Up

Published on June 12, 2009 at 11:33 pm in Life and Movies. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Pixar’s latest film, Up, is an incredibly touching and exciting story, told in an amazing and unique way. I saw it tonight and was blown away. Every movie that Pixar makes is more amazing than the last. Wall-E was an incredible film but Up takes Wall-E and adds more heartfelt and traditional characters. It’s a hilarious movie with beautiful animation (especially in 3D), lovable characters, and a truly unique story.

I think that Pixar’s movies – Up being their best so far – are the pinnacle of filmmaking. The computer animation medium offers complete creative control over everything – they can create anything on screen short of a perfectly realistic human. The environment set up at Pixar enocourages and continues to produce truly original and creative ideas. And best of all, all of their movies are G or PG. They can be enjoyed by anybody – a 3 year old, or a 50 year old – no matter who, Pixar tells great stories.

I can’t tell you exactly why “Up” is so good. The movie just comes together collectively to be an amazing experience. It doesn’t make  you want to change the world, and it doesn’t try to. These movies are entertainment, but they are the most entertaining things being created in the film industry today.

Some people I know like to call a film like Up a “cartoon.” Sure, it is. But reducing it to that word is derogatory. A caroon is something that children watch and that is made for them, something simple and not very sophisticated. Up is enjoyed by children, but it is not just a kids movie. It is a universal film and it is AMAZING. So go and see it now. If you can, see it in 3D. But even if not, it’s the movie that’s important and you won’t regret it.

You can’t argue with 98% on RT. Even Psycho didn’t get that high. That’s right, it’s better than Hitchcock. (Yes, I am fully aware that I just said something really crazy. I will only say that they are two completely different films, and comparing them to each other is unfair to both. But Up really is that amazing.)

Go see Up! Trailer! Tickets!

Synesthesia – seeing colors in numbers

Published on June 6, 2009 at 11:25 pm in Life and Television. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

So, ever since I was little I have seen different numbers as distinct colors. Not like in real life, it’s not like I’ll see numbers as different colors on a sheet of paper. But in my head, when I imagined them, most numbers had (and still do have) a distinct color. The same applies, much more vaguely, to letters. I never thought much of it until when I was 8 or 9 my parents were talking about a news article that was talking about people just like me!

And it turns out I’m not crazy! It’s called synesthesia, and tons of people have it with various degrees of extremities. I only see the colors in my head, when I imagine a number. But some people actually see the numbers and letters change color on a piece of paper as they draw them. It all has to do with some neural-this and electron-that connections in the brain that somehow gets mixed up, so some people associate certain symbols with certain colors. Wikipedia has the big-word answer if you want.

Usually the colors are different in every person. But not always. For instance, I have a friend who also has a mild form of synesthesia. About half the numbers we totally agree on (”Yeah! 7 is so firery-orange colored!”) and about half are so totally off. (”What are you talking about? 5 is the definition of blue!”) Here’s an approximation of how I personally see the first few numbers in my head:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Beyond that, any other color would just be a combination of the other few numbers. It’s not as obvious as it is on the page above in my head, it’s much more vague. But it’s there. With letters it’s much tougher. Letters like A are easy just by being pure red. E and F are two slightly different shades of green, D is a sort of light navy blue. But the colors sort of fade with most of the other letters farther along in the alphabet.

Okay, now here’s the crazy thing. It has to do with the Lost DVD set. I had always thought that the colors for the DVD cases for each season matched the seasons well for some reason, but it had never really occurred to me why. Then, recently, I realized. They matched almost exactly what I consider the colors of 1-4 to be. Season 1 was a light blue, season 2 a dark red-ish color, season 3 green, and season 4 blue!

lostdvds

Okay, so sure – season 2 is more of an orange color than red, but aside from that this follows my idea of what each number should be exactly. It’s most likely just a coincidence, as most people with Synesthesia don’t share the same colors with each other, but still a very interesting finding. Also, the fact that the upcoming Season 5 DVD is not yellow as it obviously should be, proves this is all probably me just getting excited about nothing. But still!

Do you have Synesethia? There must be more people out there who have this, however mildly.

P.S. Speaking of Lost – holy moly on that finale. Locke is dead. Again.

Beatles for Sale

Published on May 31, 2009 at 4:31 pm in Music. 2 Comments Tags: , .

I’ve been listening to the 1964 Beatles album “Beatles for Sale.” It doesn’t have any of their really famous tracks, but it’s a really good album, from before they became super-duper famous, and evolved in their music. The rock melodies feel really traditional and basic – but in a really good way. I especially like “No Reply” and “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.”

The Ability to Watch and Enjoy a Movie

Published on May 24, 2009 at 11:40 pm in Life and Other. 1 Comment Tags: , .

I’ve been thinking about movies a lot lately… well, ok, nothing new. But still, I was thinking, it’s pretty amazing that we’re able to watch movies, or tv, or read books, or watch theater, wahtever – and even though we know that what we’re watching isn’t really happening, that it isn’t real, we’re still able to be emotionally affected by the events that we see.

It’s amazing that the human mind can do that, understand that something isn’t true on one level, but then still let those same things have such a profound impact on us. Imagine that an alien came to our planet who couldn’t do this for whatever reason. They would see a movie and just not believe it, they would not comprehend the true characters, and they would only see actors. Most art would be irrelevant to this alien, because it could not suspend belief, even emotionally to understand anything that’s happening.

