The Oscars and its rainy and cold in SD....

I know the weather is nowhere near as bad as other parts of the world but its been rather cold and wet the last couple of days here in San Diego. Just the kind of weekend to stay in, catch up your DVR list, and watch the Oscars tomorrow night. Anyway even though we haven't seen every movie that is nominated this year we are definitely opinionated about our picks to take home an Oscar but everyone knows that The Social Network and Restrepo will win in there categories....or will they??? I am interested to see if Banksy will make an appearance.

Below is the list of nominated films.

Best Motion Picture of the Year
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids are All Right
The King's Speech
The Social Network
127 Hours
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone

Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role
Annette Bening (The Kids are All Right)
Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole)
Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone)
Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)

Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role
Javier Bardem (Biutiful)
Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network)
Colin Firth (The King's Speech)
James Franco (127 Hours)
Jeff Bridges (True Grit)

Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role
Christian Bale (The Fighter)
John Hawkes (Winter's Bone)
Jeremy Renner (The Town)
Mark Ruffalo (The Kids are All Right)
Geoffrey Rush (The King's Speech)

Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role
Amy Adams (The Fighter)
Helena Bonham Carter (The King's Speech)
Melissa Leo (The Fighter)
Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit)
Jacki Weaver (Animal Kingdom)

Best Animated Feature Film of the Year
How to Train Your Dragon
The Illusionist
Toy Story 3

Best Documentary Short Subject
Killing in the Name
Poster Girl
Strangers No More
Sun Come Up
The Warriors of Qiugang

Best Short Film (Animated)
Day & Night Teddy Newton
The Gruffalo Jakob Schuh and Max Lang
Let's Pollute Geefwee Boedoe
The Lost Thing Shaun Tan and Andrew Ruhemann
Madagascar, carnet de voyage (Madagascar, a Journey Diary) Bastien Dubois

Best Short Film (Live Action)
The Confession Tanel Toom
The Crush Michael Creagh
God of Love Luke Matheny
Na Wewe Ivan Goldschmidt
Wish 143 Ian Barnes and Samantha Waite

Achievement in Art Direction
Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
Inception
The King's Speech
True Grit

Achievement in Cinematography
Black Swan (Matthew Libatique)
Inception (Wally Pfister)
The King's Speech (Danny Cohen)
The Social Network (Jeff Cronenweth)
True Grit (Roger Deakins)
Achievement in Costume Design
Alice in Wonderland (Colleen Atwood)
I Am Love (Antonella Cannarozzi)
The King's Speech (Jenny Beaven)
The Tempest (Sandy Powell)
True Grit (Mary Zophres)

Achievement in Directing
Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan)
David O. Russell (The Fighter)
Tom Hooper (The King's Speech)
David Fincher (The Social Network)
Joel and Ethan Coen (True Grit)

Best Documentary Feature
Exit through the Gift Shop Banksy, director (Paranoid Pictures)
Gasland Josh Fox, director (Gasland Productions, LLC)
Inside Job Charles Ferguson, director (Representational Pictures)
Restrepo Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, directors (Outpost Films)
Waste Land Lucy Walker, director (Almega Projects)

Achievement in Makeup
Barney's Version
The Way Back
The Wolfman

Achievement in Film Editing
Black Swan (Andrew Weisblum)
The Fighter (Pamela Martin)
The King's Speech (Tariq Anwar)
127 Hours (Jon Harris)
The Social Network (Kirk Baxter and Angus Wall)

Best Foreign Language Film of the Year
Biutiful (Mexico)
Dogtooth (Greece)
In a Better World (Denmark)
Incendies (Canada)
Hors la Loi (Algeria)

Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score)
How to Train Your Dragon (John Powell)
Inception (Hans Zimmer)
The King's Speech (Alexandre Desplat)
127 Hours (A.R. Rahman)
The Social Network (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross)

Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Song)
"Coming Home" from Country Strong Music and Lyric by Tom Douglas, Troy Verges and Hillary Lindsey
"I See the Light" from Tangled Music and Lyric by Alan Menken Lyric by Glenn Slater
"If I Rise" from 127 Hours Music by A.R. Rahman Lyric by Dido and Rollo Armstrong
"We Belong Together" from Toy Story 3 Music and Lyric by Randy Newman

Achievement in Sound Editing
Inception
Toy Story 3
TRON: Legacy
True Grit
Unstoppable

Achievement in Sound Mixing
Inception
The King's Speech
Salt
The Social Network
True Grit

Achievement in Visual Effects
Alice in Wonderland
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1
Hereafter
Inception
Iron Man 2

Adapted Screenplay
127 Hours (Simon Beaufoy and Danny Boyle)
The Social Network (Aaron Sorkin)
Toy Story 3 (Michael Arndt, story by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich)
True Grit (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)
Winter's Bone (Debra Granik and Anne Rossellini)

Original Screenplay
Another Year (Mike Leigh)
The Fighter (Paul Attanasio, Lewis Colich, Eric Johnson, Scott Silverand Paul Tamasy)
Inception (Christopher Nolan)
The Kids are All Right (Stuart Blumberg and Lisa Cholodenko)
The King's Speech (David Seidler)

Random...but pretty cool.

