Foam Dart Shootout!

And just like that, the video I teased in my last post is finished!



This took me so much longer to make than I intended it to.  Christine and I actually went out and filmed the source footage late last summer.  "Life" and other related circumstances led me to not really doing much with it for quite a while after that...

This year though, I resolved to get back into filmmaking in a major way, especially after 2013 was almost entirely devoid of it.  Even then, the visual effects took me a bit longer than expected, but I'm really happy with how it turned out!  (as a side note, if anyone ever hears me say again, "setting up a green screen won't be practical in that location - I can just rotoscope everything..."  please smack me.)

John Carter

I still say that Disney's marketing team screwed the pooch on this one by dropping "of Mars" from the title, leaving the uninformed viewer really confused as to what in blazes the movie is even about.

I just saw it the other night, and found it thoroughly entertaining and well executed, but with a plot that was pretty rough around the edges.  In the end, I enjoyed it more than I expected, though that may be aided by the fact that there's been a dearth of adventurous science-fiction/fantasy in my viewing as of late...

This quote from io9's review sums it up pretty well for me:

The real question is should you watch the movie to catch those moments of greatness, or skip it because you know you'll be frustrated by its problems? I would err on the side of watching. This is an imaginative bit of fun, and it looks fantastic splashed across a giant screen. (Do not, however, make the mistake of seeing it in 3D. It wasn't filmed in 3D, and the 3D frankly looks like crap, spoiling the visuals at every turn.) John Carter may not be the gamechanging retro-futuristic epic we were hoping for, but it's still worth checking out.

Though I disagree with the author on one point:  I rather liked the frame story!

On another note, the original Edgar Rice Burroughs story, A Princess of Mars, has lapsed outside of copyright in the US, and is available on Project Gutenberg!  I'm partway through now, and it's intriguingly different enough from the film to be worth a read if you're interested.  Very much a product of the time it was written, and if you're fascinated by the history of the genre, it's cool for that reason alone.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen = Biggest Second-Weekend Drop in Michael Bay's Career

I saw an opening-day midnight showing of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Like many I was, shall we say, less than impressed. Other similarly disappointed friend noted ruefully that it would still probably make boatloads of money. This is true. For a film like this, the audience is more or less built in. It can't not make money.

However, that night I also claimed that if Team America: World Police came out next year, they wouldn't be singing about how much Pearl Harbor sucked anymore. I predicted that once the build-in audience had done their duty, and word spread about how bad it was, we would see the largest second-week slump in Michael Bay's career.

Called it.

Transformers 2 had an opening weekend gross slightly shy of $109 million. The second weekend saw that figure drop to a bit over $42 million, for a week-to-week change of 61.2%, placing it currently ranked #252 on Box Office Mojo's list of the Biggest Second Weekend Drops - the highest of any Bay-helmed movie.

(Also worth noting: Those figures only count the actual weekend part of the first weekend. They do not include the more than $91 million made on that previous Wednesday and Thursday. If those were included, the drop would be even more severe)

Media and Technology: An Interests Showdown for Obama

Last tuesday, like most people at Syracuse, I watched elatedly as Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.  It was a historic moment any way you slice it, and all eyes are on Obama now as he attempts to live up to the hope over 66 million of us placed in him last November.

There's been no shortage of news speculation as to how he will handle one pressing issue or another.  However, being me, I've been wondering about another angle.  Perhaps not the most important or pressing, but one which greatly interests me.

Aside from the pomp of the ceremony itself, two things about President Obama's inauguration day struck me. First:  the new website at WhiteHouse.gov, which went live before he had even finished taking the Oath of Office.  Second:  The star-studded "Neighborhood Ball," hosted by ABC, which kicked off the string of events he and Michelle danced at.  These two events stood out to me because they highlight two "interest groups" among which Obama has strong support;  the wired world of the internet, and the glitz and glamor of Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

Barack Obama ran what is widely hailed as the most technology-savvy campaign in history.  With the small but passionate exception of Ron Paul supporters, the "internets" as a whole loved him for it, and looked forward to a presidency that understands and embraces new technology.  So far, signs that Change has come to the members of the executive branch are good.  The new White House website is every bit as fancy as the Obama team's previous online works, and having a weekly video podcast of sorts sounds like a great way to engage the populace.  Later in the week, we heard about the complaints staffers have been voicing over the archaic I.T. infrastructure in the White House - a lament all to familiar to any geek who has found themselves thrust into the bureaucratic technology morass that typifies most established institutions (50 meg mailbox quota for Syracuse students' e-mail, anyone?).  Heck, even the fact that the president fought to keep his Blackberry shows that he's a new breed of president - one who "gets" technology.  Let the Tubes rejoice!

However, the "Neighborhood Ball" I saw tuesday night on ABC demonstrates Obama's clout with another group: the entertainment industry.  During the campaign, one of the first widely-talked-about attack ads from McCain was directed at Obamas "celebrity" appeal.  His life up to this point reads like an Oscar-winning screenplay, and like most Democratic candidates, he had his fair share of supporters among the Hollywood elite.  That ABC would get together with chart-topping recording artists to throw the first of his presidential balls further proves Obama's appeal among the entertainment industry,

Clearly, both groups are looking forward to a plethora of wonderful changes our new President will bring.

