One of my favorite Netflix features is that you can stream movies in your queue. Add this one to your queue so that you can start streaming it to your computer right now: Henry Poole Is Here. The trailer's vibe makes it seem wacky...but it's not. The music is all wrong, NOTHING like the music in the movie. But it might still give you some idea: it's slow, quiet, lyrical, a little sad, and very sweet, about what you might find at the end of your rope.
And you can start streaming it now.
I gotta tell you. We've really gotten into the two of us, watching movies gathered close around the laptop in bed. You can't do it ALL the time, but it's very intimate. This is the perfect movie for that.
While it's not streaming, this next one is a picture with a similar slow, sweet vibe. Again, the music is all wrong - the score is by Michael Penn, and gorgeous. So are the shots - gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, which the trailer gives absolutely no sense of. But again, hopefully, a little sense that this reaches way past cliches, way past the pain, into building something new and real.
We watched this one on the big screen (REALLY big - a 100-inch front projection system), but still a very, very intimate picture.
(The big screen ain't just about me, btw. Every time we've moved, my wife wouldn't even consider a house that doesn't enough throw-room for a projector. She bought one of those laser measuring thingies to make it easier to figure out.)
That streaming Netflix thing really is off the hook. As you might guess from other of my entries, I'm not buying the Blu-ray hype...but the built-in Netflix streaming in many newer models is tempting enough that my wife said it's time for us to start looking around at our player options. (Ah, that's my girl!)
So anyway, two movies that will reaffirm your faith in life, in love, and in moviemaking.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Aug 30, 2009 at 8:54:51 am
As a guy who regularly talks about trends in media consumption and distribution, allow me to make the observation that people who talk about trends in in media consumption and distribution are idiots. Including me. We're hardly ever right about anything.
However, money talks. DVD buying peaked between somewhere around 2007, and has been trending downward since then. While Blu-ray buying is on the rise, it doesn't amount to much in the overall video buying world - certainly nowhere near enough to compensate for the decline in overall DVD sales. Says a senior analyst at Screen Digest, "We don't expect BD to be driving even minimal sector growth until 2010."
Now, it's easy to blame this on an economic downturn...which wasn't happening in 2007. It also doesn't take into account one of the most remarkable statistics I've come across in a long, long time:
47 percent of consumers now own a high-definition TV, up from 35 percent a year ago.
Read that again, slowly. HDTV ownership is up by nearly one third in the past year.
Nearly half of America owns an HD TV.
And yet, the number of people who say that they are likely to NOT buy a Blu-ray player in the past year is UP a little! 93% of people surveyed say that they are NOT likely to buy a Blu-ray player in the next year!
Read it again: HD television sales are UP nearly 30% this year over last year. People are LESS likely to buy a Blu-ray player this year than last year.
It's not the economy. Millions of people saw the value in buying an HDTV. They do NOT see the value in spending a fraction of that on a Blu-ray player.
It's not the cost of disks. You can rent a Blu-ray disk for hardly more than an SD DVD disk.
It's not any lack of confidence in the quality of Blu-ray. Anybody who bought an HD set saw Blu-ray aplenty in the store.
It's that they don't see the value in Blu-ray over the HD programming that they get from cable and satellite.
In other words, they could get a Blu-ray player for about the price of a month of cable with premium channels...but then they don't need the Blu-ray disks.
In my case, I watch TV around 5 hours a day, which puts me right in the middle of the pack for adult America. With the exception of an odd commercial here and there, 100% of what I watch is in HD. I watch a ton of movies in HD. This week, that includes "The Dark Knight," "Tropic Thunder," and "X-Files: I Want to Believe." I haven't watched them yet, because they're parked on my DVR. I'm also not in a hurry for the first two, because I saw them in HD on Demand BEFORE they were on Blu-ray. (I'm not in a hurry for X-Files because I'm not convinced it's good enough to spend my time on...but hey, it's there.)
I also watch quite a bit of TV (most of it network TV - woo-hoo!) and live sports (go Red Sox! - and for the record, my wife can be even more into sports TV than I am...but we both dig it.) No Blu-ray equivalent unless I'm willing to wait a looooong time.
I've talked about this often enough in other posts (follow the tags), but this is the first time that my instincts about the mainstream have been confirmed, as follows:
HD = good.
HDTV = will spend many hundreds, if not more, to buy one.
Blu-ray = yawn, even for $200-300, if not less
What do you think, kids? Given that I choose to write about this stuff on a regular-ish basis, and that EVERYONE who does so is mostly wrong...am I wrong this time? Why do YOU think that interest is Blu-ray is so low relative to HD TV buying, and waning?
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jun 25, 2009 at 12:35:11 pm
I noted in my entry on the Tron sequel that a speedy look at Joseph Kosinski’s IMDb profile reveals virtually nothing -- not even his birthday. I’m amazed that nobody has gotten around to it yet, but he doesn’t even have an entry at Wikipedia.
(I wonder if it's related to the absence of an entry on the Tron sequel. Probably. The only power in the universe I can think of that's more powerful than the masses converging on Wikipedia is Disney.)
And so we ask,
who is this man, and why is he directing the sequel to Tron?
I first discovered him a year before any mention of him helming the Tron sequel, the same way that millions of other folks did: I saw this AMAZING commercial for the Xbox 360 videogame, “Gears of War.” On top of footage of horrific battles and a massive, terrifying monster, he lays a haunted, heartbreaking version of “Mad World.” It makes for an unsettling mix of violence, sorrow, humility, fear, and overwhelming mortality.
Hit the HQ button. Set it to full screen. Turn it up.
Here’s Kosinski talking about his work on the spot, which, remarkably enough, started with the song.
That version of “Mad World” is by Gary Jules, and was first heard by most of us in the remarkable “Donnie Darko.”
"Donnie Darko" was enough to propel the song to #3 in the UK in 2003, but its presence in the Gears of War commercial drove it to #1 at iTunes in 2006.
If you like that, you should also check out the full-length version. It lacks the blunt-force trauma of the shorter version, but it gives you a stronger sense of Kosinki’s cinematic vision. Again, click the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.
What I did IMMEDIATELY after seeing that first clip was to find out as much as I could about it. I quickly found the director’s website, josephkosinski.com. It turns out that he’s directed quite a few very, very high-impact spots over the years – even if, to be honest, I still haven’t seen most of them outside his website.
The website is in Flash, so links beyond that one are a no-go. The site is also a little old, I think – the clips are small-ish, and dog slow. It’s still worth poking around – lots of great info about the spots, including credits...but watch the spots here before you visit.
One of his commercials is among my recent favorites: “Lincoln Effect,” and it includes the great tagline, “Starships Don’t Need Keys.”
Since we’re talking about directing “Tron 2.0,” I want to draw your attention to “Apple, iSPEC,” a short film that, according to the credits, “postulates the evolution of the personal media device and experience, placing the viewer within a digital recreation of the Colorado Lounge from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining.’”
Sound freaky? Well, it is. It also evokes a postulatory (I guess) evolution of the world of Tron, from one oriented around the dark, to one oriented around light. Regardless, the camera moves through the opening scenes, including a very interesting new software UI, exactly as you might imagine it moving through a Tron sequel.
That one was all CG, and frankly looks it. Not in a bad way, but for all that it offers a strongly personal camera perspective, there are clearly no people in this environment. It’s truly gorgeous, though, and I’m not shocked that it won the Autodesk iDesign Award.
I learned that from a brief bio formerly posted at the site for his (former?) company KDLAB. The site’s just a landing page now, pointing you elsewhere, but I found the bio floating around, apparently untethered.
Also jumping out at me from his bio: graduating from “Stanford University with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1996 and from Columbia University with a Masters of Architecture in 1999. Since then, he has taught Advanced Digital Design at Columbia and serves on the beta board for Discreet in the development of their next-generation design software.”
Let’s add this up: engineering, plus advanced design, plus next-gen software development, equals TRON, baby!
To really, really see this pay off, check out “Nike, LesJumelles.” That’s French for “The Twins.” Watch it first, and then we’ll talk.
A profile at Autodesk’s website talks with Kosinski about using an alpha version of 3D Studio Max and some other Autodesk tools to put it together.
He offers a slightly more artistic take at Archinect, where he discusses the "twin" motif. Here’s the money quote:
“I did some investigation into the relationship between speed and energy and rediscovered Einstein's concept of “Time Dilation” - something which had always seemed fascinating to me. Basically, it states that as you approach the speed of light, time seems to slow down for you, and speed up for everything else that isn't moving.”
Man, oh, man, I cannot WAIT for this movie! After reading that, and seeing those, even if I’d never heard Tron, I’d want to see a full-length version of whatever this cat is up to.
That first Gears of War I saw came soon after “LesJumelles,” when Kosinski had moved to Venice, CA’s "Anonymous Content"...after being recruited by one David Leo Fincher, who is credited as “Creative Consultant” on "Gears of War, Mad World.”
A last note about college degrees in mechanical engineering and architecture, and work in the world of software design: it’s not all that many steps from building devices, to building buildings, to building a world. Because whatever else is true about the world inside the game of Tron, it reflects the strong mechanical and engineering design of a software/hardware mind. It’s not enough for the world inside Tron to be beautiful. It has to visually make SENSE.
I’m going to end this post where it began, with the original version of “Gears of War, Mad World.” This clip opens with that, followed by “making of” footage from Digital Domain, with block renderings and motion capture footage intercut with the final version. Like many of the best magic tricks, it becomes even more impressive once you see how it’s done. You’ll see the technology, but you’ll also see how Kosinski and his team turn it into art.
Kosinski is our boy, all right.
Bonus clips:
It turns out that our boy is quite at home with sequels. I showed his sequel to Gears of War, above. Here’s the third sequel. You know the drill: HQ. Full screen. Turn it up.
And here’s his sequel to “Les Jumelles.”
Here's a 2005 montage of his work. Most of my favorite bits are in the “Les Jumelles” and “iSPEC” pieces, but check the intro: very, VERY Tron.
And a special bonus digression on commercial directors who, like Fincher, transitioned to features. Here are a few off the top of my head:
Errol Morris (The Fog of War), Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Tony Scott (Top Gun, and more others than you remember), Mark Romanek (24 Hour Photo), Tony Kaye (American History X), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind), Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), and Ridley Scott (take your pick).
(Who am I leaving out? Let me know in the comments.)
I should also note that some of these guys have done some of the best music videos of all time. Romanek: “Constant Craving,” "Are You Gonna Go My Way," “Closer,” and one of the all-time greats, Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt." (I wrote about it here.)
Fincher’s videos are so off the hook that, as with Kosinski, I looked him up the first time he caught my, with Madonna’s “Express Yourself,” another on my short list for best ever.
Check it full screen, and loud. Some obvious nods to “Metropolis,” only with crotch grabbing. “Rated M, for Mature” – no kidding -- but a real joy to watch again. Throw in “Vogue,” “Forever Your Girl,” “Janie’s Got a Gun,” "End of the Innocence," and “Cradle of Love" off the top of my head.
Anyway, I like commercials. I like music videos. I like movies. Storytelling is storytelling.
Which brings us back to Kosinski and the Tron sequel. I have no idea if the guy liked the first Tron, or even if he saw it at the time. (I'm guessing he was around 8 when it came out.) But as I look at his work again, I can’t imagine anybody better equipped to direct the second one.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 26, 2009 at 2:54:24 pm
More specifically, a review of the rapidly emerging news about the slice of nerd-vana that may or may not be named Tron 2.
Those of us who became devoted some classics of science fiction filmmaking between, oh, I don’t know, let’s say 1977 and 1983, have reasons to cast the stink eye in the direction of latter-day sequels, prequels and such. One of those classics is 1982’s “Tron,” and you don’t need me to explain why.
Yet even in this post-stink-eye era, the word on its sequel is nothing but good so far – including the news that it’s being shot in stereoscopic 3D. As soon as you hear that, your reaction is probably the same as mine – how could it NOT be?
Details have been coming fast of late, so it seems a good time to review where we are so far. Let’s start with a wonderful a bootleg clip of the trailer from 2008’s Comic Con. The quality is pretty nasty, because it’s, well, a bootleg. The clip itself drags a bit (less a well-paced trailer than a look at the “look” of the movie so far, I think), but you can definitely see where they were at the time.
