Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Week Three
There's a kind of feeling you get when your body hasn't had quite enough sleep - enough to function, but not enough to do much beyond that - where everything feels like there's a half-second delay built in.
For some reason I haven't been sleeping well for the last few days, and I'm kind of operating on the assumption that I haven't developed an alternate persona and started a cult while I'm being an insomniac that manages underground fight clubs.
So there's a lecture in one hour, forty-nine minutes. It's half an hour's drive away, followed by the hunt for a parking space - because my university renounced believing in cars in 1972 under papal edict - followed by a fifteen minute walk from the only place you can park, at which it's recommended you don't by the same university, even though there's no alternative.
This is all part of the fun, see.
I love my course, and, by extension, I love my life, even if I have to do so on five hours' sleep...
Anyway.
As it came up last time, here at Eton Crow, for a film blog we don't actually talk about films that often, and for a filmmaker's blog, we don't actually post that many films. So you've been waiting for so long, here's two at once; firstly, Eton Crow's own attempt at a Jenny Everywhere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Everywhere) film:
And secondly, a friend has asked me to host and post this:
Which I was fairly happy to do, given just how pretty it is.
Anyway, it's early yet. I wonder what today has in store...
Sunday, 6 February 2011
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
Summer '92, I remember it clearly
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Just Consider This
So this is just a short entry.
First, listen to this, from Sunshine:
Now watch this:
Now watch this:
Now go watch Kick-Ass
. 'Cause this music shows up again. See, now, previously I'd only noted it in relation to Wolverine and The Adjustment Bureau, but thanks to the magnificence of TV tropes, it appears that the same music - or rearrangements of the same music - pop up in four different places.
So... Consider that, if you will. Because I know I am...
Diary of a Mature Student: Just Consider This
So this is just a short entry.
First, listen to this, from Sunshine:
Now watch this:
Now watch this:
Now go watch Kick-Ass
. 'Cause this music shows up again. See, now, previously I'd only noted it in relation to Wolverine and The Adjustment Bureau, but thanks to the magnificence of TV tropes, it appears that the same music - or rearrangements of the same music - pop up in four different places. So... Consider that, if you will. Because I know I am...
Monday, 17 January 2011
I'll hold tight - I'll remember to smile
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Waiting for the day after the day
So it occurs to me that for a film blog, there isn't too much actual writing about, y'know, film. Apart from complaining about 3D, but that makes me a redshirt in a sea of crimson.
Here's the thing; studying anything tends to change how you look at whatever it is you study. I know this isn't a revelation, but as has been said before, it's like watching a magic show from the side of the stage, where you can see the mirrors and paraphenalia. You won't catch all the misdirection and presdigitation, but you won't miss it all either, and that halfway stage between knowledge and understanding can get kind of annoying.
So watching your actual film becomes a kind of well, look at how they did that, or I can see the plot structure from here, and you can kind of tell what's going to happen way before it does, which any sane person who's seen enough films can also do, but at least they're not inculcated into doing it as a routine.
So you - or at least, I did - start looking for films that are different in some way, and start to treasure that little occasional bit of difference. It's not quite the same as the fan who rabidly defends the obscure because they like it before it was cool. It's just... When something falls into the venn diagram of both different and good, well, that's a nice event.
This is why I need you to check out Black Dynamite
.
Black Dynamite is, in an odd kind of way, the perfect film for film students. This is primarily because, in aping the low-budget films it affectionately parodies, Black Dynamite helps point out what you shouldn't do while making you laugh at how they do it.
The DVD comes out in the UK on Monday, for the low, low price of £7.99. You have no reason not to buy it, because it's one of the funniest films I have ever seen. Granted, my recommendation not withstanding, it's also very well done, extremely clever and has one of the best sight-gag setups I have ever seen, without any hyperbole.
So... there you go! That's this month's quota of writing about actual films.
Diary of a Mature Student: Waiting for the day after the day
So it occurs to me that for a film blog, there isn't too much actual writing about, y'know, film. Apart from complaining about 3D, but that makes me a redshirt in a sea of crimson.
Here's the thing; studying anything tends to change how you look at whatever it is you study. I know this isn't a revelation, but as has been said before, it's like watching a magic show from the side of the stage, where you can see the mirrors and paraphenalia. You won't catch all the misdirection and presdigitation, but you won't miss it all either, and that halfway stage between knowledge and understanding can get kind of annoying.
So watching your actual film becomes a kind of well, look at how they did that, or I can see the plot structure from here, and you can kind of tell what's going to happen way before it does, which any sane person who's seen enough films can also do, but at least they're not inculcated into doing it as a routine.
So you - or at least, I did - start looking for films that are different in some way, and start to treasure that little occasional bit of difference. It's not quite the same as the fan who rabidly defends the obscure because they like it before it was cool. It's just... When something falls into the venn diagram of both different and good, well, that's a nice event.
