The Prestige was everything a good movie should be. It had everything: thrills, suspense, mystery, heartbreak, humor and romance.
Much applause for Chistopher Nolan who really put together a fine film. I was also floored by the excellent cast and the stellar performances all around.
2006 has been a great year for movies, I’m curious what the holiday season will bring.
Apparently Brandon Flowers, lead singer of The Killers, was a bit annoyed by Green Day’s 2005 DVD ‘Bullet In a Bible’. In particular the performance of American Idiot and how Billie Joe pumps the audience during it.
“I just thought it was really cheap,” he explained. “To go to a place like England or Germany and sing that song - those kids aren’t taking it the same way that he meant it. And he [Billie Joe Armstrong] knew it.”
After reading the article I tend to agree with him. There are parts of ‘Bullet In A Bible’ that kinda struck me as Green Day deliberately missing their own point and playing up anti-American hatred. That said, to get offended is kinda ridiculous if you ask me. What were they supposed to do, not play the song?
That said the phenomenon he’s referring to does bother me. While I was in Ireland in 2004 there were a ton of kids wearing ‘Not My President’ shirts with swastikas drawn on Bush’s forehead. I wore that shirt with pride as an American just as I sing along to American Idiot. With pride in my nation and what it stands for, in civil disagreement of my government’s policies. Not because I hate my nation, but because I love it. Somehow I don’t think those kids in Europe get that. In that sense I agree with Flowers and it scares me.
It’s just a shame it he’s saying it a year too late and for shamless self promotion:
The Killers frontman said he believed that his band’s new album ‘Sam’s Town’ is a much better representation of America.
“People need to see that, really, there are the nicest people in the world here!” he declared. “I don’t know if our album makes you realise that. But I hope it’s from a more positive place.”
(Via Punknews)
So I’ve decided I’m going to publish a book of my photography. I’m not entirely sure of the timetable for this but I plan to take as long as I need to get it done.
The book will be titled “Nothing Left” (you’ll understand eventually) and will be a study of communication in the modern world. Photographs focusing on nothing but signage and power lines. The two most common yet overlooked ways that the human race in the 21st century communicates.I often joke of my fascination with powerlines and signs but in truth they both amaze me. I plan to devote a lot of time and energy to this project over the next year. I’m also sure it will inevitably require travel. If I want to be taken serious as photographer I need to treat this seriously and I’m excited at the possibilities.Check out my work in progress on Flickr. There will be much added in the coming days / weeks.
I already put this on my del.ico.us but I figured it needed more attention because it was that damn good…. More rotoscoping and compositing! I’m sure you’re thrilled oh fictitious reader.
Special Effects house Buzz Imaging shows off how it made the effects used in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The clip showcases some incredible 3d modeling, rotoscoping and compositing work and makes it almost look easy. Don’t be fooled, this sort of thing takes days, weeks even months to get right. But it’s still incredible.
(Via Daring Fireball)
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” - Thomas Paine, 1777
I just read this for the first time and felt I needed to share it. In today’s world Paine’s quote could be warped or distorted into justification for the war in Iraq. But his timing was the revolutionary era, place it with another famous quote often attributed to Ben Franklin and I believe you’ll understand the true tone of the time.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety”
Wow… this makes my stomach turn but I cannot believe how true it is, this guy is a genius.Why Paris Hilton mattersIt’s incredible, hilarious, but incredible how right on this is. This should be cause for a great deal of thinking. I never imagined that something so superficial and worthless could be such a good model for success.(Via Digg)
So, I’m not really a big anime fan or that much of a video editor
but this blew my mind. I can only imagine how many hours this took to complete.
If you’re completely confused, let me explain. This guy noticed that Japanese cartoons or ‘anime’ tends to have a lot of running scenes and decided to do something with it. He spend hours combing over cartoons, isolating scenes and editing down shots to combine them fluidly and create one project. He wasn’t content with just cutting scenes together. He went into the video and used a process called rotoscoping to isolate individual characters from their shots and lay them out in other ones.
Think Roger Rabbit, Lord of the Rings and Forrest Gump.
Painstaking and time consuming to say the least. Excellent work by this Istiv guy, best of luck to him.
(Via Boing Boing)
…I’ve watch the clocks go ’round.
Walked myself through some days
that have put me where I am.
In another time, In another place
all things might have been in place
But for now I’m finding myself up here standing on a rooftop screaming.
Hey world are you listening… listening to me?
I’m here and I’m hurting to begin again.
It’s another time, it’s another place.
We are making more old days.
But for now I’m finding myself out and standing on my doorstep screaming.
Hey world are you listening… listening to me?
I’m here and I’m hurting to begin again.
Hey world I’m ready to listen… and learn something new.
