I’ve been meaning to sorta write some film reviews, or start talking about film.. in this blog, since I started it.. but I haven’t done much of that.. I should confess, before I get on with it, that the way I relate to film is somewhat idiosyncratic.. and so my reviews / talking about it will be.. I probably won’t tell you what a film was about in a literal sense.. cause I’m not sure if that even matters to me.. we’ll.. you’ll see for your self if you read on.

So Micheal Clayton is a film… features George Clooney… who’s one of those few actors whom.. the chix seem to dig, and yet I dig as well..  My favorite performances of his probably being his stuff with the Coen Brothers.. and perhaps them heist films of his.

Anyway..

So the first thing that impressed me about Micheal Clayton was the cinematography.. the photography. There’s a kind of subtle beauty going on here.. 

Structurally.. things are not the usual, which I like.. no, we were in good hands here.. directorially speaking.. and how freaking rare that seems these days?!  You know.. modern Hollywood films.. what can we say of them? These are films that are.. so much more about commerce then art that.. well box office returns are more important then if the film is any good.. it’s not about artist concerns.. it’s about market concerns.. and the results are usually crap.. and at best a good pop corn film.. 

Well Michael Clayton doesn’t suffer from these sorts of things..  it’s a mature film, made by mature film makers, for a mature film going audience.. as a pose to… err.. I’m not even going to get into it.

So the structure is a deviation.. not a big deviation, but enough of one so that you don’t feel like…  Ok, I like my films to be a bit of an adventure.. where we don’t really know where we are going..  a film could be anything, and yet we are always sorta getting the same thing.. at least if we’re talking about the big Hollywood stuff.. I mean its as if they have a few emotional arches they feel the need to recycle endlessly…

I’m sorry.. this isn’t so hot of a film comment..   but..

I’m reminded of the first time I saw George Lucas’s THX1138.. Here’s a film who’s idea was to make a film that felt like a foreign film.. in the sense that we are being taken into a world that doesn’t even seem like it’s totally the product of our culture..  so its awesome in the adventure of it.. and its wonderful graphic style… cinematic conception.. lots of things.. we’re hanging with artists whom are inventing and creating…. Wonder why this doesn’t happen more..

I’m not meaning to put Michael Clayton on the same level as THX, or anything like that.. but just to say it has at least some of that kinda mojo going for it..  I mean yeah.. it does have the weakness of George Cloony…. the weakness of us having seen his work before.. we know what to expect from him.. so the adventure isn’t so.. far out, or anything but..  

Anyway.. so this is a film to see.. I recommend it as being…. drum roll please… not total crap

Since I got the new MacBook I’ve been obsessed with a new video blogging project. This seems to have come out of the blue.. not that I hadn’t been thinking about video a good deal prior.. but jumping into this like this.. The level of commitment I’m now feeling for it.. the excitement and passion I’m feeling for it.. The feeling of just being possessed by it… that is very surprising to me.

It’s as if God spoke to me and said “Matt, you must start video blogging, you must become a video blogger.” “Well God, that’s a little random, don’t you think?” Of course the trouble with God is.. there’s really no one to turn for for second opinions.. well I suppose there’s always Satan but…

It comes to me like a revelation.. like one day you wake up and you realize “this is what I’m supposed to do,” and though you had thought about it prior.. never did it command you.. . not like this.

What’s brought Matt to this new video blogging project? 

Ok, brace you’re self.. this could get long.

Somehow I always wanted to be a film maker.. since I was little kid… So it should be no surprise that I took some video and film making classes in college.. though.. the equipment at Mass Art, the only state art school in the US, was not capable of.. well I couldn’t do what I wanted to do with it.. so I never really got too into video or film making while there… really only dreamed about it.. though I did take a few film criticism type classes to kinda.. prepare I guess… 

But I can remember hanging out in the dorms.. getting high with some folks.. and telling them how in a few years anyone can own a video camera, the tools to edit it, and how we’d be distributing it via the internet.. imagining that world of possibilities.. and so.. I sorta went in that direction.. with my music, learning web design skills.. etc.

Somehow.. somewhere in there.. perhaps it was a result of my first “real job” as an interactive designer.. I was able to afford a video camera.. I also bought Premier and After Effects. I think I must have been on a G3 that could barely handle it.. it didn’t have a DVD burner, and the hard drive was tiny… so in practice I didn’t do much video.. just played around a bit.. shot video.

I started creating a kind of video library of.. just raw footage.. some of it dating back to the collage years.. with the idea that I’d eventually do something with it.

Sometime latter.. still on that old G4.. I started dating this girl whom.. I fondly refer to as Sue of Zen. Sue was hard of hearing.. needed subtitles to watch tv or films. When she was thinking about getting HBO I saw my opportunity..  ”No, you should get Net Flicks I said… I was thinking “if she needs subtitles to watch films.. she probably will be fine with foreign films.” So.. I conned her into letting me pick the films.. all the great film makers of film history.. for the year or so that we were involved.. I’d see up to 8 films a week.

The effect of Sue of Zen and I watching so many films was.. I became a horrible film snob.. I mean when you watch that many films.. that many of the greatest films ever made.. it’s hard to tolerate the crap!  I haven’t watched films like that since.. and I’ve grown a little more forgiving of Hollywood.. 