This is why I need you to check out Black Dynamite
. Black Dynamite is, in an odd kind of way, the perfect film for film students. This is primarily because, in aping the low-budget films it affectionately parodies, Black Dynamite helps point out what you shouldn't do while making you laugh at how they do it.
The DVD comes out in the UK on Monday, for the low, low price of £7.99. You have no reason not to buy it, because it's one of the funniest films I have ever seen. Granted, my recommendation not withstanding, it's also very well done, extremely clever and has one of the best sight-gag setups I have ever seen, without any hyperbole.
So... there you go! That's this month's quota of writing about actual films.
Monday, 3 January 2011
It started out as a feeling, which then grew into a hope
Our Director writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: The Inbetween Hours
Let's kick off with a not-so-controversial statement: £11.30 feels like a ridiculous amount to have to pay to see a film.
It's popular to jump upon the anti-3D bandwagon. I don't really want to do that, but there are - obviously - reasons why people wield the hammers of discontent in the direction of the 3D film phenomenon.
Sure, it makes films a new and different experience - temporarily - but at the core of things, it feels oddly Barnum and Bailey, because, thanks to the way things are, cinema is, well, suffering. So why, you might ask, should we begrudge the Film Industry the chance to fight for its' continued existence?
Because, I would say, 3D conversion isn't fighting.
I feel old at the moment. This is just life, really, 'cause everyone feels this every now and then. But right now I feel how I must imagine my grandparents felt on the introduction of Television, or how my parents felt during the shift between eight-track and vinyl to cassettes, to CDs. And let's not be excluding minidiscs, because it ain't nice to exclude.
What it feels like, to myself and probably myself only - and considering nobody reads this blog anyway (I've just found the Stats button, and my all time high was a post on Doctor Who which garnered an impressive 15 pageviews) is that cinema is currently trying to make a shift analogous to the difference between audio cassettes and audio CDs.
For those of you too young to remember - and, unfortunately, I know you exist - cassettes, like their predecessors, were linear in function, i.e. you listened to the songs one, by one, by one, and you had to rewind or fast-forward in (approximately) real time to skip them or listen to them again. Suddenly - well, relatively suddenly - CDs come along, and you can skip from track to track and back and back with merry abandon, in nonlinear time.
Functionally, it's the same principle as the difference between video cassette and DVD - a film on video was linear, in that you had to rewind or fast forward without any particular degree of accuracy. They were bulky, and that was the biggest problem once DVDs came along - you could stop worrying about storage space and upgrade to something half the size or, if you got shot of the case, just the size of a CD.
Now, in theory, you don't have to buy a physical product at all, which is kind of mindblowing for a child of the 1980s.
Of course, we can reparse that last sentence with a reitalicisation, because now you don't have to buy a product at all, physical or not.
Here's a declaration; back in the day, I loved the idea of Napster. Friends used it, and they couldn't stop espousing the virtues of downloading what you wanted, when you wanted it, forever, for free. Napster had a window of approximately thirteen months before it was shut down, but it's not particularly hyperbolic to state that it had a revolutionary impact upon the "illegal transfer of intellectual property" or, to yourself and myself, music.
Now, I have a fairly confused moral stance on torrenting, which may make me unpopular with the current generation, because, basically, I don't do it.
This isn't necessarily because of the whole "illegal" part - although that's certainly a part of it, wacky square that I am - but more a choice, albeit one that's certainly not the popular way of doing things in this, our modern world.
For me, it comes down to the issue of access. Napster was revolutionary not because of the 'music for free' part but because of the sheer amount of things you could access. In the end, it was oddly fatiguing; those I knew who used it would end up running out of things to search for long before they'd accessed even a percent of what was there.
As a teenager, music meant listening to the limited choice of radio stations - in the hope they'd play something from the last year, and not the last forty - or going to that mythical place, the Record Shop, and actually having the money to buy something.
At my computer now, I can access Spotify - which will find anything they have in their server cloud, and stream it to me (albeit at the price of occasional advertising). Alternatively, people upload songs to Youtube so I can find anything I particularly want there as well. If I want to pay for it, I can download the MP3 via Spotify or Amazon or iTunes.
I know that if you're under, say, 25, none of this is news or even remotely novel to you, but that's the joy of youth, I guess. If you are young and reading this - two rarely co-inciding dynamics, I suspect - then try and imagine that mythical land before 2000 where there were only four, then five television channels, where the internet streamed at 56k down the phone line, and when information that wanted - as the hacker dictum goes - to be free, wasn't.
And now it is.
So here's the thing. Even though information - in the form of songs, books, films, whatever - is now free, it hasn't stopped the information being produced. Breaking down the dam hasn't stopped the river flowing - it just means that the average netizen is flooded with choices and methods and ways and means.
