Saw Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation this afternoon. The most ambitious thing ever. Wonderful. Go see it if you ever get the chance. So much fun.

The Q&A after was a little rushed after, but from what I can tell a lot of what was said has been documented here:

http://www.theraider.net/films/raiders_adaptation/

There were fires, flaming trucks, high speed chases, swords, squibs, lots of guns, the thing where Indy goes under the truck, horrible production accidents making head molds out of industrial plaster instead of dental plaster (including blind scribbling of a note that read HOSPITAL) and a fucking submarine.

Good time.

Yeah sure! I love the format of the show, the film drives the discussion and keeps everything moving. But sometimes a topic makes me just go, "Fuck, if they paused the movie right now I could listen to them talk about that one thing for two hours". Such as:

* Tippett's philosophy of deeply motivated, reverse engineered animation design, or whatever you want to call it. As mentioned in Starship Troopers and Constantine. Eh, let's just say anything relating to the arts of puppetry and animation.

* Following the history of a certain kind of visual effect through time. Something like the history of vfx environments from Tron to Double Tron, or how lightsaber effects changed from A New Hope to Sith or whatever.

* In a similar vein, I don't remember where (fxphdod?) but Mike Seymour recently mentioned how you can follow the Harry Potter franchise as a really accurate reflection of how visual effects have advanced over the last decade. Particularly the rise of the London houses (DNeg, MPC, Framestore, The Mill). Could be a neat thing to examine.

* Editing in general, experiences solving creative or story problems. In your own productions. Might have been from DiF, but I've been turned on to the idea that it's very difficult to comment on editing of a piece unless you know what was available and wasn't included.

Feels like I'm pitching show ideas, which isn't my intention. Just trying to elaborate on some of the kinds of things I would enjoy hearing you guys expound on.

If they were bonus episodes for-purchase or something, I totally would.

On a wider company philosophy type level, is this the boldest pros-be-damned move Apple's ever made? They've introduced consumer-centric products and stuff, but this is the first time I can think of where they dramatically changed a flagship product at the expense of their high-end customer.

They've drawn a line and said, "Fuck y'all it's like this now". I'm interested in what this means for the pro market. This opens a void in the professional space that will likely be filled primarily by Avid, but I think this is a huge chance for other players to roll in too.

Premiere Pro CS5 is great, 64-bit, does some Kona GPU acceleration with certain cards, and plays real nice with the rest of Adobe's products. I haven't spent a lot of time with Avids, but from what I do know, Premiere Pro is a much shorter cognitive leap away from FCP7. If Adobe added a server-side, Unity style server offering, there's a chance they could become a contender. Until they do, it'll probably just be that 1% that does everything on their own or happened to get it when they picked up Creative Suite (me included).

Autodesk could also step up and make Smoke competitive, maybe as a different product that could do offline editing, the same way Flare can support a Flame. Shrug.

There's also Lightworks, that weird-ass open source thing that I don't know anything about. Apparently it's good enough to cut a feature on. The Kings Speech was cut with it.

Jeffery, the stuff you wrote to that tumblr is really great, anyone with a passing interest in the topic really needs to check it out. You buried the link so I'll post it again here in exclamation:

http://jefferyharrell.tumblr.com/ !!!
Also! High five on the Daring Fireball pickup.

The DGA usually opposes co-director situations for this among other reasons, but discourse with someone from there, or anyone who deals with arbitration may provide some ideas.

There's a book I haven't read in years, like since-developing-taste-ago, but considering it's written by Eric Idle it's probably still excellent. The Road to Mars. As I remember it, some comedians travel a solar-system wide vaudevillian circuit while their android tries to write his thesis and figure out the nature of comedy. Deals with as much of the "human/robo wuaaa?" as you can read into it while remaining really enjoyable and funny.

Oh, and this down here is the reason for the post, but didn't want to just drop a bullshit image link into an interesting conversation.

http://twitpic.com/2wuzsv

Was just listening to the Never Let Me Go ep of the Creative Screenwriting Podcast interview with Alex Garland, writer of Sunshine, and one of the audience questions was to elaborate on the "difficulties" with Sunshine he mentions elsewhere in the interview. His answer's pretty candid.

http://creativescreenwritingmagazine.bl … -go-q.html

~51:15

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arGzXbxkTC4

Quite informative, considering.

It leans towards ignorant use of DSLRs in higher-end productions. They're still great for the money, just be aware of the limitations.

That's a great position from which to read the book. Murch was originally a sound design guy that got into film editing, and that informs a lot of his sensibilities.

And for you or anyone else that's interested in the book, don't let the "bible" term scare you off, its like  120 pages and can easily be read in a day, if not a weekend.

Most people praise the opening sequence of Inglourious Basterds for being edited exceptionally well, but personally I think there's a lot more done just with the edit on its own in the sequence at breakfast later on in the film. If you can get your hands on that (there's odd snippets on youtube) consider how the cuts lend themselves to the emotional weight of the sequence.

Enthusiastic nomination for Edinburgh as the best place.

It's a weird thing. You can start arguing that if a substance can cause sudden death it should be controlled, and then consider alcohol poisoning. You can argue that a drug that can inspire violent insanity should be controlled, then consider again, alcohol.

Drug regulations are difficult laws to deal with, since the effects and repurcussions of the substances are tied to the individual's biological/psychological makeup. Legislation tends to protect the lowest common denominator with the highest chance of dangerous, crippling addiction. The slope, she is a slippery, and there's a pile of sad junkies at the bottom where it evens out.

That said, an exciting bonus of moving to California last year was the prospect of registering specifically to vote in favor of legalization.

Yeah, just elaborating, since I suppose I wasn't clear. Which happens a lot. I suck at English.

As mentioned, shutter artifacts from the way the camera draws a frame will fuck up tracking. The Foundry has a cool tool to compensate for that, but it's not 100% reliable.

Keying gets really hard because of the (8bit) compression algorithm used in the camera starts to degrade significantly when you introduce some arbitrary level of detail that's beyond the functional bitrate of the video. Then your edges go to shit.

Renting/borrowing/thiefing cameras for different projects will teach you a lot more about the pros and cons of the tools than any amount of forum discussion. And  (this is where I was less clear) if you're only looking to do a project once in a while, just renting a camera for shooting days can be the better option financially than dropping big bucks on your own for something that may not be used enough to justify the expense.

That money could go to more important, longer lasting aspects of your development as a filmmaker (like booklearnin or watching/buying more movies) Your brain and your ability to tell a compelling story is a lot more important than talking about sexy bokeh and compression artifacts.

But then again, can't underestimate how much you can learn about light and composition from shooting stills in manual with a prime lens. Which you can do with a 7D. If you just want to hear someone say to go buy a 7D, I'll say buy a 7D. And a 50 mil f/1.4. The sexiness-per-dollar ratio of that thing is unrivaled at the moment.