On Sunday I got back from another 4-day jaunt to Windsor for the continuing SRSI. The project is pretty incredible. I wish I had some short segments to share but I’m well behind on the editing part, sadly.

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Say, I made this promo that I like. You may like it too, if you like shooting. The movie airs tomorrow night on Space.

Development of my media center app of choice, Plex, has seemed stagnant of late, with their blog only updated with new plugins for Danish sports channels and the like. But all was not as it seemed. Deep in the dark, there were rumblings. And lo!

At the end, we decided, just like with our plug-in framework, to throw out the existing code and rewrite it from scratch… The ground up rewrite not only results in an extremely powerful library for personal content, but also sets the stage for providing many benefits beyond just the library itself.

Plex’s new Library, Alexandria, is thus teased. Hopefully it won’t be burned down by the Christians and blamed on the Romans, like the real one.

Shutter Island has many delights. Even a sub-par picture by Marty Scorsleazy is sure to be full of masterful craft moments, as his crew is top notch. This one is no exception: shot by Rob Richardson, edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, designed by Dante Ferretti, the names are as predictable as they are excellent. One surprise is old Scorcese pal Robbie Robertson as music supervisor. In the Kubrick style, there is no original score, so this job is more important than simply finding pop songs to play in the background of bar scenes. Even more Kubrickian is the inclusion of Ligeti and Penderecki (you might remember us from such modernist horror scores as: The Shining), but there’s also some Eno, some Cage. One powerful piece is “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter, a beautiful, languid, melancholy, near-minimalist string piece. The soundtrack is great. (So is the film, by the way.)

Shutter Island’s last act is full of surprises. Perhaps the greatest – not a spoiler! – is the song that plays over the credits. It’s surprising because it’s a mashup, of the aforementioned Richter track with Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth”. It’s also surprising because it’s a beautiful mashup, perhaps the greatest I’ve heard. The only credit for the composite work is “mixed by Robbie Robertson”. Quite a set of ears on that dude, to say nothing of the brain that thought of blending these two sources that are so dissimilar but also simply made to be together. Have a listen, but also chase down the originals to see what I’m talking about.

Right now I’m working on a documentary about artists in Windsor, Ontario.

There, I said it. I’m not sure what manner of resistance has taken hold of me, but I’ve found it difficult to actually post about this, despite having resolved a couple months back that I wanted to blog about the whole process. Part of it is when you want to post about something important to you, the standards go up from the usual “write a bunch of shit that’s on my mind and post it, quick” to something more involved that butts right up against your already constrained free time, as your time is already full doing the thing that’s important to you. Something like that.

Let me bring you up to speed. This may take more than one post as I’m going to post something today, that’s for damned sure, but I don’t have long to do it.

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In this reporter’s opinion:

• 25th Hour
• Children of Men
• Mulholland Drive
• Memento
• United 93
• Zodiac
• Spirited Away
• Martyrs
• Cache
• Donnie Darko
• Grizzly Man
• Surfwise
• LOTR trilogy
• Batman Begins / Dark Knight

I’m too lazy to be too fussy about it, so that’s not necessarily in any order, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten something great, or failed to see something mindblowing. I haven’t put films from this past year which is probably a mistake, but it feels too hard to make an accurate judgment of anything so recent.

My conception of an ideal film is something that makes you think and feel. Preferably both, but films that provoke only thought are better than those that provoke only feeling (Forrest Gump can make you sniffle, but that doesn’t make it a wonderful film). I measure the greatest films by how much I reflect on them afterwards, and that is often a combination of thoughts and feelings. As a consequence I love open-ended, somewhat mysterious films whose meanings are elusive, rather than films that tie everything up into a neat little bow.

I know, the last two entries on that list don’t quite match those criteria. I just added them because I’ve probably watched them the most, so they would be more in the ‘guilty pleasure’ category.

I thought King Kong was amazing in the theatres. When I watched it at home on DVD, I lost interest halfway through. It felt sagging, bloated. Dark Knight blew my mind on Imax, but when I got it home the dialogue felt wooden and speechy, the structure confused.

You see where I’m going with this.

Avatar, in the theatre, in 3D, is an experience I’d recommend to anyone, even though it may well result in headaches and exhaustion. Your optic nerve gets a real workout. The visual richness of every frame is heightened by the 3D in a way that makes my other 3D experiences – Final Destination, Up, Ice Age 3, Dr. Tongue’s 3D House of Slave Chicks) – seem like cheap parlour tricks. It wasn’t just action (although there was plenty of that), there was beauty, wonder. My Avatar-mates and I all admitted to tearing up at some point during the proceedings.

The sheer CGI-ness of the thing is also overwhelming. This film is essentially set in the Uncanny Valley, yet as a tale of exotic adventurism, of failed conquest of the irrational, of getting outside your body and putting on a new skin, it certainly works. By the end of it, the humans were the ones that looked weird. Avatar will be a legendary drug movie for some time to come. (And no, I’m not saying I was high seeing it, although I kind of felt like it after.)

But will it be celebrated as much as some of the more gushing reviews would have you believe?

In order to answer that, we’d have to answer my opening question: which is the true experience, the 3D Imax blowout or watching it at home on DVD or even Blu-Ray? The practical answer is the latter experience, as ever since VHS took root, home theatre revenues have dwarfed theatrical box office. If a movie is the sum of all its viewings, Avatar’s cracks will show up. Its stock, underdeveloped characters, its all-too-angelic indigenous peoples, its blunt allegory, its “Unobtanium”. I’d say it’s the worst Cameron script, which isn’t really much of an insult, but still.

But if we are allowed to be idealists, optimists, to judge a movie in the best possible light in which it can be seen – which for Avatar involves kooky glasses – we might well see it as a glowing blue planetful of awesomeness.

Here’s a set of photos from our Star Wars promo shoot I mentioned last week. Big christmas card potential here, I’m thinking.

There is no question in my mind that cameras like this are the future for many of us.

By us I mean those interested in both still and motion picture photography. I’ve been into both fields for a while, both by hobby and trade, and it still blows my little mind to think I could afford a thing like this. It’s been a long, gradual and perhaps predictable time coming, but that doesn’t make it seem any less crazy. When I was in university we shot on VHS, and people were saying Hi-8 video was the future. Then it was the DV “revolution”. I split on a cheap DV handicam with some friends. But you still couldn’t get a nice image with these things – you could imitate video stuff, but never convincingly film. For that you needed to shoot film, which was a mulit-thousand-dollar proposition for camera rental & processing. Soon, we were lucky enough to be able to shoot on early pro HDCAMs like the Sony F900, but that was still a half-million dollar camera. A few short years later, the Red is here at $20,000, which is mind-blowing to anyone in the industry.

And now we have sub-$2,000 video SLRs like the GH1. Cameras with great optics, all-digital workflow, 1080p24, compact size, full manual control. Interchangeable lenses, decent low-light shooting. Total craziness.

These are amazing cameras, but they have kinks. I’m sure in a year or two this category will have stabilized, the feature set will be clear, and choices will be easier. The next iteration of the GH1 (might I guess GH2?) will solve a lot of the problems with this thing. Because yes, there are problems.

• no video out – you can put HDMI or composite out when reviewing shots, but not while capturing. This makes it very hard to do a lot of things where the director and camera operator are not the same person.
• poor audio support – the GH1 has a surprisingly decent built-in mic, and an optional mountable shotgun mic, but most of the time, I’d want to hook up a wireless lavalier mic. You can do that, but the audio in is a minijack that auto-levels the signal. For best sound, you need to record into a separate audio field recorder and then sync in post. That’s a couple hundred extra and a big pain in the ass.
• low bitrate – the camera has great optics, but the files it saves are too low a bitrate. Sometimes this bites you, sometimes it doesn’t.
• AVCHD – I find this to be a shitty codec, which causes headaches in post as it must be converted to something Final Cut can use (still haven’t figured out how to get it into the Avid). When you combine AVCHD’s interframe compression with the low bitrate, especially in 1080p24 mode you get compression mud in certain situations, like fast camera movement and/or complex detail (grass, especially). This sucks. There is an MJPEG mode that is mud-free, but it’s only 720p30 and is still low bitrate.

I don’t want to sound complainy here. The GH1 has a lot going for it. Mainly:

• I found the still modes to be awesome. I may not be the best judge, not having used a lot of DSLRs, but I’ve gotten some great photos out of this thing.
• The flip-out LCD is a lifesaver. Every camera should have this.
• the kit lens is impressive. It’s the equivalent of a 28-280mm zoom, which gives you a lot of options. Its silent autofocus is another engineering marvel for an SLR. I really never thought I’d use autofocus, but it’s quite smart.
• An advantage of the category in general: these cameras are really small compared to video cameras, and thus really stealth. You can get away with a lot. Except you’ll have to put up with people posing as they wait for the ‘click’.
• This is another categorical feature, but one that compares favourably to most video cams, even much more expensive ones: interchangeable lenses. I’ve picked up a fast 50mm FD lens and the results have been really satisfying.All the cameras in this category, which right now includes the Canon 5DMkII and the new 7D, suffer from strange, idiosyncratic drawbacks.

