- Thursday, 03 Jul 2008 | Comments?
Fake branded pens designed to upset freeloading pen-borrowers. Perhaps I should order a set.- How to torment telemarketers with one word. Telemarketers irk me so much I doubt I’m able to pull this one off. (via Neato)
- Tuesday, 01 Jul 2008 | Comments?
- Having done some pagination, I know how hard it is to be good. There’s a lot more to it than just selecting a font, a size, and a weight. And getting every quote right can be a bitch.
- Sunday, 29 Jun 2008 | Comments?
- It’s back! It’s been three years since last time I blogged in Portuguese, and I’m eager to go back to the old stand-up emulation routine…
- Thursday, 26 Jun 2008 | Comments?
Something wicked I’m preparing. Coming soon.I think Mythbusters has probably done a very good job at getting people interested in Science (in the basis of the Scientific Method at least) despite its annoying populist format. But if you can’t endure the endless repetitions and the reality show nonsense, this site lists the results of every experiment ever made on the show.
As an aside, I’ve always wondered why in general the attempts at explaining Art - be it in documentaries, or in books - are so piss-poor when we consider Science’s Great Explainers.
- Wednesday, 25 Jun 2008 | Comments?
- “ So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”—
Bill Gates’ e-mail rant to the leading Windows developers.
I was never a supporter of Microsoft-bashing (which somehow I always related to ‘friend spam’ and bad Powerpoint attachments), but this piece is incredible because it’s legit. And I admire Gates’ patience (or is it rabid sarcasm?) in the face of true WTF moments.
- In the weblog...
Dreams in Color
Monday. 23.June.2008 | Comments (2) | Permalink 823
Words and Thoughts in RGB is my most successful piece of work to date. It won three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize in local festivals, and has been selected to a few important festivals both in Portugal and abroad. Not bad, for a small documentary shot and edited in under a week, and which was not supposed to be made.
Way back in the third year of film school there was this optional mini-documentary exercise. In haste I wrote a small voiceover text in English and asked my South African friend Joana to read it. Having done Type Seven (also in video) a few months previously, my intention was to make a small educational documentary as a PC demo, then take it both to film festivals and PC demo 'compos'. A nice plan, hence the English. However, other things happened and I dropped the project.
Skip to a year later. I had spent most of the fourth and last year of film school preparing a 'serious' documentary about immigration to / emmigration from Porto. However, my most definite lack of production skills meant completion at that pace would be years in the future, and the scarcity of good material I had with just a month until the deadline left me completely demoralized. So I had a conversation with the prof, and we agreed I would deliver a smaller project. Time to dust off the old Words and Thoughts in RGB voiceover tape. I decided to cut corners and make a proper video so no more PC demo, even though I used some effect sequences I had designed in Demopaja. More so, 30% of the video running time is filled with the same out of focus shots of headlights in the dusk, which I shot two days before deadline after I decided to go to the movies to unwind for a couple of hours and then watched the starting credits of Paul Haggis' Crash.
(I had cut so many corners in fact, I am ashamed to admit, the documentary has two serious factual errors: the visible spectrum wavelengths are between 400nm and 700nm, not 300-700nm, and blue is close to 430nm, not 700nm.)
Anyway, the documentary was finished, then submitted to festivals. It won the Jury Prize after its first public exhibition at the Ovarvideo festival. My expectations for this hasty documentary were so low I hadn't bothered to attend the awards cerimony and didn't know I had won for a couple of days until someone from the festival called me early in the morning while I was asleep. Suddently a small work of mine had earned me enough money for a laptop, and I realized this festival thing might be the way to go whenever I finish something... So, even after a very discreet mid-week, mid-afternoon appearance at the important Vila do Conde festival I had a distribution offer from a small producer and distributor, Andar Filmes, and a couple of years later the chance to reshoot the whole thing in HD and proper non-hasty conditions, under request of the Coimbra University Science Museum. And hopefully, it'll be the first of a 5-part series. Words and Thoughts in RGB had gone a long way, baby!
Today I finished editing Segredos da Luz e da Matéria: A Cor, also known as Words and Thoughts in RGB 2.0. For your viewing pleasure, here's the original. Enjoy.
