if i was still in san francisco, the 48 hour film project would be a fun way to no sleep a weekend.

maybe can make it to the Saving the Image: Art After Film Book Launch at the New Museum on thursday (april 22, 2004, 6 - 8pm)

also- http://www.freeafterrebate.info/

- idle time's holding pattern screen saver, cycles though images from an airplane window (osx/pc, via wired mag's the cult of the mac blog
- sadly, refresh: the art of the screen saver is no longer online. however, paul pfieffer's EXCELLENT john 3:16 screen saver is still available through the race in digital space conference web site. (os9/pc)
- lindkvist's pong screen saver (osx)

also-
the best icons ever, pixelgirlpresents.com

Don Hertzfeldt: Film Threat Interview

Love him! I just got the "Animation Show" DVD. Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge's work is amazing (including the original Office Space short), but so is Das Rad and Atama Yama. Check out the trailer!

The images from the new film in production look ridiculously amazing (and hard).

Also - old interviews at UGO and Ain't it Cool News.

In addition to The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry is going to direct Master of Space and Time starring Jack Black. oh yes.

Hammer & Tongs, who directed Blur's "Coffee and TV" music video, will direct the movie adaptation of The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. (starring Mos Def as Ford Prefect and John Malkovich as Humma Kavula??) Shynola and Asylum worked on the movie too.

p.s. am very excited to see the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban this weekend.

The last month of college, we used Bennett's projector to screen Big Fish and the Animation Show on the side of our house.

This time around, the movies or going to be on Rockefeller Plaza. Garden State, Napoleon Dynamite, and Danny Deckchair are going to be shown tonight through Thursday as part of Drive In Movies at the Rock. free!

After Effects style 2.5D seems all the rage in music videos at the moment (Modest Mouse, Franz Ferdinand, New Found Glory, Bad Religion, etc.) Hopefully the exposure will push the style from being new and flashy to a sophisticated method of experimenting with representation. Basically. I love it. Here are some motion graphics sites to play with: Nexus Productions and Filmtecknarna Animation Stockholm.

And some old favorites: lobo.cx, mk12, (the amazing) Nando Costa, and guilherme.tv.

As I sit here madly refreshing the Mac Observer and MacRumors blogs from WWDC, waiting for some visuals of Apple's juicy new aluminum monitors, I'm on a bit of a music video kick. Here, pretty much link for link, is a posting about Alex Rutterford (of the Autechre video, Gantz Graf), from the excellent Swen's Blog. A couple more well executed videos and he could pick up cult Michel Gondry-like status and renew faith in (non-ramp shaded) 3D animation.

Interviews!

• Alex Rutterford interview from 2002
• About Amon Tobin's Verbal and Autechre's Gantz Graf
• About Radiohead's Go to Sleep

Downloads!

• Autechre - Gantz Graf 37 MB
• Radiohead - Go To Sleep 12MB

Sam Raimi would like to build a "century cam". (via Leah) Essentiallly, time-lapse of metropolitan cities, one frame a day, for 1,000 years. Not a new idea, but maybe he'll have the pull to actually get the project instated.

On a related note, just started reading River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West

P.S. I'm psyched about Spider-Man 2

Two summers ago I visited the (delightful) Museum of Television and Radio to see an exhibit celebrating the Cartoon Network (Samurai Jack...mmm). One of the museum's great features is a gigungous broadcast archive. You can browse their database and reserve a show, then go to a console room and watch your selection at a monitor with headphones. I think I chose an old Beatles appearance and a never-aired pilot for a Jack Black/Ben Stiller sitcom called "Heat Vision and Jack".

waxy.org recently posted the pilot as part of their bandwidth blowout. Download the torrent and you'll be on your way to seeing... Jack Black as the smartest man in the world, Owen Wilson as his talking motorcycle (a la Knight Rider), and Ben Stiller as strip club DJ (and of course Melody from Hey Dude will be making an appearance). Also- haven't watched it myself, but also starring Jack Black. Computer Man.

