Goth winnowing

stardate

BRAIN: Chuck and Buck
SAMIR: saw it
SAMIR: Mike White said it was all based on him thinking about what would happen if one friend grabbed another’s dick while they were in the bathroom
SAMIR: thoughts?
BRAIN: I liked it
BRAIN: creepy yet sweet
BRAIN: I’m finding that is a genre I like
BRAIN: like May or Kissed
SAMIR: May!
SAMIR: I loved that
SAMIR: I liked Kissed a lot too
…

BRAIN: Victoria Victrola and the Vaudevillians have a song called Zombie
BRAIN: which has a million verses
BRAIN: it’s about a zombie outbreak and the narrator falls to a zombie, her bf leaving her behind
BRAIN: then as a zombie she finds him and bites him in revenge
BRAIN: what do you think of that story idea
SAMIR: interesting… is there an ending though?
BRAIN: presumably they wander around together in undead bliss
SAMIR: hm
SAMIR: that’s not revenge then
BRAIN: no, it’s the genre we were talking about earlier
SAMIR: sweet/creepy
BRAIN: yes
SAMIR: reminds me of the New Year’s Day episode of Fear Itself
…
SAMIR: the scripts weren’t well done
SAMIR: and it got a low audience
SAMIR: so [I consider] this idea still available
…
BRAIN: I would love to make a creepy sweet movie
BRAIN: like something that will winnow the true goths
BRAIN: like “in my day the real goths had dead animals around their rooms!”
BRAIN: none of this perky emo bullshit
BRAIN: my friend Danielle, who I met at a film festival when she was working in PR for a startup, is a total Grown Up Goth
BRAIN: and sure enough when I visited her house she had all this dead shit on the walls
BRAIN: she sort of sheepishly admitted she’s always had a thing for taxidermy
BRAIN: I was in awe

Velcro Ninja

stardate

The fastening is made from perforated steel strips 0.2 millimetres thick, one kind bristling with springy steel brushes and the other sporting jagged spikes.

Metaklett can support maximum weight when pulled on in the plane of the strips, and a square metre can hold a perpendicular load of 7 tonnes, says [Josef] Mair.

OJ: steel velcro!
BRAIN: I bet if you wrapped it around a stick and hit someone with it their skin would rip right off
OJ: i’m sure it will be in some japanese gore movie with that use soon
OJ: VELCROOOOOO NINJAAAAAAA!

Notes on Pikmin 2 tuning

stardate

Trying to get Pikmin 2 solved in the smallest number of days

  • Day 1 – you have no choice. You collect the 5 pikmin, then the battery, kill all the enemies and collect the other parts. Now you are blocked by water.
  • Day 2 – you also have no choice. You need to get the globe to get to the next area (purple pikmin)
  • Day 3 – your first free day in Awakening Wood. It’s possible to clear the two dungeons available. The race is to collect white pikmin (15 if you haven’t lost any from the cave you found them in) and get them to break down the poison wall that leads to the area with the broken bridge that leads to the main area. They cannot do this on the same day you get them unless you use red sprays. The blue pikmin here are behind an electric gate that you need yellow pikmin for, but they are not here. Get the other globe half behind this wall to open the third area, Perplexing Pool.
  • Third area: Perplexing Pool. Get the yellow pikmin the first day, you can clear the only accessible dungeon the same day (bring white pikmin!). If you collect the dead things near the yellow onion and then go to the dungeon, when you leave the dungeon the yellow onion will magically be near the rocket when you return.
  • Now return to Awakening Wood to retrieve the Blue Pikmin

Voyeurism koan

stardate

SARASOTA, FL. – A man accused of taking photos of a sleeping woman after he undressed her has been charged with Video Voyeurism.

The evidence was found in a camera that the man left behind at her residence.

OJ: voyeurism: FAIL
BRAIN: I know, how do you expect to beat off to photos you don’t have with you?

You know what is funny about voyeurism? It’s not so much the act as the getting caught that is the crime.

Like if no one EVER knew that you did it… the victim would not be harmed… since it’s their impression that causes the actual harm. The creepy feeling only happens after you discover someone has been watching you naked.

If a dude beats off to your naked body in the forest and no one finds out, does it make a sound?

Edit tightening checklist

cine notes

I posted this on a film collective forum but I realized I should have also posted it here.

I’ve put together a list of hints for editors to use when trying to get a tighter edit. I’d love to hear yours as well.

The motivation here: while I really enjoyed our [movies played at the collective’s] last showing, I think all of them could have benefited from a savage pruning, no doubt having missed out on re-edits due to time constraints. Even if you disagree, I hope some of these tricks come in handy.

All these tricks come with a caveat: if it “looks weird,” then ease up a bit.

Decide in advance how long a given movement or line is going to take. Then edit the footage to match that length. Sometimes I’ll edit with all the video turned off, just to get the timing on the dialog right, and then I’ll turn the video back on for fine-tuning. What this technique lets you do is to decide the pacing of the scene, without letting the source footage decide for you.

Trim actions to their shortest possible length. Watch every clip in slow motion… keep cutting frames off the end until you can no longer tell what is happening in the clip. Now back up and add a bit to the ends again. Make sure someone watches what you end up with to make sure they can still follow the action!

