ben eating breakfast (kitchen painted yellow on Saturday), bathroom and stairs shots—five setups in three hours (11-2). The first shot took a LONG time, about an hour. No matter what we tried, the framing just didn't look right. For some reason shooting dining room tables is hard (remember we had to reshoot the Gracie footage). After that, everything was pretty quick. Pretty boring stuff. Ben eating. Ben brushing his teeth. Here are some frames with some test color correction.

3 new b/w DVDs + 1 oldie

Some of these films have been on the festival circuit for awhile now and have finally picked up distribution...

Able Edwards
One of the early all-bluescreen films. Shot on a Canon XL-1. b/w noir sci-fi + 3D models. Looks like crap but I still want to see it. In a mixed metaphor, the creator of the film compares himself to Mozart: "Francis Ford Coppola once said there would come a day when some little fat girl from Ohio could borrow her dad's camcorder and become the next Mozart of moviemaking. We would like to think that Able Edwards is that little fat girl."

The call of Cthulhu
In one of my older posts I wrote about the HP Lovecraft Historical Society, a group devoted to hard-core real-life adventure game play using incredible props (the post was on the Electriclerk computer). This faux 20's silent film was shot in their b/w "Mythoscope" process which probably means shot on miniDV and routed through After Effects. In one of those Queen-like moments ("no synthesizers used!") they state, "we are pleased to say there are no CG effects in the movie." They mean no 3D models. They do use some green screen. I want to see this one for its swamp made of yarn.

Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)
A strange integration of dvx100 b/w footage composited onto a newer print of Caligari reframed in 16 x 9. I'm not sure what the point of this one is but there's a write-up in the April 2006 issue of American Cinematographer. Doug Jones, the most famous actor you've never seen (Pan's Labyrinth, Fantastic Four, Hellboy) plays Cesare.

Criterion Collection: La Jetee
Finally, what appears to be a decent print of La Jetee released on DVD in the original French with subtitles.

Circuit bent... er, Kit-bashed V1

I'm taking a bit of a breather after the semester and engaging in true hobby activities (sort of). This is my first kit-bashed model. I took a sideways Fieseler V2 rocket (the jet usually goes on top). I then took the tail wings from a B-377 Stratocruiser and stuck them on the sides. The 377, by the way, is an unbelievably cool early airliner. In actually had a lounge on a lower deck! I then took the wing motors and some brackets from the Ford Trimotor and stuck them on top.

Right now this thing looks pretty realistic I think. Having seen planes like the assymetircal Blohm and Voss BV 237, the incredible Dornier Do X seaplane and of course, the Erkranoplan, the design is fairly tame and looks like some sort of experimental buzz bomb from before WWII. So the next step will be to try to add more stuff to it and make it a little more over the top. That's where the performative aspect of the activity comes in. How far do you go?

The actual activity of building the model is pretty fun. When I was a kid, I was always getting glue over everything and every model seemed difficult and time-consuming. Now that I'm older, the models seem pretty easy to put together. I think when you're a kid, you also are trying so hard to get everything right. I used to follow the directions expicitly and try to create a perfect, clean model. Now I just fill and sand (it's like working with bondo) if it doesn't work right. I've been building my own pins out of spare parts and drilling holes where needed. And if I'm not interested in a part, I just leave it out (like the interiors).

So here's what I've learned about kit-bashing so far. First, I'm still having a hard time figuring out what scale to get. I tend to think of everything in terms of inches, but of course scale models come in scales like 1/72 or 1/100. So for some big models it's OK to get them at tiny scales like 1/100. But for some smaller items, you have to get them at larger scales. I think the V-1, for instance, is 1/48 and it still looks small. So I've actually been going to airplane websites, finding the dimensions of the actual planes and then calculating their size at the available scales.