What a fantastic movie. and a fantastic trailer.

Related:
Free Comic Book Day is a single day when participating comic book shops across North America and around the world are giving away comic books absolutely free to anyone who comes into their stores. Free Comic Book Day is tomorrow, July 3.

DIY Bottle Cap Tripod

Ripped off the pages of Gothamist:

Dave Chappelle will be working on a film with director Michel Gondry! Variety reports that the film is inspired by Wattstax, a documentary about a musical event hosted by Richard Pryor, and will combine music and comedy. And since Chappelle will be starring (as well as producing), Gothamist imagines he'll be the event's emcee, and perhaps have other roles as performers. The idea of Dave Chappelle and Michel Gondry, who directed The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Human Nature, and many groundbreaking videos, is also mindblowing. Kudos to your agents and managers, dudes. And, even better, filming begins next month in Brooklyn.

Also: Dave Chapelle will not be doing the Rick James biopic; he told Terry Gross in a great NPR interview that he spoke to Rick before his death and Rick's concern was that his children might not understand the film, even if it was a comedy. But Rick James's shadow still looms, as "I'm Rick James, bitch!" gets tossed out a lot at his shows. His Showtime special, For What It's Worth, aired last Saturday and is in repeats.

Thank you. Gothamist.

The Chocolateer was selected as a heat winner for "Western - A Modern Day Outlaw is Run Down" in the 2004 NYC Midnight Movie Making Madness Festival!!!!!! Hoorah!!! Come October 8, Tavet, Ciara, Tim, and I (among others) will be busting our collective asses trying to make the best movie ever in twenty-four hours. Let the pain begin.

The Chocolateer is online here.

This one's from Alison. House of Flying Daggers, directed by Zhang Yimou (of Hero and Raise the Red Lantern), will be released on December 3. The movie looks ridiculously good. ComingSoon.net has a slew of trailers. International Trailer D and International Trailer H are stunning.

The other movie I can't wait to see - The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou comes out on December 10. Touchstone has released two "webisodes" as promos for the movie view them here and here.

I was at Tekserve again for a last minute dvd-rom and hard drive replacement. While I was there, I checked out the new ipod Photo. Color LCD is nice, but nothing to drop a couple hundred dollars on. One interesting feature, is that when you have an image in fullscreen mode, you can use the scroll wheel to zip through all of your photos in rapid succession back and forth. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is using it to experiment/demonstrate time-lapse or stop motion.

And, of course, the first person I find on the internet to exploit this feature uses this as their example footage. Why?

Those clever Hewlett-Packard ads that have been on TV and even getting some play before feature films on the theater? with the lovely David Hockney photocollage references? all part of the $300 million "You + HP" marketing push featuring the all-encompassing tagline: "(customer) + HP = everything is possible." The ads are available on their web site. Hooray. Too bad they're in poor windows media player encoding. Bah.

You + HP: Digital Photography campaign, articles on the creation of "Picture Book" here and here.
You + HP: Digital Music campaign
Everything Is Possible campaign
Change + HP campaign, which includes David Fincher's "Constant Change" spot. Better quality quicktime available here. Article about the (post)production here.

The director behind the crazy "Picture Book" and "You" spots? Francois Vogel. To see his stuff, including the HP ads and the QTVR inspired "Trois Petits Chats", go to the Tool of North America site, click on directors, and then click on his name (damn, flash sites are annoying when you can't direct link). Better yet, here's links to the highest res quicktimes (480x360!!!) I could find of "Picture Book", "Francois", and "You".

Cool Hunting has a great video posted of Barking Irons showing off their silk screening production process. So hip it hurts. here.

Spaced Definitive Collector's Edition DVD, another reason to get a region free DVD player.