Well there was one other effect.. I became a lot more sophisticated about film.

When it came time to buy my Mac Pro.. I was thinking Video Making when I bought it. 8 Cores, a better then standard graphics card, 1.7 or something or other terabytes of space.. go for the 2 24″ HD screens..  etc.. I was even budgeting in professional video cameras and lighting rigs.. . 

But the thing was.. I wasn’t really jumping in head first into the video production stuff.. Hell, I wasn’t doing much of anything.. well, that might be over stating it. 

A few latter: 

Anyway.. so a long story, right? I can’t really get into everything about what I’m up to.. so lets go into what I’m up to at the moment..

Adventures in Apple’s Motion 3D

Motion is a motion graphics program.. that’s sorta 2.5D-ish, that’s a part of Final Cut Studio.  Motion graphics is basically animation with tittle graphics for film and TV.. My approach is basically painting plus the dimension of time… 

So I don’t know Apple’s Motion..  And Apple hasn’t done a real good job with thinking through the learning process… as the manuel is rather sucky. They have a few training videos, but they don’t really get you up to speed.. they just kinda give you a few things.. and from there you just kind of fumble around.

For the last couple days now.. I’ve been doing these little motion graphics projects.. which are perhaps more about learning the software then it is about making great work.. I’m aiming for great work, but who knows if I’ll actually get there.

Still.. I can see the potential…   

A couple days latter (I think):

I’m slowly getting to the point that I kind of understand what’s going on in Motion.. It’s not really that hard to pick up.. though there’s a depth to it that still seems a little out of reach, maybe? Or maybe there’s just a lot of things I figure I ought to be able to do, that it should be able to do.. but I can’t figure out how to do it or even if you can do it.. but then I’m new to the case….I’ve rendered out a number of motion animations.. and.. I have mixed feelings on them.. of course there not exactly meant to stand on there own.. In any event, that I now feel like I’m getting a feel for the program.. my expectations for what I ought to be able to achieve.. is now to start really going up.My latest sets of projects have been to take stuff that I’ve designed in photoshop.. or created in photoshop. In Photoshop these images are constructed with lots of layers.. In motion I take the images of the different layers, and set them up in 3D space.. so the layers now have spatial relationships between them.. and I’ve got a few lights going.. and I’m goofing around with the cameras.. and everything is sorta moving around a little..This really does feel like painting plus the dimension of time… Painting in motion, if you will. Though using this kind of language to talk about it seems to overstate it a little.What I’m doing is very much in keeping with the kinds of stuff I was doing with After Effects those few years back. The After Effects CS4 upgrade is now on my “to get list”.. and I may likely get it rather shortly.. assuming that I continue my video commitment.. 

Motion Graphics / Animation Goals

My plan of attack, technology wise, is to start with Motion.. of course. Eventually I’ll jump into After Effects… of course.. And then, assuming I can get Cinema 4D to run on this computer, well.. there’s that. The first objective, I guess, is to obtain some serious competency with Motion.. and then into After Effects. Cinema 4D I expect to be a giant learning project, and for that.. the goal is simply to get to a point where I’m able to start creating stuff to integrate into this sort of motion graphics / animation pipeline.. as a pose to going all out into 3D animation. What I mean is.. I get the ball rolling with this stuff.. and then just add pieces to it.. a process by which I hope to develop competency with the other stuff.. but real competency with that stuff.. only needs to be at a level determined by this stuff.. if that all makes sense.

Conclusions

I don’t know what will come of all this stuff, but it’s a fun adventure to go on.. and I have laid down the ground work in many ways.. to hopefully do something great.. We’ll see what happens………..

So recently I’ve been reconnecting, a bit, with folks from my college days at Mass Art.. and in the Studio of Interrelated media program.. with an interest in checking out folks work.. Which brings us to todays subject of Mr. Bobby Abate.

I believe I first met Mr. Abate while I was in the August Studio Program at Mass Art.. This is a program for high school students.. where you take a bunch of classes for the month of August.. it was an amazing time, living in the Dorms.. I met him and a girl he was hanging with.. while smoking butts outside the dorm.. just sorta randomly.. and ended up doing something that night.. don’t quite remember what.

Any who.. Bobby was a brilliant Artist.. I mean he just made a lot of really amazing work.. and what do you know.. his work’s still quite great.. and he’s one of the folks from that time who’s still very serious about his artist’s pursuits… 

So here’s a Youtube video of his I really liked:

One of the thing’s that struck me sorta funny about this video is.. he mentions Tony Oursler as  the guy who got the funding he was trying to get.. What I thought was sorta funny about that is that Tony was the video professor at Mass Art while we were there..  Tony is often hailed as one of the top 5 or so video artst’s to come out of the US ever.. so pretty stiff competition, right? But also this video makes me think of Tony’s work.. in that you have this kind of degradation of video in a way that calls attention to it’s video-ness in a way very similar to Tony’s work.. a sort of similar aesthetic..  Though clearly Bobby Abate’s work is.. well I want to say more erotically charged? And um.. has a certain dangerous quality in that and.. well lots of stuff really.