- Monday, 23 Jun 2008 | Comments (1)
The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock seems like an interesting book. Here’s a photo from the set of Rope. The set looks simpler than I thought.- This is a very handy skill for a videographer. I’ve always been wary of cumulonimbus, but I just called them ‘evil clouds’. But I could have never guessed the harmless-looking cirrostratus means rain is on the way.
- Thursday, 19 Jun 2008 | Comments?
- Monday, 16 Jun 2008 | Comments (2)
M. Night Shyamalan’s movie is so bad the critic decided to go on a hilarious spoiler rampage to prevent people from watching.
But honestly, are there people still expecting a good film from Shyamalan? Uwe Boll, indeed…
- Thursday, 12 Jun 2008 | Comments?
Mike Sacks’ photos of TV. (via This is That)
This is probably one of the laziest ways of making good photography. But I like it and constantly forget about it. Here’s one of my last efforts (5 years old!).
- Wednesday, 11 Jun 2008 | Comments?
… and the telephones they’ll use. (via Paleo-Future)
‘Metropolis’: New York City in 1980! (via Boing Boing)- Sunday, 08 Jun 2008 | Comments?
Phillip Toledano’s Bankrupt Offices. I too have seen quite a few - abandoned offices are the same everywhere in the world.- In the weblog...
I want my TV
Friday. 6.June.2008 | Comments? | Permalink 822
After years of reading all the praise about The Wire on the internet, I finally caught a bit of an episode on TV yesterday (portuguese cable subscribers can watch the first season on MOV, weekdays at 21:00). Just as I accidentally zapped into it, I watched a it turns out classic scene in which two detectives investigate a crime scene while constantly muttering to themselves variations on the word 'fuck'. And the whole thing had such a class that in my mind it instantly downgraded every other depiction of policemen at work in film or television. I browsed the listings and watched the full episode when it repeated later last night, and I found The Wire nothing short of brilliant. Interestingly enough, turns out the series was created by David Simon, also responsible for Homicide: Life on the Street, perhaps my favourite TV show ever.
The thing about The Wire is that it feels Real, and to enumerate cop films that felt as realistic as The Wire, I say perhaps Serpico (by Sidney Lumet, one of the most underrated working American directors who owes nothing to Academia favourites such as Scorsese), or the 1950s classic Detective Story by William Wyler (which for its age is incredibly realistic in the portrail of a working precint). The Wire is no 'television' at all, it's more cinema than most films. And so are other TV series nowadays.
One of the things that really irks me about Film Studies and many critics is the constant labelling of different calibers of moving image as 'good', 'ungood' or as Evil Incarnate. I don't like many things on TV and I don't like the lowest-common-denominator culture that oozes from the networks, but I always felt a nasty pinch in my spine whenever someone gives me a variation of the 'on Cinema as Art and TV as Shite' speech. A big canvas in a dark room, a TV screen, a phone screen, or a webpage embed are all just different ways in which to see moving images, each with a different context. Just that. Different calibers have implications on what kind of images work in each, and some things do crossover between screen calibers and contexts better than others (i.e. Cinerama westerns relied too much in extreme long shots and watching them is only tolerable in a big projection). For the film/videomakers that just means an awareness of the destination displays. Artistic quality is something else altogether.
Most TV used to be bad because you only had big networks that were part of a monoculture and therefore little diversity. Today there's lots and lots of cable channels, all competing against each other and against the Internet besides movie theatres, books, etc. An explosion in diversity allows for TV series that are true works of art, and should no longer be regarded as the stupid serialized C-movies they never were. It's true there are things like CSI: Horatio Caine One-Liners or 24: Far-Fetched Conundrums Only Solved By Torture, but then you also have the movies of Brett Ratner or Rob Cohen. Bad TV is as bad as cinema can be. Good TV - can be just as good. ···
- Friday, 06 Jun 2008 | Comments?
- Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s I Want You To Want Me is an interactive art installation that mines data from dating sites. It was was installed at the New York’s MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day. (via BB:G)
- The aborted John Carter Of Mars animation project that could have changed the history of animation back in the 1930s…
- Not very thorough a list, but includes some interesting videos.
