is our latest for Citybeat. It was a lot fun and interesting interviewing local Sd artist Kelsey Brookes. We are definitely fans of his work now and are looking forward to seeing his show later this month at the Quint Gallery.
Tonight, we are working on our video for Artepolitik.com. And we should have the video posted soon if we can finish entering subtitles in Final Cut...which is a tedious thing to do btw... Anyway, last night I watched an interesting documentary called The Revolution Will Not be Televised. Its a documentary about the April 2002 Venezuelan coup attempt which briefly deposed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Its a great doc and you can watch it online for free which is a good thing. In a few days, I will be posting a short version of an article I am contributing to Artepolitik.com about it.
We were lucky enough to tape Transfer while they rehearsed for an upcoming tour in support of their album Future Selves. We are definitely going to check them out when they play San Diego.
Tonight we filmed another project for Citybeat, and will have footage posted next Tuesday. Have a good night...javascript:void(0)
In depressing news this week, Disney has drastically cut the staff of their indie movie production co. Miramax from 70 to 20 people, in what now seems to be a growing trend among big movie studios of downsizing or eliminating their arthouse films divisions. I've always felt that the film industry has destined itself to an agonizing and shallow death, by allowing big business to come in and turn film-making into a corporate, profit-driven, statistics machine. Film studios looking for the almighty dollar will continue to dumb down movies based on what statistically sells (i.e. boobs, explosions, and talking cartoon animals) and intelligent movies designed to trigger your imagination and make you think, will be a thing of the past. It would be better if filmmakers just stop putting their trust in these big profit-driven studios and released their movies under smaller, more art-house driven production companies. They may have less money to work with, but its worth it in the increase of creative control. Miramax might still be a powerhouse, had the Weinsteins not giving in to the lure of financial security under Disney and kept working on their own. Entertainment Weekly has an interesting article about the subject. I hope that independent production companies will find a way to survive outside the reliance of the shallow corporate movie houses.
Last night we went to see the Cohen Brother's new movie A Serious Man at the Landmark Theater in Hillcrest. The movie itself is hard to describe. It's a comical look at the life of a professor who can't ever catch a break. His demanding wife dumps him for a touchy-feely Francis Ford Coppola look-a-like. He keeps getting anonymous hate mail sent to his boss at a time when he's trying to get tenure. His kids only think he exists to fix the TV antenna and steal from his wallet. On top of that he has thousands in lawyers bills piling up from his divorce. Its sort of a tragi-comedy play about humanity, where you just need to watch the action and not let the characters problems affect you at all except to laugh at the unfairness of life. The guy catches absolutely no breaks...at first I wanted to choke him and scream "get a backbone!" But after a while I realized that was the joke- that he was destined for injustice. Just a thought...it seems like you can always judge the outcome of your movie experience by the crowd that comes in to watch. Landmark usually has an even mix of quiet, genteel elderly people, sullen artsy types, and loud, self-aware hipsters. This screening was pretty much over-taken by loud hipsters. From the very first shot, they would laugh "hysterically" at every line of dialogue, every scene, even the scenes that were basic set up scenes where nothing was going on. It's as if they were thinking "We know the Cohens are funny and their humour is really dry, so even though this is a location set-up shot showing an empty lawn, it's probably supposed to be funny so I'm going to laugh hysterically". Okay I'll stop my tangent. Overall, it was a good comedy, as usual it was a very-well shot and acted. But the cold, dark severely detached treatment was a little much for me. Not one of my favorite Cohen movies so far. Here's an interesting interview with the Cohen's about their latest movie.
Hopefully you are able to go out drink some green beer, pinch people who aren't wearing green, and be merry...if you have to stay in tonight, pop open a can of Guinness and rent the movie Once
Tonight we stayed in, drank Guinness, and tried to edit some HD test footage on our old G5 that we shot a couple of weeks back. After spending an hour logging footage, the trusty old G5 decided to freeze up and render the footage we captured useless....good thing we bought a new computer that we will start using as soon as we have it setup. Anyway have a good night and we will talk to you later...
Okay, so once again with feeling!!! No we are not dead, or in prison for shoplifting overpriced camcorders..we've just been so productive that we completely let our blog fall by the wayside. I know, I know..there is no excuse for it. And I'm sorry to the fans who we've disappointed with the long hiatus (and by fans, I mean some random cat that stepped on his passed-out owners keyboard, inadvertently clicking onto our blog and giving us a view)
But anywho..the important thing is that we're back, with a newfound sense of duty, driven by an overwhelming sense of guilt.
July
We entered a contest for Klondike along with about 30,000,000 other people. Although our skit didn't win, it was pretty encouraging that we were able to make a decent video with the most skeleton-y of skeleton crews (two people). Here is the video...not too shabby of work for just for a couple of people, with no grip, lighters, cameramen, actors, food, or shame.
August
We entered another contest, this one for one of those web channels. It was a comedy called Stu's Blog, about an internet geek who chats on a video blog and obsesses over a neighbor girl. It was a pretty funny skit, and was by far one of the longest ones we've made.
We are working on some important projects that we'll be posting up before the end of the year. One is the final edit of a great film that has been in work over a couple of years, by one of the most talented members of the El Roberto Crew. We also have the final edit of the Radiohead project-it is almost finished and promises to to a very cool short once it s completed.
Links...
Here are a couple of links to some very cool filmmaker competitions that are coming up...
Another video contest..this one looks a little cheesy-it's for Excedrin. Something about making a video about speed. I don't know. You'd be amazed how vague a lot of these companies are when they try to describe what they're looking for in videos. Anywho, its worth a shot! We're going to attempt to submit to the Sundance contest (but ONLY if we get our current projects complete before he deadline) but I think we'll skip this one. Good luck if you decide to try it!
That's all for now..we'll be back tomorrow-See you then!