Second, you can't be distracted by the model, you have to look for the parts. I got some really beautiful planes like the Junkers bomber, but there's not much you can take from it, maybe just the tail section. Maybe in the future they'll have the kit basher's special in which there are an assortment of individual jets, props and wings. But now, you have to carefully choose models or you won't have anything to bash! Most plane designs have engines built into the wings for example. But you can't transplant an engine like that. So it's been taking awhile to find designs where the engines and other parts are fairly discrete. That was why I picked up the Ford Tri-motor.

Finally, I discovered that if you use the wings from a batplane, whatever you do your model will look like a bat-something!

24p for $1000

Been following cameras. DVX100's are down to about $1800 now. The Canon XH A1 is in the 3000's but has that weird 24f mode. Still, it's supposed to be nice. The Canon HV-20 looks like the one to beat for cheap indy films. The footage I saw on youtube looked nice. True 24p (not 24f) but from a CMOS. The low light shots looked good too but of course it's hard to tell with crappy youtube footage. One big advantage of this over a DVX100 is the native 16x9.

noisefilm channel: Fabulous World of Jules Verne (1958)

It's always surprising to me when I find something like The Fabulous World of Jules Verne on DVD. Somehow I think I've seen every bizarre hybrid animation DVD that's ever been released. I guess not. It's available from retroflicks.com and Amazon but apparently the print is terrible.

Developing story idea

I always think it's amusing when bloggers apologize for posting late or post news about changes to the blog. As if all four of my regular readers cared! Anyway, this blog has become part notebook, part production blog, part reflection site, so I decided to try to categorize things from now on. This will make it easier for you to find posts on a certain topic and also enable you to bypass any new posts on weird propeller aircraft.

Our hypothetical next story idea is still shaping up. Ben wants to do ensembles but I want to go a step at a time. Having two people and a little dialogue is a big enough step I think. I'm still liking the Star Wars Redux idea though now I'm grafting onto Starship Troopers Redux.The idea starts the same... it's about longing for something "out there," about hearing only the news of wars and seeing the artifacts of wars. It's about information being withheld. The idea though is to have the propaganda feeds slowly transform the viewer's take on the war and the stars of the show. So at first it seems like Star Wars—yes, the Empire is evil. Then, after awhile you think, no we're the evil ones. Then it kind of goes back and forth. Part of what interests me about this is the idea of propaganda and how it works. You'd see posters of the enemy as evil monsters maybe. Then maybe you'd see the dead skeletons of the enemy. Part of this idea comes from looking at those WWII comics with Japanese villains. It's incredible some of the caricatures. And then there'd be the organic technologies. Are those the new super technologies from us? Or captured technologies from the enemy? It would all be ambiguous. Remember, this is still from a child's POV so you're not sure exactly what's going on and when anyone tells you something, you know they're hiding something. This would be intercut with scenes of our hero and heroine. Ben talked about a scene where the two kids were playing with an ant and deciding whether to kill it. And they would kill it because people are worth more than ants. And that would change the context slightly of the propaganda films because you might wonder how these kids are being conditioned to think about death. And you might think poorly of their upbringing or it may seem wise.

Film Noir films I'm looking for

Crimson Kimono (James Shigeta) NOW ON DVD
Phenix City Story
Stranger on the third floor (1940)

Apocalypto

Saw Apocalypto today—probably the world's most exciting National Geographic special. A very simple story. They could have lost a half hour off the beginning though. Maybe it's the small screen but the violence didn't seem anywhere as "pornographic" as I had read about. In fact, I was left wondering if I was watching an edited version because of the number of times we cut away from seeing gruesome things. The acting was great. Somehow I thought this was a cast dragged straight out of the jungle directed to perfection by Mel Gibson. I later found out that these people were already performers (though not necessarily actors) drawn from all over. The DVD extra shows a lot of Gibson directing and he's doing nothing special. You know, "do this..., hold it like that..., Rudy stay like that..." The results are good though.