The art and science of the final release will of course be light years (har har) ahead of this, but so far, so good!
A few things to note:
This is still online! Disney is notoriously protective of its properties, yet here this clip remains. I think they get that this barely embryonic footage is worth something, and was, after all shown publicly. I doubt any mercy will be shown for leaks…or to leakers…from here on.
I got chills hearing the roars of approval when the light cars, and especially Jeff Bridges, appear on screen. Even without the pictures, I’d have gotten chills just hearing it.
(Here’s an interview in The Guardian that includes some of Jeff’s very endearing enthusiasm for the project.)
No Bruce Boxleitner in the trailer? No worries. He didn’t sign on until later in 2008, although he’s still listed as “rumored” on IMDb.
It was at the time of the trailer called “TR2N.” Cool-looking, yes, but virtually unpronounceable.
The name has changed a few other times, but IMDB suggests that we may have landed on Tron 2.0 for now. I'm not convinced. Disney released a videogame called “Tron 2.0” in 2003.
It was generally well-received -- both the hardcore game nerds and the gen pop give it roughly a B -- but Disney seems like a creative-enough bunch to come up with a unique name. Indeed, reports as recent as a few weeks ago have said that the title is in fact NOT set. Read on for details.
Did I mention the roars of approval? That for me is the big takeaway from the trailer.
One of the first questions to come up is, who’s involved? One sign of the project’s legitimacy is the presence of Steve Lisberger, who directed and wrote the story for the original, now here as a writer and consultant. Here’s a wonderful intervie... with Lisberger, as well as the best discussion I've seen of the showing of the trailer at Comic Con.
Something to be truly excited about is that two of the screenwriters, Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis have done quite a bit of heavy lifting as both writers and producers for television’s “Lost,” my vote for richest storytelling in the history of the medium, by a pretty long shot.
The key name is of course the director, Joseph Kosinski. A speedy look at his IMDb profile shows…nothing, except a pre-production credit for Logan’s Run. To be released in 2010, sez IMDb?! I don’t think so! (Although it turns out that Kosinski did in fact sign to do “Logan’s Run” first.) And no mention of Kosinski at Wikipedia!
I'd actually heard of him a couple of years before he signed on for Tron, when me and millions of other folks were bowled over by his commercial for Gears of War. Hit the HQ button. Watch full screen. Turn it up.
I was actually a little skeptical about the Tron sequel before I found out that the guy who did THAT was directing the movie! And while you may be skeptical about a commercial director taking on Tron for his first feature, I've put together some of his spots and other shorts that relate to what he might be up to with Tron, and some of the striking things he has to say about it. You'll love it. Even if you'd never heard of Tron, Kosinski is one of the most creative people you'll have come across in a long, long time.
In the meantime, here are some more of stories that have put the Tron sequel back in the news of late. First comes this article at /film the week before last, featuring the first picture of a costumed actor. Later that day, a picture from the set in Vancouver, standing in for New York City.
(I’m only including a few photos from the articles I link to at /film. It’s a great resource for folks tracking stories like this for the entire “reel world” that you should check out.)
The fella who sent in the picture is breathless with wonder:
“I was in total awe of how much equipment and gadgets they had. Everything I’ve seen them doing in the last five days is easily some of the most expensive stuff I’ve ever seen. It’s probably is $300 million, even if it’s canadian dollars.”
(Presumably written by an American who hasn’t noticed that the US dollar is getting its ass handed to it by the Canadian dollar…although because they’re Canadian, they’re doing it very, very politely.)
It took Disney only 3 days to tell us that the budget of Tron 2.0 is NOT approaching $300 million, a figure that had also been mentioned in the Vancouver Sun.
In reporting that debunking, /film includes a picture of a camera, and some tantalizing tech details:
“[‘Benjamin Button’ cinematographer Claudio] Miranda has challenged his crew with the task of having all the flexibility of standard 2D cameras including ambitious use of shots as well as Steadicam in 3D.” … “Amongst other setups, we will be rigging an F-35 to a GF-8 crane and Mini-Scorpio head to get a bird’s eye view out over the night streets of Vancouver.”
Remember the stereoscopic part? I recently had a chance to speak to John Daro at FotoKem, where a number of recent stereo smashes have been posted. He was speaking generally about stereo 3D DI…most definitely NOT about Tron, I promise…but he gave me insights into how the Sony F35 CineAlta camera works for stereo features.
Quite a bit of footage from the F35 crosses his desk, most of it shot at 1920x1080, 4:2:2, recorded at 880 mbps to the Sony SRW-1 HDCAM tape recorder that you can see prominently docked to the back of the F35.
Yes, tape. There’s a ton of it out there, even for high-end digital cinema. And yes, 1920x1080. As Russell Lasson noted in 21st Century Cinema for Creative COW Magazine, virtually all digital cinema is 2K, and as Panavision’s John Galt noted for us in The Truth About 2K, 4K, and The Future of Pixels, the majority of 2K is shot at 1920x1080. Even the Academy aperture for a 2K scan is only 1728 pixels.
So don’t get your panties in a wad about the Tron sequel or anything else being shot at 1980 for the big screen. You’ve already seen a ton of movies shot this way.)
At 4:2:2 for a stereo 3D shoot, the SRW-1 takes two HD-SDI feeds, and records them to a single tape: left-eye/right-eye for frame one, left-eye/right-eye for frame two, etc. John digitizes via the Sony SRW 5800 into the Quantum Pablo, which splits out two separate streams in real time as it digitizes.
The SRW-1 records only – only! – a single stream of 4:4:4. Shooting that way would of course call for a dedicated deck for each eye.
So if the report about shooting Tron 2.0 is accurate, that’s almost certainly how it’s being recorded. In any case, John will be going into much, more detail on the 3D DI post process for the upcoming Stereoscopic Issue of Creative COW Magazine.
Another recent report about Tron 2.0 is that it will be scored by the masked electronica dance duo known as Daft Punk.
With the original scored by the iconic Wendy Carlos, they have as much to live up to as anybody involved in the production of Tron 2.0. They can be cheesy – not necessarily a bad thing in this context – but I think they’re a great choice.
The most-viewed Daft Punk clip I found is this bit of genius by a youngster named Austin Hall, set to their song, “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” also known in this permutation as “Daft Hands.”
The uber-geeks at Ain’t It Cool News got an updated report on the plot in the last few weeks, which you can take a couple of ways. One is that, far from being mere fanboys, the team at AICN have established themselves as a genuine force to be reckoned with. For example, site founder Harry Knowles emailed James Cameron about some of the “Avatar” rumors he’d been hearing, and Cameron replied.
So this wouldn’t be the first time that AICN has had info leaked to them...sometimes from official sources, intending to whip up a storm. It also wouldn’t be the first time that a studio has leaked something substantially true, but with important details obscured. And as the author points out, anything can change over the next two years. But his one rings true.
You can find plenty of other good stuff at AICN (as well as some adult language – step gingerly). I've been following it since early web adopter Roger Ebert – whose site remains one of the web’s great film resources -- pointed us to AICN back in 1996, when it was just Harry Knowles and his father. (Harry also co-hosted “At the Movies” with Roger a few times.)
And this story includes the news that the name of the movie is not Tron 2, but “something with a colon."
This week they've also posted another exterior shot from Vancouver this week. Below is greatly reduced from the original.
As with the other photos we’ve seen so far, admittedly not much to see, but trainspotters will note that this is in fact another train, and that it has indeed been spotted.
This little summary is far from complete, but it’s enough to catch you up on where we are so far. For more perspective on this news, especially on director Joseph Kosinski, see here.
PS. In an article for Creative COW Magazine, CGI pioneer Steve Wright tells how the effects in Tron actually set the industry back!
This is the sidebar in an article in on how commercials were actually the driving force in widespread adoption of CGI. Pretty slick stuff, and well worth a look.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 26, 2009 at 9:48:02 am
In my Monday-morning breakdown of the numbers after the opening weekend of Monsters vs. Aliens, I noted a disproportionate share of the dough coming from 3D screens:
$58.2 million for the weekend, on 4104 screens
28% of those screens were 3D, and accounted for 58% of the gross!
.03% --that's three-tenths of 1 percent -- of those 4104 screens were IMAX (143 to be exact)...and they accounted for nearly TEN PERCENT of the gross!
Now, IMAX is a name you know. Until very recently, it has been synonymous with big-screen stereoscopic projection. Really, it's the first major brand in this space.
Here's the next brand to watch: RealD. Right now, they make the 3D systems used by roughly 90% of the installed screens. (The other big name besides IMAX: our pals at Dolby. But that's another story, and I'll get to it soon.)
RealD recently announced that their specific slice of the pie was a big one: over $25 million of the total take came from screens using their systems.
The 3D screen rollout has obviously slowed, for obvious reasons...and there are equally obvious reasons why someone might want to sign up for one of these screens anyway: there's obviously money to be made. Of course, if everything obvious was true, or everything true was obvious....well, you get the point.
In any case, look for more from RealD soon, right here at your friendly neighborhood COW.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 19, 2009 at 6:46:40 pm
Jeffry Katzenberg has been a major advocate of stereoscopic 3D for a while. The first place I saw him talk about it was ShoEast in 2007, a gathering of eastern US movie theater owners and operators. The talk was called "The Future of 3D in the Digital Age," and it was among the places that he said that all of Dreamworks' animated features would be released as stereoscopic.
On one count, he underestimated how quickly this would come to pass: he said that there would be "5, 6 or 7 'Super-A' titles" in 2009, 12 to 18 by 2010. So far this year, we've already seen My Bloody Valentine, the Jonas Brothers concert movie, Henry Selick's "Coraline," and just this weekend, "Aliens vs. Monsters," with 10 more slated for release this summer.
Here's the first trailer for Aliens vs. Monsters, which first ran in 3D during the Super Bowl:
Here's the second trailer:
Here's the third. Not sure why YouTube won't let me embed the high-quality version, but it's worth following the link to take a gander.
The next biggie is going to be Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
(You can see Entertainment Weekly's preview of the year's 3D releases here, but it's worth trying to track down the print issue, which includes anagplypic stills from most of those features, along with 3D glasses to view 'em. Pretty slick. It also doesn't have much to say about James Cameron's Avatar, opening in December...but I sure will later.)
So for the pace of "Super 'A'" releases, we're well ahead of schedule.
As theater owners pushed back on Katzenberg in 2007, they said that upgrading screens was going to be way, way too expensive. His reply was that they'd make more money on 3D showings, and this week's premiere of "Monsters vs. Aliens" certainly bore that out. Here's how the numbers broke down:
$58.2 million for the weekend, on 4104 screens
28% of those screens were 3D, and accounted for 58% of the gross!
.03% --that's three-tenths of 1 percent -- of those 4104 screens were IMAX (143 to be exact)...and they accounted for nearly TEN PERCENT of the gross! (Again to be exact, $5.2 million, a record.)
To put it another way, 28.3% of the screens accounted for nearly 70% of the money that Av.M pulled in! That is, as the kids say, off the hizz-OOOK! (Actually, I doubt any kids say that anymore.) There's absolutely no question that Katzenberg is being proved right on feature after feature.
However, here's one area he was a little optimistic on: he predicted 6000 3D-equipped screens by March 2009. The number is more like 2000 in the US, with a smattering more overseas. Let's be generous and call it halfway there.
The good news is that there are a total of 8000 screens "committed" (see previous link)...but as far as I can tell, no particular timetable.
When I say 8000 screens, the vast majority are those offered by RealD. Dolby is late to the party, but has a few hundred screens committed, mostly in Europe. The draw is that they don't require a new screen, and sell their gear outright. RealD requires new screens and collects royalties....but c'mon, seriously now, RealD has it locked up. Although as far as overall revenues, all signs point to Katzenberg being exactly right: the real money is in 3D exhibition.
It's true now. It's going to get truer. Expect more details.
In the meantime, our stereoscopic 3D coverage is going to be a wild ride that you're not going to want to miss. If you don't already subscribe, now's a good time to start.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 31, 2009 at 8:07:06 am
This isn't just huge news for people in the digital cinema business: it's huge for everyone in any aspect of show business, including slobs like us.
I saw the news of Sony's new 4K projectors on the front page of Variety.com.
