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What does Marcellus Wallace look like, typographically ?

First seen on: http://www.37signals.com/

Great clip

“Reading time is free”
-Roland Barthes

The medium of film is a medium of time. Scenes made of stills move in frames per second. In order to extract meaning from a film, we must watch it sequentially – from scene 1 to scene end. What if we could approach film and cinema spatially? Aside from comic strips, the church’s stained glass windows, and the photo-novel, what other forms can this take? What does this mean now?

It didn’t occur to me to ask these questions until reading Roland Barthes’ The Third Meaning. How can a still image take on a cinematic property? How can sculpture be cinematic? What if a map, which is traditionally used to convey information, could be used as a cinematic element?

I imagine a gallery filled with stills from a film, strung about. The film, displayed , but not projected, visible, but not readable, hangs through the gallery. The soundtrack plays, but we see no animation. In an extreme example, the object is literally a cinematic object.
Playful, absurd, pastiche.

While the comic strip is narrative, I have to wonder whether it is cinematic. I now ask – what is the difference between narrative and cinematic?

The properties of cinema:
1. larger than life
2. more real than real
3. durational

It is not only the moving image that separates film and cinema from other narrative forms – it is its presentation and production. It is the largess. The projection. The quality that forces you to watch for more than just 5 minutes. If are to gleam anything from the cinema, you must endure the entire piece. You cannot simply glance at a film like a painting because it is durational.
However, this does not mean it is cinematic. A cinematic form will inherently contain narrative elements – plot, character, spectacle, musicality, and tempo. There are also cinematic techniques – pan, zoom, fade, transition. In defining cinematic, I am looking for the least common denominator. What would it take for something to NOT be cinematic? What would exclude an item from being cinematic? Can anything be cinematic?

An animation is more real than real

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/magazine/12hodgman.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=8859dc4eb289d59d&ex=1163566800&pagewanted=all

“Bugs Bunny, imitating the conductor Leopold Stokowski in concert, will violently raise his arms in onetwelfth of a second (two frames of film). Every part of his body will be rock-still — save for Bugs’s quivering hand.

It is impossible for a living being to do this, but not for Bugs. He is truly Stokowski, more Stokowski than Stokowski was himself, because Bugs is the impression of Stokowski: his power, his arrogance, his supreme control over his musicians, perfectly boiled down to its essence. We laugh because it is completely unreal and utterly truthful in the same moment.”

I found this particularly interesting because it creates a parallel truth. Right next to our sensory truth, there is another layer of truth – perceived truth. An impressionistic truth.
Non-linear cinema will begin to have an effect of reality-tv.
That’s all I’ve got on that…

Lev Manovich asks WHAT IS DIGITAL CINEMA? His answers are almost too McLuhan for me. However, since I like McLuhan, I like his answers.
1. Digital cinema is NOT live-action film. Live-action film (a 20th century construction) consists of what we see in front of our eyes – the stuff of the real world. What the camera captures, then, is live-action. Lev raises yet another interesting point – 20th century cinema is the stuff of a mechanical heart (motor) and mechanical eye (photography). Simply said, 20th century cinema is a child of the industrial revolution – 21st century cinema (digital cinema) is a child of the digital revolution. One of Lev’s more interesting moves is to frame Apple’s Quicktime, non-linear editing, and other video tools as revolutionary as Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope. For those of us who use it everyday to compress, watch, and edit video, it is quite disorienting to think of it as a revolution – yet it is.

Not only is digital video revolutionary, it is quite literally changing the way we see and experience cinema. Once you have an image, you have pixels. And because everything can be reduced down the pixel level, there is very little to distinguish one image from another (aside from resolution). Assuming we have the same resolution, the act of compositing images and pixels once again flattens the image. So, pixelating and digitizing actually have a flattening effect on images. However, the net effect is actually very layered. What was once a group of men with a green screen is now a scene in Lord of the Rings.

2. In essence, anything – as long as it can take the form of pixels – can become digital cinema. Digital cinema, then, is animated pixels. The “real world” is no longer the source of Lev’s digital cinema. Virtual 3D worlds crafted by a digital animator now have the same value as a scene directed by a David Lynch, Spielberg, or NYU film student.

