Viewing entries tagged with 'movies'
Shady Art from a Sunny Place
Gosh, if you are having a great time right now but you would rather be slightly depressed then go and see one of the Van Morsel/Wiseguy Productions animations. It's very interesting animated art with amazing dialogue. It sounds like audio recordings inspired by automatic writing and one wonders from what depths of the writer's unconscious it comes from. Interesting, yet deeply disturbing.
I am lucky enough to know the artist – but I won't blow his cover here. Let me just say that he lives in a town called Nelson, the most sunny place in all of New Zealand. His art can probably be best described as the opposite.
As a start I recommend Rook but there are heaps of other yet unpublished animations by Van Morsel which I hope will be available some time on YouTube or elsewhere.
Blender
I am currently testing Blender (Blender on Wikipedia), an open source 3d program − and I find it amazingly rich in features and quite user-friendly once you did a couple of tutorials. I did a few things in Lightwave and Maya in the past but I think Blender compares quite well to those and other commercial applications − but it's free!
I am definitely no 3d pro (well, not yet that is) and just start (once again) to use a 3d software but I am really excited about Blender. Like every other professional 3d program it takes quite a while to get into it, to understand the workflow and to figure out best practices; and even then there will always be a zillion new things to discover. So don't expect to get your Pixar job offer next Monday.
In general Blender has a good and easy-to-use interface (it is not your standard everyday interface but it makes a lot of sense), it seems to be very stable, has all features you would expect of a professional 3d software, can be used both for high quality rendering and 3d game design and development (with Python scripting, game engine and logic, etc...). It runs on a lot of different operating systems like Windows, Mac, Linux, Irix, Solaris, etc...
A problem that often appears with open-source projects is poor documentation and tutorials. However, with Blender you don't need to worry. There are heaps of high quality tutorials, a good documentation and a very supportive community. For a start I highly recommend the Wikibook Blender 3D: Noob to Pro.
Open source? Free software? Comparable to commercial software? If you don't quite trust this then it would probably help to see a good example. The open movie project Big Buck Bunny is a quite recent and hillarious short animation and pretty convincing for the capabilities of Blender. See the YouTube video below, watch it on Vimeo in higher definition, download it for free or support future open movie projects and buy the DVD. And for all those geeks out there don't forget to enjoy the story over the technical details. It's entertainment after all.
The Machine Girl
This looks like completely mental stuff that would dwarf Planet Terror in terms of madness and Kill Bill in terms of female revenge. A happy high school girl gone unhappy. Sushi, Tempura, Machine Guns. Obviously more a 'boys' film...
Grindhouse
Grindhouse, the 'Planet Terror' and 'Death Proof' double feature by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. This looks like some great fun. I'm looking forward. See the trailer!
Kill Bill
I just couldn't resist to combine these two pictures when I saw them.
Sorry Bill, don't take it personal - I just don't know another one. Cheer up!
Hafenbüffet
Once again Café Imperial and The Robbery were screened. Once again it was part of the digital sushi program which took place in the Hafenbüffet in Rorschach, Switzerland, on Friday, March 12.
Anyway, the Hafenbüffet is really worth to keep an eye on: concerts, films, theatre, readings, art, etc. in a nice athmosphere.
Digital Sushi
On January 22nd there will be the first filmfestival of my uni: digital sushi. There some short films which were created by students will be screened. Among them is The Robbery which I made in 2003 at Creative Media, Melbourne.
The festival is located in the Conrad Sohm club, Dornbirn, Austria. Entrance time is from 8 pm and it will start at around 9 pm with a party afterwards. The cost is 5 Euros minimum, the proceeds will be distributed to Licht ins Dunkel, an organization for social projects.
So if you feel like it and you are around then, just come over. I am sure it's gonna be a nice evening. And, hey, it's the Austria - actually the Europe premiere!
American Movie
Filmmaker Mark Borchardt (right) and executive producer Uncle Bill.
This film documents the making of "Northwestern". The filmmaker Mark Borchardt, who is fascinated by the idea of making movies since his childhood (his favorite films are "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Seventh Seal"), dreams of making a full feature length film after a few short horror flicks he did. The documentary starts showing him looking through his mail - full of bills - until he stops, saying: "Your AT&T Universal Card has arrived?! Oh God, Kick-fucking-ass, I got a Master Card!" From this moment everything goes wrong:
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