Variety is barely peripherally related to the projection side of the business. This message is directly aimed at the people who make the movies: 4K is here...and the ideal use of a 4K projector is NOT the projection of 4K images. Its primary intent is for a full 2K for eacheye!! You can kind of get that from the last frame of the animated ad that you can see in the grab above -- and, uhm, the name of the product. The first 2 frames of the animation are even more on the nose, but in case there's any doubt, I saved you the effort of typing in the link to Sony's site as posted at Variety:
And just today (March 30 as I write this) our pals at AMC -- the same ones who committed to 1500 RealD screens just yesterday -- have announced a "commitment in principle" to add 5000 Sony 4K digital cinema systems. They've already rolled out 150 screens at 11 theaters, and 29 of them are 3D-capable. Now it seems to me that dang near every new screen going in should be 3D-capable, and it looks like the next ones will be (at least in principle). I have no idea how this fits in with yesterday's announcement between AMC and RealD, but that's not my problem.
Except, if I'm going to keep writing about stereoscopic production and projection, it kind of IS my problem. This is insane. AMC has movies to show. I have movies (and TV) to watch, and frankly, other things to do. It's clear that there are going to be new 3D announcements more or less every day of the week. I ain't making any promises, but I'll try to at least pass along some the biggest.
Several things to note:
--That Sony intends this projector primarily for the stereoscopic projection of 2K images (that is, one for each eye) lines up exactly with what we reported from both Panavision's Senior Vice President of Advanced Digital Imaging, John Galt (below), and The COW's own Russell Lasson, that 2K is where it's at for digital cinema. (John talks about deployment here, and Russell talks about actually posting 2K for digital cinema here.)
--Not that practical 4K projection isn't perhaps coming. But I don't see the existing thousands of 2K digital cinema projectors upgrading, nor do I think they should.
--One of the big draws of these digital cinema projectors is that they provide an experience that can't be duplicated at home. Here's the problem with that argument: I've seen people actually putting 4K projectors in their home theaters since the year 2000 AND FRAKING FIVE.
There are a ton of great reasons to sign up for an account at the AV Science Forum (aka AVS.com), not least of which is to read stories like this one, of a real-life installation, first reported in January 2006. I'm pretty sure you'll need an account to read the story (the usual name & email form/email activation link), but here's a photo of our happy owner:
You can also read reviews of the Sony CineAlta SRX-R220 and Meridian 810 (pictured below) 4K projectors in HOME THEATER MAGAZINE last year.
--A Creative COW programming note: smack in the middle of the Variety front page pictured above is a note that, after dangling over the precipice almost since the day it first aired 3 seasons ago, "Saturday Night Lights" has been given a 2-year, 26-episode commitment. This isn't just a big deal for fans of quality television, but for The COW's own Todd McMullen, a camera operator on that show. He told a couple of great stories about it, as well as a career that began on Martin Scorcese's Casino (!!! Talk about starting on a high note!), in Creative COW Magazine's Film Values issue. Here's the online version of his article.
I love his thoughts on Cinematic Style. Short version: it ain't shooting at 24P or adding a filter in FCP:
To me cinematic style is big and ballsy. A shot that makes the viewer look at it and think about it. It's tough to explain, but the norm just isn't as interesting to me.
I like to go for what's not normal, especially with composition and lighting. I love a long lens profile shot. I like having foregrounds in a shot, especially a master. I prefer having the camera low, looking somewhat up. I like dolllies and cranes when it makes sense, although most of the time it doesn't. I also like the reverse over, basically, coverage from behind the actors.
And I really like it when a director wants to cover a whole scene in one camera move. Good stuff.
Now, you can't have all this for every shot, but I try to make a frame as interesting as possible. Because, for me, the story is in the surroundings. It isn't always told through the words.
--Well, I've once again veered off topic, so here I'll veer back on. The fact is that there's no clear home standard for stereoscopic viewing. Here's what the world leader in theatrical stereo viewing has to say on home viewing: "We are already working with top consumer electronics manufacturers to bring these new technologies to fruition in the highest possible quality. Please keep checking this space for updates!" In other words, nada. Bupkes. No soup for you. Nice picture though - check it out. That'll have to do for now.
--Except for the two-color glasses, of course. No need to settle for the cheap, cardboard ones. You can get really snazzy ones at Amazon.
Of course, there are two different sets of colors for these anaglyphic glasses, and they're not compatible. At $3 a pair, it's hardly a platform war, but it also barely hints at some of the issues confronting home viewing. But that's another post.
Hey, and it turns out that there's some huge breaking news on that front that came down just today. Patience, patience. I'll get to it soon. After I've had a long nap.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 30, 2009 at 8:37:55 pm
The image is from the front door of the game's official site. You can also find a truly wonderful story by John Carnack, its designer, on how Wolf3D made its way to the iPod Touch/iPod platform.
More coolness: the developer has released the source code! Tweak away, my pretties! And expect Doom and Quake soon.
(I'd forgotten that, in 1995, id Software had also released the source code for the original version of Wolf3D.
When Wolfenstein 3D was released for Mac in the early 90s, it was for many, many years the only game worth playing on that platform, even after later games came along. (Slowly. Until the iTunes app store, Mac games were 100% pathetic. Besides Wolfenstein. Okay, and Myst.)
Looking at it today, what I notice most isn't its primitiveness, but its zen-like simplicity, both visually, and in its objectives: Kill Nazis. Win prizes.
Maybe one of you kids knows who to ask, but if you ask ME, the castle scenes in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade" (which it certainly should have been) were explicitly inspired by Wolfenstein. I really think so: castle setting, supernatural overtones, lots o' Nazis. In fact, my favorite line in the movie, snarled through gritted teeth, comes as Indy sees who his true hosts are at this castle: "Nazis. I hate those guys."
(I'm absolutely certain that MechaHitler was the inspiration for the classic "Mecha-Streisand" episode of South Park. Seen below as she faces defeat by Robert Smith of The Cure.
Anyway, you can buy Wolfenstein 3D in the App Store for a tenth of what I paid for it in 1991 or so. Lock and load.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 30, 2009 at 10:42:54 am
If you have an iPhone or an iPod-Touch and are interested, submit your information ASAP.
Criteria to be selected will be based on previous trial history, your activity in the CE arena, and a ratio of the devices in use.
We will only select 1 submission per user, so if you have multiple devices please pick one and submit that.
Multiple submissions will be rejected.
Thank you for your continued participation in the DIRECTV CE program, and your interest in our latest field trials.
The DIRECTV iPhone team.
First, DirecTV has an iPhone team! My guess is that, just as there's an iTunes app to control your Netflix account, you'll be able to remotely program your DirecTV with it. Of course, DirecTV hasn't said just yet...and the beta sign-up cycle is closed...but definitely worth watching.
Engadget also reports that, after wobbling for a while, DirecTV had a record quarter, adding nearly half a million new subscribers.
Although I got into DirecTV 1.0 back in the early 90s, I'm not currently a subscriber...but it's gratifying to see our baby grow up, and indeed, cracking the whip on the growth of HD content for all of us.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 17, 2009 at 7:08:33 am
I like award season, year-end lists and all that. There's so much that goes on in the year, much of it frankly much more important than entertainment, that it's easy to forget some of the great stuff we've seen, heard, and read. And in the scheme of things, there's not that much that's THAT much more important than entertainment, is there? :-)
I hope to get around to other categories, but I've been thinking about movies. Oscar nominations get announced this week, and as I've mentioned before, the Oscars are as close to a holiday as my wife and I celebrate, so I'll start with movies.
In Bruges Even though this was only (only!) my second-favorite movie of the year, I was inspired to write this column by the fact that both of the lead actors were nominated for Golden Globes. Even though I've never liked him in a movie before, I was delighted that Colin Farrel won a Golden Globe for his part in this remarkable story.
It's got enough profanity and enough accidental violence that it suggest what might be possible if Tarantino had a really gentle touch because he was so sentimental....but who wants Tarantino to be gentle and sentimental? But it's so original that, rather than compare it to anybody else, I'll say that the comedy gives way to a careful meditation on ethics, responsibility, honor, sacrifice, and the hope and redemption found in the best relationships.
Did I mention that I'm no Farrel fan? But in this, he was funny, warm and ultimately heartbreaking, definitely deserving of his Best Actor Golden Globe. I can't imagine anyone else having won...with the exception of his co-star Brendan Gleeson. How cool is that the two leads of a very small independent feature are both nominated for such a prestigious award! And how full of integrity that the producers didn't throw Gleeson into the supporting category to give him possibly a better shot. (More about that later.)
Mostly, I wish they both could have won. In fact, Ralph Fiennes should have won a Best Supporting Actor award for his role in this. I've never seen him better.
So even if you hate two of the actors and have never heard of the third, stop whining. See the movie. You'll see I'm right on all counts.
This is actually just about the second best movie I've seen in the last COUPLE of years. I've already seen it 4 times, and will be watching it again later today. LOVE that HD DVR my friends.
The Visitor The best movie I saw this year, and the last several.
Richard Jenkins is one of those "oh yeah, THAT guy" actors, most notably as the dead father in Six Feet Under. He wasn't in every episode, and as a ghost, didn't always have much to do. But he was featured in an episode called The Room, perhaps the best hour of TV I've ever seen. Absolutely indelible.
The Visitor was another small indie movie about a widowed man who sees the end of his life much more clearly than his life now, which he also recognizes as empty in every way you can imagine. It's sweet, and quiet, and deeply human, as some things fall apart, and others are put together in surprising ways.
It turns out that the writer/director Tom McCarthy created this part with Jenkins in mind -- absolutely understandable if you'd seen The Room, I swear. This was Tom's second picture. The first was another understated gem, The Station Agent...which he wrote for lead actor Peter Dinklage.
Anyway, Richard said that this was the role of a lifetime, and it would have been no less true if the film hadn't been written for him.
The tragedy: that The Visitor was such a small film, so early in the year, that Jenkins is an incredibly long shot to even be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. He should win.
The good news: he has been nominated for 4 other major awards, including the Independent Spirit Award. He was given a special award by one critics association for "Best Year," for his roles in this, Burn After Reading, The Broken, The Tale of Despereaux, and Step Brothers. (A pretty good year.) It was Step Brothers star Will Ferrell who suggested Jenkins to the producers. They agreed that he was the guy, and held up the production until he was available.
A remarkable guy. A remarkable movie.
Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight. Even after all the hub-bub about what an amazing performance he gave, I still wasn't prepared for how good it was. I'm just going to leave it at that: however good you've heard he was as The Joker, he was much, much better. I think you have to go back to Cagney to find such a compelling anti-hero.
Not my favorite scene, but the only one I could find an individual clip for:
But here's the thing: he's nominated as Best SUPPORTING Actor, which is ridiculous. He's on screen more than Batman! I'm glad he's going to win (which I say with absolute certainty before the nominations are even announced), but it still ain't right. Some other actor in what really IS a supporting role is going to get shut out, and that's a shame.
As long as it isn't Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, who many believe might win. I liked that movie more than I thought I would, but all that fuss about Tom Cruise as a foul-mouthed movie exec in makeup and a fat suit? Yawn. I really do think obnoxiousness and obscenity can be funny, but this was just tedious.
In any case, re: this Best "Supporting" nonsense, my man Michael Schaefer says "STOP THE OBSCENITY!" A little strongly stated, but he makes a really good case.
Iron Man I think the last Robert Downey Jr. movie I saw was Sixteen Candles. Do you remember him in that? Didn't think so. My point being that I held off seeing Iron Man because I didn't have any particular interest in either character or the actor.
Boy, was I an idiot! (Again.) This is the best comic book movie EVER, by a ridiculous stretch. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give Iron Man a SEVENTY FIVE, and the second best comic book movie ever, The Dark Knight, a SIX. Yeah, I really thought it was that much better. But Heath Ledger was still amazing.
Death at a Funeral Another indie movie, another first time writer, directed by the great Frank Oz. It's a really funny movie about a funeral that runs off the rails. It was a teensy bit squirmy for folks who've just been through a really tough one (my wife's mother passed away what seems like a few weeks ago, but it was late September)...but once it got going, it was impossible not to laugh. HARD.
My point in bringing this up is to mention Oz's commentary, the second best I've ever heard. (The best, now and forever, will be the commentaries on the extended versions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.) The writer and the funniest of the actors were on one commentary, and it was fun. Frank had his own, though, it was a shimmering wonder. You'll see and hear exactly how he works as a director, and the things you have to juggle to make a movie happen. We found it riveting. It's worth renting the movie for this 94 minute film school.
