a poorly debugged set of device drivers, with excellent copy protection.

good lord.

Microsoft just gave me the opportunity to wait on hold, and then to talk to a stranger from india. We had a conversation composed of me reading 54 single digits to him, and then him reading a new set of 54 digits back to me. There was a script, and so we couldn't even really say anything else to each other. It was like being in the coded communications department of the army in a war we'd both been drafted for, as I'm pretty sure neither of us had any idea what the numbers meant, and we both would've rather been doing something else. I think the man on the other end of the phone may have had the worst job I've ever run across; I feel awful for him.

Who on earth ever thought that was a decent way to do anything? Somebody must have... Did Jim Alchin approve this? Dave Cutler? Brian Valentine? Bill Gates? Did any ONE of them look at this, and think, 'Yeah, that's great, let's do it that way!"?

Actually I think Dave Cutler is the only one on that list who DIDN"T have to approve this. Unbelievable. I thought it was a joke, until I realized I couldn't actually use the copy of Windows XP I paid for until I went through these shenanigans.

wow

these are pretty amazing images.

i don't have a lot to say about them except that they seem to have a quality which really makes you think. it's a liminal moment, caught on film, and somehow it generates a huge sense of wonder.

i saw these first on the svn blog.

King of Kong - in theaters!

The King of Kong (homepage, trailer) was one of my favorites from Tribeca this year; I think it might even be my favorite doc I've seen there yet. That of course rules out some heavy duty films like Favela Rising, and some fun ones - Crazy Legs Conti, or Zen and the Art of Competitive Eating.

King of Kong is about the world of competitive retro videogaming. Or at least it starts out being about that. In English, that means it's about people who spend a lot of time playing Pac Mac, Galaga, Space Invaders, Dig Dug, and of course...Donkey Kong. The first wave of arcade machines, early 1980s.

What you expect to see when someone tells you that a movie is about retro video games is Nerds, capital N. And you will not be disappointed in that. But it quickly becomes something much more broad, and genuinely fascinating; King of Kong is a film about identity, and the way others perceptions of us shape our own paths - or don't, depending on who we really are. It's a film about a rivalry, and how that affects the rivals. It's also a hugely funny film, and depicts some of the most interesting folks to grace the big screen in quite a while.

And the good folks at Picturehouse have seen fit to put it into a few theaters, starting today. Highly Recommended.

(Theaters near me)

take the red pill...or the trucker speed anyway.

it's the family friendly part that scares me the most, but good lord - what a wierd cast!

Speed Racer Movie from the Wachowski Brothers with John Goodman, Christina Ricci, Susan Sarandon and Emile Hirsch

vroom!

the latest thing

Web video!

The Lever 2000 Raise Your Game Challenge


These videos were a lot of fun to work on. They were cut in a manner very similar to a true documentary edit process - lots of interviews, lots of versions to get to the best telling of the story. But perhaps with a little bit more wiggle room around what actually happened than a doc; this is reality TV - err, internet - after all!

In spite of the delivery format being 320x240 pixels, the series was shot on DVC50, and had both a traditional NLE upres and proper mix sessions. In English, that means it got more attention to detail than a lot of broadcast TV does these days.

I'm resposible for editing all of episode 7, and a substantial part of 8, though I had excellent help from another editor, Kevin Berry, on that one.

Enjoy! Though I highly suggest letting the video download before you start watching. For some reason, no matter how fast your connection is, the player seems intent on stuttering.

Rhyme Animal News

I'll be back shortly with a wrap up of some fantastic films I saw during Tribeca...but wanted to share some good news regarding one of the short films I cut last year, RHYME ANIMAL.

- A web site is up at www.rhymeanimalmovie.com

- The movie has been accepted and screened at the Cleveland International Film Festival, as well as the Newport Beach Film Festival.

- We've got some festival dates coming up in the New York area. Rhyme Animal was accepted into the Brooklyn International Film Festival (http://www.wbff.org/) and the Hoboken International Film Festival(http://www.filmfestivalnj.com/). Those two websites are a fascinating study in contrasts. I'm not sure either site has been updated with the actual screening times yet. I believe we're screening in Hoboken on Monday, June 4, 2pm but I don't know the location.

And we're also screening in a pretty cool event, the Cannes Short Film Corner. It's not the festival proper, but it's real, it's a market, and it's online as well. Check our rhymes out here:

http://shortfilmcorner.withoutabox.com/festivals/event_item.php?id=6435

And finally, please check out the trailer for the short.

Hi Rez:

http://www.synchrostudio.com/clients/rhymeanimal/rhymeanimaltrailer.mov

Lo-fi:

http://www.synchrostudio.com/clients/rhymeanimal/rhymeanimaltrailerlr.mov


That's all the news so far!

Tribeca Film Festival 2007!

