Adrift – A Tribute To San Francisco Fog

Time lapse maestro Simon Christen’s latest project is available to watch on Vimeo.

“The weather conditions have to be just right for the fog to glide over the hills and under the bridge. I developed a system for trying to guess when to make the drive out to shoot, which involved checking the weather forecast, satellite images and webcams multiple times a day. For about 2 years, if the weather looked promising, I would set my alarm to 5am, recheck the webcams, and then set off on the 45-minute drive to the Marin Headlands.”

Adrift from Simon Christen on Vimeo.

History Repeats Itself

3d spectaclesIt seems the latest 3-D movie boom is over, and with it the boost to box office receipts that Hollywood was counting on to bolster their income against falling video rentals and DVD sales. The same rejection of 3-D happened the first time the technology was introduced in the 1950s, and again with the brief flowering of 3-D in the 1980s, with audiences getting tired of wearing the glasses (or not being able to wear them if you’re colour blind), and paying extra for tickets for 3-D movies.

In 2011, audiences have started to buy tickets for “flat” (or 2-D) versions of the big movies being released in 3-D. Whether this is because they baulk at the price of tickets (which can be anything up to $20), or because they prefer watching movies with a traditional depth of field is not known. However, the numbers are clear:

Ripples of fear spread across Hollywood last week after “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which cost Walt Disney Studios an estimated $400 million to make and market, did poor 3-D business in North America. While event movies have typically done 60 percent of their business in 3-D, “Stranger Tides” sold just 47 percent in 3-D. “The American consumer is rejecting 3-D,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, wrote of the “Stranger Tides” results.

One movie does not make a trend, but the Memorial Day weekend did not give studio chiefs much comfort in the 3-D department. “Kung Fu Panda 2,” a Paramount Pictures release of a DreamWorks Animation film, sold $53.8 million in tickets from Thursday to Sunday, a soft total, and 3-D was 45 percent of the business, according to Paramount.

3-D (or stereo vision) has been around since 1894, so it’s not going to disappear anytime soon. However, as happened in the 1950s and the 1980s, many of the movies currently being shot in 3-D may only ever see a 2-D theatrical release. Will we lose a classic 3-D experience because of this? Hitchcock shot Dial M For Murder in 3-D in 1954, and included some sophisticated and innovative use of the technology, especially in the scenes with Grace Kelly wielding a pair of scissors that bring a whole new level of tension to the narrative. Unfortunately, this came at the end of the 3-D boom, and the move was eventually released as 2-D (although there are occasional screenings held of rare prints of the 3-D version).

Will the studios keep pushing 3-D onto audiences? This time, 3-D TV has a part to play, as those who have invested in 3-D sets will demand content to justify their investment. However, the signs are that 3-D 2010s style is just as much of a short-lived gimmick as its predecessors, until the next Avatar comes round to spark interest in the format once more.

3-D Starts to FIzzle, and Hollywood Frets – New York Times
A history of 3-D cinema – The Guardian

Watching War Online

The Violence in the Media debate has focused primarily on mass media, conceived and created by institutions and targeted at a mass audience. The ubiquity of cell phone cameras, and the ease with which a video shot on one can be uploaded to the internet, has changed all that. The technology means that we can now see raw, unregulated violence online, whether it’s the exploits of a happy slapping gang in South London, or troops opening fire on protestors in Libya.

What effect does this have on our collective and individual psyche? Xeni Jardin writes in her thoughtful post in today’s Guardian:

…human beings do not have an endless capacity for empathy, and our capacity is less so in the [un]mediated, disembodied, un-real realm of online video. At what point does access to war gore become harmful to the viewer, and at what point do each of us who observe this material for the purpose of reporting the story around it, become numb or begin to experience secondary trauma?

There’s also a concern that, even with a cell phone, footage can be faked, re-cut or re-mediated in order to manipulate both events and the viewer. What purports to be the raw, bloody truth, an eye-witness account from a non-partisan bystander, may actually be deliberate, heavily political propaganda. For decades we have viewed news-gatherers as relatively “trusted sources”, believed that they report what is happening from a third person perspective – although those reports might be subject to political bias. However, citizen journalism shifts our news into a first person framework, showing the Who, Where and some of the What, but never addressing the How and the Why. Without that vital explanation and mediation, news footage can indeed leave the viewer feeling traumatized, numb and confused.