I’m here and I’m willing to get myself through.
-Hot Water Music “Rooftops”
I wasn’t going to do this but Zeldman’s post stirred up a lot in me.
Has it really been five years? I really don’t know what to do… it still seems so unbelievable. I feel like I have spent the last 5 years living in a bad dream just waiting to wake up. I still sorta lie to myself about things. I let the media corrupt me and my memories of what happened that day. I feel cheap and used. Until recently I had almost completely forgotten parts of it. As if they were blocked out of my memory.
The endless smoke. The smell of burning and ash. The jumpers. The smoldering holes that were once buildings. How they didn’t stop burning for weeks.
A few weeks back I went upstate with Christine and her family and found papers from 9/12. I looked though them and every article was in somehow related to the towers. It was like everything else in the world just froze. Like someone put the rest of history on pause for a moment. I had forgotten that baseball went on hiatus, or how long it was before planes were flying again. And how weird it was to hear fighter jets overhead rather than the commercial planes that you were so used to you barely even noticed them anymore.
I was living in Brooklyn at the time, attending the Pratt Institute. I remember everything like it was yesterday. My roommate Dan and I were on our way to class when the guys across the hall from us yelled, stopping us from getting on the elevator.
“Some idiot flew a plane into one of the Twin Towers.”
We ran into his room where his roommate was videotaping it from his window. Although it disgusts me to admit now, honestly… at the time…. we laughed. We laughed recounting the famous story of the plane that hit the state building back in the 40’s. Thinking this to be the same: a very public accident of small scale.
What you have to realize is that we had no idea of scale, we figured it was some private plane and honestly didn’t even think about size or injury. It seemed impossible that anything could even damage the towers, so we didn’t even think anything of it. The longer we stood there, the more smoke I saw, the more serious it felt. But we also figured we were late for class, so we’d better get a move on.
When I got to class most of my classmates hadn’t even heard about it. About 10 minutes in someone comes running into our room and yells:
“A plane just flew and hit both Trade Towers!”
Half of our class went running into the other room to go look out from their window. Once again: the issue of scale. You never really realized how big those things were until a plane flew into them. It seemed reasonable to many to believe that they were close enough together that one plane’s wingspan could hit both towers. As I looked from the window and watched the North and South towers billowing out black smoke it hit me. I was the first one to say it aloud:
“The one tower was already smoking when I left my room this morning, the second one just happened. This is no accident, someone planned this.”
It just seemed inconceivable at the time to everyone in the room and honestly I forget sometimes how carefree we all were before that day. The teacher rushed us back to our respective room where we continued class for a bit. Time passed and he called for a break. I started walking to the on campus cafeteria and attempted to phone my parents back home… strangely I couldn’t get a signal out at first.
“Turn off your phone asshole! Other people need to use the networks.”
Confused and completely caught off guard, I looked up at the upperclassmen had just yelled this at me and I didn’t know what to make of it. The phone was useless anyhow so I shut it off. When I got into the cafeteria it was like nothing I had ever seen before. A massive amount of people were crowded around the TVs that were mounted on the ceiling. Someone had changed the channel from the usual corporate marketing bullshit CTN (college television network) and put on the news. I stood there frozen in shock with my peers as we watched the first tower fall. When I managed to regain thought I then rushed myself to my room and put on CNN. Dan had just arrived as well and we sat and watched in astonishment as the second tower fell.
Neither of us knew what to do, we both agreed that we weren’t going back to class. Fuck class. We spent the rest of the day just in a fog sitting there dumbstruck. I remember trying to load up CNN.com and it crawling. Going even to a white page with headlines briefly announcing countries that were wishing their sympathies. Horribly enough Afghanistan was the first to issue a statement of sympathy. It wasn’t for a few days before we would realize the grim irony in that.
The first thing on everyone’s mind was war. And honestly the first nation people thought of was Iraq. It was no secret even back in 2001, BEFORE 9/11 that Bush wanted to invade Iraq. There were still our enemy, the media had conditioned us to think that way so it seemed to make sense that they might would perpetrate such an evil. All I could scrounge up from the news though was something about an unmanned US spy plane being shot down over Iraq that morning. Something I’ve never seen or heard mentioned since.
At some point I made it to the rooftop of my building and snapped the photograph you see above. The door to the roof was normally locked at threat of expulsion, but somehow none of that really mattered anymore.
My biggest regret, the one thing that gets me to this very day is that I was so close and yet, all I did was sit there and watch TV, like everyone else. I should have taken off and gone into the city and found a way to help but I sat there and did nothing like a zombie.