The implication of Lev’s work, here, is essentially this – digital cinema does not favor any kind of content, whether it is “real” or “virtual.” As McLuhan predicted, digital cinema (new media) has freed itself of the constraints that film and cinema (old media) used to have – realism. We can now film and animate anything we may imagine.

Through the creation of imaginative universes, we now begin to visualize virtual utopias. More importantly, we communicate them dynamically, visually. Like in architecture, digital cinema can create, design, and animate virtual worlds to build real-life physical worlds. With cinema moving into animation, even experimental
non-linear cinema will begin to have an effect of reality-tv.

Lev’s work is sweeping. Yet, I find it slightly reductiveTo say that digital film is animation reduces the work to a previous work. The truly revolutionary claim would be that digital film is expanding the role, definition, and discourse of animation.
Traditionally, animation creates associations with cartoons.

Many blogs, writers, and critics (Steven Johnson and Janet Murray, among others) dump video games into the discourse. As a $30 billion industry, it’s no wonder video games are getting this kind of attention. Janet Murray, though, is more apt to call these video games non-linear narratives. Where Lev’s explanation of digital cinema falls short, Janet Murray’s explanation does not. As video games are expanding the definition of narrative, digital cinema should be expanding the definition of animation.

Bill Morrison’s Decasia
http://www.decasia.com/clip1.html
Bill Morrison is not the first artist to take decomposing film stock as raw material, but he plunges into this dark nitrate of the soul with contagious abandon. Founded on the tension between the hard fact of film’s stained, eroded, unstable surface and the fragile nature of that which was once photographically represented, Decasia is an avant-garde movie with universal appeal, as well as an apocalyptic subtext unavoidably tied to the catastrophe of 9-11

and…
Ten:
Abbas Kiarostami’s most form-minded experiment since his hall-of-mirrors staged doc Close-Up is another small triumph for DV. Truly operating in the gap between fiction and documentary, Ten is a superb conceptual adventure, establishing the director as one of the few filmmakers since Andy Warhol to rethink the nature of on-screen acting.
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0352,top10,49740,1.html

first – thanks to Karl, Anil, and Rui for their help.

here’s the problem:
I had a minidv shot on PAL , LP (long play), and anamorphic
Most minidv decks allow you to capture on PAL / NTSC , but only in SP (standard play)

So not only did I have to change certain settings during the capture, I had to change settings on the timeline.

here’s the solution:

1. I had to use a PAL camera and switch to the LP setting to capture
it correctly.

The minidv decks I use will not allow you to capture LP footage
be it NTSC or PAL.

2. After capturing, you must change the settings in FCP.

In FCP, every timeline has options/settings.
So, Click on timeline
From the menu bar, select SEQUENCE -> SETTINGS

Make sure the Editing Timebase / framerate is 25 fps (that is PAL)
and make sure to choose CCIR 601 PAL (you’ll recognize the setting in the menu)

If you are having trouble changing the framerate, make sure to empty
your timeline first (thanks Special K)

For old dated pictures, see:
This Apple Article
It’ll give you the gist of what you have to do to get it widescreen, but not widescreen PAL.

For WIDESCREEN, make sure to check the anamorphic (16:9) box

Another good tip is to compare your sequence settings with your clip settings.
You can do this directly by going to where your clips, bins and
sequences are listed and scrolling through.

though i saw it quite some time ago, i enjoyed a woman is a woman.
i also saw a band of outsiders.

tonite, i saw- My Life To Live [A Film in 12 scenes] (1962) – not knowing what to expect.
it was quite slow and had a somber feel throughout.

my favorite scene centered around the theme of articulating an idea.
in this scene, godard includes the story of the 3 musketeers:
when we think, we are crushed.
the lesson: thinking kills.

nana, the main character, also contemplates on the theme of “responsibility”
i smoke – i am responsible
i am sad – i am responsible
(the list continues)…
at the end of the list, Nana says:
i forget i am responsible.

reading the subtitles allowed me to enjoy the absurdity of this -
we are, in fact, responsible for forgetting.

yes, this too is part of our existance.
—i misspelled existence, but spelled existance correctly— i am responsible