As mainstream news outlets cut overseas budgets and turn ever-inwards towards freely and cheaply available celebrity gossip and entertainment stories, concerned citizens need to seek their news independently, often turning to ‘primary’ sources such as cellphone videos and Twitter commentary. However, we need to educate ourselves to regulate and analyse this information, putting ourselves in the position of editor, double checking facts, assessing the choices made in framing and representation. We need to become our own gatekeepers, ensuring that we’re not numb, or traumatized, and that we can give the death of a stranger the importance and respect it deserves no matter how many times it plays out in a tiny online window.

Atrocity Exhibition – The Guardian

“I Do All My Own Stunts”

Black SwanEveryone loves a chance to put an Oscar-winning actress down, now it’s Natalie Portman’s turn as her dance double for Black Swan claims credit for the performance.

Sarah Lane, soloist with American Ballet Theatre, was hired to depict all the complex dance sequences that Portman, with only a year of training under her leotard (as opposed to the two decades that go into making a professional dancer), could never have pulled off. So far, so usual: stunt doubles are routinely hired for fight, chase, dance, ski-ing, driving or riding sequences that demand an elaborate set of physical skills. It’s almost part of the illusion expected when we go to the movies, that at some point, the actor will disappear back to their trailer and let a bewigged stunt person of approximately the same height and build get down to the death-defying gymnastics. There are two main reasons for this 1) stunt people are professionals who are really, really good at the physical stuff, and b) if it all goes pear-shaped, stunt people can be replaced halfway through principal photography, while a lead actor cannot.

Lane’s beef is not so much about the illusions created within the film-making process, which involved having Portman’s head digitally superimposed onto her body for the long shots, as she knew that was going to happen. She is more concerned about the way Portman’s people claimed credit for her dancing as part of her Oscar campaign. She accuses them of

“trying to create this facade that [Portman] had become a ballerina in a year and a half… How unfortunate it is that, as professional dancers, we work so hard, but people can actually believe that it’s easy enough to do it in a year. That’s the thing that bothered me the most”.

A big part of Portman’s pre-award press did include coverage of how she suffered for her art during the making of the film, both with the year of training beforehand, and the pressures put upon her during the actual movie to come up with convincing dance performances. And Academy voters love to see actors suffer, as well as push their physical limits. A movie is only one part of a media phenomenon, like Black Swan, which consists not just of the film narrative, but of all the narratives swirling round it – like the love story between Portman and her principal choreographer.

Darren Aronofsky jumped to his star’s defence for Entertainment Weekly:

Here is the reality. I had my editor count shots. There are 139 dance shots in the film. 111 are Natalie Portman untouched. 28 are her dance double Sarah Lane. If you do the math that’s 80% Natalie Portman. What about duration? The shots that feature the double are wide shots and rarely play for longer than one second. There are two complicated longer dance sequences that we used face replacement. Even so, if we were judging by time over 90% would be Natalie Portman.

And to be clear Natalie did dance on pointe in pointe shoes. If you look at the final shot of the opening prologue, which lasts 85 seconds, and was danced completely by Natalie, she exits the scene on pointe. That is completely her without any digital magic. I am responding to this to put this to rest and to defend my actor. Natalie sweated long and hard to deliver a great physical and emotional performance. And I don’t want anyone to think that’s not her they are watching. It is.”

Sarah Lane is a performer in her own right, an artiste who is used to getting credit and acclaim for her work. And she has a day job. No wonder she’s pissed – but she is in a uniquely privileged position to bitch about it. Portman is also a relatively soft target – it seems easier to accuse an actress of not being able to cut the physical stuff than a male star. No one would dream of making similar allegations about Jason Statham or Dwayne Johnson. There are legions of stunt artists out there who will forever remain silent about their contribution to the work of actors (usually macho action heroes) who claim that they, also, do all their own fighting, chase, dancing, ski-ing, driving or riding on screen. If these stunt doubles speak up, they never work again.

Much of Hollywood’s allure – and marketing – revolves around the larger-than-life abilities of “the talent”. The audience want to believe that what they see on screen is the singular performance of one very special person, when, in fact, it’s the result of hundreds of hours of work by whole teams of people, both on set and in post production. But bottom line is that the star always gets the credit – that’s showbusiness.

