In LA

The sociopolitical comic series “Get Your War On” has now spawned a series of video shorts that maintain the look of the originals shockingly well¹.

I just watched the “Thanksgiving Day” video. The jokes come fast and hard, it took me two viewings to catch them all.

The full set of 19 videos can be found here.

This is a worthy port² of the comic to video. Definitely worth a look if you don’t mind gobs of profanity and political humor that leans sharply to the left.

1. Created using animation tools built originally for the film “Waking Life”, I believe. [↩]
2. Port - modify (software) for use on a different machine or platform [↩]

You knew that fortune cookies are an American invention, right? They’re related to a Japanese pastry, and were either invented in San Francisco or LA early last century. They do not exist in China. Armed with this knowledge, please to enjoy youtube clip:

Thanks to boingboing.net for bringing this video to my attention, and Jennifer 8 Lee for creating it (I think). I love it. I don’t know where the video was shot exactly, but it makes me miss the people of Beijing. There’s a nice cross-section of people and places in the video. Their good-natured reactions to the strange cookies are awesome.

I’m a little behind the times –you’ve all probably seen this already, but I really appreciated this music video. Please note before clicking: as far as music videos go, this one’s on the more violent and disturbing end of the spectrum. And if the imagery doesn’t disturb, you may not find the music easy on the ears, especially if you’re not already keen on the less accessible tracks from France’s Ed Banger Records.

The iconic jackets, the pseudo-documentary feel, the match between the relentless nature of the music and imagery, and the Clockwork-Orange-esque synth notes at the end that may have been the inspiration for the entire video –all resonate for me. It reminds me of the film Man Bites Dog but with no attempt at intelligence, irony, or a point. Just a straightforward and effective cinematic and emotional experience.

There’s a pretty amusing parody of the video available here.

At the extremes, those who think online filesharing helps artists¹ may see this story as logical and evidence for their beliefs, and those who assume illegal downloads of movies and music always hurts content creators may see this as a joke (funny or not), but I think it’s pretty cool that a little independent film has generated a lot of positive buzz through word-of-mouth reviews from people who illegally downloaded the film –and the producer of The Man From Earth has officially thanked these movie “pirates”. To wit:

“Our independent movie had next to no advertising budget and very little going for it until somebody ripped one of the DVD screeners and put the movie online for all to download. Most of the feedback from everyone who has downloaded “The Man From Earth” has been overwhelmingly positive. People like our movie and are talking about it, all thanks to piracy on the net!”

All’s well that ends well.

Technorati Tags: film

1. I know I’ve discovered more artists and purchased more music due to the existence of p2p technologies, from napster to gnutella. [↩]

There’s a video up on one of China’s youtube clones of a Chinese TV broadcast, which features footage of actress Li Bing Bing re-recording some lines of dialogue in a session with director Rob Minkoff and ADR Editor Chris Sheldon. It’s over here.

According to a BBC article, keepers at the Chengdu Research Base for Giant Panda Breeding have been trying to entice the pandas at the reserve to mate by showing them videos of panda porn.

I find it interesting that the article is accompanied by two stills that appear to be from the panda sex video. One is a boring photo of the two pandas looking at each other from across a room. The other is of Qing Qing attacking Ha Lei, accompanied by the caption “Females commonly attack males after mating”.

These are strange choices for photos to accompany the article. The article is specifically about researchers showing this video to uninterested pandas in an effort to get them aroused. It should have been accompanied by photos of the researchers showing the video to pandas, a still of the pandas mating in the video, and (since the BBC obviously has the video of the pandas mating) they also should have posted the video to their website as a companion piece to the article. But that’s apparently not the way Western culture works. Violent photos are just fine, but photos of pandas actually engaged in mating (the horror) cannot be shown, and video –forget it.

Giant pandas mate rarely in captivity, and there are only a couple thousand of them left in the world. The entire video is newsworthy by any definition of the term. Who could be offended at a pair of pandas going at it?