The Insane Console History Video 2.0 from Elder-Geek on Vimeo.

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Kanye West Film Trailer

A cool looking upcoming flick from Kanye West...hopefully this is the trailer and not the actual film (JK)

Live on KSDT Radio!!

Evening y'all. A is on the radio again tonight talking shop (i.e. politically motivated film and music) with Ian of Artepolitik.com, you can listen here.

The Funniest Part of Tonight's Oscars

Poor director Roger Ross Williams getting Kanye'd by producer Elinor Burkett. Click here to read an article about the bumrush. "Security!"

The Hey-day of Disney Animation

For anyone like me, who grew up trying to mimic Ariel's iconic burst out of the water in their backyard pool, and sang every lyric to Beauty and the Beast, this movie will be a big treat. Can't wait to see it. Just seeing the sketches of my favorite Disney cartoons is getting me all excited to watch the film.

BMW Films

The Hire were a series of short films produced by various hollywood directors over a 2 year period for BMW. These highly popular shorts always featured Clive Owen as the driver with cameos from Gary Oldman to Madonna. The films were used as part of their TV ad campaigns back in 2001 and 2002 and you had to go to a BMW dealership or their website to view them or pickup a DVD. Executive produced by Tony Scott the Hire series were high stylized shorts with A-List cast and crew. These films laid the ground work for Tony Scott's surreal/experimental action films Man on Fire and Domino.

Despite all this success, in October 21, 2005, BMW stopped distribution of The Hire on DVD and removed all eight films from the BMWFilms website just four years after the first film debuted. The series was abandoned, because the project had become too expensive to afford. In the end, the series had been viewed over 100 million times in four years and had changed the way products were advertised. The films continue to grow in popularity on youtube and other viral sites and remain an interesting study of advertising and film.

Neil Blomkamp Interview

Here's a great interview with Neil Blomkamp of the Oscar-nominated film District Nine from Filmmaker Magazine

New videos!!!

Hey,

Here are the two videos we've been editing the last couple of days. Finally done!(sound of beer cans opening). Time for some Coors Light and Rock of Love!!! Just kidding.... until tomorrow when we get back to editing some more.

Have a good night.

So happy its Saturday...

So tomorrow we are going to be shooting some more footage for our experimental Balboa Park short during the Healing Arts Festival. The short we are working on has an abstract narrative and relies on visuals and sound used in non-naturalistic ways to convey story. We should be posting some footage this week.

Red Alert.....

Besides it being International Commie Camera Day tomorrow, May 1st 2009 where you can win any model Holga....we also found out the maker of kickass high-end video equipment Red is hosting a video competition to win their newest creation the Red Scarlet 2/3....all submissions must be no longer than a minute and the story must revolve around a red box...if you haven't seen any footage captured with the red camera...look below:

test with red camera - paris from Opus Magnum Production on Vimeo.

Here's the video...

We are still playing around with the export settings because the footage is a bit stretched from the 16x9 to qt conversion..anyway hope you guys like it. More to come...



Camera Obscura
Oliver Stone's camera technique -- We found this interesting article about how Oliver Stone uses varied film stocks, contradictory cutaways, and more to make his films. I have been interested in learning how film directors like Oliver Stone and Tony Scott work with their Directors of Photography to develop the overall look and feel of the film. And have tried to emulate their techniques in my film work. Later this week I will post some videos where I used multiple formats to create a unique look. Check out the article.

Monday is approaching....

So its Sunday night and I am surfing the web again....when I noticed on that some users are posting feature films on youtube. I am not sure how they are able to keep these films posted without them getting taken down. Anyway, as I found out, you pretty much find any film out on video on youtube.
Camera shake:Enemy#1!..Read about it here
and how to avoid it....of course you can always try to clean it up in Final Cut Pro but why waste the time.

So happy its almost Friday...

What's up everyone,

So we basically have the commercial edit completed. It was the first time Candice edited one of our projects, and we are both mentally exhausted from the experience. Just kidding....it was easy. Right now we just have to record the voice-over and insert some text and its done.

Next up... we are in pre-production for a music video and are honing the God with a Gun script. Hope you guys are having a great Thursday and are exercising your drinking muscles in preparation for the Easter Holiday weekend.

Sunday night codec problems

Hello everyone,

It was a productive weekend for us. Below is an outtake from our Cafe Eleven shoot below.



We were having some errors pop up when we were trying to export this clip using Apples H.264 codec. Apparently its a common problem when exporting from Final Cut Pro. Check out what the folks at Apple are saying about this software bug. Besides having issues exporting using H.264, the clip we were able to post has some sizing issues since it was shot on HDV 1440X1080 HDV and resized to 320x240.


I was surfing the web and stumbled upon these great Stanley Kubrick resource site called the Kubrick Site. Its a great resource archive of the late filmmakers life work. The site is a non-profit educational site made possible by contributions of readers. Anyway, that's it for now....