Monthly Archive for April, 2009

Film Fellows Events

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

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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:

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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.

Alien Attack (Movie)

Published on April 4, 2009 at 7:14 pm in Filmmaking and Videos. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I guess it’s pretty sad when my Uncle Bob posts about a movie I did almost a week before I actually get around to posting it on my own blog myself. But here it is anyway. It’s sort of  a pseudo-cartoon I did using keyframing in Final Cut Express. It’s not supposed to be a masterpiece or anything but I think it’s fun enough. (Be sure to click on HQ in the YouTube box to view in high quality!)

I “designed” the spaceships myself with some textures I got online. Pretty much everything else I found online – all the backgrounds are from me google-imaging the 100 different variations of “new york city skyline”, and I downloaded all of the explosions for free from Detonation Films – they have a collection of free and paid sparks, bangs, and explosions that you can superimpose onto videos with Final Cut – which is what I did. Both pieces of music are from the soundtrack for the movie 28 Days Later. (Amazing movie by the way)

Reviews!

Note: During intereviews sound quality was low and quotes in [brackets] are my best estimation at what was said.

“Why do you always have to make movies about killing people [and really awesome things]?” – Deri Reed
“I like how you could see the aliens in the window of the space ship, that was [a fine example of filmmaking at it's best].” – Ira Saltz
“The sound effects are awesome and make this work [one of the truly genius masterpieces of our time]” – Uncle Bob

!slooF lirpA

Published on April 2, 2009 at 7:26 pm in Humor and Life. 0 Comments

So, if you visited here yesterday, April 1st, 2009 you would have seen this:

netsua-aprilfools1

It’s Netsua, but it was backwards. Well, actually, it was a screenshot of Netsua.com flipped backwards. If you missed it (which makes sense seeing as I haven’t really posed in 3 weeks :-/), you can still see what it looked like at this link.

And here were some of the April Fools day related links I also posted on that page:

Click me (April Fools Day on Wikipedia)
and me! (Five April Fool’s Day office prank videos)
me three! (Funny April Fool’s joke on a typography blog)
and me? :-( (The virus that was supposed to infect millions of people on April Fools Day)

April Fools Day is an awesome day, and it’s always great to see what the web does. YouTube was upside down, which was incredibly awesome. (You can still do it by adding “&flip=1″ to the end of any YouTube video URL)

Also, be sure to check out my April Fool’s jokes from last year, and the year before.