Spaced was created by the people who recently made Shaun of the Dead. The movie was inspired by an episode of Spaced where Tim takes speed and plays Resident Evil for twenty four hours straight. Later he hallucinates that zombies are attacking everyone. Check out the Spaced Out website for more on the series. Including episode guides with loving reference listings like:

11 min, 56 sec. into episode four: The line 'We put them down, all of them' was taken from The Phantom Menace trailer, 'Wipe them out, all of them', when we were all very excited about the new Star Wars film and didn't realise what a bone crushing disappointment it was to be. Summer was so full of promise and yet the creeping hand of disillusionment was soon to clasp its icy fingers around our hearts and reveal to us that George just doesn't have a clue. It still hurts.

It's pretty gloriously geeky. Shameless love of pop culture and kitschy camerawork. and there's slow motion pantomine gunfights. The series is currently playing on Trio regularly. (Also coming soon on Trio, Pilot Season, with Sarah Silverman, David Cross, Andy Dick, Jon Benjamin and director/writer Sam Seder on Feb. 20ish.)

Ooh. A new blog for the RSS feed! I'm hoping that Self-Reliant Filmmaking turns out to be another HD for Indies information mother lode. The first post (only November 2005, a young'un) lays out the declaration of principles - "to talk about and to encourage the practice of making high-quality films at a low-cost and/or with small-labor systems." Sweet.

The topic that caught my eye is a subject I've been meaning to aggregate and post for a while - DIY Film Equipment. Most people have seen the internet-famous $14 Steadycam, now there's a central place to find instructions on a home-made stabilizer, skateboard dolly, jib arm, car mount, depth of field reducer, and microphone pop filter. Sounds to me like a good reason to visit Home Depot and finally make all those animations/videos sitting on the back burner.

Here's a couple more jib arms, 1, 2, to play with. and from some old posts - DIY Bottle Cap Tripod and DIY Waterproof Camera Enclosure.

i love me some Gpod. The blog posts a bit torrent of the Daily Show every day, with a handy RSS you can subscribe to and a guest listing. (Although, the best place to get Stephen Colbert on The Gates is still Lisa Rein's Radar) BUT, the really lovely thing is, they post torrents for many a crazy film school/art house geek to download. Who knew there were torrents for Michael Snow's Wavelength, the famed Errol Morris wager inspired Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, and Potemkin? Gpod knew.

Whew. new site design. figuring out how to integrate the movable type template is in the works. i'm brushing up on my css as we speak.

The Center for Visual Music is releasing an Oskar Fischinger DVD on May 15. Pre-orders are available through the website. $30 for home use or $200 for institutions. To my knowledge, this is the only place to get Fischenger's work outside of an older VHS and the pricey Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film DVD set.

Don Hertzfeldt's bitter films volume one: 1995-2005 will open for pre-orders in May. Whooooooooo! Now you can get Lily and Jim, Billy's Balloon, and Rejected (and others) all in one place. (as opposed to the Short Cinema Journal... r.i.p.)

random link of the day:
Cary Fukunaga's Victoria para Chino looks great, but truly oddball is the user comment left on the short's imdb page. Is it a joke? I can't tell. It must be one of his friends...

So I've been trying to watch The Sun by Aleksandr Sokurov since Alison loved it at the New York Film Festival. Sukorov is probably best known for Russian Ark, a ninety-six minute film shot in the Russian State Hermitage Museum...all in one continuous shot (the fourth take was the one). It's the third movie in a four-part series about persons of power (Hitler and Lenin came first). The Sun follows Emporer Hirohito as he's about to in a bunker underneath the Imperial Palace in Toyko, during the last days of World War II.

I missed it at BAM's Village Voice Best of 2005 Series, but it looks like it'll be back in town for indieWIRE's Undiscovered Gems Series, which features films that have not been picked up for distribution. Check out the other films here. I'll be watching it at Cinema Village in the East Village, but other locations include Buffalo, Tucson, San Rafael, Wilmington, Ft. Lauderdale, Lake Worth, Martha’s Vineyard, Lincoln, Tulsa, and Scranton.