Like I say, I’m figuring in a year or so the dust will have settled, each manufacturer will have figured out the featureset they need, and eliminated the needless problems. Red’s cheaper camera Scarlett will theoretically be on the market, too. No matter how you slice it, it’s a great time to be shooting, and it will continue this way for the forseeable future. Perhaps one day we will simply exhale a fine mist of microscopic flying camera bugs and then let our algorithms cut it together, but until then…

I was going to do separate, detailed posts for everything I loved, but I’m going to have to freeball it here quickly or I’ll never get around to it. So here are all the rest of the films that I saw:

Dogtooth

Along with Ondine, Enter the Void and Hadewijch, one of the best I saw. It’s a brilliantly inventive Greek film about three kids raised to believe some crazy bullshit. Works as a comedy, drama, and parable.

Ondine

Neil Jordan sure can write. He makes what could be a jumbled mess of genres and topics come across as a modern fable. Quite impressive – also great music & Irish people, including Mr. Farrell.

The Loved Ones

Entertaining, unpredictable, and shallow Australian horror-comedy. Fun, better than most US horror releases, but ain’t no Citizen Kane.

Youth in Revolt

Felt like it had a half hour cut out of it. Meandering, charming Michael Cera flick that I’m sure will kill at the box office.

Cell 211

Superior Spanish jailhouse thriller in which a prison guard poses as an inmate during a prison riot / revolution. Will undoubtedly be remade stateside starring Sly Stallone and Ving Rhames or whomever.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Yes this movie is real, hilarious, and (hopefully) the start of the world’s most unlikely film franchise. It’s refreshing to like Nick Cage in a movie again, but he’s still performing and not acting. Come for the iguanas, stay for the lucky crack pipe.

The Ape

Fascinating film with little substance but some great technique and some psychological insights. For more, read Ram’s review-, with which I agree.

Backyard

Riveting, powerful Mexican police thriller about murdered women in Juarez that winds up being about much more than that.

Perrier’s Bounty

Entertaining Irish Guy-Ritchie-alike. That’s Tarantino-alike twice removed.

Symbol

Patience-testing but ultimately rewarding surrealist comedy about a Mexican wrestler and a guy who wakes up in a mysterious white room. Battling with Trash Humpers in my mind for weird-funny champion of the festival. Need to learn more about this dude

The Disappearance of Alice Creed

Workmanlike but unremarkable low-budget British thriller.

The Front Line

Italian historical thriller falls down as its confused structure doesn’t help us sympathize with some left-wing guerilla/terrorists.

Videocracy

Documentary about Berlusconi and his media empire. Floats around the edge of the ring with three topical, eccentric characters, but never lands the knockout punch.

—-

That was everything. Phew. It was quite a week. I also wanted to jot down some impressions of the fest as a whole, but we’ll see what Lady Time gives me this week.

Stuff I wrote up already:
Enter the Void
Trash Humpers
Hadewijch, Daybreakers, Valhalla Rising
My angry day two post

I’m a couple days late with these write-ups. Clearly I would make a bad film critic.

Gaspar Noé‘s Irreversible was a hugely shocking and audacious film, and someone’s slipped a tab in his drink since then, as Enter the Void amps it up a few dB in scale, ambition, technique, discipline, and frustration. In a nutshell, it’s modeled on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and follows a small-time drug dealer as he gets high, gets killed, and navigates the afterlife. It takes the concept of the point of view shot to a whole new level, and applies a strict video game perspective to each of multiple states of being. Oscar’s real life is seen in the first person, with the camera literally where his eyes are, and includes blinking, his thoughts (muttered monologue), and even his DMT-induced hallucinations. His deathbed flashbacks to his past life are shown in the third person, with the back of Oscar’s head visible in the foreground. His bodyless ghost-floating is seen from spiralling overhead shots.

These techniques are applied unrelentingly. If Oscar’s spirit wishes to follow a different friend, the camera flies across the city and finds that friend. And if a scene is to play out from this point of view, it does so, all from above, with no cutting in to closeups.

It’s a grimy neon afterlife that Noé has us enter, as Oscar the ghost drug dealer navigates a nighttime Tokyo populated by drug-addled artists, predatory dealers, and most importantly his stripper sister, with whom he has a quote unquote special bond. Oscar’s past, while not without some cliched happy moments, is scarred by a violent, traumatic incident. Noé shows us everything in unnecessary detail, as if to rub our noses in the gore of human misery.

It’s a sleazy and somewhat dull world, to be truthful. Oscar and his sister never take on the dimensions of real characters and it’s hard to form any bonds with them. I get the impression that this film is a cautionary tale, and Noé does not respect his characters. The dialogue is consistently mundane. A particularly frustrating scene toward the end, which could have been powerfully emotional, is almost laughably blunt.

Noé is anything but subtle. When I tell you that the film’s based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I know this not because I’ve read it or because it’s visible in the corner of the frame on a character’s shelf, but rather because the characters talk repeatedly about it, describing its contents and laying out the course of the film for those up in the cheap seats.

Also, the purity of the technique starts to get in the way of the storytelling. The need to ghost-cam fly across the city to follow different characters basically adds a 30-second whip pan every time we switch from A- to B-plot. Likewise, the playing out of long take scenes in single overhead shots gets tiresome, and bloats an already challenging film past the two-and-a-half hour mark.

That’s the frustration, that Noé doesn’t climb down from the lofty heights of the concept and the technique and make a real story out of this thing. All the same, he’s achieved some amazing shit here, and fans of formalism and/or the seedy afterlife will want to check this film out.

So much of film reception is expectation. I went in to this Harmony Korine film having heard bad things, and was just saying to Jenn “we may well walk out of this,” when Korine concluded his introductory remarks by saying, basically, if you’re the sort of person who walks out on movies, might as well do it now. It was a challenge (a throwdown, hell no I can’t slow down) that I accepted almost unconsciously, and I realize now it reset my expectations to near zero.

If you are expecting an experimental work of artistic merit, Trash Humpers may well fall short. I don’t think Korine is playing in the big leagues with this one, which is not to say he couldn’t if he tried. However, if you treat this as a bizarre sketch comedy feature, one step weirder than Tim & Eric, say, you may well enjoy it, as I did.

The Trash Humpers are four southerners who wear creepy old-person masks and, well, hump trash. And trees, and walls, and whatever else. They also smash TVs, vandalize things, break into homes, and kill people, all the while muttering, grunting, singing atonally and/or laughing like sick hyenas. There is no plot to speak of, only a collection of scenes featuring the central characters, and other supporting characters drift in and out freely. The film is shot on VHS, meant to capture an archival quality, as if you might find the tape in a dead person’s things and wonder just what the fuck they were up to. As such, the director/cameraman Korine is also one of the Humpers, and shows up more and more toward the end of the film.

One one hand I’m tempted to criticize the film for lacking cohesion, and argue that it could have benefited from a more targeted sense of mystery. You can’t help but project some onto it (was there a falling out among the humpers? Whose baby did the lady humper steal?), but I do not imagine this is a Mulholland Drive-level puzzle waiting to be solved, if by Korine’s own explanation of it afterwards. I’d also propose it might fare better as a YouTube channel rather than a feature. On the other hand, it’s easier to just let the film be what it is, which is a fuckin’ weird 76 minutes of weird shit going down.

Mmm, my third day of TIFF was much better. Perhaps it’s equal parts personal adjustment to queuing and crowds (something I go way out of my way to avoid in regular life), better choices of film, and all around better luck. I mean, no one likes rushing around to line up for films you find okay or kinda hate, but if the films are good, you take it with a grain of salt, yeah?

Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch was my starter in the morning, and I was quite into it. I confess it’s the first Dumont film I’ve seen, but won’t be the last: it’s a fascinating meditation on religion perfectly married to a compelling plot.

Daybreakers was next. I tried to only get tickets to films that weren’t about to get a release, but in certain cases I couldn’t help myself. If you say “sci-fi vampire film,” I mean I’ve actually watched Bava’s Planet of the Vampires, know what I mean? This had its flaws – wooden dialogue, a little too earnest – but made up for them in sheer inventiveness and entertainment value. Despite the daylight scheduling, the screening was classic midnight madness, with a whooping crowd and a great warm-up from Colin Geddes.

I finished the day with the brooding Viking film Valhalla Rising, another film from a filmmaker I’m slightly ashamed to be unfamiliar with, Nicolas Winding Refn. It was like Bergman doing Conan the Barbarian, with perhaps a little too much emphasis on mood and enigma at the expense of depth. But it gets bonus points for a disembowelment and a mute, one-eyed protagonist like someone from a Leone flick.

My scheduling was still poor today, with a scant 15 minutes to get from film to film, but my trusty bike got me there on time. Directors were present for all three films, but because of my rushed scheduling I only got to hear the Q&A for the last one, which I regret. It’s probably better to allow a lot more time between flicks, especially as they tend to start late.