If I were part of the bricks-and-mortar information industry - the music companies, the publishing companies, the film industry as a whole - I would, obviously, be very worried about the money aspect.
Having been to the cinema today, it feels like - in the film industry, at least - that worry is starting to manifest itself in undignified ways.
I'll give you an analogy. I drive a reliable car. For two years, the service costs were reasonable, what you'd expect. The year the mechanic servicing my car decided to retire, the cost of servicing was three times the previous years. This would be understandable if anything more than previous years had been wrong, but it seemed, at the time, as if the mechanic was just charging as he liked because, hell, he wouldn't have to do it again, see me again, or care what I thought.
Today, at the cinema, I was five minutes late. This meant I only had to sit through thirty-five minutes of commercials.
Unfortunately, once the trailers and adverts were done, there was some of the most blatant shilling I can honestly say I have ever seen.
Let's talk about Paul.
I like Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, because of Shaun of the Dead and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hot Fuzz. (I liked Spaced for a time, too, and maybe even Hyperdrive.) I like watching Simon Pegg's career go from little fish in a tiny pond - i.e. the British film industry - to little fish in a bigger pond, to a growing fish - supporting roles in MI:3, Star Trek and, of all things, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's nice to see homegrown talent doing well.
It's not nice to see homegrown talent desperately shilling for business.
Once the trailers had finished, but before the film, Pegg and Frost appeared. At first it was to give the whole "Thanks for actually coming to the cinema!" thing, which is getting a bit tedious in itself - it feels like you're being thanked for making the goddamn effort to drag yourself into town and concurrently being patronised for paying eleven! pounds! thirty! (plus £1 for the 3D glasses). In communicative terms, it doesn't make sense - once the audience have paid, there's no real need to thank them for doing so, you've already got them - and it's also odd to be, functionally, thanked for not being a pirate.
So far, so usual - but then because they were willing to do their bit, the trailer for Paul followed, which is, technically, fair enough.
After this, Pegg and Frost joke for a minute about how you should see their film, then try to sell you the Odeon Loyalty Card.
Wait, what?
In effect, it was like paying to be advertised to, as if you have to put up with the adverts for the right - nay, the privilege - to see the film in the first place.
This is where I can kind of understand the attraction of torrenting and downloading - you're not suffering a constancy of advertisement just to see what you've paid to see.
Another example; I went out and bought Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on DVD last week, being a huge, nerdy SP fan.
Before playing, there are six - skippable, thankfully - trailers on the DVD for not just films, but enticing you to buy the next generation of DVD player, to visit the Universal Studios park on the other side of the goddamn world - and how does that work, really? "Oh, honey, we've seen the film, now let's fly to LA! - before the film comes on.
At least now the trailers are unskippable, for I recall a dark time when some DVDs came with unskippable adverts for things like Maltesers.
So. Let's bring in the standard cliché; the Film Industry stands at a crossroads, right now. it's a cliché because it's true.
On one hand you have crackdowns and ISPs getting stricter on downloads, prosecuting the users and shutting down the torrents, which is scary and, given the proliferation of technology, unrealistic. In some ways, it leads to a future where all downloading via legal ISPs will be monitored in realtime.
On the other hand, you have the choice of finding a new way to entice people. Forget 3D, because yes, it's pretty, but it's also going to be a long time before it's perfect and the glasses don't induce a headache. 3D feels like an attempt to buy time and get the last generation of cinema-goers to retain their interest. Instead, you have to find a way to stop talking at people - mandatory advertising, high costs, new gimmicks - and actually establish some sort of dialogue to find out what your audience actually wants, because, frankly, it's not forty minutes of 3D commercials followed by shilling for a loyalty card that only exists because people over 25 still go to cinemas.
In some respects, it's basically, to call back to my analogy earlier, time to find a new mechanic.
Of course, I'm buggered if I know that would look like...
Diary of a Mature Student: The Inbetween Hours
Let's kick off with a not-so-controversial statement: £11.30 feels like a ridiculous amount to have to pay to see a film.
It's popular to jump upon the anti-3D bandwagon. I don't really want to do that, but there are - obviously - reasons why people wield the hammers of discontent in the direction of the 3D film phenomenon.
Sure, it makes films a new and different experience - temporarily - but at the core of things, it feels oddly Barnum and Bailey, because, thanks to the way things are, cinema is, well, suffering. So why, you might ask, should we begrudge the Film Industry the chance to fight for its' continued existence?
Because, I would say, 3D conversion isn't fighting.
I feel old at the moment. This is just life, really, 'cause everyone feels this every now and then. But right now I feel how I must imagine my grandparents felt on the introduction of Television, or how my parents felt during the shift between eight-track and vinyl to cassettes, to CDs. And let's not be excluding minidiscs, because it ain't nice to exclude.