You can see more of his work at his official website.. sweetkitty.com, brilliant stuff. 

I should maybe close on.. in reference to the video.. I don’t actually know a heck of a lot about the art world today. My carrier vision has always been about searching for new existential / asymmetric relationships to the market place.. but.. working out the art world part.. is something to do.. as I tend to want to go down rather serious avant guard -ish paths.. In any event.. you look at how Brilliant his work is.. and… well shouldn’t he be in a very high stratosphere?

Sometime ago I did a post on a software instrument / effects bundle that goes by the name of Komplete… The FM8 is a software synth found in said bundle…  

If  you’ve ever seen the movie Blade Runner, recently rereleased…  If I’m not mistaken, that film’s sound track was made with the Yamaha DX7…

The DX7 is a “frequency modulation” synthesizer.. or FM synth.. This is just one sorta technology for synthesizing sounds electronically. The DX7 was a very popular synth, Brian Eno is famous for using it.. and the DX7 now considered a classic. The FM7 is a software emulation of the DX7 and the FM8 is an upgrade from the FM7… 

Some notes about FM…

1. It tends to be very efficent with respect to what sorta demands it places on processors. 
2. The sound created tends to be a little cold, dark.. simple in some ways.. so you’d probably want to put it through a few effects to give it some character.. 
3. FM synths tend to be difficult to learn to program.. its just the nature of Frequency Modulation

Ok.. so the FM8 is sorta like a sci fi version of the FM7. I haven’t really gotten the chance to explore the FM8.. till now, but I can tell you about what’s new in it.. at least with respect to what this particular moment leads me to wanting to take advantage of.

1. New onboard effects…  These effects are very very nice.. ranging from guitar amp emulations to reverb and EQ… to chorus and flange.. lots of goodness.. The question mark here is I don’t know how well integrated into the sound engine these are.. my impression is that they aren’t really tightly integrated.. what you’d probably like to do is.. have the effects parameters modulated by the synth program.. and I don’t think the FM8 does that.. though I’m not sure.
2. Morph Pads… You have X/Y Axis’s… think of this as like a grid.. on a square piece of paper. At the 4 corners of that grid you can put a synth program / patch. Another words.. if you had some sort of a programed horn section… you could put that at one corner.. you could then have some sort of a programed string section put at another corner.. as you move between those two corners the sound will morph between them. Since I’m thinking of using the FM8 in a ambient sorta way.. morphing between sounds.. will allow me to create a kind of morphing ambient sound scape.. which should be great… the big challenge here is figuring out how to automate the XY movements in the sequencer

I’m still working on the Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne project.. or I should say this is that sound project. Up until this point all the sounds are acoustic sound of two types: Orchestral and Ethnic. There’s a certain kind of “timelessness” you associate with these kinds of sounds.. How long have the instruments found in todays Symphony orchestra been around? So the feeling you get from these sounds is that this composition could have been made anywhere since the dawn of these instruments.. (Though compositionally.. no composer in history would approach composition in anything like the way I’m doing it)   In the case of the ethnic instruments.. the dates go back even further.. we get a sense of primordial human experience…  

The sounds of the FM8 are the opposite.. They were used effectively in Blade Runner to call to mind a futuristic dystopia..  We tend to associate FM synthesis with sci fi / futuristic stuff… So there’s the question of how do we integrate them into this production… 

The title “Toshiro Mifune VS John Wayne.. calls to mind post WW2 cinema history..  Films by John Ford and Akira Kurosawa… It’s sorta the Samari versus the cowboy.. It’s perhaps interesting to note that Kurosawa was hugely influenced by Ford.. and that Kurosawa’s Samurai pictures and a huge influence on the American western.. as a for instance the Magnificent 7 was essentially a remake of Seven Samurai. Perhaps it should also be mention that Kurosawa’s films were a huge influence on George Lucas.. and Star Wars… 

In a strange way the music seems to be commenting on film history.. 

Latter that day: 

My sound work has always had a cinematic quality to it.. I always feel as if we are somehow moving through space.. its as if my music was “music with camera angles.” The challenge of integrating the electronic elements with the acoustic stuff continues..  I’ve started this process by using sounds that are atmospheric, often more atmospheric then musical…  

Besides the FM8, I’m also now working with Absynth and Massive…  

The entrance of the electronic sounds involves automation of volume, effect sends, and pan position.. I have a long section where the sounds are far away in the background and more or less moving closer.. The trouble is that the acoustic instruments are playing softly at this point.. so I feel as though we hear the atmospheric sounds to quickly.. they aren’t quite subtle enough in there entrance.

I’m not sure how much of a problem this really is. 

A tactic for countering this problem.. is to set up some delay aux tracks.. and bring some of the orchestral and ethnic percussion into the delays.. as well as more into the verbs..  Which ought to help fill out the space a little. Right now I’m driving at the notion of wanting to go deep into atmospheric ambiance soundscapes… with slowly evolving sections..   

Latter that night: 

Music’s going very well.. but alas I think I must call this blog entry to and end… Stay tuned, as they say, as I’ll probably make more new version of this track available shortly..