Wow - this is cool - I totally have a blog!

anyway, it's that time again, spring and ... movies!

Tribeca Film Festival is upon us again, and once more I have emptied my wallet and filled my calendar with strange and unknown things to see. I'll try to make a few notes along the way and let y'all know what's interesting.



The first film I saw was the world premiere of "WILL EISNER: PORTRAIT OF A SEQUENTIAL ARTIST", which was a decent doc about a fantastic subject. Eisner more or less invented what's known today as the graphic novel; that is to say using the form of a comic book but addressing themes which would not appeal to a typical 12 year old boy. Like most art, the history of it is way more complicated than you realize; apparently the comic books went through something extremely similar to the movies where without regulation of any sort they became extremely sexy and violent, and then someone came along and blamed all of America's ills on the comics. So like the Pre-Code films of the 30s, the violent comics were the subject of a congressional inquiry (enquiry?) and the industry ended up instituting a 'self-imposed' code to keep comics safe for kiddies, and boring.

Eisner was instrumental in breaking that model, first through a periodical he published called "The Spirit", and later through a series of one–off graphic novels he did addressing a variety of philosophical issues. He also wrote a couple of manuals for comic artists, and perhaps most amazingly, displayed a sound business sense his entire life, which enabled him to be a productive artist over an astonishingly long range of time and in a huge variety of circumstances.

The film also touched on how so many of the great american comic icons were created by Jews from the ghettos of New York, and the complicated relationship these artists had with Judiasm.

Overall, I really liked this film; the interviews were well done and varied, and the filmmakers had clearly tried very hard to make space for the artwork to show through. WILL EISNER: PORTRAIT OF A SEQUENTIAL ARTIST" is screening a number of times during the festival, and I'd highly recommend checking it out.

quick link - david carr on My Kid Could Paint That

I've got a few posts percolating, but here's something I saw today I really liked. I've been reading a blog by one of the NY Times journalists, David Carr, about Oscar buzz, and today he wrote about a film at Sundance I'm really interested in seeing. It's an interesting post, and does a great job of showing how a blog can be useful and different for a professional writer.

The Carpetbagger Blog

shout it from the mountaintop.

really cool feature on the nyt web site i never noticed before, because it's only mentioned in little tiny letters at the very bottom of the page. Alt-click (option click in mac speak) on any word in an article and a window pops up with a definition of it. Very cool. Sunni / Shia confusion? No problem.

Why was that so hard to tell me about?

24, once more.

Once again, Kiefer's back to sabotage my monday nights and keep the doldrums at bay (or slow the editing on the side project du jour, more likely). In the premiere episode, they blew up a bus before the opening credits had even finished, and Jack killed a man after being on US soil for less then 20 minutes - with his TEETH. That's some fine television right there.

Last season I tried to keep track of the violence Jack perpetrated, but never published the post because I didn't fill out the data completely. Here's the info I had gathered.


"24" kill count:

7- 8am: knocks out 1 security guard/maintainence person
8- 9am:
9-10am:
10-11am:
11am-12pm: Jack killed one person (assassin).
12pm-1pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. He beat up the President's Chief of Staff (Walt) though.
1pm-2pm: Jack shot 3 people but didn't kill them. He tortured one of them.
2-3pm: Jack Bauer killed 1 person (terrorist)

3-4pm: Jack Bauer killed 3 people (henchmen)
4-5pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. Someone tried to blow him up though.
5-6pm: Jack didn't kill anyone, but he shot someone's wife in the leg.
6-7pm: Jack killed 1 terrorist at CTU.
7-8pm: Jack didn't kill anyone. He persuaded someone to commit suicide.
8-9pm:
9-10pm:
10-11pm: Jack shot at least 4 people, maybe more. He also slit someone's throat.
11-12pm: Jack shot at least 3 people while breaking out of a bank. Also, he threatened to shoot the manager's wife.

The Good Fairies of New York

I read another book that has fairies in it.

This one I picked up at a new little bookstore that has opened in Jersey City...I don't believe I've mentioned it here before...it's called the Imagine Atrium, and it's a great little shop. 528 Jersey Avenue, right next to the coffee shop, which is very convenient. It's a small, but fairly highly curated little book shop, with a tendency toward the spiritual which seems to be somewhat frequent out here. Not in a bad way.

But back to the fairies - the book (The Good Fairies of New York) had a foreword by Neil Gaiman, and was published on Soft Skull Press, so I figured it was worth paying attention to. I don't really know anything about the author, Martin Millar, but I will investigate him now...It turned out to be quite a lot of fun, but not in the Susanna Clarke model of fake history....more like Buckaroo Banzai or something....it's a pretty chuckle filled tale about two fairies who are into punk rock and fashion who unaccountably find themselves in New York City...in the east village, to be exact. They hang out in bars, befriend and confound the locals. They end up meeting fairies of other ethnicities, and going on dates with them and fighting quite a bit as well. The book is written in an understated but very funny way. I laughed out loud about a dozen times. If you are looking a for quick read to divert your attention from a mysterious odor that no one can explain, and know a little bit about punk rock and the geography of New York City, you could do far worse than to grab this book. Highly recommended.

hot damn. basecamp on my treo.