Spent most of the film looking at the cinematography since it was shot on Panavision Genesis. It looked a lot better than Superman Returns that's for sure. Apocalypto had a kind of seventies documentary look to it. A little over-contrasy. Skies blowing out a lot. Not beautiful, not gritty, not overly-stylized. It got me wondering why these films would look so different. Superman Returns had a brown mushy look to it. But it's not like changing tape brands would make any difference like changing film stocks though it's a funny thought that using Maxell tapes would look different from Sony tapes (does the Genesis system even use tapes?),

From a cinema point of view, it paid off to build the big set and hire 700 extras. Not once did I think composite or crowd simulation. You just never doubt it. It really helped to convey that documentary feel. Contrast with The Fountain. More ancient Americans, but they look like they're running around on sets and their pyramid looks like a cheap composite.

Unintentional or intentional humor?

I don't think they are, but I still can't figure out whether the following are intentionally or unintentionally funny. Can someone help me out?

Batman: dead end [SPOILER]{VIEW}.
Batman is attacked by the Joker... then the Alien (from Aliens)... then the Predator... then the Aliens AND the Predator.

The Core (w/Hilary Swank)
Man drops dead on table in the first scene; pigeon takes out a london bus...

Episode III:
Annakin, after chopping off Count Dooku's arms: "Yes, but he was an unarmed prisoner...."

Spider-Man III
Topher Grace praying for Peter's death.

I'm pretty sure the following was NOT meant to be funny:

The Prestige:
Constant one upmanship in the mano et mano battle of the magicians.

Copyright: now this is great art

This wonderful Disney mashup/instructional video does two things: it provides a challenge to unfair copyright practice and it's an interesting approximation of what the noise film final exposition video might look like. A must see! From Stanford University... [view]

JPL, 3 technologies

Took Sean to the JPL open house today. I didn't know it was such a big deal. I heard there were 15,000 people each day! Disneyland efficiency and big lines just to see robot spacecraft. It gave me the idea that I should make some hobby robot spacecraft. Like Mars rovers and spacecraft made of wooden boxes and plastic and cheap light bulbs and wires. There are now three kinds of technologies I'm working on.... 1) cyber-organic technologies (heart-rocket), 2) overperforming hobby technologies (hobby satellites) and 3) kid-style super fantastic mega ultra machines (like the Ekranoplan). The cell phone photo above shows the really beautiful antenna on one of the rovers. BTW, I found I can transfer photos from my phone to my computer using Bluetooth. Amazing when things work when they're not even supposed to.

More image reference for hypothetical next film

Uneven tone and bad writing

I was skimming through Ep. III yesterday. The tone is all over the place. Is it light-hearted? Serious? Is the following an inadvertant pun or a joke put in a bad place?

Annakin has just killed Count Dooku after cutting off both of his hands. Obi Wan scolds him.

Annakin: Yes but he was an unarmed prisoner.... I shouldn't have done that, it's not the Jedi way.

Star Wars Redux & a phenomenology of childhood

Here's another short film idea. It came about because Dan and I were talking about Star Wars and I was trying to abstract the qualities of Episode IV. In other words, what makes Star Wars, Star Wars? This was my solution. It doesn't quite solve the problem but actually I like it.

* * *

We hear the rumble of what sound like B-17s in the distance. A boy runs up to the camera craning his neck toward the sky. We look overhead and see a small group of rocket planes in formation slowly flying into the distance. Fade to black.

It's morning and the boy is running. He passes a man with a strange metal frame attached to his head. There is an eyepiece over one eye. The boy passes another man who appears to have a bloody organ in a clear plastic sack attached to his body. The boy runs into a small school room in a dusty desert-like area with a low horizon. The boy is late to class. The class is watching a projection. We see faces of men who look familiar. We see strange newsreel-like footage. It has a garbled quality. Images of strange aircraft and maps flash by. We do not quite understand them.