I can’t explain exactly why I’m writing this or what conclusion I am hoping to come to, the fact is I don’t think I have one. I’m writing this just to write it, just to put it out there. I can’t explain what this is better than Zeldman did so I won’t try:
“These mini-essays are not art. They are not reportage, either (but what is?), and may not even be accurate. We were all a bit dazed—although not so dulled as now. The shock and sorrow were fresh. The events of September 11th had not yet been branded, nor turned into tools of partisan rancor, nor made into a mini-series, nor used to justify atrocity.”
So much of our world changed on that day and for once people really came together. Now I look at where we are today and I am concerned that we haven’t learned a thing. In fact we’ve let ourselves and our feelings be used and manipulated in the name of this atrocity to commit others.
Have we learned the right lesson? Have we done the right thing? Is the world a better place today? I hope dearly we can say yes, but my gut seems to tell me otherwise.
Fair enough I guess I’ll work on that. I’ll try to make this brief. I’ve been busy for the past few months, but things seem to be settling down for the moment which is good. Work is good, back to school season is just ending so hopefully things might ease up, that’s about all I can say. I’m hoping for new products soon, but have no clue in truth. I plan to pick up a MacBook Pro whenever they put out a new version. My 12″ Powerbook’s AppleCare has just expired, and while it’s still running and treating me well, it’s time to move to something with a little more power, something that can run Aperture or actually interface with a video iPod. (12″ had USB 1.1)
So I’m back playing Halo 2 again, that game will not die for me I still enjoy it every bit as much as I did when I bought it. Oh that reminds me, I officially, after what… 4 months, have decided that my X-Box 360 was a completely worthwhile purchase. 3 reasons:
Other stuff….
So I’ve been keeping busy, not working on any major design projects at the moment, mostly studying new programs and trying to (re?)teach myself how to draw. That said, I have been working at getting MediaRebellion.com back up and running. I’m not sure what we’re going to use it for but I moved all the content over to Wordpress and as of yesterday two days ago I installed the Beta of phpBB 3 on the site which actually seems to be running REALLY smoothly, it’s leaps and bounds better than any other free message board system I’ve used.
I’m also now hosting / administrating the official message board for The Epoxies. Incase you havn’t checked them out, they are a new wave / punk band from Portland, Oregon that totally rocks, I highly recommend checking them out.
Canon put out a new version of the Rebel… I want it.
Seriously… it’s getting ridiculous how easy the process for photography is getting.
Back in February my friend Lindsay and I did a photo shoot in the mall parking garage. She’s a photographer herself but she’s also an aspiring model. This works out well because I consider myself a designer who is an aspiring photographer. So anyway she’s looking to build a modeling portfolio and I’m looking to build a photo one of my own. I also recently acquired a copy of Apple’s Aperture professional photography software and was itching to try it out.
Overall while we had a great time, but when I looked at the shots I was disapointed. We were limited by the cold weather much of the lighting was awkward, and most of the poses left a lot to be desired. (due both the the weather and Lindsay and I’s comfort levels I’m sure). I ended up letting the photos sit for months after the initial shoot.
It was shortly after that time that I discovered my Flickr addiction. And the other day I decided to take another crack at the photos because I wanted to put something up, just for the sake of it. (I paid for a Pro account, I should use it no?) When I really dove in, I was blown away. I can’t say enough how impressed I am, both by the ease of use of the program and the results I achieved. Aperture made it easy to color correct and retouch a lot of what I viewed were unusable photos.
The more I think about it though the more it’s unbelievable to me. Anyone who has even worked with real professional color photography can tell you how much of a pain in the ass the whole process can be. While it’s a lot of fun, you can spend weeks on single images at times. Not only that but it’s expensive. Retouching can be a nightmare and color correction can have you walking back and forth turning nobs trying to get something just right. Don’t even get me started on the cost / hassle of promoting and sharing your work.
Now-a-days you can get a Digital SLR for under a grand that take images at resolutions higher than film grain, print to a high end printer that does too. Using a program like Aperture or Photoshop, and a Flickr account and you can have a whole ‘roll’ edited and corrected in a matter of minutes. From there it’s easy to share share it on the web for everyone to see or subscribe to, so you know people are checking it out.
As a side note; I remember during my senior year at Pratt i did some of my work digitally for my color photo class. I would print my work on my Epson 2200 and hang it next to my other work. The really amazing part is that people in class were unable to tell. That to me sealed the deal, my film camera sits and collects dust these days. Stuff like iPhoto and Flickr’s are the icing on the cake. I can hardly remember what life was like before digital.
Anyway, I present to you without further ado: Lindsay O’Connor
Out of fairness to my lovely modeling friend I will spare you the before and after comparisons. I’d like to assure you though that the quality was not nearly this nice until I took them into Aperture. That’s not a criticism on her, but on my own skills as a photographer. Luckily… I’m still a designer.
Check out the rest of the shots here.
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