Got a Film Forum flyer in the mail. Two that I'm looking forward to are Michael Kang's The Motel and Jan Svankmajer's Sílení (Lunacy).

In The Motel, thirteen-year-old Ernest Chin lives and works at a sleazy hourly-rate motel on a strip of desolate suburban bi-way. Misunderstood by his family and blindly careening into puberty, Ernest befriends Sam Kim, a self-destructive yet charismatic Korean American man who has checked in (played by Sung Kang, the self-destructive yet charismatic Korean in Better Luck Tomorrow). The main reason I want to check it out is the 'Love and Other Disasters' section of Jeff Yang's Give Me Puberty, Or Give Me Death article.

As the topic of adolescent relationships comes up, Mike and I play a game of Top This.

...

"I remember going to the local Dairy Mart all the time to see this one Filipino girl, because one time when she gave me change, she accidentally sort of scratched my hand with her finger, and my whole body went completely crazy," he says. "I would go in there and buy candy bars all the time, just hoping that she'd touch my hand again."

I admit that in fifth grade I kissed a girl I liked on the back of the head when she wasn't looking. "And then I fell down trying to run away, so it was totally obvious that it was me."

"There was this girl in seventh grade, and it took me weeks of agonizing to call her up," he says. "And when I finally asked her out, she was like, 'I can't.' I hung up and started riding my bike around the whole neighborhood, totally juiced, because she didn't say no, she said she couldn't. Which to me meant she would if she could. Of course, I never called her again, because I didn't want to screw it up. That was the closest I got to a girl in junior high."

I tell him about the popular-crowd girl with honey-blond hair and cool glasses who came up to me on a dare and asked me if I liked anyone. Dizzied by her presence, I stammered out a yes, only to have her start rattling off names, trying to pin down my crush's identity. I could see a faint terror rising in her eyes as the list of remaining female classmates grew shorter and shorter, until I finally let her off the hook by saying it wasn't anyone in our year. Exhaling with relief, she announced that she knew exactly who it was: It was Wendy, a sixth grader and friend of my little sister, the only Chinese girl in school that wasn't a member of my immediate family. It wasn't, and we both knew it.

Game over. It's a draw: We're both huge losers.

Oh man, everytime I read it, it kills me. The Motel plays at Film Forum, Wednesday, June 28 – Tuesday, July 11.

Jan Svankmajer's self-described horror film is based loosely on The Premature Burial and The System of Dr. Tarr and Dr. Fether by Edgar Allen Poe and inspired by the Marquis de Sade. In nineteenth-century France, Jean Berlot is plagued by nightmares in which he is dragged off to a madhouse. On the journey back from his mother’s funeral he is invited by a Marquis to spend the night in his castle. The Marquis later takes his guest to a surreal lunatic asylum where the patients have complete freedom and the staff are locked up behind bars. And, of course, there is a lot of stop-motion raw meat animation sprinkled in (it's a Svankmajer film!). Trailer available here.

Lunacy plays at Film Forum, Wednesday, August 9 -Tuesday, August 22. Check here for additional screenings.

Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Edgar Wright are shooting a new feature, Hot Fuzz, set to release in February 2007. These are the boys behind Shaun of the Dead and the freaking awesome UK TV series Spaced. The movie features heterosexual lifemates Pegg and Frost as cops (not zombie hunters) doing the buddy cop action comedy thing (a la Lethal Weapon... but British). Hot Fuzz has a podcast production diary teaser. I like a big day on set and pub action, which goes something like... "hello, the web. we're shooting at a 900 year old pub built by peasants who wanted to get drunk. and, uh, it's been here ever since."

(via twitch)

Also, did anyone else hear about Werner Herzog getting shot in February? I love this:

German director Werner Herzog was shot by a crazed fan during a recent interview with the BBC.