Class is over now. The other kids seem to be walking home and no one except the boy seems to notice the thin wisp of smoke in the distance in the scrubby desert. Now the boy is walking toward the smoke. It appears to be a small sputnik-like satellite that has plunged into the ground. He is able to remove a small device from the satellite.

It's night. The boy is looking at the device. It looks like some kind of strange receiver that picks up noisy sounds and images. He spends some time looking at a poster of a rocket ship with a human heart in a plastic bubble. As the sounds of the device fill the room we peer out the window at the night sky.

We now crane down to a young man. It is the boy grown-up. He embraces his mother. Then he walks into a rocket plane. The rocket plane takes off and joins a squadron of other planes flying off into the distance.

THE END

Notes:

I've suggested to Dan that Ep IV is qualitatively different from the other Star Wars films. One of the things that makes it unique is its sense of adolescent longing and the feeling of being trapped in the middle of nowhere and that something is happening far, far away. Like there are rumbles of wars in the distance and only in tiny filtered ways does news about what's happening reach us. So this story is about what it's like to be a child. Adults try to keep information away from you, yet you know something is happening yet you don't know what. And it seems simultaneously wonderful yet frightening. And it seems very American... to have news of faraway wars carried through the airwaves. For me it was Vietnam. For today's kids it's Iraq. And fighting a war is less about immediate violence than he effects of war. Casualties. Strange programs like Victory Gardens that seem hopelessly removed from the cause yet enable you to "do your part" (or support the troops).

In the beginning we see these gruesome figures, perhaps injured in the faraway war. The idea comes from the beginning of Chariots of Fire. At the beginning we see images of men injured in WWI. They're more window-dressing than anything else. They never appear again.

Then the classroom images. These are like newsreels, like propaganda. But you're not sure what they're about, like when I was a kid watching cartoons that were leftover from WWII. You'd see cartoon people with flashlights saying, "lights out" and you'd have no idea what they were talking about. Or you'd watch out-of-context cartoons that showed Bugs Bunny talking to an audience in a theater. Or you'd see cartoons that adults thought would make it easier to understand difficult concepts. But anthropomorphizing everything just made it all seem weirder. It's about the way adults tell you about forbidden topics like child molesters. Parents try to tell you the specifics of what to do (don't talk to strangers) in order to avoid talking about the larger issue of pedophilia. So you have these weird decontextualized rules that evoke something larger and forbidden.

The satellite comes right out of Star Wars of course. It is the event that intrudes on the hero and promises to change his life. The radio receiver idea is the Princess Leia videotape, a secret message. Give it the "me" treatment and now we have a static-y noisy radio-like device.

The poster on the wall is about the way children don't understand metaphors. I was at the shooting range once with my friend and his father shooting 22s. There was a poster that said "Guns and alcohol don't mix." I always wondered what would happen if you DID mix the two together: would you get some kind of explosion? Years later I realized that the statement wasn't meant to be literal. So we wonder about the rocket poster. Is the rocket really a rocket with a heart in it? Or is it some kind of metaphor? And there's some kind of slogan. Like "a slip of the lip sinks a ship." That's one I heard as a kid and I had no idea what it meant.

I call this ending the "Gattaca" ending because it's similar in tone. There are a lot of other possible endings. In the Star Wars ending, we actually see our hero defeat the enemy. In the Republicans-are-evil ending we find out that there's no war—it's just a scheme to keep the public under control. In the Democrats-are-evil ending, the war comes to us and destroys the schoolhouse. In the Explorers ending, we discover that the spaceships were really just garbage scows... a really disappointing ending. In the "telephone game/conspiracy" ending we discover that there was no war; we just pieced that idea together. In fact, those rocket ships were just going on routine flights.