What it feels like, to myself and probably myself only - and considering nobody reads this blog anyway (I've just found the Stats button, and my all time high was a post on Doctor Who which garnered an impressive 15 pageviews) is that cinema is currently trying to make a shift analogous to the difference between audio cassettes and audio CDs.
For those of you too young to remember - and, unfortunately, I know you exist - cassettes, like their predecessors, were linear in function, i.e. you listened to the songs one, by one, by one, and you had to rewind or fast-forward in (approximately) real time to skip them or listen to them again. Suddenly - well, relatively suddenly - CDs come along, and you can skip from track to track and back and back with merry abandon, in nonlinear time.
Functionally, it's the same principle as the difference between video cassette and DVD - a film on video was linear, in that you had to rewind or fast forward without any particular degree of accuracy. They were bulky, and that was the biggest problem once DVDs came along - you could stop worrying about storage space and upgrade to something half the size or, if you got shot of the case, just the size of a CD.
Now, in theory, you don't have to buy a physical product at all, which is kind of mindblowing for a child of the 1980s.
Of course, we can reparse that last sentence with a reitalicisation, because now you don't have to buy a product at all, physical or not.
Here's a declaration; back in the day, I loved the idea of Napster. Friends used it, and they couldn't stop espousing the virtues of downloading what you wanted, when you wanted it, forever, for free. Napster had a window of approximately thirteen months before it was shut down, but it's not particularly hyperbolic to state that it had a revolutionary impact upon the "illegal transfer of intellectual property" or, to yourself and myself, music.
Now, I have a fairly confused moral stance on torrenting, which may make me unpopular with the current generation, because, basically, I don't do it.
This isn't necessarily because of the whole "illegal" part - although that's certainly a part of it, wacky square that I am - but more a choice, albeit one that's certainly not the popular way of doing things in this, our modern world.
For me, it comes down to the issue of access. Napster was revolutionary not because of the 'music for free' part but because of the sheer amount of things you could access. In the end, it was oddly fatiguing; those I knew who used it would end up running out of things to search for long before they'd accessed even a percent of what was there.
As a teenager, music meant listening to the limited choice of radio stations - in the hope they'd play something from the last year, and not the last forty - or going to that mythical place, the Record Shop, and actually having the money to buy something.
At my computer now, I can access Spotify - which will find anything they have in their server cloud, and stream it to me (albeit at the price of occasional advertising). Alternatively, people upload songs to Youtube so I can find anything I particularly want there as well. If I want to pay for it, I can download the MP3 via Spotify or Amazon or iTunes.
I know that if you're under, say, 25, none of this is news or even remotely novel to you, but that's the joy of youth, I guess. If you are young and reading this - two rarely co-inciding dynamics, I suspect - then try and imagine that mythical land before 2000 where there were only four, then five television channels, where the internet streamed at 56k down the phone line, and when information that wanted - as the hacker dictum goes - to be free, wasn't.
And now it is.
So here's the thing. Even though information - in the form of songs, books, films, whatever - is now free, it hasn't stopped the information being produced. Breaking down the dam hasn't stopped the river flowing - it just means that the average netizen is flooded with choices and methods and ways and means.
If I were part of the bricks-and-mortar information industry - the music companies, the publishing companies, the film industry as a whole - I would, obviously, be very worried about the money aspect.
Having been to the cinema today, it feels like - in the film industry, at least - that worry is starting to manifest itself in undignified ways.
I'll give you an analogy. I drive a reliable car. For two years, the service costs were reasonable, what you'd expect. The year the mechanic servicing my car decided to retire, the cost of servicing was three times the previous years. This would be understandable if anything more than previous years had been wrong, but it seemed, at the time, as if the mechanic was just charging as he liked because, hell, he wouldn't have to do it again, see me again, or care what I thought.
Today, at the cinema, I was five minutes late. This meant I only had to sit through thirty-five minutes of commercials.
Unfortunately, once the trailers and adverts were done, there was some of the most blatant shilling I can honestly say I have ever seen.
Let's talk about Paul.
I like Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, because of Shaun of the Dead and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hot Fuzz. (I liked Spaced for a time, too, and maybe even Hyperdrive.) I like watching Simon Pegg's career go from little fish in a tiny pond - i.e. the British film industry - to little fish in a bigger pond, to a growing fish - supporting roles in MI:3, Star Trek and, of all things, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It's nice to see homegrown talent doing well.
It's not nice to see homegrown talent desperately shilling for business.