There’s a great new trailer online for The Forbidden Kingdom, and it’s awesome. It is available as flash video embedded within a page and also available in HD Quicktime. To see it, go to Yahoo’s “The Forbidden Kingdom” page, look for the “Exclusive Trailer”, and click the button for the resolution of your choice (the 1080p version looks amazing, but if you don’t have the fastest computer or net connection I’d recommend the 720p), or click the “Click to play” button to see a reasonably ok looking embedded flash version (looks better than the trailer on youtube, but much worse than the HD QuickTimes).

Unlike the “Teaser Trailer”, this trailer concerns itself less with introducing the story and is more focused on imparting the feel of the film. There are tons of beautiful shots of scenery, action, Jackie Chan fighting Jet Li, Li Bing Bing being all hot and evil, Collin Chou looking devious, and Michael Angarano getting beaten up by just about everyone. In my opinion it’s more exciting than the teaser trailer, and given the amount of action in the film, a better representation of the film as well.

Yahoo’s “The Forbidden Kingdom” page also includes a countdown clock to the release date of the film. Right now it says 65 days, 21 hours, 15 minutes, and 55 seconds to go. Aiiiyaa!¹ How freaky to actually see how little time is left until release. I’m going to see that countdown clock in my fitful sleep tonight².

1. that’s Mandarin for “oy vey” [↩]
2. unless I can manage to disable my brain’s javascript interpreter [↩]

And the award for best performance from a quadruped goes to…

An amusing alternate version can be found here.

Edit: Snowball the Cockatoo likes to dance to the Backstreet Boys and is awesome.

“I’d like to refer to this whole thing from start to finish as a real Mickey Mouse operation, but that would be an insult to Mickey Mouse.”

Here’s a pretty fun little compilation of Bob Knight clips from ESPN, missing of course are some of his more offensive moments.

Technorati Tags: basketball, sports

This post is going to be very geeky, and is probably only relevant for those of you who do any film editing or VFX work.

Today I needed to process a few clips with Shake to convert their colorspace from Panalog to linear. Rather than just do a bunch of pointing and clicking in the Shake gui to process each clip, I figured it might be worthwhile to spend a little bit of time scripting now to save a lot of time and finger joint wear and tear later.

I wanted my script to process any clip thrown at it, and to render out the result as a 1920×1080 Apple Prores 422 QuickTime file at 23.98fps. The script would append “_PL” to the filename before the extension to indicate that a panalog conversion had been done, so if the original file was A38.mov, the resulting file after running the command “myscript.sh A38.mov” would be “A38_PL.mov”.

I typed “shake -help |& less” to browse through Shake’s available command line arguments, and to find out how to address the “panalog4lin” macro I would be using to do the conversion.

There were two problems that made this a not-so-straightforward task. The first was that there is no way that I can find to tell Shake what kind of QuickTime file you’d like it to write (most professional users likely have it write out individual Cineon or DPX files for each frame, which would have been a simpler solution but didn’t fit our workflow). I found in the manual how to set Shake’s default QuickTime format, and set it to ProRes 422 1920×1080 in a .h file. The second problem was that Shake only renders out one frame by default unless you tell it the time range you’d like it to render. My script would have to know the duration of a clip to process all of its frames. Luckily I could use Shake’s “-info” flag to determine the duration of a clip.

Here’s the script (looks pretty simple eh?):

#!/bin/tcsh
set duration = `shake "$1" -info |& grep "Duration" | cut -d ":" -f 3`
shake -fi "$1" -t $duration -panalog4lin 1 1 -fps 23.98 -fo "$1:r_PL.mov"

I wanted to apply the conversion to all of the clips whose name contained the string “AT”, so I typed the following at the tcsh prompt:

% foreach foo (*AT*)
foreach? echo "processing $foo"
foreach? myscript.sh "$foo"
foreach? end

I walked away, ates some food, came back, and a set of clips that had been converted to linear space were sitting there waiting for me. Excellent!

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macintosh, OS X, Panavision Genesis, software, unix, vfx