http://asseptic.org/blog/ A weblog by Eduardo Sousa, a film and video geek from Porto, Portugal, with a knack for design and a keen interest in the affairs of mankind. en-us http://asseptic.org/blog/rssimage.gif http://asseptic.org/blog/ 120 14 Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:28:10 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/818
Reel time, ladies and gentlemen. It's incredible I never bothered to update my reel since I finished film school (my old reel was done before the final year). But alas, as they say, blessed the designer who never updates his portfolio, that means he doesn't need one. I'm not so blessed, as my professional precariousness has been on the rise lately. Hence a new reel. As before I left out the pedestrian stuff I usually do (institutional videos and such) so the reel only consists of stuff I can really relate to. To keep with the times, you can even watch it in gorgeous streaming HD (too bad I lack more HD content to put there).

I hope the spell works. ¶ ]]> Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:28:10 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/818 http://asseptic.org/blog/817 There Will Be Blood for weeks now (in a nutshell: here's a movie worthy of the title Citizen Kane part II: The Deicide, and surely one of the 21st century top ten films). But I'll be dissing something instead. It's a lot more fun:

I really, really like Francis Ford Coppola. I mean, this is the guy that came from the Roger Corman B-movie heart of darkness (and 3D sexploitation!), and all of a sudden BAM! in less than ten years did four of the Top Ten Movies Ever in many people's lists (the first two Godfathers, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now). Beat that, Welles! However, time passed and then things such as this happened.

And now, after ten years of retirement, there's this. Youth Without Youth has a really terrible script. Why did he even consider this for his comeback? I'm all for unapologetic science fiction / fantasy, it's a lot more ballsy than having this C-grade sci-fi dementia coated in some sort of ugly pseudoliterarian/spiritual paint. And Francis Ford Coppola might still have a little of his master touch, but for most of the movie it feels as if he is someone else stealing from his own box of tricks (i.e. his signature vertical flips - such as in the opening of Apocalypse Now, here appear as forced at the very least, nauseating in parts). And what's with those crappy 'liquidify' effects - the kind that was already crappy in techno videos made in 1992?

And another thing: Is it just me, or is the whole premise of much of the latter part of the film disturbingly similar to Paul Auster's appaling The Inner Life of Martin Frost? Is there anything cornier than a Unless Writer Stops Muse Dies plot? Francis Ford Coppola the director deserves better material, or else he may end doing the kind of movies where in the end, it was all just a dream or something.

Oh. Oops. ¶ ]]> Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:14:11 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/817 http://asseptic.org/blog/816 uploading stuff to Vimeo and watching future TV on Joost or Babelgum (Miro is a wonderful idea, but the current client is one piece of slow unusable rubbish - now a Joost client with Miro content would be it!). I also spent some time trying out the flashy new Web 6.0 (whatever) services and stuff. Besides Vimeo (and the über-cool Tumblr, which as you know I have used for more than a year now - and 80% of my blogging is done through it), not many deserved my time. Virb, for instance, looks cool enough, but I really don't need another place where I aggregate everything. That's what the very site you're reading is for, right? Virb may be nice looking and functional. Other 'web services' are not. Once I logged in to last.fm I went straight to the account cancellation form. Can't listening to music be just a matter of pressing one button?

That's why I think Muxtape (last week's meme, I know) is da shit: A list of songs in Big Type, you click one and it starts playing the list from that song onwards. Could it be simpler?

Well, here's my mixtape.

It's been a while since I last made a playlist, actually. I didn't use to find it this hard. I used to know a lot about music (well, a lot more than I know now, anyway). Ten years ago, I would spend a now unimaginable percentage of my income on records. My knowledge was biased towards the electronica and indie pop sides of things, but I could come up with a nice coherent playlist by heart. I used to record a lot of tapes for playing in my car radio, and I was confident enough to record a mixtape and present it to a girl. I even put a couple of mixtapes on my own website, back when MP3 was a technical term, Napster was a new thing, and nobody really seemed to care much about copyright infringement.

Nowadays, in an era where I can't really figure out Muxtape's legal existence (but I do hope it lasts) I had this unbeliveable neurosis putting together a simple playlist thought of as a tape I'd listen to while driving my car. I guess I'm old... ¶ ]]> Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:14:58 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/816 http://asseptic.org/blog/815
Bad Day was my last fiction effort during film school. It was written as a one hour movie, but time constraints made me rush and drop things during shooting and so I ended with a slower-paced, fifty minute picture. Almost year later I re-edited the whole thing as a slim thirty minute short, and that was that, a Bad Day I could live with. Here it is now, for your viewing pleasure.

Extra geek points to whoever points out the obscure Philip K. Dick reference (note to self: don't do it again). ¶

Site improvements: Now you can comment on Found Objects, which have also gained permalinks - so 2003, ain't it? ¶ ]]> Fri, 28 Mar 2008 01:35:26 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/815 http://asseptic.org/blog/814
During the last year of film school we had an optional project - to write a short film to be shot in a single day, according to a theme. The theme was: what if there was some sort of pill that made you smart? I took the opportunity to do an explicitly sci-fi short, Weltschmerz. I stole a lot from the Voigt-Kampf scenes in Blade Runner, with some Peter F. Hamilton thrown in. It was fun. It was shame we lost the lead actress a couple of days before the shoot (not many times I heard someone so devastated on the phone, it was not her fault) and, unable to postpone, had to make do with Isa, which we had cast in a minor role primarily for her looks. We had almost no time to reharse, but Isa took the role quite bravely and I'm so thankful... We may have taken twenty hours (we shot the whole thing in a single apartment, so we had to change decorations a few times), but we did shoot it in a single day.

Here's the whole 13-minute short. Enjoy. ¶ ]]> Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:41:13 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/814 http://asseptic.org/blog/813
My online video spree continues with Sometimes We're Happy, a short film I did during the third year at film school in which I have a go at magical realist weirdness and, unfortunately, at acting. I have quite a soft spot for 'Por Vezes Somos Felizes' and I still look at it as perhaps my most aesthetically appealing work, done before I started worrying about other things.

Such as: directing real actors.

A remake, anyone? ¶ ]]> Mon, 17 Mar 2008 12:16:38 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/813 http://asseptic.org/blog/812
The Zero - the story of a dangerous number is a documentary I did during my second year at film school and I've come to consider my first real work as director, past the whole storefronts-at-night, harbour-industrial-fetish, defocused-screen (see below), timelapses-are-so-cool experimental video thing one does when clueless (along with bad horror, which I never did for some reason).

Anyway, as I prepare /media for a spring cleaning, I decided to put my oldest (i.e. ineligible for festivals, for sale, etc) works online, so now you can enjoy The Zero in its full sixteen minutes of glory. Enjoy. ¶ ]]> Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:59:41 GMT http://asseptic.org/blog/812