Once the trailers had finished, but before the film, Pegg and Frost appeared. At first it was to give the whole "Thanks for actually coming to the cinema!" thing, which is getting a bit tedious in itself - it feels like you're being thanked for making the goddamn effort to drag yourself into town and concurrently being patronised for paying eleven! pounds! thirty! (plus £1 for the 3D glasses). In communicative terms, it doesn't make sense - once the audience have paid, there's no real need to thank them for doing so, you've already got them - and it's also odd to be, functionally, thanked for not being a pirate.
So far, so usual - but then because they were willing to do their bit, the trailer for Paul followed, which is, technically, fair enough.
After this, Pegg and Frost joke for a minute about how you should see their film, then try to sell you the Odeon Loyalty Card.
Wait, what?
In effect, it was like paying to be advertised to, as if you have to put up with the adverts for the right - nay, the privilege - to see the film in the first place.
This is where I can kind of understand the attraction of torrenting and downloading - you're not suffering a constancy of advertisement just to see what you've paid to see.
Another example; I went out and bought Scott Pilgrim vs. The World on DVD last week, being a huge, nerdy SP fan.
Before playing, there are six - skippable, thankfully - trailers on the DVD for not just films, but enticing you to buy the next generation of DVD player, to visit the Universal Studios park on the other side of the goddamn world - and how does that work, really? "Oh, honey, we've seen the film, now let's fly to LA! - before the film comes on.
At least now the trailers are unskippable, for I recall a dark time when some DVDs came with unskippable adverts for things like Maltesers.
So. Let's bring in the standard cliché; the Film Industry stands at a crossroads, right now. it's a cliché because it's true.
On one hand you have crackdowns and ISPs getting stricter on downloads, prosecuting the users and shutting down the torrents, which is scary and, given the proliferation of technology, unrealistic. In some ways, it leads to a future where all downloading via legal ISPs will be monitored in realtime.
On the other hand, you have the choice of finding a new way to entice people. Forget 3D, because yes, it's pretty, but it's also going to be a long time before it's perfect and the glasses don't induce a headache. 3D feels like an attempt to buy time and get the last generation of cinema-goers to retain their interest. Instead, you have to find a way to stop talking at people - mandatory advertising, high costs, new gimmicks - and actually establish some sort of dialogue to find out what your audience actually wants, because, frankly, it's not forty minutes of 3D commercials followed by shilling for a loyalty card that only exists because people over 25 still go to cinemas.
In some respects, it's basically, to call back to my analogy earlier, time to find a new mechanic.
Of course, I'm buggered if I know that would look like...
Friday, 24 December 2010
I'll come back, when you you call me - no need to say goodbye
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Genetically Modified Santa Time
Okay, so forget Christmas.
Let's talk about The Jacket. (Or, for the Amazon crowd, The Jacket).
I (heart) The Jacket as much as I like using the phrase "I (heart) (x)".
(I like using the latter, because old people attempting to use current slang = perpetual fun).
I am unsure exactly how The Jacket managed to fuck up the simple "Make More Money Than The Film Costs" equation - given that, according to reliable sources (well, wikipedia, but it is Christmas Eve and I can't be bothered to do much in the way of research) it took approximately seven million less than it cost to make, which is something normally only reserved for films like Punisher: War Zone.
My question is; why does this make any particular sense? Let's run through the negative points first;
- The storyline is not that easy to follow unless you immediately swallow the concept of time travel via something similar to a Tulpa;
- There's a kind of icky undertone where the main characters meet once when one is very young then again where she's older, and the older versions have "The Sex", although it's only an undertone
- Some of the people involved get hit with the idiot hammer with alarming regularity.
But, seriously, the wattage of the film is strangely immense. You've got:
- Adrien Brody, just pre-King Kong but post The Pianist and The Village;
- Keira Knightley, post-Pirates of the Carribean, King Arthur and Love Actually
- Kris Kristofferson, post the entire Blade trilogy (although given the third film, well...) and pre-... um... nevermind
- Jennifer Jason Leigh, lovely in eXistenZ, also post Road to Perdition, similar to:
- Daniel Craig, post-Layer Cake and Road to Perdition, and just pre-Casino Royale;
- Hell, there's even Reliable Character Actor Brendan Coyle, who you may also remember from Downton Abbey
- And Steven Mackintosh, who's been in oh so so much.
You could base an entire publicity campaign on Brody and Knightley and sell it on that basis alone, and surely it'd take more than $21 million.
But apparently not.
There's a lesson here, kids, although I'm not sure exactly what it is beyond big stars do not necessarily a big film make. So... Draw your own conclusions.
And while you're at it, have a happy seasonal holiday.
Diary of a Mature Student: Genetically Modified Santa Time
Okay, so forget Christmas.
Let's talk about The Jacket. (Or, for the Amazon crowd, The Jacket).
I (heart) The Jacket as much as I like using the phrase "I (heart) (x)".