Man my festival experience is not shaping up well so far. The weeks preceding it are full of articles with words like “buzz,” “star” and “carpet” which make me rage-tingle a little. My first film – my fault for choosing it, I’m sure – is a 900-hour-long art travesty that features 5-minute takes of people sleeping. The film this morning is Rwanda: The Day God Walked Away which is actually fairly decent, but still smacks of art-colonialism as the funding and writer-director are French. I skip Jennifer’s Body because a sandwich now sounds like a more exciting proposition, and then at the AMC for All Fall Down, which hardly sounds like a line-up attractor, I’m forced into Satan’s Own Line which contains people who are lining up for two other, surely more “buzz-worthy” films, and we are all screamed at by ferocious, sex-starved volunteers to pack closer together, then told my film will in fact leave the line, then when I do I’m told I should get back in the line – to the back of the line I just left. What the fuck? I impulsively walk out, whether because of personal sense of outrage, my introvert’s severe dislike of lines, or a purely rational calculation that I would rather pay the $10 value of the ticket than remain in that art scum fattening pen.

It’s too bad, I would have liked to have seen that film.

The whole festival so far has a villainous feel to it, Mos Eisley for corporate sponsors, Indiewood marketers and the aspirational middle class, where people line up to exchange cash for artistic cachet. Because of the money I paid, I can now have a delightfully scathing opinion of Face, or a somber, scolding recommendation for the genocide flick, or crow that I’ve seen the shitty Diablo Cody film two weeks before it sits empty in regular schmuck theatres.

Maybe I should stick to my fucking downloads.

Nah, I’m sure this will get better, it’s the weekend and the daytime screenings will thin out during the week, and I think my picks will be more agreeable even as of tomorrow. But I’m starting to think Jesus invented Blu-Ray so I could avoid bullshit like this.

This is my first year attending the Toronto Film Fest in a serious way. By serious I mean I have a 25 daytime ticket package, I have the week off work, and I will be seeing 3+ films a day.

I generally attend a few screenings a year, either free passes through work (most often for Midnight Madness, which I adore), or going with a friend to something. But nothing comprehensive, and I confess to having a slightly negative view of the festival. I’m not a huge fan of celebrity culture, so the people who are drawn to that often bother me. Some of the film selections are questionable (every year there seem to be a lot of mainstream Hollywood flicks that are about to be released in theatres). And the process for getting advance tickets is so byzantine that it has turned me off doing it until now, despite my overpowering love of watching movies all day.

But thanks to the expert guidance of some TIFF vet friends, here I am, about ready to drop my order book off, having waded through an overcomplicated but doable selection process.

The site Tiffr (found via funkaoshi) was a huge help. The official TIFF site looks decent at first glance but the illusion quickly crumbles when you do something foolish like try to search for a film. Then you notice how it sometimes remembers your film list, sometimes not. Instead, Tiffr is like a benevolent parasite – you click a bookmarklet to shortlist films as you browse the TIFF official site. After that, your shortlist can populate a planner screen where you see the films you want to see in all their chronological, overlapping glory. Once you’ve made a series of frustrating compromises and finalized your schedule, you can print it, export to iCal, etc. (here’s mine, for whatever it’s worth to you.)

I’m cautiously optimistic about the upcoming festival experience. I think I’ve picked some decent flicks, and I’m frickin’ thrilled to have a week off work to do nothing but watch theoretically awesome movies. However, I understand there are at least a couple more Soviet bureaucratic hoops to be jumped through before I have my tickets, and possibly some lining up, so I’ll just wait and hope for the best.

Saw Bruno on the weekend. It’s got some hilarious parts, but it seems almost like a collection of skits that would be better enjoyed on YouTube.

It’s almost all embarassement humour in the same mold as Borat. Part of the time Bruno is successfully provoking and lampooning hetero gay panic. But often he is doing this by playing into straight stereotypes of gays. I think my favourite scenes were at the beginning, when the victim of the meatspace trolling was the fashion industry, and not so much later in the movie, when the victims are southern US men. In general Bruno felt a lot staler a character than Borat – we’ve all seen hilarious gay stereotypes in our entertainments before, and we don’t need Bruno to point out that yes, wrestling is pretty gay.

Take a look at this rather good half-hour doc about Detroit from Al-Jazeera’s English station. This one is hosted/narrated by Avi Lewis. It’s a little too newsy and focused on the auto crisis for my tastes, but it’s pretty excellent. Isn’t Grace Lee Boggs a total champ?

Not that I’m a massive Nader fan, but he apparently has a point about GM using bankruptcy to move its operations to China, which is actually fairly scandalous. Anyway, take a look.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Dear Robot Readers,

I could use your help with something. I have a film in this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. (I admit it, I’m a huge nerd.) It’s called “Bad Day For Vader”, and I’d love it if you voted for it. It’s only a minute long so that part ain’t hard, but you may have to register on atom first – not sure. You should be done in a couple minutes regardless.

Those of you with weblogs, newspapers, megaphones and/or skywriting businesses, I’d also appreciate your help spreading the word.

Voting stops at noon on friday, so if you could, make haste!

Here’s the link

Thanks and I owe you one.

I love the feel of this camera in the hands. I love old school film cameras with all their manual doohickeys and I don’t like bad digital compacts with all the navigating poorly-laid-out on-screen menus. This thing has got old school buttons and levers, and where you need to go into menus, they are very well designed. The flip-out LCD is from heaven. Only thing I don’t like is the absence of focus marks on the lens. Still getting used to manual focusing with this bastard – the autofocus is good, so I’m not complaining too much.

It takes a bit to get used to the video. I got into the stills part right away. As I mentioned I have plenty of experience with shooting stills, and so I saw the improvements a camera like this makes possible right away.

On the video capture side I have few skills, other than general knowledge of photography (well, plus a wealth of skills in post, but that’s anoher matter). Also, this camera’s advantages in cinematography are tricky to unlock.

The post workflow is one thing. For me, it actually takes longer to get my tapeless footage off this camera than it did with tape. That’s because you have to convert at least once from AVCHD -> ProRes if you want Final Cut to be able to digest it (here’s one video task that may actually be better on windows systems). You need to convert again if you want to remove the 30i wrapper from your 24p footage. You can shoot slomo since the camera has a 60p mode, but that involves some trickery again.

Capture has its own challenges. I certainly saw the AVCHD ‘mud’ (compression junk as a result of the codec breaking down) that happens with fast pans. This is disappointing to say the least, and hopefully panasonic can address it in a firmware update, perhaps by upping the bit rate.

I personally needed to get a ND filter for daylight shooting; if you’re looking for ‘film look’ bokeh, you want some filters going. Once I had that I got better-looking footage.

Finally, camera shake is an issue in something this small. It’s okay if you’re shooting slomo. But if not, you either want to stay wide or get some means to stabilize this badboy. I had okay luck with the camera on my lap or otherwise propped against something, but i’m also looking into either a shoulder brace or steadicam-y type thing, and there are many options that I’m still shopping around for.

Once you figure out some of these things, you can get some excellent results. Here’s two vids of test footage. (You can’t watch them in HD through these embeds, so perhaps click through to the vimeo pages.) Here’s an early, not great one:

GH1 test from dsankey; on Vimeo.

I’m happy with the footage on our back patio (the girls chatting), but little else. That footage looks great because the camera’s stabilized, I’m able to get some bokeh, in part because it’s not too bright. The footage on queen street in direct sunlight is pre-ND filter and so the aperture is closed down, meaning there’s too much DOF. A lot of it was too shaky to use, too.

Here’s a later vid, with footage from Pride last sunday:

Pride 2009 Camera Test from dsankey; on Vimeo.

As you can see, the slomo works great. It smooths out the camera jitter awesomely. Also, I had the ND filter by then, and it was cloudy, so backgrounds are all pretty n’ soft. I look at some of these shots, and think I shouldn’t be able to get them, the camera being so cheap, and me being nearly unskilled.

The other nice thing is how people deal with the camera. It’s small and has the body of an SLR. I think at the AlternaQueer tent people thought I was a news photographer. And out on the street there were so many cameras I was more or less invisible. Because of the massive proliferation of cameras these days, the incredible 280mm zoom this thing can do, and the appearance of the camera’s body, I found myself able to go pretty much anywhere and take pics of anything with no problems. That was a nice surprise.

Anyway, I hope to shoot a few more tests this week as there are still things to figure out and questions to answer. Dealing with sound is one of them.

Just got the Panasonic GH1 in. I had pre-ordered at adorama in the US, and at Vistek here in Toronto, and due to a lucky turn, Vistek came through much earlier than I had feared. I know from scouring the forums that many are being told they won’t get their cameras until July.

I’ve only barely used it, but I’m already thrilled. Perhaps much of the thrill would be common to any camera in this price range / category; many entry level DSLRs, as I understand it, would have equivalent picture quality and features. But it’s all new to me – my recent cameras are an ancient film SLR, a crappy five-year-old point & shoot, and the iPhone. I’ve taken good pictures with all of them, but never with the ease I experienced since this new baby came.

Perhaps the most unsettling thing is how frickin’ smart the camera is. The autofocus is fast, and shows you what it’s focusing on. The metering seemed always on point. And more than once we noticed it doing crazy-ass face detection. Apparently it predicts motion too? How long until it becomes self-aware, if it isn’t already?

I’m just scratching the surface of video recording, which of course is the reason I bought this camera. It’s harder to get sorted than it needs to be. If you’re going for a film look thing the right settings are crucial, which would be 1080p (“full HD”) and a shutter rate of 1/50. That means you’re recording in the rather nasty codec AVCHD, which causes workflow problems because Final Cut can’t edit that natively. Getting real 24p also requires deinterlacing the shots after that. To make matters worse, the AVCHD footage can break up and create compression mud on fast pans and tilts.