The 63-year-old was chatting with movie journalist Mark Kermode about his new film, documentary Grizzly Man, when a sniper opened fire with an air rifle.

Kermode explains, "I thought a firecracker had gone off.

"Herzog, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, said, 'Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'

"He had a bruise the size of a snooker ball, with a hole in. He just carried on with the interview while bleeding quietly in his boxer shorts."

An unrepentant Herzog insisted, "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid."

I'm still pissed at myself for missing the NY Polish Film Festival screening of Zbigniew Rybczynski and Mariusz Wilczynski shorts last Thursday. Rybczynski 's Tango is one of my favorites (I can't believe it's on YouTube?!)

But! There's still time to catch the Kihachiro Kawamoto program at BAM Rose Cinemas, running June 1-3, 2006. Kawamoto has been making stop-motion animated films since the 1950s. Films include the NY premiere of feature-length The Book of the Dead, and two programs of shorts, themed Demons, Poets, and Priests and Absurdities, Legends, and Fairy Tales. Kawamoto studied briefly under Jiri Trnka after the Czech stop-motion legend responded to a letter from Kawamoto and invited him to visit his studio in Prague. It's kind of crazy when you read midnight eye's interview with Kawamoto and realize travel out of Japan was far more rare then, and how the kindness of strangers stayed with Kawamoto.

Also-
Something to look forward to: Animation Around the World, July 17-31 at BAM
For the first time we are presenting the best of various shorts filmmakers and festivals from around the world with filmmaker's hand-drawn, stop-motion, computer-assisted works. Programs include: Best of Ottawa 2005; Best of Animateka (Slovenia); Best of Clermont-Ferrand; Animation Block Party; and Paul Driessen Program

Two recent favorites. Feel good and great execution.

The Rapture - Whoo! Alright Yeah Uh-Huh
Directed by Ben Dickinson at Waverly Films
Animation by Wyeth Hansen + Ron Winter
Illustration by Wyeth Hansen

Nice editing. Is that a chroma hoop flare? Sorry, dork out moment :) Another solid video from local Waverly Films. Jon Watts's Steppin' Off video for Jason Forrest was one of the best at 23 Reasons To Spare New York. And I remember thinking that The Werewolf Solution was gonna win the 2004 NYC Midnight Madness Festival for sure (unfortunately, I was wrong, also hallucinating from lack of sleep).

Gnarls Barkley - Who Cares
Directed by Barney Clay
Starring Mario Van Peeples as a burn-out, blaxploited Dracula

The Ottawa Animation Festival is great. Here are some of my favorites so far (trailers and youTube can't compare with a proper 35mm screening... but it's kind of amazing that you can find almost everything online):

Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski - Madame Tutli Putli (Canada, 2007)
Trailer above, more info at the NFB website.

Aaron Augenblick - Golden Age (USA, 2007)

Don Hertzfeldt - Everything Will Be OK (USA, 2006)
Trailer. More info at Bitter Films.

SSSR - Zune 'Endless Cookie' (UK, 2006)
Higher res at No Fat Clips!.

Luis Cook - Pearce Sisters (UK, 2007)

Jacques Drouin - Mindscape/Le paysagiste (France, 1976)

Yuri Norstein - Hedgehog in the Fog (Soviet Union, 1975)

Marie Paccou - Un jour (France, 2001)

Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud - Persepolis (France, 2007)
Trailer. More info at movie site.

Koji Yamamura - Franz Kafka's A Country Doctor (Japan, 2007)
Trailer. More info and screening schedule at Yamamura's website.

Signe Baumane - Teat Beat of Sex (USA, 2007)

Smith & Foulkes - Coca-Cola 'Videogame' (UK, 2006)

Claude Chabot - Apnée (France, 2007)

Matthew Walker - John and Karen (UK, 2007)

Michael Langan - Doxology (USA, 2007)