(I like using the latter, because old people attempting to use current slang = perpetual fun). I am unsure exactly how The Jacket managed to fuck up the simple "Make More Money Than The Film Costs" equation - given that, according to reliable sources (well, wikipedia, but it is Christmas Eve and I can't be bothered to do much in the way of research) it took approximately seven million less than it cost to make, which is something normally only reserved for films like Punisher: War Zone.
My question is; why does this make any particular sense? Let's run through the negative points first;
- The storyline is not that easy to follow unless you immediately swallow the concept of time travel via something similar to a Tulpa;
- There's a kind of icky undertone where the main characters meet once when one is very young then again where she's older, and the older versions have "The Sex", although it's only an undertone
- Some of the people involved get hit with the idiot hammer with alarming regularity.
But, seriously, the wattage of the film is strangely immense. You've got:
- Adrien Brody, just pre-King Kong but post The Pianist and The Village;
- Keira Knightley, post-Pirates of the Carribean, King Arthur and Love Actually
- Kris Kristofferson, post the entire Blade trilogy (although given the third film, well...) and pre-... um... nevermind
- Jennifer Jason Leigh, lovely in eXistenZ, also post Road to Perdition, similar to:
- Daniel Craig, post-Layer Cake and Road to Perdition, and just pre-Casino Royale;
- Hell, there's even Reliable Character Actor Brendan Coyle, who you may also remember from Downton Abbey
- And Steven Mackintosh, who's been in oh so so much.
You could base an entire publicity campaign on Brody and Knightley and sell it on that basis alone, and surely it'd take more than $21 million.
But apparently not.
There's a lesson here, kids, although I'm not sure exactly what it is beyond big stars do not necessarily a big film make. So... Draw your own conclusions.
And while you're at it, have a happy seasonal holiday.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
Mix with the local gentry and don't crash Tarquin's Bentley
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Seasonal Greetings Or Not
I'm renouncing narrative filmmaking.
At least for next semester.
This, to a film student, is apparently like moving from Christianity to Satanism, but, if so, sign me up with the Horned God, because fucking hell but narrative filmmaking has become irritating to do.
It's not so much the writing - although that has it's own annoying qualities - so much as recording the dialogue.
Be the first to tell me when I'm wrong, please, but dialogue recording for student films has proved - for me, if nobody else - to be the biggest ballache this side of the Alps. It's literally almost never perfect on the day, and ADR and Looping have yet to prove particularly useful, although perhaps more useful than the alternative.
The main reason for this is that we don't have sets - every location is, by definition, a found location, and if you have electricity points, then hey, you're bouncing already.
Last year, I made four short films of a fairly low quality. The first was, curiously, the best in sound terms; four conversations over a three-minute period, decent boom work. From there, it was all downhill; the second had some ADR (and, ambitiously, some foley work), but wasn't that great in sound terms. The third was a dancing film, dialogue-free, based around the cuts and the dissolves, and was pretty fun. The final one had an entire section of dialogue that was cut out, followed by a dialogue-free opening sequence that was pretty solid - nice visuals, but the rest of the film didn't materialise anywhere or anywhen.
Of the four films, 25% had decent sound, 50% were all the better for being dialogue-free, and on the last one, the less said the better.
This year, the first film made had decent dialogue because we were, curiously enough, subbed all the best equipment for a day.
The second film, however, currently awaits editing, and I'm dreading it, because we pretty blatantly didn't have the good equipment. So continuity editing is going to be appalling, because the light changes over the course of the day, during a single conversation. The evening's filming should be fine, although it's kind of a reprise of a film from last year.
That last sentence should give you a bit of a clue about one of the major student film problems, however; time.
The filming took place over the course of a single fourteen hour day, at the end of which I was wondering why I'd thought it was a good idea in the first place, although to be fair I always ask myself that question upon making a new film.
I want to edit it, because there are some odd little moments of beauty in there. I've uploaded the footage - a process made laborious because the computer here in the Eton Crow offices with a working firewire port has a tiny hard drive and the computer with a large drive doesn't have a working firewire port, which meant transferring all the footage piecemeal from one to the other. But it's done, now, and ready, now, and I'm not ready, now, at all.
Instead, I'm ready to renounce my faith in narrative filmmaking. From now on, it's all music videos and maybe documentaries, baby, because no dialogue means no worries...
... At least, in theory...
Diary of a Mature Student: Seasonal Greetings Or Not
I'm renouncing narrative filmmaking.
At least for next semester.
This, to a film student, is apparently like moving from Christianity to Satanism, but, if so, sign me up with the Horned God, because fucking hell but narrative filmmaking has become irritating to do.
It's not so much the writing - although that has it's own annoying qualities - so much as recording the dialogue.
