“Police officer Amadeus Warnebring was born into a musical family with a long history of famous musicians. Ironically, he hates music. His life is thrown into chaos when a band of crazy musicians decides to perform a musical apocalypse using the city as their orchestra… Reluctantly, Warnebring embarks on his first musical investigation…” Continue Reading…
So I have a minor pre-occupation at the moment with the concept of remaking a movie shot for shot. This process is not as common as one might think. Remakes of movies occur all the time in Hollywood, far too often by some people’s standards and usually with the sole intention of cashing in on a franchise that has proven itself successful in the past or with a foreign audience. But typically, the aim of the film is to re-imagine the original, infusing it with a modern day perspective or a sly ironic twist. “Staying true to the original” is a term that you will hear in certain instances but this intent is usually reserved for the spirit of the piece and not the actual content of the frames. Continue Reading…
The first in a three part series, legendary visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull talks about the inspiration and process that led to the creation of one of the greatest dystopian landscapes in science fiction: the opening sequence of Blade Runner. (via Daring Fireball, via Coudal)
“I like where we’re going with technology and global integration but the fact that corporations and dollars rule everything in our lives, I don’t like it. This isn’t the Hollywood I wanted to be part of. This isn’t the version of it that I saw when I was a kid…”District 9″ and every other movie is treated like fast food. It’s promoted relentlessly and then it’s gone. Everything is a flamethrower-intensity and milked for everything it can give and then it’s just chucked away. Everything is judged instantly, too. You look back at something like “Blade Runner” and wonder how a film like that, which doesn’t do well at first, would be treated today.”
Even the most cursory glance through director Neill Blomkamp’s early personal projects and advertising work unearths the visual and thematic roots of his first feature film District 9. In fact, “Alive in Joburg” is literally the short film upon which D9 is based. Dig around some more, through the Tetra Val short, the Nike Crab ad or the ‘Yellow’ spot for Adidas and it becomes apparent that there is a consistent “world” being explored in all of his work, at once familiar and extraordinary.
In anticipation of D9′s official opening tomorrow, I’ve compiled a YouTube Playlist of Blomkamp’s work that includes his Vancouver Film School demo reel and a couple of early music videos that prove that even the most brilliant artists have to start somewhere…
One other short film that is also worth checking out that is not on YouTube is “Tempbot”, a lighter, though perhaps equally bleak take on the robot theme that exists throughout Blomkamp’s work. Enjoy.
It may be the defining position that this book had in my childhood. Or it might be a result of the fact that rumours of this Spike Jonze project have been piquing my interest for what seems like half a decade. Or perhaps I have simply been caught up in the momentum of the Arcade Fire soundtrack. But it took the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are to break me out of my tumbleweed blogging silence. Enjoy.
Just started getting into True Blood, Alan Ball’s latest HBO series about a telepathic waitress in Bon Temps, Louisiana who falls in love with a vampire. Like Ball’s previous project, Six Feet Under, the title sequence was created by the talented team over at Digital Kitchen and presents a perverse montage of imagery that perfectly captures the juxtaposition of sinister and spiritual underlying the American South. Better still is the “True Blood Featurette” that links from the same page which I can only assume is a director’s cut of the more twisted material that was collected for the project.
UPDATE: I was showing these clips to my friend Doug today and he directed me to some additional “disturbing deep south fun” from the documentaries Searching for the Wrong Eyed Jesus (which we both concluded was a primary influence for the DK title sequence, some footage seeming to be directly lifted from this film) and The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia of which I can find very little in terms of footage online but did find a gallery of the photographs on which the film was based. Disturbing fun indeed.
A current obsession of mine is the use of strictly defined colour palettes in films and television shows. Ironically this recent interest comes as a result of a late 90′s TV drama called “Once and Again” that my wife Jane has been watching repeats of on the PVR while she nurses our daughter. The thing is, I can always tell the show from the distinctly grey colour palette that runs through the majority of the scenes. Lighting, costume, and decor all contribute to this effect that is punctuated by out-of-scene reflections by the characters that are filmed in black and white. I find it all strangely curious especially when I consider that this monochromatic character of the program is what makes it seem boring and unremarkable to me.
Anyway I hope to explore this idea further in future posts. In the meantime, my research into this area has turned up Alan Woo’s Pie project which contrasts and compares the colour palettes of movies by running a Processing script that captures each frame of the movie and creates a ‘pie chart’ of the colours contained within.
