Day: March 9, 2010

Categories
Truly Free Film

Should Movie Poster Tag Lines Be Transformed

“Earth.  It Was Fun While It Lasted.”  Armegeddon’s tag line sticks with me, because I instinctively substitute “Earth” for “Indie Film” when I read it.

In these days of RampantFilmBizChange,  everything is ripe for reconsideration.  MCN hipped me to AdWeek’s collection of “66 Great Movie Taglines“.  Sure the list gets a smile regularly from me, but I walk away deadened and jaded.  The sell is obvious.  The dominant clever factor feels like a child beauty pagents’ related icky. “Look at me!  Look at me!  Give me a trophy!  Now!!!”.  Get me outta there.

Can’t we do better?  Or at least do different?

Continue reading “Should Movie Poster Tag Lines Be Transformed”
Categories
Let's Make Better Films

Conquering The Mind Through Better Editing?

FilmmakerMagBlog tipped me to this NY TImes article on “evolution” of editing to mirror the way the brain works or likes to.

The basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.

Movies today are, on average, much pinker than the films of half a century ago. Their shot structure has greater coherence, a comparatively firmer grouping together of similarly sized units that ends up lending them a frequency distribution ever more in line with the lab results of human reaction and attention times. “Roughly since 1960,” Dr. Cutting said, “filmmakers have been converging on a pattern of shot length that forces the reorientation of attention in the same way we do it naturally.”

Continue reading “Conquering The Mind Through Better Editing?”
Categories
These Are Those Things

Lego: The Force Unleashed

Lego and Star Wars are like peanut butter and jelly.  Stop motion and YouTube are their bread.  There is such a huge supply of great work out there, we are ready to see the best of list of the genre.  For now though, we are willing to venture that this is worthy of inclusion on just such a list.  Hope The Younger wanted this placed in The Bowl but the violence is a bit intense for the young ‘uns, and we are not ashamed to confess our total love of these things anyway, so it’s landing here today instead.