Be the first to tell me when I'm wrong, please, but dialogue recording for student films has proved - for me, if nobody else - to be the biggest ballache this side of the Alps. It's literally almost never perfect on the day, and ADR and Looping have yet to prove particularly useful, although perhaps more useful than the alternative.
The main reason for this is that we don't have sets - every location is, by definition, a found location, and if you have electricity points, then hey, you're bouncing already.
Last year, I made four short films of a fairly low quality. The first was, curiously, the best in sound terms; four conversations over a three-minute period, decent boom work. From there, it was all downhill; the second had some ADR (and, ambitiously, some foley work), but wasn't that great in sound terms. The third was a dancing film, dialogue-free, based around the cuts and the dissolves, and was pretty fun. The final one had an entire section of dialogue that was cut out, followed by a dialogue-free opening sequence that was pretty solid - nice visuals, but the rest of the film didn't materialise anywhere or anywhen.
Of the four films, 25% had decent sound, 50% were all the better for being dialogue-free, and on the last one, the less said the better.
This year, the first film made had decent dialogue because we were, curiously enough, subbed all the best equipment for a day.
The second film, however, currently awaits editing, and I'm dreading it, because we pretty blatantly didn't have the good equipment. So continuity editing is going to be appalling, because the light changes over the course of the day, during a single conversation. The evening's filming should be fine, although it's kind of a reprise of a film from last year.
That last sentence should give you a bit of a clue about one of the major student film problems, however; time.
The filming took place over the course of a single fourteen hour day, at the end of which I was wondering why I'd thought it was a good idea in the first place, although to be fair I always ask myself that question upon making a new film.
I want to edit it, because there are some odd little moments of beauty in there. I've uploaded the footage - a process made laborious because the computer here in the Eton Crow offices with a working firewire port has a tiny hard drive and the computer with a large drive doesn't have a working firewire port, which meant transferring all the footage piecemeal from one to the other. But it's done, now, and ready, now, and I'm not ready, now, at all.
Instead, I'm ready to renounce my faith in narrative filmmaking. From now on, it's all music videos and maybe documentaries, baby, because no dialogue means no worries...
... At least, in theory...
It's good to know that you are home for Christmas - it's good to know that you are doing well
Our Director Writes:
Diary of a Mature Student: Mistletoe and Wine
In some ways, what I basically miss is The Sofa.
Way back when, in the mists of time, I used to visit friends in London fairly regularly - initially when I was still living there, then afterwards I'd travel down to see them, do the social thing. All very nice.
It was an interesting little flat - I was friends with one of the male residents (and by extension his girlfriend, later fiancé, later wife), and he was dating one of two sisters, the other of whom lived there with her soon-to-be husband.
What would happen is that, after a night with a few drinks, or a meal (with a few drinks), or just an evening in general, is that myself and my friend would sit down and watch some of the trashiest, worst films known to man.
I can't honestly remember how it began - I think, although I have no proof, that it was X-Men 2, which is in no way trashy or bad. (It is, however, pretty long for a blockbuster, superhero film. But that's another thing.) However, after that, things took an ominous turn when I discovered that Starship Troopers 2 was being released straight-to-dvd. It sounded, from the ancillary material, so bad that it kind of had to be seen.
Having seen the film all those years ago, I can't recall much, if anything, about it, because I'd had what might charitably be called A Little Too Much to drink. I remember, however, having the hiccups. This is probably not relevant.
What began with Starship Troopers 2 - a film which I may now have to watch sober, to see if any 1960s-style acid flashbacks pop up - continued as a kind of challenge; I'd thrown down a gauntlet, with that, and because my friend is oddly competitive, we started trading back and forth with films that inhabited a certain level - basically so bad but still watchable, rather than so bad as to be completely unwatchable whatsoever.
If I recall correctly, he then responded with a double whammy - Alone in the Dark, which was so bad as to be unwatchable, but then immediately made up for with Doom, which has few enough redeeming qualities but is certainly enjoyable enough if you're in the right frame of mind.
I responded to this with Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, which is an interesting film on many counts, to which I was duly responded to with Kingdom of the Spiders, starring the truly great William Shatner.
The last two, however, were done by postal correspondance, and that saddens me a little, because I kind of miss the significance of the sofa.
Don't read too much into this, because all I mean is that that type of film watching was done just for the fun of it, not because I had to study it, or write about it, or give two tugs of a dog's tail about it in any way, shape or form.
Now, when I watch a film, I see continuity errors, plot holes, narrative function; it's like watching a magic show from behind the curtain, on occasion.
You shouldn't mistake this for any yen for a simpler time, a less complex time, a time when the rain was never cold and the summers went on forever; it'd just be nice to find films to watch just to watch, that's all.
Thankfully, I have the kind of family that insists on buying me these odd collections of B-movies - The Last Man On Earth and The Prehistoric Planet were Christmas Presents Of Choice this year, along with, during the year, The Wasp Woman, and Attack of the 50ft Woman among others.