Mexican Madness!, a Korean fairytale and cyber-organic-convertiplanes

I finally saw Pan's Labyrinth, the last of the girls-in-wonderland trifecta. I felt Mirror Mask and Tideland were self-indulgent. In Mirror Mask we go inside Dave McKean's head only to find that nothing's there. In Tideland we have a series of beautiful images strung together with the ramblings of a girl talking to herself (people always talk to themselves in Gilliam films). Artists always make art for themselves but with those two films it felt like ONLY themselves. Pan's Labyrinth reminded me of Alejandro Amenábar's The Others in the sense that when you watch them, both films are unremarkable but they seem richer and more resonant after the movie is over.

Western fairytales often seem to be about having good intentions and second chances. For me, Asian fairytales often have a legalistic quality to them. You screw up once and that's it. I remember a fairytale I thought up when Maria was in the hospital. In the story, a dying Korean woman asks her husband to get her some special oranges from the top of a certain hill. He searches and searches but he is unable to find them. Fortunately, he is able to find some other fruit. Pleased with himself he returns, but his wife is disappointed and she ends up dying and haunting him. I guess in this story, there was no way to win.

I liked the blood and guts of Pan's Labyrinth. Coincidentally just last night I posted that bloody clip from Santa Sangre. I also coincidentally posted Guy Maddin's Sombra Dolorosa. I must be part Mexican. The gore reminded me that I've always been curious about cyber-organic technologies. I remember I read about David Cronenberg's existenz thinking it would be about this idea. But he went in a different direction. In our hypothetical next film, we might have something like a bricolage-heart-convertiplane sitting in the background. The plane would be powered with human organs and have all sorts of tubes and wires coming out of it and three or four large engines. In fact, noisefilm has a device like this. You can't see it in most of the shots because the device is so small but it's a heart-lung-coin configuration that somehow helps the spinning device to work (see photo).

Buenas Dias!

Congratulations to David & Alex!

I totally spaced on posting this. Congrats to David—noisefilm prop developer and #1 comment poster on the birth of 6 lb., 13 oz. Nicholas Felix last week! Our small cast and crew has had two babies during the course of making the film—an indication of the fertility of the group or how long the project is taking.

Noisefilm channel... low tech Raiders of the Lost Ark

If you're like me, you've heard about this project for years but never seen it. Now WIRED has it—VIEW. See some scenes from the VHS shot-by-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Art created over 7 years by a small cadre of teens. Low-tech filmmaking at its finest.

Tony Millionaire's Batman

Since noisefilm is on hold probably til next week, this blog has turned into a notebook of sorts where I've been jotting down ideas for a possible next film project and collecting stuff in general. I like comic book art Tony Millionaire. Here's the pitch he made for a Batman comic book that was turned down by DC. I thought it was funny...

I had one where Batman went completely broke. His corporation went completely broke. He was like, ‘should I throw this Batarang? These cost me $550 each. I’m not really sure I can afford to throw it. I should probably just run.’ And he had to sell all his cars and ride a bicycle around. If anyone sees him on a bicycle with his costume on, they’ll catch him, so he can’t even wear that anymore. He just has to wear a t-shirt and run around. They said, “no, we’re not going to do that” [laughs]. I’d like to do a story about the real Batman, what a real Batman would be like. Just some guy, who’s not really that rich. He’d just run around and try to figure out where the crime is. In my neighborhood, all he’d be doing is running up to cars where they’re selling drugs out the window.

Noisefilm channel... Dave McKean

This is an excerpt of the film The Week Before by Illustrator/Director/Musician/Master Thespian Dave McKean. I like this short a lot better than McKean's unrelentingly static Mirror Mask. I sometimes show this clip in class to examine visual artist film tendencies. I love the intent behind this project and it's nice to look at. But compared to the pieces by Guy Maddin, it seems so stiff and self-conscious in its grasping for poetic form. Supposedly, a compilation DVD of McKean's short films will be released from www.allenspiegelfinearts.com.

Tonight on the noisefilm channel... Alejandro Jodorowsky

This clip from Santa Sangre is really gross but I love the cinematography and production design. Part of me really wants to see this film and the other part of me finds the story too depressing so this clip is all I've seen. The fact that it's only available as an OOP DVD doesn't help either.

