Film projectors (as well as film cameras, processing equipment, etc.) use a special mechanism called a Geneva drive to ensure one whole frame is advanced at a time, instead of simply spooling a film continuously. Wikipedia:
The name derives from the device’s earliest application in mechanical watches, Switzerland and Geneva being an important center of watchmaking. The geneva drive is also commonly called a Maltese cross mechanism due to the visual resemblance.
In the most common arrangement, the driven wheel has four slots and thus advances for each rotation of the drive wheel by one step of 90°. If the driven wheel has n slots, it advances by 360°/n per full rotation of the drive wheel.
The device itself is beautiful in its simplicity. There are two variations on the drive (external and internal). More at wikipedia.
It’s easy to dismiss science fiction and other genre movies (and books, and games) as mindless entertainment. But the reason for the popularity of Star Wars, Twilight, and Lord of the Rings can’t simply be that our culture craves vapid adventure stories to while away the idle hours. I think we consume these modern epics because, for many of us, traditional institutions don’t cut it anymore. Church, family. and government once handed over fairly rigid instructions on “how to live”: how to be a good citizen, neighbor, spouse, or parent. The cultural revolution of the 1960s and ’70s changed all that. Vietnam, political assassinations, government corruption, and the rise of the corporate state left us suspicious of conventional authority and religion. We got jaded.
Is it no wonder, then, that many now seek moral guidance and spiritual example not in mosques and chapels, but huddled in darkened movie theaters or bathed in the holy glow of our Blu-rays? Our new gods and priests might be writers, movie directors, and actors. When, in The Lord of the Rings, Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf the wise intones to Frodo, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us,” it’s hard not to prick up our hobbity ears and nod our heads in agreement. Yes, that’s damned good advice. And for many of us, it’s guidance much easier to swallow than the kind shouted from the pulpit on a Sunday morning.
The process was refined and popularized by the German cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan while he was working on the movie Metropolis (1927), although there is evidence that other film-makers were using similar techniques earlier than this. The movie’s director, Fritz Lang, wanted to insert the actors into shots of miniatures of skyscrapers and other buildings, so Schüfftan used a specially made mirror to create the illusion of actors interacting with huge, realistic-looking sets.
Videomaker explains the effect better than the explanation on the wikipedia page:
This special effect involves strategically scraping some of the silver off a mirror, then setting the mirror in front of the camera at an angle. While the mirror reflects a miniature off to the side, the live action takes place in front of the camera, seen through the scraped area of the mirror. This works quite well. Since the mirror itself is out of focus, the edge between the miniature and the live action is blurred.
I love the invention and resourcefulness involved in filmmaking.
I don’t want to say that there’s nothing new in comedy, but having seen Andy Kaufman in the mid-70s in clubs in New York, nothing surprises me conceptually. There’s a difference between getting the joke and liking the joke. Popularity isn’t the only measure of success. Sometimes the ‘public’ is an idiot, but obscurity and perversity for it’s own sake can be a solipsistic jerk-off and real waste of time. I have no rules or expectations; I just like comedy that works.
There is a common misconception that a “story by” credit may be given to a person who simply has the story idea for a film or television program. This is never the case, as all writing credits are for actual writing. Often, a screenwriter produces a spec script that, after being optioned, undergoes a “page one rewrite” that produces a new draft. In many such cases, the original author receives the “story by” rather than “screenplay by” credit.
The film and tv industry in the USA is extremely unionised and as such there are many rules that screenwriters have to adhere to.
This wikipedia page has an interesting list of rules for members of the Writer’s Guild of America regarding screenwriting accreditation.
Making a movie completely inside a computer has its quirks. In any pixar movie, the colour palette is worked out before the animation begins. This planning takes the form of a “colour script”.
Pixar has released several images from the colour script of Toy Story 3, and they’re rather pretty. I wouldn’t mind seeing an entire animation in this impressionistic, sketchy handpainted style! Beautiful light and colour in these sketches.
This demo reel of Stargate Studios goes to show how much compositing work we take for granted on tv! Green-screen technology has come a long way in the past decade.
A screenwriter’s bible is the book compiled by a tv show’s creator to guide screenwriters working on that show. A pdf copy has surfaced online of the screenwriter’s bible for “Batman, the animated series”.
Director Marc Forster (Quantum of Solace, Stranger than Fiction, The Kite Runner, Finding Neverland, Monster’s Ball …) gives a three part interview on the film website ‘Making Of‘. In the third part he explains his philosophy that failure is vital for the growth of an artist.
As if to prove his own point, he creatively augments the English language with neologisms such as “unpredictabilities” and “intuitional”. I’m only half joking.
On reddit I found this anonymously authored image that represents the movie Slumdog Millionaire in a series of sequential thumbnails.
What on earth is the use in that? Well, aside from being a curio and a work of art greater than the sum of its parts (I’m one of only three people I know that saw this movie and disliked it), it can be interesting to see the colour palette change throughout a film.
In this case it’s light/dark/light/dark all the way, and a tendency towards blues and oranges. Many films utilize the colour palette of a film to give an effect so subtle that you rarely notice while you’re seeing it — e.g., slow transition from light to dark colours, saturated to unsaturated, cold to warm, etc.