Maybe I should just start watching them, instead of films laden with portentous significance dedicated to communicating. The films I've had to watch feel recently feel a lot like being buttonholed by someone at a party who thinks that they're talking about the most interesting thing ever, and can't wait to tell you about it.
The kind of film I'm looking for is more like a conversation with a half-drunk friend, not perfect, not insistent on anything, and certainly not looking to impress.
For any prospective film students out there - Hi! Watch your feet, try the additive dissolve, don't try the whip-pan - what I would say I've really learnt from this course so far is that watching a film is communication; the film is trying to tell you things above and beyond what's seen on the screen. The basics are that you can tell a films' budget, its' politics, its' production values, and maybe a few other things besides.
The rest - to end on a portentous single sentence - is more or less up to you.
Except I can't stand to end that way, so... Go and watch, say, The Godfather, or The Graduate, or any films listed in various categories of Best Film, or whatever.
Then go watch Starship Troopers 2.
See which one you have more fun with.
Diary of a Mature Student: Mistletoe and Wine
In some ways, what I basically miss is The Sofa.
Way back when, in the mists of time, I used to visit friends in London fairly regularly - initially when I was still living there, then afterwards I'd travel down to see them, do the social thing. All very nice.
It was an interesting little flat - I was friends with one of the male residents (and by extension his girlfriend, later fiancé, later wife), and he was dating one of two sisters, the other of whom lived there with her soon-to-be husband.
What would happen is that, after a night with a few drinks, or a meal (with a few drinks), or just an evening in general, is that myself and my friend would sit down and watch some of the trashiest, worst films known to man.
I can't honestly remember how it began - I think, although I have no proof, that it was X-Men 2, which is in no way trashy or bad. (It is, however, pretty long for a blockbuster, superhero film. But that's another thing.) However, after that, things took an ominous turn when I discovered that Starship Troopers 2 was being released straight-to-dvd. It sounded, from the ancillary material, so bad that it kind of had to be seen.
Having seen the film all those years ago, I can't recall much, if anything, about it, because I'd had what might charitably be called A Little Too Much to drink. I remember, however, having the hiccups. This is probably not relevant.
What began with Starship Troopers 2 - a film which I may now have to watch sober, to see if any 1960s-style acid flashbacks pop up - continued as a kind of challenge; I'd thrown down a gauntlet, with that, and because my friend is oddly competitive, we started trading back and forth with films that inhabited a certain level - basically so bad but still watchable, rather than so bad as to be completely unwatchable whatsoever.
If I recall correctly, he then responded with a double whammy - Alone in the Dark, which was so bad as to be unwatchable, but then immediately made up for with Doom, which has few enough redeeming qualities but is certainly enjoyable enough if you're in the right frame of mind.
I responded to this with Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, which is an interesting film on many counts, to which I was duly responded to with Kingdom of the Spiders, starring the truly great William Shatner.
The last two, however, were done by postal correspondance, and that saddens me a little, because I kind of miss the significance of the sofa.
Don't read too much into this, because all I mean is that that type of film watching was done just for the fun of it, not because I had to study it, or write about it, or give two tugs of a dog's tail about it in any way, shape or form.
Now, when I watch a film, I see continuity errors, plot holes, narrative function; it's like watching a magic show from behind the curtain, on occasion.
You shouldn't mistake this for any yen for a simpler time, a less complex time, a time when the rain was never cold and the summers went on forever; it'd just be nice to find films to watch just to watch, that's all.
Thankfully, I have the kind of family that insists on buying me these odd collections of B-movies - The Last Man On Earth and The Prehistoric Planet were Christmas Presents Of Choice this year, along with, during the year, The Wasp Woman, and Attack of the 50ft Woman among others.
Maybe I should just start watching them, instead of films laden with portentous significance dedicated to communicating. The films I've had to watch feel recently feel a lot like being buttonholed by someone at a party who thinks that they're talking about the most interesting thing ever, and can't wait to tell you about it.
The kind of film I'm looking for is more like a conversation with a half-drunk friend, not perfect, not insistent on anything, and certainly not looking to impress.
For any prospective film students out there - Hi! Watch your feet, try the additive dissolve, don't try the whip-pan - what I would say I've really learnt from this course so far is that watching a film is communication; the film is trying to tell you things above and beyond what's seen on the screen. The basics are that you can tell a films' budget, its' politics, its' production values, and maybe a few other things besides.
The rest - to end on a portentous single sentence - is more or less up to you.
Except I can't stand to end that way, so... Go and watch, say, The Godfather, or The Graduate, or any films listed in various categories of Best Film, or whatever.
Then go watch Starship Troopers 2.
See which one you have more fun with.
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