Eye like a strange balloon

I keep talking about this b/w Guy Maddin film with cheap sets and how our hypothetical future Super-8 film might look like this one but with rockets or planes. I found the film posted on YouTube so feel free to view it HERE. (They don't let you embed this one.)

Here's another Guy Maddin short you might like. This time he turns his goofy surrealist eye on Mexican Wrestlers! Look how tight he shoots. No wonder I like it!

Airplane aesthetics, extrapolated technologies

(Plane from Things to Come)

In the past I've pretty much believed the modernist idea that an airplane that flies well looks good, the idea being that form and function go hand in hand. Certainly there are many planes that fit the bill like the DC3. But I can imagine that a lot of planes that fly well don't look good. So maybe our hypothetical movie would be about awkward technologies that function well, but look hashed together. You know, something like "Masking tape in the sky."

Another idea I find intriguing focuses on extrapolated technologies. Technology usually develops paradigmatically. So you have propellers and then jets and then rockets; three completely different technologies. That's why Star Trek's Enterprise still looks right to us. We accept the idea of "warp drive" because we've seen paradigmatic technological change. But what if technology merely changed by extrapolation? Popular culture is littered with examples of inappropriate extrapolations: the house of the future where feminism means you can wash the living room carpet with a hose. Or Things to Come in which the modern planes have lots and lots and lots of propellers (see photos). So the film would feature a world where more = better. So a better car would be bigger and have more tires and two engines and lots of cylinders. And a faster plane would have more engines and more wings and bigger wings. And technology would become explicit so that the rich guy's plane would have five wings and two engines whereas the poor guy's plane would have only three wings and a tiny engine. It would be the bricolage world where when the poor guy got richer, he could strap on two more engines for a three engine, three wing plane. This is the world before computers when everyone could fix the timing on their engines with a screwdriver, the JC Whitney world where you're constantly adding cheap add-ons to your vehicles.

What's up with the planes

Last night I was emailing Susan (Guo). She wanted to know if she had the right site because it was all about airplanes. Then I spoke to Ben briefly today. He wanted to know what's up with all the airplanes. So it occurred to me that it's not clear to others what is the relationship between the airplanes and some future Super 8 project.

So here's what I'm thinking...

Maybe I might have some space scenes. We're surveilling someone on the ground then we pull out and see a satellite in space along with some rockets. Or maybe this is a science fiction film and the characters fly around in what is essentially a giant V-2 rocket. Or maybe this is a war mystery and the weird aircraft is part of the mystery. Or maybe the planes and rockets are in a junkyard set in back of our main character. Or maybe the character builds his own plane out of scraps. Or maybe this is Star Wars farm boy in space type show. Our character looks up in the sky and sees an Ekranoplan flying overhead or a squadron of modified batplanes. Or maybe this looks like cheap sci fi and a rocket crash lands somewhere. Or maybe our character is trapped in a rocket floating in space. Or maybe the plane is part of a top secret military installation and everyone treats the craft with wonder even though it looks to us rather stupid and dated. Or maybe our character is a kind of superhero who uses bricolage technologies sort of like MacGyver but even more primitive and stupid.

You know, it almost doesn't matter. When I get this interested in something there is almost always a payoff. But the payoff often occurs when and where I least expect it.

More aircraft that I like

My other idea

I forgot to jot down this old idea for a film based on some of my research on Merleau-Ponty. It's about a guy who's blind but doctors find a way to retrofit him with special goggles that enable him to see. However, when he uses the goggles, everything seems far away to him, like he's looking through long telescopes. Possible endings...

>He goes crazy

>He decides that life was better the old way--blind

>He decides that telescopic vision isn't good but it's better than nothing.

Oh yes, rocketships. Somewhere there are rocketships.