Looks like a few weeks ago someone released a Basecamp client for several mobile platforms, including my favorite, PalmOS.

http://www.phonified.com/Tracker.html

I'm working on 2 short films, a documentary, and another documentary right now on top of my day job, and the busier I get, the more Basecamp reveals itself to be a lifesaver. This little palm app, Tracker, is ugly, seems to be written in Java, flaunts palm UI conventions and has a frankly bizarre setup procedure. It also seems to work, and right now that's where the bar is.

For anything I manage by myself, I still love you SHADOW, the best outliner anywhere...but the collaboration thing is so undeniable once you start seeing it in practice, and being locked out of basecamp by the Treo's low-end mobile browser is very frustrating. Tracker seems to work by using a server backend to grab info from Basecamp and then pass it along to the handheld; it has to re-sync a project from time to time, but it's all there - milestones, messages, comments, to-dos. Actually...alllll the to-dos are there, even completed lists, which is a bit annoying...clearly still a 1.0 product. Also, no writeboards, but it's understandable; that could be pretty tricky on a small screen.

Making Basecamp genuinely mobile is a huge step - I'd been considering picking up PalmOS development myself again to do this one - and so I am thrilled to have Tracker around. I assigned it a hot-key within 5 minutes.

Been Reading.

I've noticed that when I'm busy I tend to get the most stuff done - that is, busy with work, somehow, results in lots of non-work creative and inteelektual meanderings accomplished. To wit: while working on Rhyme Animal, I read:

Collected Short Stories of Pushkin
"Anansi Boys", Neil Gaiman
Re-read "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell", Susanna Clarke
"Ladies of Grace Adieu", Susanna Clarke
"American Gods", Neil Gaiman
"Good Omens", Nail Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
"Foundation", Isaac Asimov
"Rising Tide", John Barry
"Water for Gotham", Gerard T. Koeppel

I know there are at least a couple of others I'm forgetting at the moment. It's no spectacular truism, but it does point to the fact that an agile mind depends on keeping it well fed...and don't worry, the queue of books waiting for attention is a bit broader than the previous list, so the diet is properly balanced.

I could use a good, interesting history book right now actually.

So freakin close

Rhyme Animal is almost done. We are retransfered, picture locked...everything but the mix is final. It's been a long road, and I am looking to resume many frivolous activities once more, such as cooking, sleeping, writing here and generally not making my girlfriend's life quite so miserable. It's a lot of work to make a film, even a short, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. We've already submitted to Sundance, Slamdance, Tribeca FF and SXSW...wish us luck...

i have been SO busy

but there is actually quite a backlog of things to write about, so it's all good.

In case you've stopped appreciating the sheer insanity that the 'net provides, take a few steps back and look at it through the eyes of Douglas Adams, about twenty years ago.

http://media.ito.com/kevinmarks/hyperland.mp4

It's a film Douglas Adams made for the BBC about the future of television and the internet, though of course it wasn't called that then. Totally fascinating stuff.

Via the interesting blog of Kevin Marks, quicktime and now blog guru.

that explains it.

fortune cookie:

"in order to discover who you are, first learn who everybody else is. You're what's left."

material culture and music, or boy how i miss record covers.

a few years ago - basically, within about 3 days of getting one of the first iPods - I decided to put my whole cd collection into a digital jukebox. I'm no dj shadow when it comes to record collecting, but even a fellow who's just moderately interested in music can come up with a few thousand cds and records over the years without trying too hard. I made a project out of it, took a stack of cds in to work with me every day for like 6 weeks, and had my laptop convert them while I did my job.

That allowed me to file the actual disks away - such a relief, as in a crowded new york city apartment, every inch is valuable. No more time spent wondering how this disk got in that one's sleeve, or buying another copy of something because you kicked that 22$ import across the floor and scratched it all to hell. The juke ran on an iMac(blue) I purchased on ebay solely for that purpose, and basically worked really well. Before my most recent move, I carted all the CDs up to a friend's basement...people who have entire houses don't mind that sort of thing, it turns out. At the new place, not having to fill a whole bookcase with music is completely liberating.