That said the 720 60p works well, and also presents the opportunity to shoot slow motion. And all in all, for the crazy small amount of money this thing costs, you have an HD, 24p camera with a sensor only a hair smaller than a RED camera.

There’s Pride on the weekend, and then I’m off the next week, with the intention of shooting me some (film? AVCHD? MTS files?), so I’ll have at least some test footage to show before too long.

(follow the stills along on flickr)

Vindicated! I was actually having my doubts as to the authenticity of this film (see previous post), after I seemed like the one naive idiot who didn’t think some arch ironist like Gondry or Jonze was ingeniously behind it. However, here’s a review at twitch. “The film is not a put-on. After Last Season is, however, so genuinely and startlingly bad that a movie cult will undoubtedly form around it.”

Other highlights:

• “Unbelievably, the film’s trailer, including the editing, is representative of the entire movie.”
• “Impromptu props made of cardboard and other discarded material are everywhere.”
• “In fact, the performances seem disconnected from the overall narrative as if they were occurring in a black box.”
• “Some scenes are perceptibly out-of-focus. There is a pervasive, muffled background noise. Scenes come and go with no continuity or explanation. Conversations often cutaway to shots of furniture and other items for no reason.”
• “A large part of the movie consists of the previously mentioned computer graphics, which are brutally crude. Although these graphics fit into the story, [the] film leans heavily on them to pad out the 93 minute running time. Thus, the parade of colored circles, spheres, birds, and fish tends to goes on and on as if the film went on pause and a screen saver kicked in.”

Joy!

I’m really thrilled by After Last Season. The trailer is something else:

It’s tempting to believe it’s an exquisitely constructed hoax, isn’t it? After reading this MetaFilter thread, though – especially this and this – you’ll be convinced it’s real. Real, and more awesome than a sack of robot pegasi. Just for font nerds alone it’s a comedy explosion. If you like fonts, unrelated clips of mundane dialogue and overlit white rooms, you’re in for a nirvanic thrill ride.

Anyway, it’s opening “regular-wide” tomorrow, so if you live in Lancaster, CA, North Aurora, IL, Rochester, NY or Austin, TX, please go see this. I hear they have printers in the basement you can use. (via the Space blog)

Holy shit. This just rocketed up to the top of my must see list.

I still remember seeing the original in the theatre. Awesome.

UPDATE: replaced YouTube embed with one that’s still there, I think.

Hello, website. Here, I owe you a post. I’ve been meaning to experiment with a game diary. Hell, why not make it a ‘media’ diary, i.e. not just games – in case I don’t actually play any games. Which doesn’t seem very likely right now. Anyway, who knows, this may be even more boring and self-absorbed than normal. Or, it could be handy to refer back to later.

I’m casting around for a game to get into. I’ve tried many things, but nothing is sticking. I believe what I’m after is that feeling of absorption, which presumes that I absolutely love the game. Last time it happened was Fable 2, I believe.

Anyway, tried Far Cry 2 as I hear it is almost completely open, which seems to appeal to me these days. Unfortunately, it causes me motion sickness. Too bad – seems like a great game, and a refreshingly different setting.

Also managed to get past the level that was causing me grief in UniWar on the iPhone (mission 7). Not sure why they put such a hard one so early on, as the following mission is a cakewalk.

I watched a couple more episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It’s surprisingly good. You see the credit sequence with its barely-clothed girl prancing and shooting and you assume it’s going to be adolescent action bullshit. And then you get the plot where the sex androids are committing suicide en masse.

Finally watched Who Killed the Electric Car. Wouldn’t call it inspired, but it’s a fascinating story. The answer is of course ‘freemasons.’

I was just doing some camera research and stumbled upon some interesting stuff.

I’m what you call prosumer when it comes to cameras, both video and still. I’ve set up my own darkroom and processed my own film, and used a film SLR for many years. On the motion side I’ve worked in film and TV for many years. However, in a still camera, I tend to prefer small and portable to an SLR, as I can’t take pictures if I don’t bring it with me. And on the video side, until extremely recently, it was impossible for an individual to own something close to pro quality, as pro film and HD cameras tend to cost half a million dollars. That has obviously changed, and now with the Red camera, HD camcorders, and video-enabled SLRs, it’s a different world.

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This is a station ID I did for Drive-In Classics a couple years back. It aired late at night as a treat for stoners.

Wish I could name all the sources, but at the very least it’s Beach Party, Vanishing Point, a kung fu flick, and VO from some shitty old trailers.

This Is It from dsankey on Vimeo.

I watched both the original and the remade Friday the 13th last weekend; I had never seen either. The remake was pretty meh, as could be expected. The original was surprisingly shitty. It’s essentially plotless until the end, when there’s a twist. But it’s not like the twist is especially powerful, since you don’t give a shit about any of the characters.

You may have heard Psycho described as the godfather of slasher cinema, and Friday the 13th seems to be the missing link, as it’s heavily indebted to Psycho. Not to say it’s Psycho-good, it’s just clearly very much inspired by.

The film has a moment of beauty, though, right at the end. And it comes with some beautiful music. I felt inspired to do a little chop-up job on both, and here it is.

He’s Still Out There from dsankey on Vimeo.

Mmmmm.

As always, it’s the only time of year you are guaranteed to find a few good films in theatres. So I’ve been seeing a lot more, and it seemed time to do a roundup of films I’ve seen recently. Most of these are currently in theatrical release, but some are on DVD.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Curiously uneven, and my least favourite Fincher film. Features brilliant sequences sandwiched between southern-fried folk wisdom that had me LOLing, and not in a way Forrest Gump would have wanted.

Frost-Nixon

Quite liked it, although I hear the play is much better, and the film introduces a number of historical inaccuracies. Great actoring, though.

Milk

I generally hate biopics, but van Sant turned in a decent one here. Politico-historically interesting, not so much artistically so.

The Wrestler

This film has a number of great things going for it: fantastically vulnerable performances from Rourke and Tomei, a beautifully and authentically realized setting, generally good storytelling, and more than a few great bits of dialogue. It was critically wounded by a couple of broad, melodramatic strokes in the plotting. I kept on thinking of the Simpsons episode where the doctor tells Homer he can’t be shot out of a cannon any more.

The Wackness

High-five, Wackness. You killed it. I have little tolerance for highschool-slash-coming of age stories as we just see so many of them, but this one distinguishes itself with sharp writing, a great sense of humour, Real Human Emotion&trade, and Ben Kingsley’s best performance since Gandhi was the head of a gang or whatever. Perfect soundtrack, too.

Planet B-Boy

A documentary following four b-boy teams competing in the “Battle of the Year,” and a straight-up awesome feel-good movie in the vein of Rize.

Surfwise

A doc of the “real-life freak” variety. Documents the iconoclastic life of a money-hating doctor who raises a family of eight completely outside the system, as a tribe of nomadic gypsy-surfers all living in the same camper. It’s a mind-opening meditation on the possibility of living outside the system.

Next I really want to see Synecdoche and Slumdog Millionaire …

Knockoff brands always make me laugh, whether it’s Sorny or Toasted Oat Os. So I wound up thinking about The Asylum today, the studio that produces ‘mockbusters’ (which I’ve mentioned here before), and I checked in to catch up on their recent output. Highlights:

• The Day the Earth Stopped
• Sunday School Musical
• Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls
• 30,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• The Terminators
• and the confusing Transmorphers 2 in 3D.

What, no Dank Knight starring Heath Leggings and Bristian Cale? Missed revenue opportunity, fellas.

I find it endlessly fascinating to think about how one medium is going to influence another. Right now, there are so many media spilling into the same pot that it’s hard to imagine how the stew will taste. But in this AV Club year-in-movies retrospective, Tasha Robinson makes an apt observation:

To me, the trend there seems to be less about people filtering the world through their pop-culture experiences—apart from the occasional extreme iconoclast, who in this industry doesn’t?—and more about people filtering the world through camera lenses, seeing every experience as something to be caught on video and shared with a hungry voyeuristic world. I recently watched Martin Scorsese’s 2008 Rolling Stones concert doc Shine A Light, and I laughed at the way Scorsese’s cameras capture people in the process of capturing Mick Jagger’s cavorting on their phones. He’s making his movie—a big, shiny, energetic, polished production—and they’re making their low-fi versions in the middle of it. Or looked at another way, they’re in the front row at a Stones concert… and they’re watching the experience on tiny little screens held up in front of their faces, because capturing it for later is more important than living it.

That attitude has its benefits—for one thing, it gave us Trouble The Water, which rides entirely on the amazing from-the-ground footage two New Orleans residents shot to document their own lives before, during, and after Katrina. I suspect we’re going to see a lot more of that in 2009, as people continue to turn their cameras on themselves and their neighborhoods. Given that so many of our favorite 2008 movies were little lo-fi films about ordinary people rather than the pricey escapist fare, I’m suspecting this might ultimately be a good thing, and I hope it continues.

One of many interesting ideas here is that with so many cameras out there capturing footage, there’s a potential for a new kind of cinema that is both theatrical and collectivist. Imagine a room full of people at an event; you stage something going on in the room, and count on the people there to record it for you. You then sort through the footage from the event and assemble it. Or, you could post all the collective footage for anyone to assemble their own edit. It’s the sort of production that would have been completely inconceivable 15 – 20 years ago.