Speaking of actors – it’s even more amazing that we can see the same actors in dozens of movies and still believe them to be different characters and people every time, while still knowing that they’re still acting. This dual-minded ability, whatever you call it is so much a part of our society and how we interact within it. Graphical user interfaces on computers are also based on this idea – they try to replicate things in real life – a button in a computer program is based on a buttons in real life – but what if we couldn’t comprehend the fact that those pixels were a button, and we couldn’t get past the fact that we KNOW it’s not a real button?

Weird.

Conclusion of Film Fellows

Published on May 4, 2009 at 9:51 pm in Filmmaking and Life. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

I had sooo much fun over the last few weeks doing the Tribeca Film Fellows program! Since my last post, I’ve been to  a ton of screenings of great movies including “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench”, “Fixer”,  ”Off and Running”, and the youth short film collection “Our City, My Story” which the film fellows shot the intro for.

But probably the best part of it all was developing my film pitch with a Tribeca film mentor, and although I didn’t win one of the prizes, my mentor Sean McPhillips was incredibly helpful in helping me to formulate an idea for a movie that I am now starting to make. Through the program, we met twice to discuss how to craft my movie idea into something worth making – and I feel like the idea I have now is really great.

So over the next few weeks I’m going to be making the movie, currently called “Connect”, and hopefully filming this weekend! I’ll post more on it later.

Film Fellows Events

Published on April 22, 2009 at 11:02 pm in Filmmaking and Life. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

npfilmfellows1

This past week has been pretty awesome for me. At the beginning of last week I started the main part of the Tribeca Film Fellows program. We’ve been going on field trips and tours all over the city, learning all about the film business and filmmaking in general. Starting last Monday, and the 19 other film fellows met the Vice Presidents of Development, Marketing, and Press at Miramax. Then, on Tuesday we went to the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and then we got to shoot on 35mm film at Panavision.

The next day we got to see the footage we had shot, and saw it color corrected in a super-duper-expensive film development studio, and met David Koepp – the writer of Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones 4, Ghost Town (with Ricky Gervais), and tons of other movies. On Thursday, we went to the Mayor’s Office of New York and learned all about how to acquire filming permits in New York City, then met Jane Rosenthal, who co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival with Robert DeNiro. On Saturday, we saw a sound mixer put together the sound effects and music for a TV trailer, complete with all the big bangs and booms you don’t know you know so well.

So, after all of that, I’m sure you can imagine that it was sort of a let-down yesterday when we all just had a quiet dinner and got some cool goody bags containing some NYC-related DVDs, and some books about filmmaking. Oh, and we also met some random actress named Natalie Portman and each got a personal copy of some piece-of-crap $1300 software called  Final Cut Studio. Here’s hoping that the rest of the program will be more exciting than last night was…

Continue reading ‘Film Fellows Events’

The Seamonster (Movie)

Published on April 8, 2009 at 5:00 pm in Filmmaking and Videos. 1 Comment Tags: , , , , , .

I would like to take this chance to sincerely apologize to Peter and Maraika, two awesome people who the following movie was made with. They co-wrote, co-directed, and co-acted in the following movie, but because the editor that they hired to complete the movie was a complete idiot, the movie has not been able to be released to the public until now. The music may sound a little familiar.

Again, I’m very sorry Peter and Maraika, and I hope you like it!

Macheist 3 Bundle

Published on April 5, 2009 at 9:28 am in Technology. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Yet again, Macheist has a 12 – no wait 13, hold on a second, I mean 14 – wait, plus the extras: 17-application bundle available for mac users to download. For the Macheist 3 bundle, they’ve lowered the price from $49 to $39, and when you add up all the applications in the bundle, plus the extra ones, the combined value is over $1,000. And yes, I bought it (like last year). So, here’s some of the noteable ones and what I think of them:

mh3page

Picturesque:
It does some cool design elements that Apple has made famous, but I can’t shake the feeling that everything it does it just current fad in graphic design.

World of Goo:
I’ve heard great things about this game and it is pretty fun. I still have yet to really try it but it’s nice to have a fun and innovative game concept.

PhoneView:
Luckily this works with the iPod Touch – the only use I can really get out of this is taking music from an iPod to the computer quickly and easily, with file names and ID3 tags attached.

LittleSnapper:
Seems like a nice alternative to Skitch. It definitely has a slicker interface and also a very nice way to organize all of those screenshots you take.

Acorn:
I love the idea of having all of the tools in one window to reduce the clutter that always happens in Photoshop and Pixelmator – good for simple photo edits.

Kinemac:
This is why I bought the bundle. FCE is great, but unlike Final Cut Pro, it doesn’t come with a 3D motion program like Motion. Kinemac does most of the same things as Motion, for a fraction of the price.

WireTap Studio:
This should be great for recording audio from specific applications whenever the need arises – for a quote from a movie on DVD, or for a sound effect on a website.

Espresso:
A little bit above my head in the web design area, but it should be interesting to learn to the application – it does FTP and text editing, with style.

These are only 8 of the 17 applications included in the bundle, but the ones I find the most interesting. You can view and download the whole thing at Macheist.com, but you may want to make sure you have a mac first. But be sure to get it by Tuesday, because after that the bundle won’t be available anymore.