Natalie Portman Accused In Black Swan Row – Digital Spy

Darron Aronofsky Defends Portman – Entertainment Weekly

Actors Who Do Their Own Stunts – Moviefone

Hollywood Stuntman reveals tricks of trade – NPR interview with Hal Needham

How To Become A Meme

Photographer Noam Galai took a picture of himself screaming and uploaded it to Flickr in 2007. Four years later, that image has become part of cultural discourse, appearing everywhere from anti-government graffiti in Iran to the cover of a book in Mexico. Noam’s face appeared on all kinds of merchandise, but he was never credited, and didn’t receive any payments for its widespread use. He tells the story here:

The Stolen Scream: A Story About Noam Galai from FStoppers on Vimeo.

He’s generally very phlegmatic about the whole experience, honoured that his face has become a badge for freedom fighters, and flattered that it has global significance. However, as this video shows, he’s bemused that his work could go so uncredited and unrewarded.

Compare the fate of Galai’s image to that of an iconic photograph from another era – one in which principles of copyright very much held sway. Robert Doisneau’s The Kiss By The Hôtel de Ville was shot in 1950 for Life. Since then, it has been reproduced over and over, but has been jealously protected by copyright law, so much so that a couple who thought they might be the ones in the picture thought it was worth bringing a lawsuit. Doisneau’s name is synonymous with his work, however, and no one would dare use it, as happened with Galai’s image, to illustrate a magazine article without obtaining proper permissions.

Is intellectual property just a quaint twentieth century concept? If so, how do we expect artists, writers and photographers to make a living?

The Stolen Scream – Noam’s own blog with all the latest examples of image usage
Screamography – money from these products does actually go to Noam
The Kiss By The Hôtel de Ville– Famous Pictures

YouTube and Fair Use

YouTube Copyright ClaimAny quick scan of YouTube reveals a dizzyingly inconsistent array of movie and TV show clips. In theory, clips should only be uploaded by the copyright holder, but movie studios and media conglomerates have a range of attitudes on what can and can’t be uploaded by fans under the remit of “Fair Use”.

Fair Use is the legal principle that allows others to quote excerpts from copyrighted work for the purposes of “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.” Given that “scholarship and research” has never been a prime function of YouTube, in the early days of the site, major movie studios were quite aggressive about getting clips taken down.  However, around 2008, studios realised the power of viral videos and interactive marketing (posting clips for people to comment on) and shifted their position. Martin Anderson explores the ramifications in an in-depth feature over at Shadowlocked.

It was the time of Facebook-for-everyone, the time when ‘viral marketing’ transited from the water-cooler to the company policies of PR sites; a time when it began to occur to the major studios that they might consider the harsh object-lesson learnt by the music companies’ eternal take-down war with the MP3 uploaders – particularly since their own product could not be encapsulated in the 10-minute limits of a YouTube upload (recently extended to 15 minutes for many users, though to little practical difference, in these circumstances).

Young people, people far cooler than they were, the very people whose wallets, purses and general esteem the media giants were desperate to invade, were out there doing work and getting product-coverage that their own marketing departments would have killed to achieve by conventional methods. They weren’t getting a dime for all this work, and to boot they could now be completely controlled by the Content ID architecture.

The ContentID software allows the automated tracking of clips. It scans content and matches it back to a database, so that copyright holders can

* Identify user-uploaded videos comprised entirely OR partially of their content, and
* Choose, in advance, what they want to happen when those videos are found. Make money from them. Get stats on them. Or block them from YouTube altogether.

Curious, Anderson tried uploading clips from different properties to see what the reaction would be:

NBC Universal’s North American stake on the excellent 2008 black comedy In Bruges meant that my clip upload was blocked in the US, while Lionsgate decided to monetise my uploaded clip of 2003’s The Grudge by adding commercials. NBC Universal banned my uploaded clip of Jurassic Park: The Lost World all over the world, though they seem able to tolerate a 16-second clip.

Anderson also identifies several YouTube users who only post HQ clips from movies during the promotional period of a DVD or theatrical release. Genuine fans or studio sock puppets?

As audiences become more and more resistant to traditional forms of advertising, it seems that media providers have their eye on “user” generated content as a way of getting their message across. The whole ethos of YouTube is ‘Broadcast Yourself’, and it would be a shame if that spirit was lost in a slurry of marketing videos produced by the media institutions who have a stranglehold on all our other channels of communication in the first place.

US Copyright Office on Fair Use
YouTube and the major film studios – Shadowlocked
YouTube’s Content ID