It’s also the sort of production perpetrated by none other than The Beastie Boys, with their awesomely titled Awesome: I Fuckin’ Shot That in 2006, the year Google bought YouTube, and conceived well before YouTube opened for business.

I don’t know the moral of this story – it’s ongoing, as they say. Perhaps it’s that the Beasties are awesome.

This is an experimental short I just finished. I’ve been meaning to do more of these; the last one was one year ago. I find the format pretty inspiring and theoretically relatively easy to get done, but the bottleneck has been editing; I do a fair amount of editing for my day job, and rarely want to when I get home. So this summertime footage has taken until now to cut together.

I don’t want to say anything about my intentions here, other than to think of it as a trailer for something – a memory or dream, perhaps.

Missed this one – The NYT Magazine’s Screens Issue, from last week, with lots of amazing articles about the convergence of film, TV and computers, and also a David Lynch interview.

Just wanted to recommend this Swedish tween vampire flick. If that sounds like something you would hate, look again. It’s a fascinating film, beautifully made and acted, by no means trendy or facile. It’s always impressive when a film tries to let the characters’ gazes speak instead of dialogue, especially when it works. This ranks up there with my favourite vampire films (including Habit, another amazing and often overlooked one). It’s amazing how so many different sorts of stories can be told through the vampire myth.

I just rented a film off iTunes for the first time. The service only became available in Canada in June, and when it first started the selection was far from compelling, so it’s taken me until now to give it a shot. I chose the middling spy thriller Spy Game.

The iTunes movie experience has some good points. I liked that my download was watchable fairly quickly, which compares favourably to either bittorrenting or actually getting off my ass and going and renting a flick. The quality is decent (let’s say slightly below DVD quality). The price was good, too – $4. And at 48 hours, the rental period is more reasonable than Rogers on Demand’s 24. The ease of getting the flick onto the iPhone is a plus, too.

But other than that it’s all bad.

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This is by no means timely, but I just got around to seeing Wall-E, and surely this site must at least acknowledge robot masterpieces when they come around.

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OK let’s see here, fire up robot radar and analyze: what happened in the past week?

The post-E3 review drew to a close with game critics choosing their nominees for the best games of E3, with Fallout 3, Spore, Little Big Planet and Gears of War 2 doing well. (I’m just going to shrug and forego judging the wisdom of choosing the ‘best’ unreleased games.)

Nintendo got aggressive and sued flashcart makers like R4 for enabling piracy. As CDM points out, this has a special impact on the homebrew music scene, which relies on flashcarts, and which contrasted with the Japanese release of the first commercial DS music title, Korg’s DS-10. And, inevitably, the DS-10 ROM was leaked, so various musicians downloaded it and loaded it onto their flashcarts and used it while waiting for their legal, Japanese import to arrive.

Comi-con just wrapped up, and I’m still sorting though what went down there, but a highlight seems to be some new Watchmen footage (cam of trailer). There was a Terminator: Salvation panel as well. Oh, and Method Man showed up to promote his comic! Yes, a Method Man comic.

Oh, shit. This beta NFB site is too much. 400+ films so far, more being added, free to stream.

Would still like the ability to download, but [this is good]. Hit options and choose “extreme” (no “gnarly” option?) to get maximum resolution. (via 3rdparty)

Here’s Cosmic Zoom, one of my faves:

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Here’s an interesting article speculating on the economics of Dr. Horrible, and Joss Whedon himself weighed in to say it is “sensible.” Long and short of it is that the show would need to sell about 100,000 copies on iTunes to see a modest profit, and more like a million to compete with Hollywood paychecks for the creators involved (assuming a budget of $250,000). This is before any DVD revenue is taken into account.

I think we can assume Dr. Horrible will make money for its makers, but is there anything more we can take away from it? Joss Whedon is, after all, a special case within a special case – he has a pro budget and talent pool, and beyond that a rabid extant fan base. But nothing about the success of this show means much for amateur creators, those who couldn’t get Neil Patrick Harris to work for scale, and couldn’t afford to pay him scale anyway. There still doesn’t seem to be a system that can help such talent succeed, other than “get a million viewers on YouTube.” That’s not a system, that’s the problem already solved. A million viewers, whether on the web or on TV, spells success. It’s how to get there that counts. (I know this isn’t Joss’ fault, it’s just you get to thinkin’.)

That’s enough of that particular subject. Soon: Dark Knight!

I linked to it earlier in the week but man, thanks to doombot for reminding me to actually watch Dr. Horrible. It’s Joss Whedon, and it’s beyond awesome. Enjoy it soon as it vanishes on sunday.

Perhaps the association superhero=jock, supervillain=nerd was always obvious to everyone, but it only breaks through my thick skull with the help of Captain Hammer’s… er, hammer. Whedon really loads up every superhero cliche with meaning. The freeze ray is what will let the awkward Horrible pause time to think up something witty to say to his crush, for example. And hey, you get lots of jokes, songs and Nathan Filion.

Whedon is such a great writer that even this master plan is a joy to read.

Ars re-reviews the PS3, which they gave a 6/10 upon its original release. What with all the firmware they been revisin’, though, today’s PS3 earns a handsome 9.

From my position of ignorance – not owning a PS3 at present (although thoroughly convinced that Future D owns one) – I can hardly disagree. If people ask me for console advice, after asking them searing and insightful questions that reveal their darkest inner souls and gaming habits, I tend to advise a good hard look at Sony’s fatboy. Sure, the 360 has a great catalogue and online service, and the Wii is great if you like party games and plumbers. But if you’re at all thinking about HD over the next few years, which you probably should be, it’s hard to argue with that Ray of Blu. To say nothing of Sony’s excellent track record in hardware design, and all the games that you know, should come out at some point, hopefully.

And now I’ll shut up about Sony being so awesome already.

Finally, eh? Movies, in both SD and HD, both for rent and to own, are now up inz the iTunes for the gentle-yet-rugged people of the True North.

As for pricing, Apple is charging $9.99 for catalogue title purchases, $14.99 for recent releases and $19.99 for new releases. iTunes Movie Rentals are $3.99 for library titles and $4.99 for new releases, with high-definition rental versions for an extra dollar. The rentals can be previewed, purchased and watched on iPod classic, iPod nano with video, iPod touch and on a widescreen TV with Apple TV.

Gizmodo claims the viewing period is now 48 hours, a huge improvement over the crippling 24 hours the service was offering in the US, but I’m going to assume that’s an error. Also, prices are from $1 to $5 higher than in the US, despite the dollar being at par… make of that what you will.

As part of an ongoing quest to get the most out of my Mac Mini media centre setup, I took a couple things for a spin recently: XBMC for Mac, a Front Row replacement, and Sapphire Browser, a plugin for Front Row. Be warned: both of these apps are in beta, and aren’t polished final products. But they are certainly interesting.

One thing I was specifically looking for was something that handled HD content a lot better than front row. The mini is no slouch processor-wise, but it ain’t no Mac Pro, and perian -enhanced Front Row seems to have issues playing back HD files – dropped frames, curtailed fast-forwarding use until the entire flick is loaded, and worst of all for me, it outputs surround sound as regular old stereo. So I have to play files out of VLC if I want to give all my speakers a nice workout.

XBMC for Mac

Hell, I don’t even know how I got into this one. I guess I saw on Lifehacker that there was a new beta that supported the Apple Remote, and I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s the open-source media centre developed for the oldschool Xbox and now ported to Linux and Mac. It’s got a lot going for it, which I will sum up in delightful bullet point form:

• plays 5.1 audio properly
• plays HD video very nicely
• extremely feature-laden
• if you treat it properly, it will scrape IMDb and suchlike for rich metadata about your media. Once this has happened, you can browse by film poster, call up plot summaries and cast and even then browse by cast / director / what have you
• will tell you the weather, for fuck’s sake
• is free.

HD playback is a huge advantage right there. The Mini lifted 720p like a champ; word on the street is that it will sometimes have trouble with 1080p files, although I didn’t have any to test.

Unfortunately, the audio is another matter. I couldn’t get surround working at all. This has to do with the amp itself – mine refused to decode whatever XBMC was putting out. However, most people apparently have no issues, and the feature is going to see improvements a couple betas down the road, which might be a couple months away.

XBMC supports skins, and there are a few nice ones out there – to my eyes, nothing as refined as Front Row itself, but not bad and hell, you could make your own skin if you were really fussy. And that’s the nice thing about XBMC – it’s an open source project, with all the advantages with go with it.

XBMC has a lot of detailed configuration parameters, and there is great power and versatility in them. You can fine tune the details of your playback down to the scaling algorithms, and you can even do this while playing something back.

But, alas, with great power comes great… complexity. Who’s kidding who, it’s pretty complicated to set this thing up properly.

A note on the concept of “library” in XBMC. This must have been an evolutionary layer that grew on top of the original, simple XBMC interface. The library is the mode that scrapes the web for metadata (something not apparent to me at first glance), and it isn’t enabled by default. Until you figure that out, the XBMC interface is completely bereft of visual frills, even lacking thumbnails of the videos: something that is undoubtedly awesome to get working on an Xbox, but pointless on a Mac with a hardy competitor in Front Row built in.

