About

"Hold on, hold on, CUT!" you yell at the camera operator, spitting some while you point. "Is this being shot with a UV filter or not?" You remind him for the sixth time that your title is Senior Art Director. You then return to your glass of port, havarti and crackers off-set. Somedays you do the whole routine with a French accent.

Other places you should go:
Cops on Bikes
Chirp Mix Series
Byrdhouse
Home
Work
Flickr

Blog - see all 44

Top Ten Top Tens 5 days ago

These are the Top Ten reasons why I'll click on a link that has a Top Ten anything:p

Let the Right One In 3 weeks ago

The Swedish director of this haunting vampire tale replies to news of an American remake in the works by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves and sci-fi producer JJ Abrams:

Remakes should be made of movies that aren't very good, that gives you the chance to fix whatever has gone wrong. I'm very proud of my movie and think it's great, but the Americans might be of an other opinion. The saddest thing for me would be to see that beautiful story made into something mainstream. I don't like to whine, but of course - if you'd spent years on painting a picture, you'd hate to hear buzz about a copy even before your vernissage! 1

Last evening we saw Let the Right One In. It was a great, and yet somehow, an underwhelming experience for me. Perhaps my expectations were too high. It had all the elements that I want in a good movie: character, story, photography, yet something was still missing.

The photography tends to be mostly blues, greens, grays and the cool whites of fluorescent lighting. The framing is highly composed and stationary, with very, very (very) short depths of field. The architectural setting is decidedly modernist, buildings which are trendy by today's standards, but in the early eighties were tinged with institutional/socialist qualities.

Despite how great it is, the photography isn't what makes this film good. (Also, it is certainly not the typographical selection for the subtitles, which makes you work harder than you should to read the dialogue.) It is the story that does it. It is the complexity in its characters.

I failed to have a close connection to the cultural dimension of the film though and this is where I think a good film can be a great film to an audience. I felt foreign to it. I experienced the same thing when seeing Ringu, the Japanese predecessor to the American version, The Ring I liked the remake better. I'm curious to see if an American version of Let the RIght One In will do the same.

Why do I still have a slide projector and a minidisc player? 3 weeks ago

There have been many instances where I have thought of a fresh appropriation for something created years back on a different device like a tape deck or minidisk player. These bits of sound (or in some cases, images) never made the "technological jump" with the rest of my digital luggage. There they rested, locked into their own proprietary format, inable to be quickly realized in a new contex, only available on an abandoned device. One may choose to sell outdated equipment on ebay or donate them to a charity. Not me.

This got me to thinking how certain playback devices offer unique player-specific qualities. The cassette player adds an unexpected hiss to its recordings. The crackle of a scratched LP. The striped visual noise of a VCR whose tracking is a bit off. Likewise, there are recording-specific attributes, those that are encoded into the work at the time of the recording. Film does not look like video.

From wikipedia:

"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived, creating subtle change over time.

How might the media itself posses meaning regardless of the content it stores? Furthermore, should this understanding of media and their specific qualities belong in the communication designer's toolset? What if a movie that is set in the eighties is shot on a technology from that same time period, for instance on betamax?

In a recent exhibit at Art House in Castleberry Hill during LE FLASH, an artist displayed ephemera related to the Challenger explosion. The choice of slide projectors and 8mm film projectors added a layer of meaning that transgressed the content itself. It allowed you to see and experience the event as though you were in that 1986 elementary school classroom when the tragedy occurred.

Videos - see all 1

Friends - see all 8

• Add to Friends
• Add Comment
• Send a Message