Martin Scorsese attends free iMovie demo at Apple Store
Another classic from the Onion.
Scorsese, who is widely regarded as one of the most important artists in the history of American cinema, was reportedly fascinated that iMovie was capable of making footage slow down, speed up, or play backward. The living legend said he was also impressed that, by clicking a single button, a complex tracking shot could be instantly changed into black-and-white to fully emphasize the repugnance of masculine insecurities.
As Gruber observes, often the joke is in the headline; here, it's the accompanying photograph that provides the seed.
Bill Murray will see you now
Great interview with Bill Murray by Dan Fierman of GQ.
Interesting – though fitting – that he hates Los Angeles, and purports to have never seen any episodes of Sienfeld except the last (and thought it was terrible).
End of the line for Final Cut Studio?
According to AppleInsider, Apple is scaling back the Final Cut Studio apps to fit "prosumers". This sounds like an unfortunate disaster for the professional industry, but certainly seems to fit with Apple's trends the last few years.
I wonder if there's more to say.
Record in H.264 and you can never publish your work?
Apparently most all consumer (and even some professional) photo and video cameras embody licensing encumbrances that strive to prevent profitable distribution of your own work: Why Our Civilizations Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA.
Since the posting of that a couple days ago several other analyses (CNET, Engadget) have been presented, including reaction from Lukas Mathis who concludes that H.264 is not viable for long-term use.
This is sort of a rough situation.
PIXELS by Patrick Jean
A fantastic short film (2:32) by Patrick Jean. If the 8-bit video games of yore came back to seek revenge on NYC...
Hollywood edits tend to follow a formula in cadence
Fascinating little piece here; excerpt:
Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span.
They found that the magnitude of the waves [created by a Fourier transform of the data] increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation. (More…)
I guess this means that the editors know their audience.
A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever
I'm a week behind the curve on this one, but it deserves to be re-linked – a very well-done satire in A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever (made by these guys).
Deliberate mis-editing by ABC in Toyota report
CBC: ABC admits tinkering with Toyota report. This is a first-degree fuck-up in news editing. (Filed under "film" because, well, apparently the editor thought he was doing a drama)
New BC tax incentives for film and video game labour
CBC News - British Columbia - B.C. film and game firms get tax gift : This is some positive news; let's see whether it makes any dent in the flagging film biz. I wonder how broadly "video game makers" can be interpreted (e.g., "iPhone app developers")?