Once you get the library thing sorted out, things are a bit better, but you’ll be impressed by one feature, annoyed by another. Possibly the biggest strike against XBMC is that it doesn’t recognize your iTunes metadata, so all your carefully-curated album art is out the window and reconstituted, badly, by a lengthy allmusic scrape. The cover art for DVD rips and such looks great though, and the plot summaries and cast & crew details are great to have.

Ultimately, I set XBMC aside because the surround sound issue was too important for me. I’m going to keep an eye on it, though; the app is under active development and seems to be progressing well, and I may well be using it heavily in a couple months.

Sapphire Browser

Sapphire browser is a Front Row ‘plugin’ that will do all that scraping for you right within Front Row, giving you the film/TV show art, summaries etc. just like XBMC. The idea is beautiful, and if I could review the idea, I’d give it top marks.

However, the reality don’t live up. I won’t bother getting into too many details, but the scraping process did not work well at all. It takes forever, hangs repeatedly, and ultimately messed up some fairly easy categorizations. When sapphire hits upon a file it doesn’t know what to do with, it asks you to identify the correct name out of a list of results. Unfortunately, it chooses whether files are ‘movies’ or ‘tv shows’ automatically and doesn’t let you correct it other than saying ‘this isn’t a movie’ – you have no way of saying ‘this is a TV show’, so your show won’t show up in its listing at all. Only one out of six Star Wars films actually made it through this failed screening process, which is a pretty sad result. To say nothing of the several different seasons of different shows I had to click through saying ‘this isn’t a movie’ for each episode.

Again, Sapphire is in beta, so it may very well improve in the future. But right now, I can hardly recommend you try it unless you really enjoy repetitive and fruitless clicking.

So that’s it for this latest bout; personally, nothing sticks this time around, but your needs may be different. And regardless, I’ll be keeping my eye on both of these, especially XBMC. The Mac version developers have recently liberated themselves from the main project, so more good things could come of that. I’ve pretty much exhausted my look at mac mini media centre apps – there’s still MediaCentral to consider, but the price is a little steep for me. Maybe someday!

UPDATE See this more recent article, which takes a look at the new XBMC for Mac, now known as Plex, and the new app Boxee.

Wow. Bell just unveiled its video download store, and as Ars notes, the timing could be no worse. Bell is about to go in front of the CRTC about the fact that they’re throttling P2P traffic, legal or not, for Bell customers AND for independent resellers’ customers. With this announcement, the anti-competitive aspects of throttling need no longer be simply inferred, they are writ large by Bell itself. Finally, the issue of network neutrality gets a shot in the arm. Thanks Bell! (more in the Globe here)

I’ve gone on another Mac Mini media centre bender. This seems to happen periodically; I get sick of how my 21st-century media experience is turning out, and I try a bunch of different stuff to see if I can’t improve the system. I’ve just tried out a few utilities designed to extend the power of the Apple Remote, as doing more things with your remote is a must if you want to get the most out of your media centre Mac.

Along with Mira, the Apple Remote extender I was using off and on, I’ll tell you about the competition: Remote Buddy, and Sofa Control.

Current Sitch

My mini is hooked up to the TV and I use Front Row to play shit back – movies and music both. This machine also functions as a torrent hose, and that’s what set off this latest round of testing – there is a lot of fussing to be done before a downloaded torrent is ready to be played in Front Row, stuff that I have to screen share in from my MacBook Pro to do, while I’d rather do it with the remote, from the couch. Namely, I want to do some limited file management with the remote – unpacking zips and rars, adding music to iTunes, and moving files to different directories.

What do these things do?

By default, the Apple Remote is more or less tied to Front Row. It can control iTunes too, and DVD Player. But it can’t switch apps or playlists or do anything elaborate. The idea with these extenders is that when you press ‘menu’ on the remote, instead of Front Row starting, you get a pop-up menu with a bunch of different choices. This is implemented a bit differently in each app, though.

Mira

I had been using Mira. It’s got a whole slew of applications pre-programmed with remote controls. You can customize your initial pop-up menu, and you can re-map buttons in any app that already has actions defined. You can even assign applescripts to buttons – more on that later.

Anyway, for one reason or another, I’d stopped using it. I decided I’d bust it out again, so I checked the site for the latest version and discovered to my horror that it hasn’t been updated since forever and is having issues with leopard. Well, that won’t do.

Remote Buddy

Remote Buddy is the quicksilver of the apple remote: it can do just about anything, if you can figure out how to convince it to. It can control any app, can browse through your media collection or file system, has a virtual keyboard and mouse, and can be scripted and expanded.

It’s also relatively expensive at 20 Euros, and is unfortunately too ominous and complicated for my girlfriend to use. For example, the default action when you press menu is to show a menu with tasks for the currently active app. To get to the ‘main menu’, you have to click left to navigate back up to it. Seems simple, but since you can browse your music (in a clever way BTW), it’s possible to get several menu screens in, and when you click menu to hide Remote Buddy’s display, it doesn’t revert to the top level when you press it again. So my lady would have to keep hitting left about seven times to get back to where she could choose front row. Which she’s not going to do; she gives these things about three seconds to explain themselves, and then shrugs and walks away, and I’m trying to encourage her to use the technology, not scare her off. However, if you’re flying solo or the SO is a crazy nerd like you, I’d give this one a shot. You’ll be using your Apple Remote to launch tactical nuclear strikes once you’ve figured it out.

Oh yeah – I should mention that Remote Buddy not only supports a variety of different remotes, you can also use a Wiimote or iPhone to control your mac with it. Bitchin’.

Sofa Control

This is another Apple Remote extender – in fact, it’s remarkably similar to Mira. In fact, I don’t know which one to recommend to you; they’re the same price and do much the same thing. Mira’s menu is more customizable than Sofa Control’s, but then again, Mira’s having issues with Leopard. Sofa control does have a virtual mouse feature, which Mira lacks and which can come in handy in a jam. And it allows for customization via scripting, so pretty much anything you could do with Mira, I’m sure you could do with this one. But I haven’t bought Sofa Control yet and so haven’t tested it enough to know it rocks fer sure.

Back to Mira; and some dull details that should nonetheless be noted

Upon seeing how similar Sofa Control and Mira are, I concluded that I might as well stick with the app I already own, so I went back into mira to see if I could make it work. The answer is: yes, with some button remapping and a lot of help from Automator.

I am starting to love Automator. I tried to love Applescript before it, but it was far too complicated for a brain like mine (I’m “creative”, okay?). Automator is where it’s at. But I’m getting ahead of myself, let me start with a simpler problem and a solution that doesn’t need automator.

Problem: I sometimes forget to stop all the downloadin’ before I get on Xbox Live to play with my homies, and then it’s lag city and I have to get up off the couch (outrage!) and screen share into my Mini to pause downloads in Transmission.

Solution:

1. add Transmission as an app in Mira preference pane
2. assign play/pause button to keypress “command-option-period” (pause all in Transmission)
3. assign next button to keypress “command-option-slash” (resume all in Transmission)
4. add Transmission to the Mira main menu
5. profit! Or, at least, stay on couch!

Now how about something more elaborate that requires Automator.

Problem: newly downloaded video files need to be moved into the Movies directory before Front Row will see them.

Solution: First step is to create a passable way of navigating around the finder. We’re going to need to mod the ‘finder’ control set in Mira. I’ve set it up so that up and down on the remote use the “duoPress” thing in such a way that up makes your selection move up one, and holding up triggers command-up aka move up one directory. I’ve made the play button ‘open’, and the back button sends a file to the trash.

You’re going to want to add common directories to Mira’s main menu, too. Add your downloads folder, that way you can easily navigate to it and then select the files you need. You may also want to add your home directory and the finder itself. I’ve also added the Movies directory in case a video isn’t playing well in Front Row and I want to launch it with something else.

Now, create an automator workflow that has the following steps: “get selected finder items”, “move selected finder items” to the Movies directory. That’s it. Save it as an app.

Finally, put this in your Mira main menu, or assign it to a button in your finder control scheme.

I saved the right button in my finder setup for a slightly more complicated but far more common task, which is adding music to iTunes. Same deal as before, but the automator actions should be as follows:

1. get selected finder items
2. get the contents of this folder (and any subfolders)
3. filter finder items to those of file extension .mp3 (this is to avoid adding image files or .m3us that might be in the album directory)
4. add to iTunes library.

So with all of these controls set up in mira, I can now do all the routine file management stuff that used to require a screen share.

(The smart reader may point out that folder actions could handle these chores automatically, and while that’s theoretically true, I’ve had little luck with folder actions myself. They run whenever files are added, which can potentially be while the Mini is already shuddering under the weight of HD video, and they are frequently confounded by partially-complete torrent downloads. But I’m still exploring this. I’m definitely considering an action on the MBP that will scan my MBP’s downloads folder for torrent files and move them to a folder on the Mini that Transmission watches for torrents, auotomating a lot of the stupid busywork that goes along with, you know, not paying for stuff.)

Finally, I should add that while my Mira experience under Leopard is relatively painless, there are still periodic problems. Ghost presses are sent, and sometimes one press results in two. I’ve contacted the developer as he hints on his site that workarounds are available; I hope this is the case as until I get them and/or he updates Mira for Leopard, I can’t really recommend it to you, as much as I’d like to. I would say that you could certainly set up either of the other apps I’ve mentioned here to do much the same thing, should you want to.