And for what it's worth, Frank was the voice of Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear and other Muppets, and you can definitely hear it when he laughs. Which he does a lot. The actors threw him off the set for one scene because he was making it impossible to finish without THEM laughing.
Needless to say, after such an amazing, insightful tour, we were ready to watch it again. Needless to say, we did.
Best commentary, Honorable Mention. While not the second best ever, and dropped to honorable mention because it was from 2007, the two commentaries on The Simpsons Movie were as funny as the movie...which was REALLY funny.
My guess for the Oscar for Best Picture? Even though the nominations won't be announced until later this week? And even though I haven't seen the movie? Slumdog Millionaire.
I could be wrong...but I don't think so.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jan 18, 2009 at 11:13:45 am
Saturday night has become a dumping ground for television. Many networks are airing re-runs of shows that ran earlier in the week. HBO used to make a big deal out of Saturday as premiere night, with a different movie every week. Nope, not anymore. Their focus is on series programming on Sunday night. Same with Showtime (who, by the way, is up 10% in 2008, compared to POINT ONE percent for HBO) - it's all about Sunday night. I could go on with a bunch of other examples, but you already know what I mean.
This wasn't always true. In 1973-74, here was CBS's Saturday night lineup:
All in the Family (#1 for the year)
M*A*S*H (4)
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (9)
The Bob Newhart Show (12)
The Carol Burnett Comedy Hour (27)
I picked that year kind of arbitrarily - okay, I was looking up what else was happening the year that Brain Salad Surgery was released. Hey, Mike Cohen, do you have that one? :-)
Poking around a little further, it turns out that those 5 shows remained in the Top 30 from the 71-72 season until 75-76. And the fact is that the scale of those shows was much, much bigger than those numbers indicate. And on a Saturday!!
There have been other big nights, like Thursday on NBC in the 80s -- Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court, Hill St. Blues. -- but can you think of even a single big Saturday show since 1977? Even one?
For your trivia notebook: the 4 half-hour sitcom/1-hour drama between 8 and 11 configuration was developed by NBC exec Pat Weaver, the father of actress Sigourney Weaver. Pat was also the inventor of the morning news show (Today) and evening talk show (Tonight). Perhaps most notably, he originated the idea of networks creating their own programs and selling ads! A true genius. No, really - graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth with a Philosophy degree.
Also for your trivia notebook, although you might have this one: Cheers finished its first season in DEAD LAST place. Seriously, not a single other series had lower ratings. Can you imagine? There are shows with higher ratings today being canceled after a few episodes. The days of smart executives relying on their instincts is long gone. They were far from infallible, but guys like Pat Weaver, Fred Silverman, Roone Arledge and Brandon Tartikoff were as well known in the general public as executives at any big company in their days...as well they should have been. Smart guys. Good instincts. Loooong gone.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jan 17, 2009 at 6:46:19 am
When Steve Jobs called Blu-ray a big bag of hurt, he was being asked why the new MacBooks have no Blu-ray drives. His answer spoke to the cost of licensing the hardware. When his lieutenant Phil Schiller chimed in, HE was speaking about Blu-ray content when he said that the iTunes Store and Apple TV was the right way to deliver HD.
Steve knows how much a Blu-ray drive costs to license, so I'll take his word for it. I won't bust Phil too badly as an individual, because lordy knows he's not the only one to think that Blu-ray's launch will be impeded, if not altogether scrubbed, by digital downloads. I just think that downloads aren't the big story for HD delivery right now. I think the same thing that will prevent Blu-ray's speedy adoption is the same thing standing in the way of HD downloads catching on as quickly as they might.
Yes, I said "thing," not "things." There are plenty of market and technology forces standing in the way for the world at large worth talking about later, but for me, for now, there's only one obstacle standing in the way of me caring about Blu-ray or broadband delivery: my HD DVR.
Before the DVR, I was an early adopter of a whole lot of things. My first CD player cost $500 – a top loader! -- and that was one of the CHEAP ones. Like Blu-ray, the first sales were to "philes," in this case audiophiles. You could mostly only buy them in the kind of stores that sold receivers and amplifiers as separate components. Mine came from a store in Harvard Square, across from Needle in a Haystack, an entire store devoted to nothing buy phonograph needles. It wasn't a huge store, but I'm not kidding – NOTHING but needles. It was kind of eerie.
And back in 1983, $500 was real money.
I was also an early adopter of Laser Disk, which introduced a number of critical technologies to wide-ish scale (only 1% of the VHS market, but still) home use: widescreen aspect ratios, random access chapters, frame-by-frame viewing, surround-sound encoding including Dolby and THX, digital audio tracks that allowed things like commentaries and separate language tracks, director's cuts, significant bonus features, significant picture remastering, and of course, Disney picture disks.
(Without getting all dewy eyed about how much better a laserdisk in a good player looks and sounds than most DVDs, I'll simply observe that no DVD will ever be as neato as a Disney picture disk.)
There were related things I adopted early, including hand-made custom subwoofer cables, front-projection TV (had one of them big 3 CRT gun jobbies), and yep, DVR. That deserves a couple of blog entries by itself, and I'll get to 'em....but the bottom line very quickly became that there wasn't much point to watching TV without a DVR, and there was no way on green earth that we were even going to THINK about adopting HD until there was an HD DVD.
Fortunately, DirecTV came to the rescue with DirecTiVo, a co-branded box that did exactly what it sounds like it did: for $1000, plus $10/month for HD programming. Eek. A little painful, but hey, it was HD, the way we wanted, so we took a deep breath, did without heat that winter, and got what we wanted.
(I say "we" - my wife is every step along the way with all this. We loves us some HD.)
This means two things. One is that the absolutely very, very last thing that would keep my from adopting Blu-ray. I have the rest of my HD rig loaded for bear. I'm not holding my breath for players to drop below the "magical" $200 barrier.
More important for Blu-ray in our lives is that we've been watching HD movies since 2004. I'm getting more every week for the exact same price as SD cable, and using the DVR to watch when I want.
(Not at all a big deal, but something that I notice when I watch DVDs – I prefer the features and responsiveness of my DVR. I don't need chapter marks as much as I do to hop back a few seconds to hear something I missed. One button on the DVR, a pain on the DVD.)
I know there's going to be a lot more Blu-ray disks very quickly, but right now on my DVR, waiting for me to watch a couple more times before I move along are two of my favorites: Office Space and Lawrence of Arabia, neither of which is on Blu-ray. (If I was a better person, I might have put Lawrence of Arabia BEFORE Office Space. So I probably shouldn't mention South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut – should I?) I have no doubt they'll come to Blu-ray, but not before I'll have watched them a dozen times or more in HD.
The big Blu-ray news this month is James Bond. Well, I've seen all the ones I like – including my favorite, Casino Royale with Daniel Craig -- in HD plenty of times. (Daniel Craig is the best Bond by a longer distance than we have yet found a way to measure.) It's the highest-selling Blu-ray disk to date, although The Dark Knight debuts Tuesday and could easily surpass Casino Royale in its first week. I'll see it plenty of times, on my time, when it comes to my HD DVR for free in a few more months.
I've got precisely zero use for the Lord of the Rings books. I haven't gotten past the first dozen pages – sorry, I've tried, but I just can't. I laughed – hard – at anyone in my high school who read them. This put me off seeing the movies longer than I should have waited. My bad. As much as I came to love the movies in the theater (barring the multiple endings of the third), I place the deluxe editions of the DVDs – once you've included 3 commentaries and the two disks of documentaries) among the great achievements in the history of human artistic endeavor. I'm glad to be alive at the time they were released. (Yeah, really.) Not coming to Blu-ray before 2010 says Mr. Jackson. I'll have been seeing them in HD for maybe 5 years at that point. Will the extras that make the deluxe editions such a wonder all be remade as HD? Highly unlikely I think, and I watch those as often as I watch the movies.
Of course Peter will probably find enough extra goodies laying around to make the Blu-ray edition worth my while...but I'm having a hard time coming up with any reason to buy a Blu-ray player before then. Not that I'll necessarily do it then. But I'm waiting something to push me over the edge. Any suggestions? Because until you persuade me otherwise, I'm keeping Blu-ray in my big bag of ho-hum.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Nov 25, 2008 at 9:20:40 am
True confession: I hated The Matrix and its sequels. Absolutely despised them as dreck, a colossal waste of time, talent, and money. I really hate those movies so much that I can't find the words to describe it. Really, really, really hate them. A lot.
I didn't hate Speed Racer, but I didn't love it as much as my friends did either. When it showed up in 1967, it was the first major Japanimation to hit these shores, nothing like the early Warner Brothers cartoons that I loved, and still do. I eventually got into it for what it was, which was pretty cool.
(See below for the opening theme of the original Speed Racer. It's the only clip I can find...which tells me that it'll probably be gone soon. Don't blame me if the link is dead when you try to get there.)
Here's the cool part: the movie version of Speed Racer by the Wachowski brothers is coming this summer, and I'm ridiculously psyched for it. Check out the HD trailer, available in both 720 and 1080. Awesome.
(It continues to utterly mystify me that the MacBook series are the only 15-inch laptops on the market that don't support 1080. My wife had a VAIO that supported full-raster 1920x1080 before the turn of the century.)
The Ain't it Cool blog is the place for all things, well, cool. They have the links to the 2 international trailers that followed the US version below.
BTW, if you're even vaguely a fan of anything sci-fi, fantasy, Lost, Kevin Smith, comics, etc. you really should swing by Ain't it Cool every now and again. The guy who runs it, Harry Knowles, and his pals are true nut cases, but Harry's blog has such enormous influence that he has gained some of the most intimate access to this news on the planet.
Anyway, I'll see you at Speed Racer in May.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 14, 2008 at 4:23:09 am
I've written before about my enormous respect for Trent Reznor and his impact on popular music. Now, he's raising the stakes for everyone distributing any kind of music on the web.
There was a lot of talk recently about how the release of Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows, on the web before it was released in stores as a traditional disk, and how this was going to shake the music industry to its very foundations.
Here's the exact headline of one such story, one of a gajillion you can find on the topic: Radiohead's Album Threatens Music Industry. No need to mention the name of that news outlet here. You probably caught the story at the time, if not, you can look it up. The fact is that virtually EVERYONE got this story exactly wrong.
Yes, it was cool that Radiohead offered a DRM-free, web-only release of the album, for any price you wanted to pay, including zero. Even so, the band made more than they'd ever taken home on any album before. They haven't said how much money that is, or how much they made, but I love it. I'm a huge Radiohead fan, especially The Bends, which is definitely one of my desert-island disks. Anything that makes them money is a-okay in my book.
Here are the rubs: it was very low bandwidth (160 Mbps) compared to other DRM-free releases --less than HALF of some of them. Also, it's over now. You can buy it digitally from Amazon etc. at 256 Mbps, or as a CDm both at a fixed rate from a major record label. As far as you're concerned today, the web thing never happened. What kind of threat is THAT? None, that's what.
Now our boy Trent, on the other hand, HE'S shaking things up. He left his major label for the express purpose of controlling the distribution and cost of his recordings. He's not at all happy with what had been happening, including the outcome of his direct confrontation of his label regarding what he feels are outrageous pricing.
Here's what he expressed to fans:
"Has anyone seen the price come down? Okay, well, you know what that means - STEAL IT. Steal away. Steal and steal and steal some more and give it to all your friends and keep on stealin'. Because one way or another these mother****ers will get it through their head that they're ripping people off and that that's not right."
You can see that clip below. I couldn't figure out how to add two movies to the page, so here's the link to
, and the song it preceded.
Feel free to disagree, but he said what he said. And indeed, he has put his money where his mouth is. I got my copy of his new recording free, directly from him.And unlike other digital downloads, it includes ALL THE ARTWORK, including a 40-page pdf of photographs taken alongside the project.
Now the free part is only the first volume of 4: 9 songs of 36. But you can stream the whole thing for free, or buy it for only $5. That includes the release as 320 Mbps MP3, genuinely lossless FLAC, Apple's fake lossless codec (sorry, it's true). For only $20, you get the immediate download now, plus a 2-CD release when it's available: a 6-panel digipack with the printed PDF, along with some goodies like wallpapers and such. The kids eat that stuff up.