More models, cinematography and Super 8

I've gone absolutely psycho buying all sorts of plastic scale models. I've amassed a pretty good set of 50's Willy Ley era spacecraft including the hard-to-find Werner von Braun space station. I have several V-2 rockets on the way plus a couple of XV-1 Convertiplanes and a Mitsubishi Ki46 III. If it's stubby, awkward and circa 1950, I probably bought it. I must have looked through hundreds of models so far. I'll be happy if I never see another Starfighter, SR-71 or Messerschmitt again. Strange, the popularity of these items. I built the Starfighter and SR-71 when I was a kid and those kits are still easy to find. Part of what's getting me to pick up so many models is that I realized that these things don't have infinite shelf lives. Even models I bought in the last few years like the Glencoe Marsliner are no longer made. I'm sort of like the New Jack FM of plastic models. I'm not looking for the MOST popular stuff, but the second-most popular stuff. I like flying wings, Lockheed Constellations and DC-3s, but those planes are too iconographic. I tend to get things with a slightly more generic quality—things that have the familiarity of a hazy dream--like you can't remember if you ever saw it or not and you definitely don't know its name.

I've been investigating cameras lately. Fast forwarded through November last night. Shot on a dvx100. Really interesting look and a pretty sucky film. The cinematography shows incredible control and craft. But it still has the tell-tale pebbly dvx-100 grain. I'm beginning to realize that what shooting on HDV got me was better looking grain. The grain is smaller since I'm down-rezzing and HDV has a prettier grain than the dvx anyway. I also scanned through Episode II. The whole movie looks like it was made of plastic. I wonder if they used the Renderman renderer? Remember, Lucas used to own Renderman/Pixar. The one thing that stands out for me whenever I watch A Bug's Life is how plastic-y it looks. I always figured that was due to Renderman.

Been looking to get a Super-8 camera. David reminded me that 8mm cameras have to be threaded by hand in the dark. No thanks. I only know cartridges. It's cool that a lot of the Super-8 cameras do varying frame rates from 18 to 24 and even 36 fps. The last time I shot Super-8 was in high school and college. I still have my Super-8 roll from my UCLA undergrad sculpture project. But I'm too cheap to convert it to video. I still remember what's in it: walking down the stairs of Dykstra Hall, plastic robots on the loose, me bloodied in a car accident. SO undergrad and totally useless. For my project I projected it onto a muslin screen. You had to lie down on a bed and put your head in a covered frame to watch it.

Interlace flicker, the new dust and scratches

One of the charms of film is the sense of individual frames running through the projector. The dust and the jitter create a wonderful sense of energy exploited by artists like Stan Brakhage and Len Lye in their hand-painted films. Just saw Justin's show the other day. I noticed that his animation looked a lot better when projected. The interlace flicker brought a lot of vitality to the hold frames, some of which were on screen for seconds at a time. No doubt in the future, there will be plug-ins to reproduce this effect at will.

George Lucas and me

(above: kit-bashed Mars Liner. That would be George Lucas on the right.)

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that of all the director/writers out there, the ones that I felt closest to were George Lucas and Robert Rodriguez. This includes artists and experimental filmmakers. Ben found this surprising and curious for some reason. Anyway, as I continue working with the plastic models, some of the connections become clearer and clearer.

For me, the whole "Star Wars is based on mythology" thing is vastly overblown. Besides the wistful longing for a colonial age and a nostalgia for World War II and B-movies, I think a huge reason for the series' popularity is its emphasis on technology. In Lucas' scheme, utopian technology is represent by the Ewoks, the Gungans and the Wookies. Their technologies are folk technologies, essentially Romantic, integrated into nature. Evil technologies are overly formalized. This formalization leads to two main problems: 1) overspecialization/an inability to function within varying contexts and 2) the creation of technological achilles heels. Good technology falls in between. We have Luke's speeder, something like your Dad's rusty T-bird. There's the hot-rodded Millennium Falcon. The X-Wing fighters represent the epitome of rebel firepower (in Ep. IV). They contrast with the snowflake fighters. Like the Nazi technologies of our collective imagination, the snowflake fighters fuse mysticism with hardware. Their very shape embodies their transcendence of the laws of physics.

