The Genie and The Trashman Premiers Tonight

The Genie and the Trashman will be premiered tonight at TMUTheater at 6pm (EST).  Its part of a triple bill that includes JosephKw's "Experince Crawling Flesh" and RJAnaconda's "Perfect Chaos".  If you plan on coming be aware that TMUTheater doesnt work well in IE (last I checked) so you might wanna download Mozilla/Safari/Chrome before gametime.  Here is the full release thread.  I'll post a link in this post to the movie on TMU after the premier (edit - The poster is linked to the TMU upload).   Hope to see you tonight.

Bouncing about like a jackalope.

I find something inherently cool about typography, language and the written word.  Back in  "Travel with Berlitz" I had an idea of a league of extraordinary linguists (Noam Chomsky, Charles Berlitz, C3P0) but settled on travel agent noir.  In the future I think I will tackle typography in some shape/form.  


Speaking of which, My little lego man entry in the hairloss.com video contest lost out to a short film of text and two others.  Check out the winners here.  While I wasnt so impressed with that particular typograophy short (3rd place), here is one worth taking a look at...War of the Words..er Worlds read by Welles and set to text.  Very cool stuff (and just over a minute long).  Really makes me want that After Effects Program (and you thought Iclone was expensive... hehe)....And here is another pretty cool shorty showcasing a typography as architecture art project.  Nifty.


Even in a film having nothing to do with typography, I think the style of the titles and credits has a profound effect on setting the mood (especially up at the beginning of the film) and is something often overlooked or tacked on right at the end of many little screen flicks.  Im just saying. 


A fine read (on a completely different subject) this morning is Berardinelli's take on the New York Times changing online pricing structure and on online commercial revenue in general.  SoundSnap sent me an email just the other day proposing a change in their pricing strategy, while MovieStorm continues to futz about with their subscription and pricing methods.  The internet is a hard place to make a living (especially when you start charging for something that was at one point free, or can be found elsewhere for free). 


Finally, The Genie and The Trashman is wrapped (my wrap party consisted of a couple of greyhounds while playing Uncharted 2 for a few hours last night...party like a rockstar!).  It will be released thise week.  Keep an eye out here for more details.  

LibriVox and The Genie

I ran across this resource the other day while cruising the Internet Archive. LibriVox - an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks, read by volunteers. Currently has over 3,000 recordings, free to download. It struck me that this might be a fine resource for the budding filmmaker who wants to play with some good human voices or perhaps even tackle a full production set to one of these recordings. At the very least its a good source of free audiobooks for your next roadtrip.  Take a look.

And now, as promised, heres a little Genie screenie (from my upcoming Genie and the Trashman flick).  I suppose I haven't said much about this production so heres the fun facts.  It was dreamed up after viewing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari  in North Americas largest cathedral, Saint John the Devine, one halloween...a very cool experience.  A bit inspired by Trashman's Utarefson (itself inspired by.. well Nosferatu - a very cool German Expressionist flick in its own right) and then fell by the wayside for a year or so until watching Metropolis not so long ago and thought, "huh, I oughta get back on that particular german expressionist, silent treatment horse one of these days".  It will probably be silent though I'm still playing with the idea of using some sound effects.  Will probably be about 3 minutes long.  Will probably be a case of style over content as the story is uber simple and its more or less just an experiment.  Ive been avoiding using the camera switcher functionality in iclone, instead exporting clips separately and editing elsewhere for fear that the camera switcher influences the editing process.  Also, the HDR lighting effects mixed with the fog particle effects have crashed my video driver multiple times.  Very irritating.  Still, I think it will turn out pretty groovy if I ever finish it up.  

Hibernation

I stocked up on pie and cookies and holiday candy a plenty and seem to have settled down for a long winters nap. Been fiddling about with the Genie & the Trashman but with little urge to complete anything.  If I get an ounce more motivated I might have that little short out in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime I swear I will try to get a screenie or two out.  Monsters of the Atomic Age is festering about in my head as well.  I'm starting to get back into the motivated column and I have many of the sets just about ready, though the costumes remain a work in progress.


On the Iclone front Im digging Pauly's line of free Iclone characters and three of the better Iclone productions I've seen lately;  AT's Voyages of the Sojourner (a very strong 3rd act much like At's Expedition),  Raven2Angel's Echoes (check out that windswept apocalyptic exterior set) and AllPoint's "Who Am I: 2012" (so much work and effort is made to seem so effortless).  Yarmond has recently released his foul mouthed and nicely written MovieStorm flick, Jolly Old Saint Dick that has some great vivid characters and the J-Hard Christmas album commercial enclosed within like a belated xmas gift.


Otherwise, I've been reading The 5 C's of Cinematography which is a good source of thought on how to film.  Its dry but informative and has me attempting to think of scenes sequentially in terms of camerawork.  Also really enjoying this list of online tutorials for film and video production amassed by Mike Jones.  My fave so far is the 4 minute film school classes that includes material such as Drawless Animation (very cool segment).


Also finished up the graphic novel Luna Park which is visually something to behold but the story went somewhere I would not have expected.   Lets see, penniless, down on his luck, Russian soldier moves to America, lives in Coney Island and is an enforcer for a small time gangster.  Sound like any video game you've played lately?  And yet, its not that story at all.  While its no Asterios Polyp, its worth the time and money for the images alone.  I still haven't decided what I think of the story. 


So thats it, I guess I'm busier than I realized.