Things get really interesting from there. A $75 deluxe edition includes all of that, plus a Blu-ray release of the album in 2 versions, including hi-def stereo. Following a precedent that Trent has set for a few songs, all 36 tracks are available as separate multi-track mixes that you can play with in any audio editor on Mac or Windows. (Trent is a famous Mac zealot, so you can be sure that he had Garage Band in mind), plus all that other stuff.
Most interesting: a 2500 limited edition that includes all of that plus heavyweight vinyl, plus 2 large books of artwork, embossed covers, the whole deal in a fabric slipcase. Plus 2 giclee prints: enjoy as is, or ready to frame. The package signed and hand-numbered by Trent...and more...for $700.
The amazing thing: that edition has long sold-out, long before the actual release. It's among the reasons why Trent was able to take in $1.3 million in the first WEEK of its availability...again, before the releases in April and May of various versions.
Pay for only what you want, as few or as many goodies that you want, entirely outside the label distribution chain. Now THAT starts looking like a threat.
So about a week after my download, Ars Technica ran a pretty cool story about the whole thing...albeit without the link to the thing that I provided above.
PS. Trent wasn't the first to speak out about labels overpricing records. Tom Petty held up the release of his 1981 record Hard Promises because the record company raised the price of it after promising they wouldn't. It was a big deal at the time, but the story never comes up anymore. It had 2 big hits (The Waiting, and A Woman's in Love), but it's still among my favorite of his records.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 14, 2008 at 3:32:26 am
The move "Once" was one of my favorites from 2007, and against all odds, a song from this lo-budget indie WON the best song award. It led to the most magical moment I've seen in over 35 years of avid Oscar watching. Too bad you're never going to see it. It only aired ONCE, and Oscar is trying to make sure that you never see it again.
"Once" is the story of two musicians who accidentally develop an intimacy that ultimately, very gently, pushes them back to their previous loves. It's sweet and beautiful, and has GREAT music. Hence the Oscar nom and win.
Among the reasons the movie itself felt so fresh is that the two lead actors are actually musicians who've never acted before. Glenn Hansard is a member of The Frames, another member of whom made his directing debut with the movie. Marketa Irglova, a classically trained Czech emigre, plays a...classicly trained Czech emigre. The Oscar-winning song is "Falling Slowly," and was written together by both the actors and the characters. Check it out on YouTube while you're waiting for Netflix to deliver Once to your doorstep. You HAVE to see this DVD.
When they won the Oscar, you've never seen two more surprised or grateful people in your life. And in typical Oscar fashion, they cut to commercial after Glenn's speech, and before hers. Grrrrr.....
Coolest Oscar moment EVER: host Jon Steward comes back from commercial AND BRINGS HER BACK OUT to give HER speech. It was an amazing speech, and the audience went nuts over the whole thing. It was no wonder that the whole thing, both speeches and Jon putting them together was YouTubed all over the place.
No wonder Oscar made them yank it down. This is the same industry that fought home releases believing FIRMLY that it would be the death of the movies. They fought rentals because it would undercut the money they started to make from home sales.
And here we are. While rentals boom, home sales are now BIGGER than box office sales...which are actually bigger than ever, and still trending upward.
SEE??? The more people can see good movies, they more they WANT good movies. Even though plenty of movies bite (like books, music, TV, etc.), people find their way to good ones, and go to theaters hoping for more.
This was the lowest rated Oscar telecast since Nielsen started tracking it in 1973. You think that if people could see a moment of such overwhelming joy and surprise that they might tune in next year hoping for more? The history of movies says ABSOLUTELY ENTIRELY YESSSSS!!!!
And yet, they're determined that it air only ONCE, and you never get to see it. It will have the opposite effect than they hope....which, if the music business is capable of learning anything (still up for debate), is learning right now. Guard the gates, and guess what? PEOPLE DON'T GO THROUGH THE GATE.
While they don't have the video, at least Oscars.com has the speech in print. It doesn't give you ANY of the flavor, but worth checking out despite Oscar not wanting you to to ever get any of that flavor, EVER.
Fer pete's sake, why don't they at least sell DVDs of the thing? Again, following the experience of the movies, they'll make more from the DVD sales than they do from airing the Oscars ONCE. Even the NFL, who puts on the Super Bowl -- a MUCH bigger event than the Oscars -- re-airs the game on the NFL Network, and sells DVDs of it. Why? Because they want to MAKE MONEY, both from the people who didn't see it the first time, and more important, from people who DID see it, and want to see it again.
And Oscar, if you sell a DVD of the show with the award for ONCE, I'll be first in line to buy it, because I want to see the award-winning performance from ONCE, and the amazing speeches from the award-winners, more than ONCE.
The fact is that you can still find this Oscar moment online now and again, by searching "Marketa Irglova Oscar." You can also find pieces of the funniest host gig EVER, by Jon Stewart by searching "Jon Stewart Oscar."
And to end with a legit search, check out thedailyshow.com for some of Jon's stories about the Oscars. One of the best is him telling that Czech girl Madeline Albright, humbly but firmly, There was NO WAY Marketa Irglova was NOT coming back out.
You can also find the actual performance from Once at YouTube. Why? Because Glenn Hansard has been using the net, including YouTube, for YEARS to build an audience. You'll find plenty of other results for other live performances of it.
Too bad that the most uplifting, unpredictable moment in Oscar history only aired ONCE, and you'll never get to see it again. Maybe they'll eventually see that they'll make MORE money by giving people an opportunity to see moments like this more than ONCE.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 1, 2008 at 6:23:47 am
As I write this, it's Oscar eve. Just like Christmas eve, only more exciting. At least to my wife Nora and me. In fact, our primary celebration of Christmas is going to the movies, preferably a movie where things blow up. A festival of bright lights if you will.
It's not really the contest aspect of the thing. Most years we see a significant number of the nominated films. This year, we haven't seen a single one of the movies nominated for a major award. A lot of the movies look wonderful, especially Juno, but we just haven't gotten around to it.
One reason is that we keep upgrading our home theater - most recently with an upconverting DVD player. I can honestly say that our viewing experience is every bit as satisfying as a trip to the movie theater...
...with one obvious exception. There's something tribal about sitting in an audience of strangers, being moved by the same story in our own ways. It can be startling to have the same experience, including those rare occassions...though not as rare as you might think...of rising in a spontaneous ovation at the end.
The main reason we no longer experience that is, quite simply, that we don't live within walking distance of a theater anymore -- one of the great pleasures of living in the city, but not enough to outweigh the much greater pleasures of living just a tad further out.
The other reason we don't go to movies as often is Netflix, but that's for another blog post.
We love the Oscars because we like being surprised.
Last year, it was the appearance of Pan's Labyrinth, a movie with a luscious look. The REAL surprise for us was the film that won in the Foreign category was Children of God. It featured an amazing performance by Clive Owen, who has become one of our very, very favorite actors, and by far our favorite performance in Michael Caine's long career.
We're thrilled that ridiculous musical numbers are gone -- reason enough to be glad that Billy Crystal isn't the host. Instead, we love presentations like the short film by Errol Morris that I wrote about here.
We've also been caught off guard by the musical performances by real musicians. For example, the Oscars were where we first heard Elliot Smith.
(This is in contrast to the travesty of 1984, when, instead of Phil Collins, the original performer, the Academy had Ann Reinking perform it instead. The Academy apparently didn't know who Phil is.)
Another rare pleasure is seeing people earn long-desrved rewards. Last year's Martin Scorcese win, as well as Speilberg's win for Schindler's List, were as much awards for earlier films as anything else...and there's nothing wrong with that.
(re: Scorcese, I wrote about that award last year, praising the third Oscar for his editor, Thelma Schoonmacher...while also arguing that Scorcese may not have been as overlooked as one might think.)
I don't really go in for predictions anymore. It's not because I don't go to as many movies. Magazines like Variety and Entertainment Weekly, as well as their excellent websites, are among the sources that give us all we need to track momentum, which is ultimately more important than quality. And seriously, when have either awards or box office had anything to do with quality one way or the other?
That said, there's one race I'm especially interested in. Kevin O'Connell has this year been nominated for his TWENTIETH nomination in the Sound Mixing category. EW has been waging a campaign on his behalf since last year. It would be really cool if he won.
Even though most of this post doesn't have much else to do with this year's awards, I'll still swing by for an update. Otherwise, it's Oscar and me and Nora, joined this year by her sister Roxanne and their mother, all tuning in more for this than we do for Christmas.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Feb 23, 2008 at 8:50:26 pm
(Howdy to everyone who came here from any links after April 2007. Rather than edit this to reflect how things have gone since then, I created a new blog entry that you can find here.
Other than this note, I've left the original entry unchanged when I wrote it. Interesting to see what I was right about, and what I was wrong about. One thing we were ALL wrong about, that the war would go on for another couple of years. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've not seen one single prediction before January 2008 that Blu-ray, which has looked like the winner for a while, would win as quickly as it did.
With that, take a gander.)
I've heard people say that porn is going to decide who wins the DVD format wars, just like they did with videotape. Maybe it'll be PS3 or Xbox. Okay, worth talking about. But there's somebody out there who has a bigger influence on retail buying behavior than all of them combined, and they've got $100 million that says HD DVD is going to win. Anybody here want to argue merchandising with Wal-Mart?
Even if you do, Wal-Mart is the world's largest DVD retailer, so they get to win the argument.
The story being widely reported is that Wal-Mart is ordering up TWO MILLION HD DVD players from Taiwanese manufacturer Fuh Yuan for $50 apiece.
The source of all of these stories appears to be a post in the AV Science forum. And as we at The COW believe, forums are often the very, very best source for the straight dope. You'll find both the link to the original Chinese story, and a persuasive translation of it. (My Chinese isn't quite strong enough to evaluate it conclusively.) There's also a very lively discussion of what price Wal-Mart will sell them for. As the speculation rages, the price has gone from $299 down to $99. Whatever. We'll know when we know.
I'm thinking lower rather than higher. Wal-Mart has been using the weekly cycle of DVD releases as loss leaders to drive customers into their stores. They're especially fond of this strategy, because DVD buyers spend more per visit than non-DVD buyers.
If you start poking around, you'll find a heap o' articles (or, as our UK readers would say, "AN heap o' articles") about all this, but I say this is by far the best of them. (Trust me, I'm right.) (This time.) Here's the money quote:
Wal-Mart sees the new high definition formats as a way to bring in store traffic again but they realized that won't happen unless the players are affordable and there is only one standard. They recognized their own power in being king maker previously and are now using that power to drive the format that works best for them. They could care less about the technology as this is all about making money and they (like every other retailer in this space) know that two formats won't allow the market to move outside of the fringes and the dual-mode players are simply way too expensive.
So they need one standard and a lot of players in market before their DVD customers wander off to download land and stops coming to Wal-Mart for movies.
He's got a lot of other interesting arguments, but, more important, a whole lot of what appears to be actual facts. Imagine that!
Oh, and one interesting bit of speculation: that the real source of the whole $100 million story is...wait for it....Wal-Mart.
Quick closing notes for now:
I don't think porn had a darn thing to do with the success of VHS. Apparently didn't hurt it any, though..but porn's a non-factor this time for sure.
As much as the data folks like us think Blu-ray is a no-brainer, many in the home theater world hate it. Folks as old as me hold Joe Kane in the highest esteem. A former chair of SMPTE and a pioneer in video calibration, man oh man, he has nothing good to say about Blu-ray. Admittedly, some of this is ancient history (having been written in the practically medieval Summer of '06), but Joe's disdain endures the sands of time.
Using a conversation with Joe a few months later as a jumping off point, Ultimate AV concurs.
While not as virulent, Projector Central was unequivocal in declaring HD DVD the winner in an article called, "Blu-ray: Can it Survive?" Again, some of the information is dated , but still an example of how differently the world of HD disks looks from upstream (creation) and downstream (consumption).
More recently, Joe's putting his money where his mouth is. One of the reasons we geezers love him so is because of his Video Essentials. I used it daily as a systems installer (including home theater), and it's the cheapest way to make your home theater look beyond its best. It's out on a hybrid disk alright: HD DVD and standard DVD. No Blu-ray.
Even if you think he's nuts on Blu-ray, you really need to check out his disk.