One problem though:  These two groups are currently at war.

Media piracy is one of, if not the biggest issue facing the content creators in the film, television, and music businesses.  It is also at the forefront of the freedom-loving culture of the Internet.  Media companies view tech-savvy consumers as criminal scum, and brilliant programmers worldwide take pride in cracking every new protection scheme the entertainment industry can come up with, either out of belief, necessity, or (I suspect most of the time now) out of sheer spite.

In the last decade, this issue has become the defining conflict for both sides, and both no doubt would like to look to Obama as their savior.  I'm very curious as to how he will navigate these waters, not least of which because I often find myself straddling the same fence.

New "Exclusive" Clip from Cloverfield (01-18-08)

I saw this posted on Facebook, and it's probably cropping up in other places as well.

They also seem to be running a contest of sorts, so if you "grab" the embedded copy here in my blog (or on my Facebook... or anywhere else I post it) then you increase the chances of them doing a pre-screening in Pittsburgh!

Funny Song - "That Calls for a Wilhelm Scream"

Ah, movie geek in-jokes, how I love thee so.

If you don't know what the Wilhelm Scream is... go educate yourself. ;) It's pretty much one of the longest-running cinematic in-jokes out there, particularly among sound designers who like to sneak it in wherever they can.


Certainly a clever idea, and it's nice that within the lyrics of the song, they pretty much tell the whole story of how the Wilhelm Scream came to be the acoustic cliché it is today.

V for Vendetta - Simplified

Just in case you could never quite figure out what the heck V was talking about in that movie... or if you just wanted a laugh!



Such a good movie. :)

HanleyFilms.com - Slowly Coming Together

Summer's winding to an end (I head back to SU on saturday) and the Hanley Films website is finally seeing some life. I still haven't gotten around to putting all the old video online yet, since I'm re-encoding it all after reprocessing it with better deinterlacing.... But! I do have a few other things on there now.

I've set up a home base of sorts for my freelance production work. This is stuff like the LWV segments I put together last year (and am doing again this year). For now the work is still coming slowly, but with a website to point people to now, perhaps that will change. It's all just "learning by doing" and building up a resume.

Speaking of which, I actually have a resume now, in the still-a-work-in-progress About section of the site. I also put up a description of my "Studio," just in case you wanted to know the gear I use. (needless to say, the stuff I used in VPA Film, and now use in Newhouse TRF, is quite a bit better than what I have in my personal aresenal.)

So that's the state of HanleyFilms.com right now. Hopefully I'll get the rest done soon enough. If you want to see my old stuff in the meantime, most of the High School movies are on my old site, HanleyFilms.net. My entry for the Modest Mouse "Missed the Boat" video contest is on YouTube. Unfortunately, Remember the Chase is still not online, as I'm really dragging my heels on the post-production with that one (I'm being really OCD about getting rid of the telecine judder at the edit points), so there's no way to see it at the moment.

As I said earlier, I'm heading back to Syracuse on Saturday, so the next 4 days promise to be very busy. I'm producing to presentation videos for the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh's Good Government awards again this year. (that's a lot of words...) I have two more interviews to tape before I leave, one of them with Senator Jane Orie! So that should add to the frantic-ness of my week.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut Commercial

I just found it now, but this apparently played June 20 during AFI's "100 Years... 100 Movies" on CBS. (They rated BR #97, beating out Toy Story and Ben Hur, and only 3 spots behind Pulp Fiction) As should now be common knowledge, I love this movie, and have been looking forward to the Final Cut since I first heard about it.

It's up several times on YouTube, but Warner Brothers keeps taking it down. Hopefully the DailyMotion version I've embedded will stick around for a while. It has better quality than YouTube, in any case.

Blade Runner The Final Cut - Trailer
Uploaded by toma-uno

I can't say I'm terribly impressed by the herky-jerky, "look what we can do in After Effects" style of the commercial, and the audio cutting is downright sloppy. I guess it's a side effect of foolishly trying to make a film that came out in 1982 look "new."

(Listening closer, it sounds like the audio actually drops out for a split second at somewhat regular intervals. Very sloppy, and it makes the whole commercial feel "rough" and "harsh".)

Nonetheless, I'm still hyped for this definitive release, which has been a long time coming. (If you don't know, the studio politics surrounding Blade Runner were beyond messy, and it's taken most of the last 25 years to sort them out so that the film as Ridley Scott shot it can actually be seen fully)

The titles at the end indicate the Final Cut will be released on DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray, but make no mention of the rumored limited theatrical run. I'm still hoping though...