In general, try to make on-camera movements take slightly less time than they did on set. If the audience sees a shot of your hero’s hand reaching for the car door handle and then the hero settling into a car seat… they will fill in that the hero has gotten into the car.

Time remapping: if an action takes too long in a given take, speed up the footage to match your timing. This may not always be a linear conversion! For dialog, make sure to change the pitch to get back to the original tone of the dialog before you changed the speed.

Sound during a take may be screwing up the pacing of the footage. Watch the clip with the sound off. If you would have cut it differently, consider using the sound from another take, or move the dialog to be off-screen. In extreme cases, beg the post sound team for ADR.

Similarly, overlap audio from one take into the video for the adjoining take. Let’s say you have clip A, followed by clip B. In one direction, audio A carries over into clip B – allowing the audience time to watch the reaction of the character in clip B to the dialog. In the other direction, audio from clip B starts while clip A is still playing… preparing the audience to see clip B, and generating a little bit of anticipation / suspense.

Footage, sections of script, or even entire scenes can be cut. The hardest decision the director can make is “yeah, even though I love that scene, it’s totally redundant.” And yet… this decision is frequently all too necessary. If this part of the script was removed entirely… would the audience still know what is going on? Yes? Well would the mood be changed significantly for the worse? No? Well then, get rid of it. Please. Obviously the director needs to be a part of this decision! As the director, when you are watching the rough cut, ask yourself: if I went to the snack bar during this part, would I have missed anything really crucial? If the answer is “no,” then you know what has to be done. As Samantha is fond of saying, “you must kill your children.”

Flatworms

stardate

Today I found a gooey thing in my indoor water plant. I shook the bowl a bit and the goo ball slowly elongated… into an arrow head.

I figured out this must be a planarian / flatworm. I had never seen one of these guys before! There’s no chemicals in my plant, and the water is crystal clear. I guess it’s a vote of confidence that these guys are living in the water. They must have come from the (outdoor) pond where I was growing my other water garden.

I have two bowls. In the planarian one, there is parrot feather, duckweed, and fairy moss. And aphids on the parrot feather. I think I found a larval ladybug which I put on the bowl; hopefully that will do something.

The other bowl isn’t doing as well. The plant in it is a water hyacinth of some kind, which came with soil in the roots. It’s a floating plant. My mom got it for me and left it outside with no water, so when I got it, it was half-dead. It seems to be coming back. Unfortunately I left it outdoors for a couple days so now there is some kind of water thing living in it – I think mosquito larvae. The water is black and murky. I have to drain it and start over.

The Doll Squad

flix

…is one of the most hilariously bad movies I’ve ever seen.

The acting is bad. The writing is ridiculous. The main character has makeup that makes her look like she’s 60.

The direction is I’m pretty sure done while drunk. Actors walk in front of lights and perform like in a kindergarten vegetable play (to quote Michael Litfin). Sometimes they completely flub a line.

The editor put this weird kaleidoscope transition that is so brief it looks like it’s left in on accident.

Tura Satana is in it!

The violence is also funny. Ten minutes in, someone gets shot in the face, and she spins around crosseyed before falling to the ground. An enemy agent is tortured into confessing by pulling her hair.

Tons of wacky spy gadgets: brain implants. Pocket flamethrowers. Microfilms, truth serum, silenced guns, exploding cars…

Health Care

stardate

I promise when elected to impose free mandatory health care for everyone, including illegal immigrants and house plants.

I also promise to require random abortions and institute “Death Boards” that will control the population, by quota, but also largely by arbitrary whim.

In addition, 20% of the population will be required to reverse their sexual orientation, also chosen at random.

Maybe then you all can have something real to complain about.

3 Colors

flix

Watching an extra in the Special Features of “Blue” where director / cinematographer Krzysztof Kieslowski describes (in 1994) the construction of the cafe/sugarcube scene and the logistics required to make sure it took exactly 4-5 seconds for the coffee to diffuse through the sugarcube.

He also describes why he chose each close-up and the philosophy of the scene.

In the extra in the disc of “White” – he describes the beginning, where the main character enters the courthouse cut between shots of the suitcase on the conveyer belt.

This beginning was re-cut. He describes the intentional primitive images in all three films – a wheel on the road, a suitcase on a belt, and some wires in “Red.” The hero is intentionally awkward in movement and in dress, originally using long shots to let the audience absorb the hero’s mannerisms. However this was too long, so it was re-cut with the suitcases.

The hero is “marked” by a pigeon, which has tradition behind it in addition to the director “marking” the character for emphasis. Also it’s humiliating: Kieslowski describes “White” as being a movie about humiliation. Look at his face when he wipes the poop off his shoulder.

The suitcase is seen in the beginning and is meaningless. But it is a preview that we see later when we know what is in it (actually I kind of assumed there was a body in it, but that is probably because I watch too many yakuza movies).

“Red” is the best of the three. Irene Jacob is super hot, and her every movement is posed to match the light position exactly. The color choices are also the most strict of the three: every item in every shot is black or red.

The plot is the most self-referential: all the elements refer to each other at the end: the billboard image and the still from the news, and the young and old judge, with the same women and same experience with law books. In fact, the same experience with the “other man”: the young judge loses his blonde gf to the model’s photographer, but the photographer essentially loses his model to her England trip where the young judge is. The main characters from the previous two movies also make a very brief cameo.