I think both DVD formats are irrelevant. It's already all about the HD movie downloads. But that's for another blog entry.
Discuss.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Feb 20, 2008 at 6:11:54 am
I had a lot of fun writing the "The Big Dog Gets Off the Porch" article for the newsletter. (Check out my blog post on the topic too.) It took a TON of research, though, and I found a lot of things I just didn't have room to use. It also made me think about some things -- new stuff as well as stuff that's been kicking around forever. So here we go...
This was never about image quality. Sort of. There were many comparitive issues that factored into the victory, and they never had anything to do with which format looked better. As Joe Kane pointed out in the article, there was a time when Blu-ray was easily demonstrable as having much poorer quality, due largely to seriously nasty MPEG compression.
(Please note: the article I wrote for the main library had a TON of links, and took an acre of work, so I'm not going to repeat any of them here.)
I think it also pissed him off that Sony et al. simply refused to look at new, better compression technologies. There was much horror from EVERYONE (including me, not that it matters) about this, long before the format even launched. The 2005 reply from Sony absolutely did NOT help:
"Advanced (formats) don't necessarily improve picture quality," said Don Eklund, Sony Pictures' senior vice president of advanced technology. "Our goal is to present the best picture quality for Blu-ray. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that's with MPEG-2."
As the article mentions, the image quality was SO much poorer that the videophile community in particular felt that Blu-ray was DOA.
So what changed? I think Joe K is right: it was hammer and tongs competition. Blu-ray looks fantastic of course, and compeition from HD DVD chased it far faster than mere consumers ever would have.
Image quality: Microsoft fails to deliver the killing blow Anybody remember that head to head demonstration of VC-1 and H.264 at NAB? (Both of these are SMPTE names for Windows Media and QuickTime. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. There were some other formats too, but it was lights out: None of us had seen anything like VC-1. Even the hardest core Mac fanboys were blown away.
A bigwig in the Hollywood post community (ground zero for Mac fanboys, believe me) said, It's over. Microsoft won. Yeah, it's cross platform and everything, but QT is out of it.
Don't believe the hype about Avid, btw. It's the OTHER ground zero for Mac fanboys. It was started as a Mac-only company, and won 6 technical Emmys and an OSCAR for its products between 1989 and 1998, all with Mac-only products, long before Apple bought the Windows-originated Final Cut from Macromedia.
(The PC hype about Avid is another story. The short version is that the guy who said what he said, everyone he worked for, and everyone who worked for him, was fired in the next year. What he was said was never, ever true. End of story.)
So it was with no pleasure whatsoever that we went on the road with VC-1. We projected it on the top of the line Barco projectors. There were only 3 of them in the world, and we had two. (Barco themselves were stuck with only one.)
We projected VC-1 playing our 30 minute trailer reel and our 5 minute high-impact demo at 4 megaBITS per second playing off a hardrive on FORTY FOOT diagonal screens. A high quality projector showing a huge image exposed every single flaw...
...and there were none. We invited people to put their noses against the screen (rear-projected) and invited them to look for flaws. LA, NY, Chicago, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich -- nobody found any. One guy (ONE!) claimed to see some compression artifacts, but when it was pointed out that that was the texture of the screen fabric, he relented.
And that was pretty much the end of VC-1. I have no idea what happened. My guess is that Msoft both lost their will to fight in Hollywood (our contacts at MSFT disappeared), and they focused their efforts on Xbox and HD DVD.
The effect in all places was the same: they forced QT, Playstation, and Blu-ray to get much much prettier.
The OTHER result was largely the same: H.264 still has a much bigger footprint, Playstation still lacks basic features that Xbox has, as does Blu-ray re: HD DVD....but they all look fantastic.
This is why Joe Kane thinks the format war on DVD ended too soon, and why the industry as a whole is disappointed as Apple has fewer and fewer competitors -- the pace of innovation is one the verge of winding down to a crawl. Competition is GOOD.
May the best format LOSE Now, this all played out much, much differently for the TAPE format wars. People lament that Beta was the better format: ridiculously better quality, smaller form factor, more durable tape and shell, and on and on.
These are all exactly the reasons why VHS won. Betamax was too good for the studios to let it live.
In fact, they demanded that VHS image quality be reduced even further. VHS lived to see the light of day because the picture degraded so thoroughly when copied. No one of good intent would put up with it.
Which is why the Video Home Standard won. It's more complicated than that, of course, but it's why the studios backed it before the market did, even though Betamax came out earlier, and initial sales were much higher.
WHY this happened, and why it also happened in the DVD format wars in exactly the same way, is a conversation for another day. But it's interesting to note that Blu-ray won for many of the exact reasons that VHS won. Certainly following the same pattern. You think Sony might have been taking notes?
We know that Betamax's professional derivative became the professional standard, and the professional derivative of VHS, MKII, died without a trace...for many of the same reasons that VHS won in the home.
Here's a final word about competition: with Betamax, Sony was the first to introduce really high-quality audio on tape. (The professional derivative of "Beta Hi-Fii" was PCM.) VHS had nothing similar...until the year AFTER "Beta Hi-Fi."
Remember kids, competition, even in format wars -- ESPECIALLY in format wars -- is a good, good thing. The tape format wars went on just about the right amount of time. I agree with Joe Kane that the DVD format war probably ended a year early.
To be specific, my cable system just added the HD feed of the Food Network. Walter handles the HD editing, color grading for Good Eats, among the most popular shows there. Walter also handles both HD and SD animations for Good Eats, among the most distinctive parts of the show.
Wally and I have the Red Sox postseason to thank. Okay, and to a much, much, much lesser extent, the Yankees, Cubs and Phillies.
The Red Sox were pioneers of local sports programming - among the very first to own their own cable network (New England Sports Network, NESN), the VERY first to build schedules of major pre-game and post-game coverage (usually an hour, often 90 minutes), as well as extensive original programming, ESPN-style studio newscasts, talk shows, documentaries, etc.
This was a model followed by YES, the Yankees network, among many others, and is fantastically profitable.
When the current ownership bought the team in 2002 for $700 million, they were widely derided as insane. The business of baseball was in a shambles, with the entire league combined posting a $14 million loss that year. But the ownership team believed that -- even apart from a fanatical fan base coming to the park -- they could turn a profit on the NESN part of the package alone, and that it could more than offset potential losses by the ball club itself.
The club became far more profitable of course, and the $700 million investment is becoming, remarkably enough, one of the great bargains in sports history.
One of ownership's big investments was in HD. Every Red Sox game (and hockey too, which NESN also carries) is carried in stunning HD -- the best picture and VERY best sound of any sports broadcast I've ever seen. This includes the Super Bowl, whose sound and picture ass the Red Sox kick 162 times per year.
Here's where the baseball playoffs come in. This year, MLB wisely distributed the playoffs to TNT and TBS, preserving the World Series for Fox (alas, baseball coverage heinous beyond description.) We have a tiny regional cable network...whose other markets just happen to include New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, all of whom had teams in the basebally playoffs....
...and NONE of whom got TBS in HD. The outcry was so overwhelming -- and they'll be the first to say that the screaming was loudest from Boston, which had the longest heritage of all-HD coverage. They responded with TBS in HD on the very first day of the playoffs, October 3.
The news was so big, and the revenue impact so great, that it was reported on the cable company's INVESTOR INFORMATION page.
Comcast and Verizon had the same problem, btw, and also responded by bringing TBS HD online just in time for the playoffs, and not one day earlier.
Ours was the only system, however, to add FOOD NETWORK HD at the same time. (You knew I was going to back to this, right? Or maybe you'd given up hope.)
Nora and I used to watch the Food Channel all the time. We enjoy food, enjoy cooking, and our favorite show from day one has been Good Eats, hosted by Alton Brown. Many of the recipes we've picked up have become staples. The sweet potato pecan waffles are now a holiday tradition for us.
But the show is about far more than recipes. The Monty Python-inspired graphics are a hoot, and reflect the show's REAL draw, which is a smart, funny approach to food science, with history and anthropology thrown in. A recurring cast of characters, puppets, great music, and unusual approaches to shooting are all part of the mix.
And some cooking. Even when we weren't cooking at all -- and not doing much these days either -- we find Good Eats one of the most entertaining shows on TV, and highly recommend it to anyone who likes smart, funny TV.
You'll find clips there (heads up: Windows Media) that show off Good Eats style. The very first sample video: the history of cans. Short version: it started with Emporer Napoleon in 1794. Like I said, not an ordinary cooking show.
I've known that Walter has been doing the HD post on Good Eats for a while, but it wasn't until Monday that I got to see the show in HD for the very first time. In a word, stunning, even by HD standards.
The episode was on deep-frying turkey. Perfect example of why Good Eats is such a great show: I don't eat turkey, and even if I did, I'd never deep fry it. Yes, it's the best-tasting and fastest way to cook...but building my own winch to lower the turkey into 400 degree oil is more than I'm up for.
One of my favorite parts of the show is when Alton demonstrated what might go wrong with deep frying a turkey. He was in front of an Atlanta-area fire station, and as he lowered the turkey into the oil, it literally exploded into flames. Not caught on fire. No, burst into a tower of flames that poured out of the pot into a genuine inferno 15-20 feet across.
Cool!
And it looked truly amazing in HD. The shot ended as firefighters stepped forward to extinguish the flames, and the screen filled with the white blast. Dissolve from white into the next scene. Perfect.
There were other great things in the show. You could see every single hair on Big Foot, every spike in Alton's own hair, every ripple on the giant plastic ice cream cone, and razor-sharp display in the hardware store. Again, not your typical cooking show.
Walter and I have known each other for the better part of ten years now, and I've known for a long time that he's a talented dude. But this was my first time to see his latest work with Final Cut Pro and Color, in its full HD glory. I gotta tell you, I was really, truly impressed.
So even if your town doesn't have the rabid fever for the Red Sox that can force the addition of Food Network HD, pester your local cable company anyway. It's worth it just to see Walter's work on Good Eats alone.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Oct 11, 2007 at 6:07:45 am
It's not even a background, really. It's pretty explicitly the absence of a background. Even lighting, no shadows, almost adrift. Not in a bad way. Stephen Smith did a great job of covering this in the May-June issue of Creative COW Magazine, including why it's best to use chroma keys to acheive the look.
The most frequent place you're seeing it these days is the "I'm a Mac" ads. (Check the end of this entry for a great variation.) If you cast your mind back a little further, you might recall the same look in the Apple "switch" campaign. As an Oscar-maniac, I hope you saw the short film with this look in the 2006 Academy Awards show, one of the highlights of what I thought was the best Oscarcast in years.
All from the same guy. The guy who invented the look: Errol Morris.
Almost. While it was common in still photography, it hadn't been used in any meaningful way before he used it for the first time in a short film for the 2002 Oscars.
You may have heard his name before, by the way. He won an Academy Award for the documentary The Fog of War, and has been nominated for others of his films, which include The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death, Gates of Heaven, and Fast Cheap & Out of Control
Roger Ebert has said, "After twenty years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more...Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini."
Mr. Morris is not shy. This quote is on the front page of his website.
I've always been struck that he's also unapologetic for enjoying making commercials, including the Mac Switch and "I'm a Mac" campaigns. You can find dozens and dozens of his commercials at his website. Be sure to check the links in the right margin -- yet dozens more.
These full-frame commercials are what got him the gig making the short film for the 2002 Oscar Award, where he used the white background style for the first time. The short film that opened the show that year instead of the traditional musical number is a whole bunch of folks, famous and not, talking about movies they love.
First, watch it here. I watch it pretty regularly, and it still delights me every time.
Just in case you're thinking that reading this might be a waste of your time, here's an excerpt from the article.
The interviews were stacked up, one per half hour, and by mid-morning the schedule was a shambles. Walter Cronkite was [on camera.] Donald Trump was waiting, with mounting impatience, in the wings. Mikhail Gorbachev and entourage were trudging up the stairs. And Iggy Pop was in the greenroom.
You read correctly. Iggy Pop was scheduled to go on after Mikhail Gorbachev, who it turns out is a big Russell Crowe fan. "And anything with Julia Roberts." You think I'm kidding?
BTW, I also put the "schedule was a shambles" quote in there because every one of us in production can relate to that nightmare.