HanleyFilms.com... It's coming

www.HanleyFilms.com

Yes, I have a "Coming Soon" website for all my film/video work again. But this time, it's different. (promise!) I've given up on the rolls-off-the-tongue-slightly-better .net extension, and joined the rest of the world in .com-land. (Once the site truly goes live, the old hanleyfilms.net will redirect to the new hanleyfilms.com) Before, I'd relied on donated, friend-of-a-friend, or otherwise "free" hosting space, but now I've got all-out paid-for shared hosting from Dreamhost, with effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth. (The only thing they really get ticked off about is CPU time, and I have no intention of running overly convoluted PHP-driven content management systems. HTML, CSS, and a spattering of PHP for menus and such is fine for me)

Now that I've geeked out about my new hosting (it really is rather cool) - what exactly will the new site offer? Before, the "Hanley Films Website" has usually just been a single page with a bunch of links to QuickTime files (see the current HanleyFilms.net)

The new site will be... just a little bit more than that. I'm planning, at the moment:

• All my movies, from the North Hills stuff, to the 16mm short I made in VPA Film last fall, to my entry for the recent Modest Mouse music video contest. (If you really must see that, it's on YouTube). All in higher quality, and more formats than before.
  
• Information on my freelance production work. Seriously. I've already paid for my camera doing this, and I just ordered a $150 microphone to step up my game for a job later this summer. Need a low-budget commercial/music video/help on a student film/etc? Call me.
• Tips, tutorials, and other resources for up-and-coming (or so we wish) wannabes like myself.
• At least one sweet picture of the editing suite setup I've got going in my room. ;)

The video and film stuff is obviously the important part. Before, as I've said, I've put a bunch of QuickTimes on a page - sometimes in various sizes, sometimes not - and left it at that. With the extra space Dreamhost gives me, I can offer more formats than previously - for now, I'm thinking QuickTime 7, Windows Media 9, and DivX should cover most bases.

In addition to more formats, the videos will also be much higher quality. Not just higher bitrate either: Back when I first encoded most of the "masters" for the North Hills Pictures, I didn't know half what I do now about digital video. They were deinterlaced poorly, and went through a lot of unnecessary scaling up and down. This time, wherever possible, I'm going back to the "source" and redoing a lot of that, to preserve as much detail as possible.

How much of a difference can this make? Well... (click image to see full size)


I'd say that's a difference! (Of course, this shot is the most drastic example I could find, but it's still an all-around improvement to one degree or another.)

So that's where the "one, true" Hanley Films website is for now. It should turn out pretty cool, I think.

Now if I could just do something about that day job... :-/

The Overdue Post, Continued

If you haven't already, scroll down and read the first part of this lengthy catch-up. This entry will just tie up the loose ends of what's left over from that one.

Movies

I've seen several movies recently. My short takes:

Thank You For Smoking -- Funny. A very enjoyable movie, but if I hadn't been using a free ticket pass that I had to use up at the theater in Syracuse before it expired this summer, I would probably have regretted seeing it in theaters. It's not that funny. Save the $8-$10 and see it on DVD.

Mission: Impossible III -- Aside from being the most overzealous use of Steadicam this year, I was pleasantly surprised with this one. The plot is deeper and more "important" than previous installments, and J.J. Abrams did a fine job telling the story. If you can ignore memories of couch-hopping and Scientology, this is a pretty good movie, and a good opener for the string of "blockbuster" summer movies we have coming up this year.

Da Vinci Code -- As expected, the book was better. But this is still an engaging movie, and Ian McKellan, as always, steals the show. Probably worth seeing, especially if you put stock in numbers. The second-biggest global opening behind Episode III is pretty impressive. Most of all, don't listen to the protesters. A movie can't tell an intelligent person how to think, and you shouldn't let them try either.

"I Need a Jorb"

Yeeeeeah... As mentioned in my last post, film and developing for next year is going to run along the lines of a couple thousand dollars. Ouch. More than ever, I require summer employment! Unfortunately, I still have yet to have a "real," over-the-table job, what with the W-2's and the taxes and whatnot. Sure, I mowed a few lawns, I've done computer help for the neighbors, and I've helped my dad with some major renovations (cough-roofing-cough) that he was more than happy to give me some decent cash for, as contractors would ask about 10x as much, but I still haven't been "officially" employed, so that pretty much rules out places that require prior experience.

So far I'm filling out applications for places like Arby's, Boston Market and the like. (I will work pretty much anywhere but McDonald's. I don't care how "not bad" Andy says it is...) Haley mentioned a couple other places he's applying last night that I may try as well. I'd like a well-paying, tech-y job like Will and Andy landed, but that's borderline impossible considering my (lack of) employment history. In any case, I need to re-email all the references I used last year so they won't be surprised if their phone rings. (I really did apply at a few places last year, but Blockbuster screwed me over. Long story, for another time...)

*Sigh* We shall see how this goes...

Hell. Yes.

You keep on shootin' first, Han 'ol buddy!

Original, Unaltered Star Wars Release Slated for September.

'Tis a good day for Star Wars fans, and really, all film geeks. Heck, all geeks period. Scratch that: good day for everyone!

---

On a totally unrelated note, I have a sinking fear I may not be sleeping tonight, as I'm going home tomorrow, and the majority of my packing is still to be done. Crap.

Update: As of 7:00 am, this dire prediction of mine seems to be true. Fooey.