Instead of taking individual screenshots of a video and stitching them all together tediously in photoshop, you can use this great freeware program to do all the work for you. It allows you to customize the output greatly: Choose the amount of thumbnails per column and per row, their size, spacing, backgound, etc.!
There is however a maximum output of 50×50 tiles with this software (which looks like this with tile width set at five pixels– bonus points if anyone can guess the movie. hint: not a favourite of mine either). I suppose you could split a movie up into quarter-sized files to get a more detailed analysis.
An unknown comic author makes an interesting observation.
From SlashFilm:
I’m sure you’re aware of Hollywood’s overuse of floating heads on movie posters… but have you noticed the excessive use of orange/blue contrast on theatrical one-sheets? David Chen happened to come across this comic illustrating the Blue/orange contrast, although I’m not sure where it originated or who created it. After the jump you will see a ton of examples of orange/blue contrast, however I must warn you — as the comic says, once you see it, you’ll notice it everywhere.
This phenomenon was something I was vaguely aware of but never consciously thought about. Looking at their examples it all seems very familiar.
On youtube there’s a 2-part compilation of clips from Celeste Holm’s Oscar-winning performance in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947).
She stars as the supporting actress alongside a very suave Gregory Peck (whose character pretends to be Jewish for eight weeks for the sake of an article he’s writing on anti-semitism). Holm certainly holds a candle to Peck and, dare I say it, maybe even outshines his performance (though, to be fair, his character is quite flat on account of the way he’s written). Part two.
Jason Solomons at the Guardian reckons a new dawn is upon us. The old indie film elite has been assimilated into the hollywood mainstream and there’s a new gang of filmmakers to take their place, and they aren’t too bothered about the current industry whine-fodder (piracy, budgets, and blu-ray discs).
Lynn Shelton’s “bromance”, Humpday, could have been shaped into a high-grossing Hollywood concept comedy starring, say, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson. But the Seattle-based director didn’t want to hang around to make her movie. “It’s very simple,” she says. “We had the cameras, we had the script and the actors, we borrowed some houses and rented a motel room and we shot a film. It makes you wonder what they do all day in Hollywood, doesn’t it?” The result is a very funny, wholly audible comedy confronting modern masculinity.
In the years between Back to the Future and Back to the Future II, Michael J. Fox visibly aged and the actress playing his girlfriend was replaced by Elizabeth Shue. Thus, to show the closing scene from the first film as the opening of the second, it was necessary to completely reshoot it.
CollegeHumor has a video comparing the two versions. Fun:
I’ve only been here in the USA for a week and all America’s stars are dying left right and centre (or: center). David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, Billy Mays. I apologize for my deathly influence and will try my best to be more vital in the coming weeks.
I just read Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up. A friend (Kasina) and I are watching Steve Martin movies. Trains Planes and Automobiles, we found, survived the years, whereas Father of The Bride seems to have quickly lost any semblance of credibility in a sludge of sentimentality and dated nineties humour. (However, the scenes in which Martin is alone and in his element remain strongest, e.g., when he loses it in the supermarket, after stressing out about the cost of his daughter’s planned wedding, demanding to have a number of hotdog buns that correlates with the number of hot dogs as they are packeted at the supermarket). Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine, remains a classic.
Today we’re going to watch The Jerk, which, according to Martin’s autobiography, apparently marks the stage of Martin’s career where he was turning his back on stand-up, in preference of the more social and collaborative art of filmmaking.
Little Shop of Horrors, in which Steve Martin has a supporting role as a maniacal dentist, was one of my favourite films when I was a kid. I watched it many many times. I hope it will still stand up.
Bowfinger, I have a sneaking suspicion, will not have aged well…Even though I enjoyed it when I saw it in my early teens… And, well, don’t talk to me about Cheaper by The Dozen and its sequel, Cheaper by the Baker’s Dozen, or whatever it’s called. My shock-proof shit detector (Hemingway) screened these movies out of my viewing agenda after seeing the trailers. Same goes for The Pink Panther remake and its sequel.
Home is an important, sobering film, but it’s also beautiful and optimistic. It’s available on YouTube in its entirety, in high definition, for free.
It is directed by the renowned aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which affords the film a powerfully god-like perspective, albeit one weakened by a rather uninspiring narration; the information is good, but the diction is clichéd and the delivery flawed (some words are mispronounced by the narrator, hardly in-keeping with a god-like voice, and she often sounds unenthusiastic and disengaged, like she isn’t thinking about what she’s saying — give me David Attenborough or Dr. Ian Stewart!).
The effect of Bertrand’s aerial perspective is that we get to take a step back — avoiding sentimental human detours for the most part — and consider the earth as one big organism. Everything is linked, as the narrator reminds us constantly.
The general message to take home is that although our planet is in jeopardy, we can save it through “moderation, intelligence and sharing”.
There have been other films like this. This film stays quite general and factual in its approach however, choosing not to hammer away at any one specific point — simply letting the powerful images and facts do the work. The plain facts and footage it offers on meat production, for example, — without rhetoric demanding people stop eating meat — should be enough to convey to people the severity of the impact of humanity’s meat-fixation. That particular section was quite powerful, I thought, as that particular environmental issue has generally been skirted recently, as if it were not even an issue worth considering, or as if there were no sensitive way to broach the topic to a world of meat-lovers.
Cheers to Aengus who aroused my attention to this.