I interviewed over a hundred people on a white background....Of course, I'm not the first person to film someone on a white background. It's been done by a whole number of photographers, August Sander, Avedon, etc. I have no patent, no trademark, on shooting someone on a white background. Of course, when you try to do something that's free of artifice, somehow that becomes artificial as well.
The white background isn't the reason that that Oscar short, as well as the Switch and I'm a Mac ads, among others that he's done, so compelling. It's the way that people look so directly and comfortably into the camera. To acheive that, he's created a device he affectionately calls The Interrortron. It's like a teleprompter, but instead of text, it superimposes his face in front of the lens.
Soon after the Mac Switch campaign, he applied the same white background style to a series of political ads for MoveOn.org that also played on his own site. They were a variation on the switch campaign if you will: dozens of people who voted for Bush in 2000, but were voting for Kerry in 2004. Darn near none of them was happy about it either, but they felt compelled by their consciences to switch anyway.
When we first discussed shooting [them], my producers and I would have endless discussions about the way to shoot these political ads, what the appropriate way of doing it might be. Should the lighting be absolutely flat? Should the background be white?...But I like the idea that there's something very straightforward about the ads....
So no matter how you feel about either of those candidates, take a look at political advertising at its best. (Sez me.) And again, lots of related links in the right margin.
After watching the spots, you might think you've got his politics pegged, and maybe you do, but it's more complicated than that. He bumped into Karl Rove in a Hilton breakfast room in Waco. I introduced myself. I said, "I'm Errol Morris. I made this film The Fog of War." Karl Rove said, "That's one of my favorite films. I give that as a present to my friends." So it's certainly not that he's incapable of accurately representing what people say across the range of political experience.
That's really the power of The Fog of War, and an example of how startling it is to look someone in the eye, really look. McNamara's clarity is startling, an experience you won't forget.
As deeply visceral a reaction it provokes while watching it, Morris has little confidence that much will happen as a result of his work.
I think we're rudderless bumblers, regardless of what we might imagine. You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.
That's from an interview in a magazine called, appropriately enough, Stop Smiling. Still, there's a reason he keeps going.
My interest is primarily in what people are saying, and in not detracting or distracting from what they're saying, because that's at the center of what I'm doing.
That perspective, applied across all the work he does, and his strong visual style, are a few reasons among many why I agree with our man Roger that Morris is among the most important filmmakers -- and commercial-makers -- of our time.
And you thought this was going to be an article about keying.
PS. Xavier Reivax made a short film called "Same" that matches Nine Inch Nails' "Every Day is Exactly the Same" with film footage, the largest source of which is The Fog of War.
PPS. On the I'm a Mac ads, your pal and mine Eric Bliss sent me this GREAT picture:
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Sep 13, 2007 at 3:27:46 am
As glad as I was to see Mr. Scorcese finally earn a well-deserved Oscar for directing, I was even gladder to see Thelma Schoonmaker earn her third one for Best Achievement in Editing, for her work on The Departed.
She also won in 1981 for Raging Bull and 2005 for The Aviator. She was nominated for Gangs of New York, Goodfellas, and in 1971, Woodstock. (I remember that Scorcese was an editor on that as well, credited as Marty Scorcese. It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I remember that, in addition to Asst. Director, he was listed as Thelma’s assistant. IMDb doesn't mention it. Any of you kids able to confirm or correct me?)
Thelma and Marty have worked together exclusively since that time. They even worked together on Michael Jackson’s Bad video! Of course it’s ridiculous that Marty has had to wait this long for an Oscar.
(BTW, among the five other directors to have multiple nominations and never win are Robert Altman with 5 nominations – his Oscar was an honorary one -- and Alfred Hitchcock with 6.)
I was just as surprised by some of his pictures that weren’t even nominated, like Mean Streets, and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Yeah, the TV series was kind of dopey, but Ellen Burstyn won a Best Actress Oscar for her work in it. It’s the real deal, and still maybe my favorite of his pictures.
Jaw-droppingly astounding was that he wasn’t even nominated for Taxi Driver. ‘Nuff said.
One of the things I’ve wondered is if the nod for The Departed – a mid-ranking Scorcese at best – wasn’t also to make up for slights like Taxi Driver.
Now here’s the heretical part: I can’t say I disagree with any of the choices during years that he lost. I got this from Entertainment Weekly. (Sorry, can’t find this online,)
Lost with Raging Bull to Robert Redford, Ordinary People.
Lost with Last Temptation of Christ to Barry Levinson, Rain Man.
Lost with with Goodfellas to Kevin Costner, Dances with Wolves.
Lost with Gangs of New York to Roman Polanski, The Pianist
Lost with The Aviator to Clint Eastwood with Million Dollar Baby.
I would have voted the same way for all of these. Some are even immediately reflexive. I’ll take Rain Man, Dances, and The Pianist in a walk, and while I wouldn't have voted for it, I thought MDB was a better picture than The Aviator. Most people point to Raging Bull/Ordinary People as the biggest misjudgment, but I’m not buying it.
Here’s the other thing: Thelma deserved to win for the movies that Mary lost for. The Aviator should have been better than it was, but the editing kept it moving more than the story did. Even though I give the 1980 nod to Ordinary People, Raging Bull is a directing and acting masterpiece…but even more of a masterpiece for its editing. So I’m truly delighted for Marty. And perhaps because I’m an editor and understand that part of the process better, I’m thrilled for Thelma.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Sep 13, 2007 at 2:07:27 am
From Fake Steve Jobs, who remains the absolute best resource for Apple information, and by far the funniest blog on the web:
The nice folks at Sugarcat Cakes sent along this photo of their latest cake creation. They call it the Jesus Cake. Feeds a whole party of hungry geeks, but alas, you can't remove the battery.
It's impossible to overstate the impact of Harry Potter on the past ten years of world bookselling. As a bookseller in the mid-80s, I never imagined numbers like this could even be possible: 8.3 million copies of "Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows" in the first 24 hours of US sales, with another 2.7 million in the UK. In the first hour, my former peeps at Barnes & Noble alone sold 156 copies per second! Here in the world of media, we know better than anyone that there's no connection whatsoever between popularity and quality (insert snarky pop-culture reference here). But here's the thing: I think it's almost impossible to overstate how good this series is, the latest installment in particular.
Not that everyone agrees. The American Library Association noted during their Banned Books week last September that the books in Harry Potter series are the most frequently challenged in the 21st century.
They've also been subject to the largest bookburnings in American history, with one particular conflagration of 1.5 million copies all by itself. (Feel free to find your own link. None from me, though.) Of course, these geniuses included as part of their grounds that our boy Harry killed his parents with a butcher knife. Harry didn't kill them, there's no knife involved in their deaths. In fact, not a single butcher knife anywhere in the thousands of pages in the series.
Grrrrrrr.....
Okay, with THAT out of the way, I'm still astounded by how much I enjoyed this series. I'm a pokey reader, and have the attention span of a gnat. Yet the 756 pages flew by, a literal page-turner. Like the best so-called children's novels, their appeal is hardly limited to children. As entertaining as they are, they can also be dark and violent, playing out themes of war motivated by racial intolerance, class conflicts, political intrigue, a malicious press, the horrors (okay, and the rewards) of school, deep personal loss, and the power of friends and family connection to transcend them all.
Oh yeah, and a sense of fantasy, magic, wit, and childlike wonder.
And as with many of the great children's novels, they're not anywhere near appropriate for all ages. The author, J. K. Rowling, recommends that kids not even be exposed to them before 6, and read only WITH kids until 9 or 10, which is what she did with her own kids.
I'm far from alone among well-read adults who feel that this series already stands alongside King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia and other heroic epics.
That link, above, to Metacritic? One of the sites I check a couple of times a week. It's also rotated in and out of my home page. Here are some of the quotes that jumped out at me:
Los Angeles Times: What Rowling has achieved in this book and the series can be described only as astonishing.
Chicago Tribune: This is a deeply engaging book, filled with love and loss, with crackling action and almost unbearable heartbreak.
Washington Post: I cried at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. It's that rare thing, an instant classic that earns its catharsis honestly, not through hype or sentiment but through the author's vision and hard work.
And really, how often do you see a review fessing up that they cried?
Anyway, enough yammering from me. Follow the link to Metacritic and read the reviews yourself. Better still (you knew this was coming, right? The traditional closer) read these books yourself. And if you've read the others, hold on for the last installment. My heart's racing again just talking about it.
As soon as we get the next issue of The COW Magazine out, I'm going to re-read all 7 of the books.
PS. Unlike Lord of the Rings, where I thought the movies were better (sorry), other than #3, the Harry Potter movies are just okay. Don't let them influence your feelings about the books.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jul 31, 2007 at 6:21:27 am
I got that sentence as the title of a story in my Yahoo headlines. That was it. The whole headline. No idea whose song it was, whose song it became, or what the song was. How could I NOT follow that link?
It was a link to a story about Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, "Hurt." NIN's Trent Reznor was not altogether pleased when he heard about it, saying that it was one of his most personal songs -- really saying something for a guy who rewrote every rule for confessional songwriting.
He wasn't happy when he heard the results either....but he had to concede that "It instantly became his song after that."
And then he saw the video.
John is dying. He knows it. So does his wife June, as she watches over his shoulder, weeping, smiling. I can't think of anything I've ever seen even remotely like this.
Trent was amazed. I saw the video and it took my breath away. Immediately my throat had a lump in it, and at that point, it really struck home. It was heartbreaking. I had goosebumps, which I have right now even thinking about it.
It became really inspiring to me. It reminded me of the power of music....It works. And it probably works better than my version.
Here was the last question in the interview: How has all this affected your own relationship to "Hurt"?
I haven't listened to my version since then. I've been so proud of what they've done with it that I haven't thought that much about it.
While John put his stamp on the song, what really changed Trent's mind was Mark Romanek's amazing video. Here are a few production notes at The Inspiration Room.
(Markromanek.com has some great stuff, including an entertaining bio, and his entire collection of videos. Unfortunately, another Flash site that's more pretty than useful, but worth poking around. Also worth buying the DVD that gathers some of his best work.
Romanek's video of Cash's "Hurt" is one of the great achievements of the form, but the song is quite remarkable too. There aren't many versions of it online, but this one is pretty slick: a duet with David Bowie. The emphasis is obviously on the song rather than the visuals, and while John's version benefits from being tighter, this performance underscores the emotion of Reznor's writing.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Jun 11, 2007 at 9:51:27 am
It's the George Foreman iGrill, model number GIPOD200. (Did I miss the 100 model?) Okay, on closer examination, it's a George Foreman grill that you can plug more or less any MP3 player into. But the ad and the model name namecheck iPod by name. Built in speakers and amp, too. Gotta love that. You could go to George's site to see it yourself, but I've been thoughtful enough to save you the trip by pasting the picture here:
My favorite part is "Knockout tunes! Knockout the fat!" at the bottom.
He's such a sweet guy now...and maybe he was a sweet guy then...but I've never seen anybody hit harder than George Foreman in his prime.
One of his biggest fights, the one documented as "The Rumble in the Jungle" in the fantastic documentary "When We Were Kings," resulted in a hard loss to then-underdog Muhammed Ali -- one of only 5 in a career that included 68 knockouts in 76 fights. These weren't against palookas either -- back then, heavyweight championships meant something serious. These guys were arguably the most respected athletes in the world.
One of George's most famous victories came in the first HBO boxing transmission, with Howard Cosell's call becoming, as Wikipedia reminds us, one of the most famous of all time: "Down goes Frazier!, Down goes Frazier!, Down goes Frazier!" George knocked him down 6 times, with the last blow actually lifted Frazier's feet off the floor. Gotta give our man Joe credit for getting up all six times before the fight was declared a technical knockout. Another non-palooka: "Smokin' Je" Frazier knocked Ali out in the 11th round in "The Fight of The Century," which I think probably was...although I didn't see them all.
Since he retired, my favorite thing about George isn't the grill. It's that he named all five of his sons....George.
BTW, little known fact about me: I used to box. Loved it. Nothing brings clarity like being punched in the face. A finite number of times I suppose.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 30, 2007 at 4:05:14 am
A few weeks back, I wrote extensively about the EMI/Steve Jobs press conference, as well as the DRM establishment's response. Check it out if you haven't. It's really good stuff, and not just because I wrote it.