The thing is....initally the record collection all fit on a 40 gig hard drive. Eventually, that filled up...and I swapped it for a 80 gig drive. You can't delete the stuff from the forty, though, because of course it would take forever to reload everything, so it stays in the closet as a back up. Most recently I bought a 250gig drive, and amazingly that's close to filled up now; the iTunes store and my video iPod (which I love, and use all the time) have left me with the 'need' to archive ever larger amounts of data. I started the damn jukebox project so I wouldn't have to worry about the ever-increasing space demands of my library, and of course that problem never really goes away - it just gets transferred from one medium to another. As far as I can tell, there are really on two ways of dealing with the issue. First, make it someone else's problem - and that means probably paying some sort of subscription fee forever, not a great option. Second, leapfrog the situation by getting a truly gigantic amount of storage, which is in fact another temporary solution, but hopefully more longer temporary. That's what I'm leaning towards right now.

Mary asked me to give her some CDs to listen to in the office she's working at right now. It took me back for a minute, because I sort of assume that if you've got a space where you can listen to tunes at work (not like me, a video editor), you just plug the ipod in and go. But this magazine has a stereo and CD player, so very quaint. Of course, I didn't actually have any to give her, so I picked a few things out of the jukebox, burned the CDs and used the iTunes print feature to make the cd covers. As I held the finished products in my hands, I got kind of sad. I really miss CDs...I don't think it's the CDs exactly - I know it isn't, they sucked from day one - but I definitely miss having a physical component to the music. Something to hold, and to stare at. I loved minidiscs for that reason; there were so many types, and colors, it made a record collection literally look like a bunch of candy. I buy almost all of my music online now - eMusic, Bleep (god bless you warp records) and the iTunes store all make a pretty excellent range of stuff available. But I do miss the liner notes, the variations in the cd packaging, the double colored vinyl of a stereolab LP. And it's not just music that seems to benefit from this physical accompaniment to the cultural product being disbursed. People collect movie tickets, save the program from an orchestra concert, buy a t-shirt at a rock show. It's ingrained pretty deeply into our system to have a physical object which can contain all our associations with the artwork in question. It doesn't really seem like something we can get past...I doubt I'm gonna start going to record stores twice a week again, the downloads really fit my lifestyle a bit better. But I might carry a few CDs around, just for grins, instead of my iPod.

Of course, I'll need to clear out a shelf for them.

What's goin' on...

What's goin' on...

(Listening to America: A traveler rediscovers his country, by Bill Moyers. Published 1971.)

I just finished reading Bill Moyer's travelogue, published the year after I was born. I know I was born on an air force base in north north north texas, since my dad had been drafted, but for some reason I still think of the time around my birth as being relatively calm. I guess the artificial divides of the "the sixties" and "the seventies" lead to me consider that we'd landed on the moon, and everyone was sitting around drinking cocktails, marvelling at what a crazy time we'd just had, and waiting for for the next part of the show to begin.( "Apparently, they'll be inventing PUNK rock! I hear it's AWFUL!", one party-goer will say to another.)


Of course history isn't ever that neat, and reading this book 35 years later, you get an idea of how messy it can actually be. Having concluded time as Deputy Director of the Peace Corp, "special assistant" to President Johnson, and publisher of NEWSDAY, Moyers spent a summer driving through America, asking people what was on their minds, and listening. It turns out they had a lot to say. America was worried about: the long hairs, unions, school integration (bussing), the war, immigration, the trade deficit, identity politics of several varieties, race, zoning, and how one person can actually make a difference. Moyers really lets the folks he interviews speak their minds, and the book is full of minute details about each issue, but it's fascinating anyway.

What resonates throughout all of the complaints is a pervasive sense that there's something worth saving about the country. It's rather amazing to see how much differently folks interpreted the idea of patriotism; there seems to be a genuine sense of dialog between opposing factions at many of the towns that Moyers stops at along the way.

Most of what people were worried about 35 years ago is still with us today. The country was in a war that many of the citizens opposed, and most folks had a hard time explaining to each other what it's purpose was. Anytime anyone speaks about the war, it's fairly uncanny, as we spiral ever deeper into Iraq and the Israel-Lebanon crisis gets more explosive daily.

Stepping back in time, to a day when MLK was a person whose loss was freshly felt, when the nation's youth were testing their voices and being heard, and when someone could ask a question, and know how to simply listen to the answer, is a powerful experience...I finished reading this book with a much fuller picture of what America was, and is.

Tags: Bill Moyers, travelogue, book review

al gore finds out about avenue x.

http://www.current.tv/studio/media/7728433

greenlight it, folks!

this is a 'making of' doc about avenue x, that was just uploaded to current.tv, al gore's experiment in community television.

Tags: avenue x, phil roc

al gore makes a slideshow.

I haven't managed to see this yet, but here is a cool article about some of the post-production on the film. [link] The film was directed by Davis Guggenheim. I worked with Davis' dad, Charles Guggenheim back in the early part of my career. I learned an awful lot of the foundational stuff for my career by listening to him.