426

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

Situation Rap would be so much more rhymey though.

427

(43 replies, posted in Creations)

Worked out alright, quick shutters, though. Looking into the sun and all.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/67689/_DSC2786.jpg

428

(43 replies, posted in Creations)

Tripping to the Grand Canyon today for a good view of tomorrow night's annular sunset eclipse. Anyone have tips for getting not-awful pictures?

429

(9 replies, posted in Off Topic)

"I'm so glad I didn't take that chance to do more creative and challenging work." -No One

430

(39 replies, posted in Episodes)

Give me as many movies as possible of Ruffalo and Downey hanging out in a research lab punching the clock. No superpowers, no action. Just them being smart and researching and uh, contentious respects.

431

(180 replies, posted in Episodes)

A little surprising to see such a spectacular Bechdel Test failure from a writer/director so notable for his awesome lady characters.

432

(180 replies, posted in Episodes)

Jimmy B wrote:

I like the fact that they got Lou Ferrigno to voice the Hulk again (like he did in the '08 film). That amuses me for some reason smile

He voiced less than a third of the Hulk, he was an element, a layer in all of the Hulk sound. As I understand it, it was a mix of Ruffalo, Ferrigno, and a couple of New Zealanders.

433

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

Segodzilla vs Zarban and Zarban. Merchandising opportunity, guys.

We design one Zarban, and sell two to everyone that wants to recreate the magic.

434

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

Converting your selects to h.264 or x264 (same-ish thing without getting into it) around 85% quality will give you a lot of space savings and hold up the quality pretty well.

435

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

Wrapped on my show yesterday.

Got tasked last minute with an entire sequence for the finale of a favorite TV show, so apologies for blowing the deadline. Had planned on having a day off in, um, April.

Everything's shot, just need to sort and wrap it up in a neat little package. Should be online tonight.

436

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

Haven't had a day off in a month, and in that same month had to move out of one apartment and into another. Managed to shoot my stuff this morning, but might not be able to get it packaged and online until the 11th or 12th.

Not that I won't try to get it in sooner, just a heads up.

437

(569 replies, posted in Creations)

Getting this done Sunday morning. Friend I enlisted to shoot was recently in the camera department for a sequel to a very lens-flarey movie. Will try to keep flares to a minimum. At least I don't have any anamorphic lenses.

438

(24 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Dorkman wrote:

Synecdoche is one of the worst movies ever and if you liked it I will fight you.

EDIT: Except Eddie. Eddie can like it if he wants.

Pick a weapon.

439

(43 replies, posted in Episodes)

Session on the Creative Act

Convention of the American Federation of Arts

Houston, Texas
April 1957

Participants:
   Professor Seitz, Princeton University
   Professor Arnheim, Sarah Lawrence College
Gregory Bateson, anthropologist
   Marcel Duchamp, mere artist


THE CREATIVE ACT
by Marcel Duchamp


Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of  the creation of art: the artist on the one
hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity.

To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond
time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing. If we give the attributes of a medium to the
artist, we must then deny him the state of consciousness on the esthetic plane about what he
is doing or why he is doing it. All his decisions in the artistic execution of the work rest with
pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought
out.

T.S. Eliot, in his essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent", writes: "The more perfect the artist,
the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates;
the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."

Millions of artists create; only a few thousands are discussed or accepted by the spectator and
many less again are consecrated by posterity.

In the last analysis, the artist may shout from all the rooftops that he is a genius: he will have
to wait for the verdict of the spectator in order that his declarations take a social value and
that, finally, posterity includes him in the primers of Artist History.

I know that this statement will not meet with the approval of many artists who refuse this
mediumistic role and insist on the validity of their awareness in the creative act – yet, art
history has consistently decided upon the virtues of a work of art through considerations
completely divorced from the rationalized explanations of the artist.

If the artist, as a human being, full of the best intentions toward himself and the whole world,
plays no role at all in the judgment of his own work, how can one describe the phenomenon
which prompts the spectator to react critically to the work of art? In other words, how does this
reaction come about?

This phenomenon is comparable to a transference from the artist to the spectator in the form of
an esthetic osmosis taking place through the inert matter, such as pigment, piano or marble.

But before we go further, I want to clarify our understanding of the word 'art' - to be sure,
without any attempt at a definition.

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we
must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Therefore, when I refer to 'art coefficient', it will be understood that I refer not only to great art,
but I am trying to describe the subjective mechanism which produces art in the raw state – à
l'état brut – bad, good or indifferent.

In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally
subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains,
satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at
least on the esthetic plane.

The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realization, a difference
which the artist is not aware of.

Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing. This
gap, representing the inability of the artist to express fully his intention, this difference between
what he intended to realize and did realize, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the
work.

In other words, the personal 'art coefficient' is like an arithmetical relation between the
unexpressed but intended and the unintentionally expressed.

To avoid a misunderstanding, we must remember that this 'art coefficient' is a personal
expression of art à l'état brut, that is, still in a raw state, which must be 'refined' as pure sugar
from molasses by the spectator; the digit of this coefficient has no bearing whatsoever on his
verdict. The creative act takes another aspect when the spectator experiences the
phenomenon of transmutation: through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an
actual transubtantiation has taken place, and the role of the spectator is to determine the
weight of the work on the esthetic scale.

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the
work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner
qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even
more obvious when posterity gives a final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten
artists.

http://www.cathystone.com/Duchamp_Creative%20Act.pdf

440

(8 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Awesome, glad they're doing something about that. Even if it's just getting more awareness for the problem. I could have had my physical copy of CS5 literally air-shipped around the world several times and it still would have cost less than what they're asking for a digital version in AUD.

Also those guys has a real styley header font for a news site.

441

(20 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Figure the Adywan has the best aspects of everything, and is the newest, best looking version of that film I've seen.

But I'm really not too into Star Wars.

442

(62 replies, posted in Episodes)

Sam wrote:

waiting until there’s a good reason to change

Considering his last few films have had hundreds and hundreds of effects shots, I'd call that a pretty good reason. Sure, he may not have sat in a suite with a colorist for a month or two, but vfx shots need to be digitized, altered, possibly graded, and dropped back in to the film. There are digital elements to the workflow. Every shot could end up looking exactly as Pfister and his timer intended, but there was an intermediate step during which a lot of frames were digital.

It's a grey area. I understand the beneficial simplicity of saying things like "most of that was practical" or "I have never done a digital intermediate". They are simple answers that lend an air of cred and wonderous old-fashionedism, but they are PR answers. The reality is much more complicated.

443

(20 replies, posted in Off Topic)

http://swrevisited.wordpress.com/anhr-change-list/

444

(40 replies, posted in Episodes)

The butt of the guns should be in their shoulder the proper way? I don't know much about guns. Also maybe they're obvious replicas since they're swinging them around whereas the real ones are super heavy?

Just guessing.

445

(62 replies, posted in Episodes)

Squiggly_P wrote:

I'm not too worried about the Hobbit looking like crap. The footage they showed off was probably a lot more raw than you'd see in the theater. You look at just about any direct-from-camera footage and it just looks wrong until you go in and make it look like a movie. If there's still green screens in the shots, then it's probably not been color corrected / balanced and all that junk.

What I'm more worried about is the lack of motion blur on the versions projected at 24FPS. There have been movies that shot with a short exposure for some scenes (Saving Private Ryan had a number of scenes like that, I believe), and it's noticeable.

As I understand it, they're adding the proper amount of motion blur in post for the 2D version. And since RED is so closely tied to this production, I'd imagine Graeme Nattress is involved, and he's a golden god of image processing. So it will look fine.

446

(40 replies, posted in Episodes)

447

(8 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Hey look, a feature center that has nothing to do with helping you make better stuff.

448

(30 replies, posted in Episodes)

I've never seen Pirates of Silicon Valley, but in any Jobs movie worth a damn that story would only serve as the first act.

449

(15 replies, posted in Off Topic)

Eh, you take the good with the bad.

Here's a nice incendiary one:

Pauline Kael wrote:

        Let’s clear away a few misconceptions. Movies make hash of the schoolmarm’s approach of how well the artist fulfilled his intentions. Whatever the original intention of the writers and director, it is usually supplanted, as the production gets under way, by the intention to make money—and the industry judges the film by how well it fulfills that intention. But if you could see the “artist’s intentions” you’d probably wish you couldn’t anyway. Nothing is so deathly to enjoyment as the relentless march of a movie to fulfill its obvious purpose. This is, indeed, almost a defining characteristic of the hack director, as distinguished from an artist.
        The intention to make money is generally all too obvious. One of the excruciating comedies of our time is attending the new classes in cinema at the high schools where the students may quite shrewdly and accurately interpret the plot developments in a mediocre movie in terms of manipulation for a desired response while the teacher tries to explain everything in terms of the creative artist working out his theme—as if the conditions under which a movie is made and the market for which it is designed were irrelevant, as if the latest product from Warners or Universal should be analyzed like a lyric poem.

450

(15 replies, posted in Off Topic)

"And park in handicapped spaces whenever cuz who cares, right?"
Steve Jobs