Today is Baby Elephant Day
in the Pandora Machine. They come to us via Cukisag. And no, I don't have the diacritical marks required to actually write "Cukisag".Via Bill Martell -- Hitchcock does Kuleshov.Ability as an actor only accounts for (maybe) 50% of their performance. The editor creates a performance more than they do. I'm ...
Decisions
On occasion I'm asked to actually direct one of the motion pictures I'm making. Yeah, right? I know!Last night, for instance, an artist asked me to tell him what my vision for the giant robots was. In haste I made up some crap in order to keep Ian from reaching ...
The Only Filmmaking Advice You Need
Via Bill C, the brilliant only filmmaking advice you'll ever need. I though I'd add my own noise to the discussion. I figure some of the points could be amplified.1. Shoot the damn thing. Yes. And furthermore quit your whining about it. Firstly, of the, what, 1000(?) shots it takes ...
How many times should a writer be kicked in the pants per day?
There was some talk on these kind Interwebs a few weeks ago about The Asylum paying $1000 for a writer to turn out a screenplay based on their specifications. I should look up Bill Cunningham's post on that issue but the fact is that I'm writing this blog post in ...
Will You Shut Up About Guitar Cases Already?
Key art design from the "Hollywood Wizards".Metropolis Music is the only guitar store in Jersey City.*****So, I wrote to InCase about whether their guitar case would be available again and I got this somewhat cryptic reply:Thank you for contacting Incase Designs Corp. Usually it can take one to two ...
Scalzi’s, Twitter’s, and Pages
God, I must be almost exactly John Scalzi's age. Funny thing about our generation is we don't seem to complain that "you kids got it so much easier!" -- 'cause, well, you just don't (good luck finding a job BTW), and we don't complain "things used to be so ...
Why Can’t I make $5 Million a Year?
Bill Cunningham inspired me to write a post about this Wired article.Let us pause briefly in order to make fun of the Wired writer: in the beginning of the article he describes Megashark as being a "hit", but later that the title's "Netflix rental numbers were fine, but the movie’s ...
Disasters!
Apparently the new calendar year begins today. And unlike, say, August 3rd, we tend to make plans starting today.All of last year we'd been struggling to get enough scripts to be able to shoot 2 to 3 science-fiction features with strong female leads a year.And in December we got news ...
Some Information
Here is information you desperately need for the weekend:Acme Guitar Works will wire a Strat pickguard with pickups of your choice -- Fralins, for instance.Die You Zombie Bastards is a free movie on crackle.com. Be forewarned, the picture is beyond weird.A piece of advice from our sales rep regarding visual ...
I Talk Smack
I was trying to explain what I know about codecs. This is what I said. Who knows how accurate it is. It's just what I believe. For now.Quicktime compressed to ProRes 422: this is a very good compression for use with vfx artists as they can bang away on it ...