Well, here's the rest of the story, or at least as much of it as I accidentally found this morning.
Here again is the transcript of the press conference with EMI Group chief executive Eric Nicoli and Jobs. You'll find that Steve does much of the talking (surprised?), but both guys come off as smart, funny and self-deprecating. A nice read.
Of course, you'll want to hear it yourself. So allow me to present an MP3 of the press conference!
And because you're a glutton for this stuff, here are the slides in PDF form. How cool is that?
On one hand, the slides don't actually say much at all. That's the point. You kids out there? Don't do drugs. And don't put a pile of crap on slides!!! That point-by-point build nonsense? Strictly for amateurs. Don't ever, ever, ever do it. Seriously. Give people a big pretty picture to look at, then tell 'em a story.
If you give them a slide with a lot of bullet points, they'll read 'em fast, assume that this is all you have to say about it (especially if you read even one line aloud to them), and stop listening. It's a waste of time for everyone.
But if you show them a pretty picture, they'll immediately turn back to you, breathless, waiting for you to tell them what it means. You think I'm kidding about this? I'm not. Pay attention to El Jobso. He won't lead you astray.
Okay, slides rant over. But I have plenty of other stories to tell on the subject some other day. For now, back to fun with DRM, EMI, Apple, etc.
Not long after the original press conference, EMI Senior Vice President Jeanne Meyer did a great follow-up interview with bloggers at The Download Squad. (In case you were wondering, bloggers do indeed carry enough weight to get VPs from multinational companies to sit down with them. I suspect that the Download Squad strategy included just asking. So if there's some heavyweight you want to interview for your blog, just ask.)
Here are some choice bits:
The reason we decided to go with a DRM free version was because of the lack of interoperability between the various stores and devices were becoming too confusing and too frustrating.
So it turns out that EMI's strategy was based, at least in part, on the limitations of the iPod/iTunes closed architecture! Read it again. It's her point not mine, but I'm surprised we missed this before.
Not that she's singling out iTunes, though:
It will allow any retailer to sell our music to the owner of an iPod for example, not just iTunes, at the same time it will allow iTunes to sell music for people to buy for use on any number of different digital music devices and in fact mobile phones.
This quote might be the most interesting to me:
When we offered DRM free in an standard format next to a DRM free but with a higher bitrateand priced a little higher consumers on a ten to one basis went for the premium product.
I'm totally in the majority on that count, but I'll be interested to see how it holds up. On the one hand, the MP3/MP4 format is a testament to how little sound quality matters when compared to convenience. (CDs are too, for that matter.) But when higher quality is every bit as convenient? Maybe.
Also worth remembering: that the average number of tracks that iPod owners buy through iTunes is 20. Twenty. But let's put it this way. Say every iPod is responsible for just a single download of higher quality, non-DRM music that they wouldn't have bought anyway. So 100 million times $1.29 equals....where's my pencil?....$129 million dollars. I'll take it.
She also notes, as Steve did, that nearly all music currently sold has no DRM. Even if every downloaded track had no DRM, it would account for far less than 10% of overall music sales. Which begs the question, what was the fuss in the first place? Anyhoo.....
Two last updates, one new and one old. The new one first. Steve says no dice on the subscription model for iTunes. ""Never say never, but customers don't seem to be interested in it," he says, "People want to own their music." Hard to argue.
On the other hand (I'm saying that a lot, aren't I?), I watch whatever it is, 20 or 30 hours a week watching subscription TV (okay, closer to 40 once you throw in Red Sox games), and maybe 2-4 hours a month watching DVDs I own. So all the hoop-de-doo about subscriptions being the wrong model is nonsense to me. Subscription models have been proven again and again. We just don't have the right model of the right model yet.
Wait! The whole XM thing is the perfect evidence that subscription models for music do work well enough for a sizable and fast-growing audience. And radio's ratings are up while TV's are down. So there. You don't have to either own music or steal it to listen to it.
Now here's the old "update." Folks as old as me will remember when Real Audio was the coolest thing ever. Cooler than QuickTime, by a long, long shot. (Not that QuickTime could stream then. Could it?) Rob Glaser seemed like a stud because, when Apple was adrift and a non-player, he left Microsoft with the express purpose of kicking MS's ass...which for streaming media, he totally did...uhm, until...well, I'm not sure when. But sometime around when they became RealNetworks, Real became (or was revealed as?) the lowest quality, most invasive annoyance on the net. Am I wrong about this?
Anyway, here's Rob at the end of 2005 saying that the iPod's reign is going to fade "closer to 2 years than 10" (although he makes an interesting analogy with Apple's computer market share sliding from 40% to less than 4% at the time of the interview), the reason the subscription model isn't getting traction is that most people steal their music (what?), and using Lynyrd Skynyrd as an example of why Real's Rhapsody music subscription service is the coolest. I was going to say it's hilarious and provocative in equal measure....but it's more like 75% hilarious, 10% provocative, and 10% "huh?" and 5% sad for anyone who remembers when Real was cool. But you'll dig the interview. Maybe a lesson to never say anything about anything about the future in print, even online, because you'll almost certainly look like an idiot later.
Speaking of which, where's my dang rocket car? Didn't somebody say we'd have rocket cars by now?
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Apr 27, 2007 at 12:39:46 pm
Hacking was a term originally coined at MIT to descrive such classic pranks as emptying the deans office and reassembling it -- complete with rug -- in the middle of the frozen Charles River. (That illegal software thing is more properly called "cracking.") Hacking Apple TV is an entirely legal activity that makes it truly useful, starting with a bigger hard drive -- child's play for anyone reading this. A blog by the fine folks at makezine.com offer a fully illustrated tutorial called "Violating my Apple TV warranty in 4 easy steps."
Legal yes, warranty-voiding, yes, but seriously, dude. If you can find your way around a ribbon cable, you can do this. You should do this.
If you want to get really serious about hacking, like adding other applications (start with Firefox for browsing, Joost for free TV, and Quartz for added performance), the fine folks at the Tutorial Ninjas blog will happily help you out. Not child's play for everyone...but definitely a breeze for anyone who can use a command line in OS X.
This is just the very, very beginning of what's available from Apple TV hacks, with many more coming I'm sure. One of many blogs to keep up with Apple TV Hacks is (naturally enough) Apple TV Hacks. Another good one is AwkwardTV.
Note that ALL of these are blogs. When I tell people that virtually all of my time online NOT in The COW forums is at blogs, this kind of information is one of gazillions of reasons why. Blogs are where you'll find the best information breaking fastest -- one of gazillions of reasons why I'm so happy to see blogs at The COW.
Okay, final example of brilliant hacks presented via blogs, this time the Hack A Day blog. Decide in advance what you want to be drinking when you visit this page, because when you play the movie, you're going to laugh so hard that you'll eject said liquid through your nose. Appropriately enough, this hack is the robotic beer launching refrigerator. The movie takes a while to get interesting, but the accuracy tests will blow you away. THIS, friends, is a useful hack!
PS. re: MIT: you can get MIT's ENTIRE CURRICULUM, both undergrad and graduate,onine for free.It's the whole magilla: required reading lists, examples of student work, some (not all) classroom lectures, and more. Here's my pass/fail grading: the curriculum is awesome, but because MIT FAILS by only offering lectures in Real Media, you should PASS on those. But the curriculum is way cool.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 29, 2007 at 7:48:01 am
CNN reports that Apple has started charging credit cards for the shipment of Apple TVs. They continue, "Analysts say it's likely to sell well initially." Wow. You think so? The same analysts believe that Apple has taken pre-orders for more than 100,000 units, and, well, since I read it on the internet, it must be true.
Blog pioneer (he was doing it 10 years before blogging had a name) Dave Winer reports that one of his readers says he got a notice from Apple that his has actually been shipped. I got Dave's link from NewTeeVee, who quotes Dina Kaplan of Blip.TV: “The impact of Apple TV is going to be pretty big.” You think?
I'm not mocking Apple TV, just the analysts. And not even all the analysts. Jonathan Hoopes is an analyst for ThinkEquity, and has been bullish on Apple for a long time. (He rates Apple a buy, with a target of $120/share. You can look it up.) He sent a letter to his clients with a slightly more articulate take on the potential impact of Apple TV:
"In addition to sharing digital content within the home, we believe investors should understand the value of the various potential business models that Apple TV could enable.
As a digital media content delivery vehicle positioned in users' living rooms, we think the AppleTV/iTunes combination could become as disruptive to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behavior as the iPod/iTunes combination has been to the traditional music business model."
Apple has quietly added an “Export to Apple TV” feature capable of creating high-definition videos viewable on the Apple TV accessory. Unlike Export to iPod, which currently creates sub-DVD-quality 640 by 480 videos,
Export to Apple TV creates not only full DVD-quality 720 by 404 videos, but also 1280 by 720 videos.
He's done a little experimenting with this, and observes that a 90-minute movie weighs in at about 3 gigs. That sounds about right, but it also sounds a little heavy for Apple TV's initial offering of a 20-gig hard drive. (Oops.)
Still, check this out: the video from Jeremy's experiments so far only plays back in iTunes! It seems to herald HD delivery through iTunes. I don't think our boy Hoopes was even aware of this when he wrote in the article linked above that Apple TV is poised to blow Netflix clear out of the water, and is a step away from torching TiVo too.
That said, Apple is quick to admit that the average iPod user has bought 20 tracks from the iTunes music store. Which suggests to me that the stunning majority of iPod users have bought nothing from iTMS.
So this is one area that Hoopes is clearly flat-out wrong. iTunes isn't disrupting the music industry's basic business model. I don't think it ever will. Disrupted the portable music player industry that iPod was so late to join? Absolutely.
Is it going too far to say that iPods have taken off because you don't need to buy anything from iTMS to get a dandy experience? iTunes is awesome software for ripping your entirely legally purchased CDs and elegantly getting them on your iPod.
Unlike the iPod, Apple TV will require payment to view content on a big screen. Apple can't include DVD ripping tools in its official software so you're going to be limited to viewing content purchased from the iTunes store.
That's Jason O'Grady, one of the hardest of the hardcore Mac users ever. Like Hoopes, I think he lets some of his arguments take him off course, but I think he's zeroed in on this: Apple TV takes off when I can use it for my media.
Anyway, we're about to find out, ain't we?
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 21, 2007 at 5:32:13 am
One of the favorite games of Mac Kremlinologists is looking under the hood of new releases to find "hidden" text strings for hints of what's coming. Monday's release of QuickTime 7.1 hints at a whopper: Apple TV could be doubling as a game hub.
What Apple has not yet said, but is quite apparent from Monday's iTunes release, is that Apple TV will also sport some rudimentary gaming capabilities. "Are you sure you want to sync games? All existing games on the Apple TV," reads a localized string file hidden in the software. Another reads, "Some of the games in your iTunes library were not copied to the Apple TV [...] because they cannot be played on this Apple TV."
In total, iTunes 7.1 includes a little over a dozen text strings relating to game management on the new Apple device. In addition to syncing, the strings offer user prompts for various other operations such as removing games, preventing unauthorized games from making the sync, and warning users when their Apple TV can no longer accept new games due to a lack of space.
Note that this is still a long way from becoming a full-bore gaming console a la the Wii, et. al. Instead, it looks like a way to sync your iTunes games with your Apple TV.
Wait, iTunes games? Apparently so. On the one hand, this suggests something pretty lightweight, not nearly as intense as a console experience. On the other hand, two developments shed still more light on this.
In an interview with Wired, the former general manager of Xbox's online download component now works for a gaming company in a role that includes porting games to new platforms:
It will be about taking the stable of franchises and games out of PopCap's studio and adapting, customizing it for different platforms -- adding multiplayer, new play modes, HD, customizing the user interface and display for Zune, ipod, Apple TV, Nintendo DS, PSP.
Students at the Savannah College of Art and Design reported today receiving an e-mail from a recruiter working directly for Apple, Inc., who appears to be actively tracking down skilled graphics designers among those enrolled in the school's Fine Arts programs. Those hired for the summer program would be tasked with creating "consistent, high quality 3D and 2D art for games," the message said.
This is clearly the beginning of something big. I predict that when it starts to happen, it will be moving fast. It's not like the iTMS launched with just a couple of songs to buy.
Posted by: Tim Wilson on Mar 9, 2007 at 5:11:41 am