Compare this to the secular X-Wing fighters. They are subject to physics conventions; their wings are designed for lift and their shape minimizes wind resistance. Like an F-14, their aerodynamics change to fit the situation. The X-wing fighters depend on a pilot who must incorporate the Force into his being and then control his craft. The design of the snowflake fighters, on the other hand, suggests that the Force, is mystically—and unnaturally—embedded into the very substance and design of the craft itself.

There are several things going on in the Star Wars films. First, there are the characters and the narrative (presumably based on myth). These come across as the least important part of the films. They function principally as a gluey binder to give the film structure. Lucas' principal concerns seem to be these: 1) the nature of technology both as theme and in terms of the filmmaking process, 2) the integration of abstract animation into narrative filmmaking and 3) noting the qualities of film itself. Lucas is quite an astute observer of the qualities of things-in-motion and is good at embedding these observations within practice (e.g., what makes something look fast? What makes something look exciting?). This contrasts with people like Spielberg and Michael Bay. I see them as adept at using conventions which have already become codified as film grammar.

My project

As I wrote in the post on the Ekranoplan, I like bricolage technologies, machines that look as if they were assembled out of existing technologies. The obvious parallel to model-making is kit-bashing: taking parts of different models and putting them together. I also like hobby technologies as is evident from the Noise project. Any project I'm likely to work on will probably include these sorts of technologies as a focus. The characters, like Ben in Noise, are more likely to be backgrounded. Also likely to be foregrounded are the visual art aspects. In Noise film we have the shrine, the clue video and the installation rooms, all of which integrate a form of modernist abstraction into narrative filmmaking.

Boy meets girl

There's the old story about the writer who wakes up in the middle of the night with an incredible idea for a story so he gets out of bed and jots the story down.When he looks at the note in the morning it says, "boy meets girl."

Last night I had this dream and I thought, wow, that's an incredible story. That's a "relationship film" I'd like to direct. So I woke up and wrote it down--

In the prelude we see that this woman wanted to become a nun. But she became a doctor. Then there's a guy with a son. And the life he leads is a routine everyday life. Then his son stars in a series of commercials with a girl. And it's the doctor's girl. And the two kids are together all the time. So the guy and the doctor are always together too. Then one day the mom-doctor says 'would you like to join our photo club?" And she's very cool about it, but he finds it's a club in which member exchange nude photos of themselves. And the guy and the doctor start an affair. Then one day, the club--basically everyone in the doctor's office--finds all their photos missing. So they put up a notice. Let's trade says the notice. Give us back the photos and you can have [don't remember...]. The way we'll know if you accept this deal is if you pick up this item from the floor.

So the day comes and we see a hand pick up the item from the floor. And we see that it's the woman doctor. "I'm sorry I dragged you into this," she tells the guy. She wants to end the affair and this is her way of letting everyone know she wants to change her life. She took the photos. And we see her returning to the convent but we're not sure exactly what she's decided to do. And in this film, everything is subtext. All the characters are very cool and on the surface, impassive.

The real portable Memex

In our film, the portable memex was a handmade device that stored a portable microfilm encyclopedia that allowed Ben to do his research. The prop got built but cut out of the film. Yesterday, I stumbled upon its real-life equivalent on the Modern Mechanix site.

Expanding the scale model idea

I've been working night and day on some school projects so work on the film has stalled for at least another week and a half. However, I've still been musing about what a future film project might look like. So far, it looks like this—

>grainy b/w, maybe shot in 8mm

>something to do with strange old aircraft or rockets, if only in the background. I did pick up a bunch of plastic models on Ebay (see below).

>looks like Guy Maddin's Eye Like a Strange Balloon but more mid-century than mid-1800's.

>Hanging miniatures and glass shots. No composites.