Next, I’ll have a look at XBMC for Mac, a Front Row replacement, and Sapphire Browser, a plugin for Front Row. Both scrape the net for metadata in really interesting ways, but both seem to have their share of problems, too.

UPDATE See this more recent article, which points out that Mira now works with Leopard.

So this article popped up on the weekend and basically states that a (likely joking) statement has been warped out of context to produce a petition for one million signatures to stop Mr. Boll from making video game movie adaptations.

Of course, he’ll never stop. He loves this stuff and people keep working with him because he makes action movies for dirt cheap. He’s magical that way. And one million signatures would probably convince him that if one million hated him, two million must love him….

Paul Robertson’s short film is a beautiful tribute to 2D Japanese side scrollers. Well, it basically is a 2D side scroller, except one set in an otaku’s fever dream, and you’re watching, and the people playing it are Kings. Kings, I say. Oh, and it features a ‘Violence Tank’ and ‘The New Ultimate Jesus.’

Wonderful news! Well, I think so anyway.

Luc Besson’s wonderful world of tiny wee creatures Arthur and the Minimoys has two sequels coming up and Ubisoft will be handling the game verions. Yay! I love Ubisoft! I like Luc Besson! Yeah, I actually do. The Fifth Element made me like him for life.

The sequels, which will be released along with the films over the next two years, are Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard and Arthur and the Two Worlds War.

As long as movies keep turning into videogames then Ubisoft should handle all of them. I mean Beowulf had that crap singing, so much crap singing, but still it looked really good and the blood effects were awesome.

How did I go from talking cute wee children’s stories to blood effects?

Yeah, I bet they do:

They see the videogame business as an opportunity for significant growth, especially compared to their more mature, traditional businesses such as television and movies. Box office revenue inched 4.0% higher last year, in large part because of ticket price increases, while home-video sales declined 3.2%, according to Adams Media Research. In contrast, videogames are the fastest growing sector of entertainment, with sales in the U.S. rising 34% last year to $8.64 billion, according to NPD Group Inc.

Prepare for Scary Movie 6: The Game.

I do read more sites than just the AV Club, although you wouldn’t know it today. Anyway, Book vs. Film examines the many film adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novella I Am Legend, which I found interesting because after many conversations with people about the latest film, I have yet to find anyone who’s actually read the source text – apparently for good reason.

That got me thinking: why didn’t they make an I Am Legend game? Gun-happy last man alive in a zombie/mutant/vampire plagued city seems like a home run when it comes to game plots. Well they did, sort of. They made a “multiplayer first person shooter RPG” in Second Life. Official page here, and IGN writeup here. Sounds interesting, because it seemslike there were no AI characters (you probably can’t do that in Second Life), and also since it had an end goal and when it was found, the whole thing shut down.

Incidentally, my favourite film is hands down Omega Man, although I haven’t seen the Vincent Price one yet. But how can you beat albino mutants with shades and a dodgy new religion? I doubt the cheap knockoff I Am Omega managed to. That’s from The Asylum, the studio known for cheap knockoffs that capitalize on enormous marketing campaigns. Check out their past films: Transmorphers, The Da Vinci Treasure, Pirates of Treasure Island, Snakes on a Train, AVH: Alien vs. Hunter, and my personal favourite Hillside Cannibals.

As a followup to the post about King of Kong, there’s an interview with ‘villain’ Billy Mitchell at the AV Club. I gotta say, I definitely have an impression that he’s a way nicer person than the film makes him out to be. And I totally want to try his hot sauce now.

You know that feeling when you’re watching a documentary and you just can’t believe what’s going on? When real-life events seem so unbelievably dramatic, they must be made up?

Well, maybe they are. Or, maybe not. Who knows?

King of Kong is about the battle for the title of World Champion, Donkey Kong. It follows nice family guy Steve Wiebe as he challenges sleazy hot sauce magnate Billy Mitchell’s 1982 high score, wrestling with the corruption of the officiating body Twin Galaxies, which is in league with Mitchell and refuses to honour Wiebe’s scores. It’s a fast-moving, entertaining film full of larger-than-life characters such as Wiebe and Mitchell and the guys who run Twin Galaxies. It would be a great documentary. If it were true. Unfortunately, it stands accused of innacuracies that dwarf anything Michael Moore has ever done. Read this and then this and Walter Day’s other criticisms.

Now, I don’t know which side is right, and I think it’s totally worth watching regardless, as long as you keep in mind this controversy. If, as Twin Galaxies states, Wiebe had the world record for three years, the film is brutally misleading – it presents his score as being quickly disqualified and the title reverting to Mitchell. Twin Galaxies states that what happened is that Steve’s million-plus score was indeed disqualified, but then the title reverted to Steve himself since his 947,000 score had not been invalidated. Confused yet? Since you can’t trust any of Walter Hill’s statements at face value, we would need more sources and details to know what actually happened with regards to Twin Galaxies’ scorekeeping or any of this shit.

UPDATE: As it turns out, MTV’s Stephen Tolito has turned in quite a number of articles about the controversy: one two three four. They don’t necessarily get beyond ‘he said / she said’ disputes, but they at least present both sides and contain this headscratcher of a quote, from Mitchell’s best friend, Steve Sanders:

“Is the movie accurate?” Sanders asked. “I would say yes. Is the movie fair? I would say no.”

Here’s a good, measured piece from Ars’ Nate Anderson: Is the music industry dying? The answer is: no. CD sales are tanking hard, but digital sales are skyrocketing – not just at iTunes but also eMusic and presumably others.

Convenience isn’t the only thing at work here; price is also a major factor. [eMusic CEO David] Pakman believes that the CD is priced “completely wrong,” and points out that hundreds of major DVDs can be had for $4 or $5. Despite the pressure that music labels have been under the last few years, CD prices have never approached this level (not counting those Beatles Greatest Hits! (as played by the Western Ljubljana State Radio Orchestra) discs you find in value bins).

Goddamned right. If CDs were $3 I’d be buying the hell outta them. But it’s clear that the major labels have had a big hand in their own downfall, and not just the suing-own-customers thing. They could have lowered prices on CDs to $3 and still made money, and they could have realized that albums full of junk filler tracks won’t sell like hotcakes in the era of single track downloads. And they could have ditched the DRM a lot quicker.

So given that, and thinking of the recently-announced iTunes movie rentals full of DRM and time limitations, what’s Hollywood thinking? Isn’t it clear that the DRM has got to go eventually? They should get out in front of that shit right now, and not cock it up like the labels did.

Ars: Video-sharing site use surges as writers’ strike goes on. Yeah, that would happen, wouldn’t it? As Nate Anderson points out, the data both supports the writers’ position that online revenue is important, and warns the studios that people can live without their output. Last thing they want is a baseball strike scenario, where the sport itself never really recovered its following.

So it’s over. Warner is dropping HD DVD support and going all Blu-Ray, all the time, and the rumour has it that Paramount, and Universal will follow when their contracts run out in a few months, completely ending studio support of the format. Warner’s reasoning is as follows (from the press release):

The window of opportunity for high-definition DVD could be missed if format confusion continues to linger. We believe that exclusively distributing in Blu-ray will further the potential for mass market success and ultimately benefit retailers, producers, and most importantly, consumers.

I.e. if we’re not careful, people will give up on HD discs altogether and stick with their DVDs. Clearly they have data indicating that HD disc player sales lag far behind HD monitor sales, which is scaring them.

Let’s skip the inevitable discussion of how downloads are the future and just concentrate on one point: Sony was right. About everything. After all the mockery about the ludicrously high price on the PS3 when it came out (because of its Blu-Ray drive), everyone points to the PS3’s Blu-Ray drive as the deciding factor in Blu-Ray’s victory. Yet to be seen is whether a focus on the HD optical drive (Sony) or a focus on games (Nintendo) is the more lucrative path. Yet, console and game sales aside, obviously Sony will clean up with Blu-Ray licensing fees and patent royalties. I just can’t find data on how much money this might make them.

Up here in the barren, snowclogged wasteland of Canadia, if you’re not slipping on poorly cleared sidewalks or getting tasered by renegade Mounties, you’re complaining about how it’s hard out here for a nerd when all the tech companies treat you like second-class assholes: no iPhone, TiVO, Kindle; no movies or TV on the iTunes Store. Well forget you, iTunes, as Microsoft announces that on December 11th, movie rentals will come to Xbox Live, for “as little as 310 Microsoft Points for Standard Definition movies and from 460 Microsoft Points for High Definition movies.” Let me quote Steve here on the translation from funny money: “Movies will cost 310 Microsoft Points ($4.34) for older films and 440 points ($6.16) for newer releases, with high-def versions going for 460 points ($6.44) and 660 points ($9.24) respectively.” Confused yet? As a comparison, $8 is what Rogers charges to stream a slightly out of sync HD movie.

And of course, no TV shows, because everyone knows Canadians hate TV and just like to watch the whale fat congeal on the wall of our igloos as we chug maple syrup. Good times.

Are first person games bound for extinction?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Halo fan, and a Marathon fan, and a Bioshock fan, hell, even a Doom fan. I like Oblivion, and Deus Ex was pretty rad too.

And I’m writing this in the first person. (He writes something like this in the third person, he sounds like a serial killer.)

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Mayhap you’ve already come across this link, as it ain’t new, but the Moon Books Project has a plethora of public domain films and books formatted for use on the popular DS homebrew media app, MoonShell. You’d probably get a better reading experience by picking up the works in cheap paperback format, but to each his own. And there are some film classics in there: Night of the Living Dead, Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Rashomon, M, Welles’ The Stranger, Carnival of Souls, and inadvertent comedy greats Plan 9 from Outer Space, Reefer Madness and Hercules.

Nice bit of machinima here.

Lit fuse films

Remember when Ebert said video games aren’t art, and then Clive Barker disagreed? Well, Ebert has responded. It’s pointless to argue with Ebert, but then pointless is what we do best over here.

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Some recent films that I thought I would write up. Recent as in “I saw them recently”, not “they came out recently”. Although some did.

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Two related items came to my attention today: this article about the growing importance of game trailers, and Narcogen’s shot-by-shot analysis of the E3 Halo 3 trailer – the latter clearly an example of the ‘forensic approach’ detailed in the former.

It is worth noting that the two examples the article gives of trailers backfiring were Halo 2’s 2004 E3 trailer, and Killzone’s 2005 trailer. The article implies that gamers’ expectations can be raised too high, and thus trailers can backfire. Sure, that can happen. But the reason for the backfire is clear, in both cases: the trailers were deceptive. The Halo trailer contained gameplay footage of levels that didn’t appear in the game. The Killzone trailer was pre-rendered, so it had no relation whatsoever to what the game itself would look like. Small deceptions abound in film trailers (different music, sound effects, severe dialogue editing), but if you made a trailer that different from the actual film, you’d likely run afoul of fraudulent advertising laws.

I can’t see how the forensic approach to video is anything but an exciting development. Perhaps it’s only coming now because the technologies required – the pause button and the internet – are relatively recent phenomena. (I think of those poor structuralist film students in the 70s and before, having to watch repeated showings of the same film before they could perpetrate a shot-by-shot analysis). Anyway, it seems of a kind with ARGs, and signifies that techniques previously only practised in ivory towers can now be done by anyone, for entertainment even. The motivation is clear, too; it’s not that “these internet losers have too much time on their hands” but rather that – as the Traxus reference indicates – the material is layered with meaning in such a way that rewards close viewing. Sure, it’s hyped-up graphics porn for the mainstream, but it’s rich with detail for the story nerds, too.

Let me filter GreenCine Daily for a moment. (I wish someone would do that, actually. There’s so much good stuff every day on that site that I can’t keep up. That’s a common feeling; I can’t keep up with MetaFilter either. Online content needs filters, but apparently now even the filters need filters…)

Right, Cannes. To sum up interesting films: Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, Spanish thriller The Orphanage, Friedkin’s Bug, the animated Iranian Persepolis, and of course the Coen’s latest, No Country for Old Men. Oh wait, Bug isn’t at Cannes. Anyway. Speaking of things not at Cannes but mentioned by GreenCine, Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.

Here in the NYT is another in a long series of articles heralding 3D filmmaking as a potential saviour for cinemas. CinemaTech mentions:

in 1953, the peak year of the original 3-D boom, there were 23 movies released in 3-D, including ‘House of Wax’ and ‘It Came from Outer Space.’ (I’d be surprised if we see a half-dozen 3-D releases this year from major studios.) By 1955, there was just one movie made in 3-D.

The question is, what’s to save the present recurrence of 3D film from the fate of the original, 50s incarnation? In the Times article, proponents argue that this time around, they have Cameron, Jackson and Spielberg on their side – the A-team of spectacle filmmaking. I’m not so sure that more spectacle is what Hollywood needs, or if it’s even possible. But at least they’re trying. In the 50s, in response to the rapid growth of TV, the film industry evolved many variants in an attempt to differentiate itself. Most failed. (Insert smell-O-vision joke here.) But eventually, film found its place in the ecosystem – albeit a smaller one than it had enjoyed pre-TV. Film will adapt again, but is it too late for the theatres, I wonder? Will TV (in the form of HDTV home theatres) finally eat film?

What happens after HD? Is a question I was wondering about, and happened to catch a post-NAB blurb on the topic.

Ultra HD, or “Super Hi-Vision” (what a name!), is what Japan’s public broadcaster NHK proposes.

It’s 7,680 × 4,320 pixels of resolution, as opposed to SD’s 640 × 480 and 1080 HD’s 1920 × 1080 px. 16 times the res of HD. One minute of uncompressed footage would take up 200 gigs of space.

I’m not sure you would really want to be super high if you were watching that.

I used to constantly have the argument with my film pals about whether digital tech would replace film, and they used to tell me it would never happen. (One of them is now a manager of digital cameras at a big camera maker.) One of the big arguments in favour of digital over analog tech is: although suchand such digital technology may not at present surpass the analog equivalent – say, HD is not better than 35mm film – just give it time and eventually the digital option will be both cheaper and much higher quality than the analog. You can’t fight the robots.

Here’s “an article about Vudu, a movie-downloadin’ box that will compete with AppleTV and the Xbox 360. Distinguishing features:

• no computer required
• uses P2P
• claims purchased films start playing right away, with no need to download
• apparently has broad studio support
• many ex-TiVo developers

Looks interesting. Will it work? Consumers aren’t dumb. So the cost of the downloads will be crucial. They will have to be substantially cheaper than DVDs to justify the purchase of a $300 box.

And from what that article says, it seems Vudu doesn’t do TV shows. It strikes me that the compelling reason to buy into the iTunes-iPod-AppleTV system is getting TV shows right after they air. If you get your shows from iTunes, you can cancel your cable altogether. The downloaded films aspect seems much less compelling – hobbled by high prices, poor selection and lack of extras. So I’m not sure relying on films alone will be a smart move, especially since both competing systems offer much more.

Via merlinmann comes a link to this impressive footage taken with a little HDV handicam, the Canon HV20 and an adapter called the Brevis which allows the mounting of 35mm lenses. Thing is, the camera is $1000 US, the adapter another grand. Which is to say CRAZY CHEAP for a full-on 24p bastard that makes images like that. In five years will we all be shooting Imax on our cellphones or what?

I’m sorry to hear it’s not doing well, but I’m not surprised. It is fundamentally at odds with the current theatrical experience. You have people leaving after the first film, thinking the show is over. You have people complaining that the film is scratched and there are reels missing. So clearly the marketing didn’t communicate the whole point of this thing. And frankly the film shouldn’t be playing in multiplexes. It should have an intermission; apparently that’s not possible in modern theatres. Plus they need to run their 20 minutes of ads and trailers in front of something with a three hour running time.

My friends and I saw Cannibal Holocaust at the Bloor Cinema maybe a year ago. Now that’s a true grindhouse film, and the experience at the Bloor was perfect: lots of laughing, yelling, pot smoke. That audience would get Grindhouse, that’s where it should be playing. Oh but wait, they spent between $50- and $100-million on it, can’t do that, they wouldn’t recoup. WTF? Spend big-audience money on nostalgia for a type of cinema that only a fraction of the audience is familiar with? Spend $100-million to recreate films made for garbage money?

Ultimately my opinion of the mainstream theatrical experience is so low that I can’t imagine anyone wanting to experience it, let alone make films for it. Tarantino and Rodriguez are to blame for the enormous budget, the Weinsteins for the failed marketing, and the exhibitors for just generally being assholes who view their audience with contempt.

They are both great films. Planet Terror is relentlessly entertaining, whereas Death Proof has a lot more going on than is initially apparent when your ass is numb and your bladder about to detonate. Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike seems a stand-in for not only 70s junk cinema, but also Tarantino in the mid-90s. But I’ll wait until I see it again on video – where this film belongs nowadays – before I get further into that.

An old Kottke link picks up on Ebert picking up the term “hypertext cinema” or “hyperlink movie” to describe what I’ve taken to calling “ensemble drama”. We’re all trying to describe films like Babel, 21 Grams, Crash, Magnolia, You Me and Everyone We Know, Syriana, and most significantly, films like Short Cuts and Nashville by Robert Altman. Neither term really adequately describes the phenomenon – the key point is multiple instersecting storylines, often with characters who don’t know each other. “Intersecting” could be referred to as “cross-cut”, as I don’t think people would consider Pulp Fiction part of the genre since the stories are told as separate arcs.

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I can’t say I’m super-jazzed about this thing. I understand it’s the early stages and it’s primarily intended to give iTunes show-downloaders a way to watch their stories on their couch. But iTunes shows are standard def. And the Apple TV only works with “widescreen” televisions. Unless the thing is targeted at people who were tricked into buying EDTV sets a couple years back, that means HDTVs. And what do current HDTV owners tell you? That their gorgeous displays are great for what little HD content there is, but it sucks watching SD on them. Ouch for Apple TV!

Of course, in the future everything will be awesome, and I’m sure the Apple TV will follow suit. Once you can download HD content from iTunes these problems vanish. But no matter what, it’s unlike Apple to ship a shitty 1.0 product, so I can’t view this box as anything but a misstep.