Alien Ship

Getting closer to having an alien ship, Brian Schiavo is starting to detail the model.

Wondering if we should just shoot it outside with a bluescreen or greenscreen backdrop. I wish I had some bluescreen material, I only have greenscreen...

Third Act

The whole problem with I Am Legend (and yes, there are spoilers here) is the third act. It actually kinda went to hell.
I have a fix, in case they want to re - shoot it to make it better. Interestingly, this fix may have already happened in the development process because hints of it are in the movie.

OK, so... we have to get Neville's "sacrifice" to make sense.

We don't really get a sense of how obsessive he is about saving the city in the first act. I know we have him talking about that in flashback, but we don't get the sense that's what's driving him today while he's out hunting deer. Actually, that solve is difficult. I'm going to ignore it for now.

Here's a thing. Did you know that the night-seeker on the table had a character name? "Alpha Female". And do you know what the name of the main night-seeker dude who is Neville's nemesis is? "Alpha Male". I think that at some point it really had to be more clear that the reason Alpha Male was going after Neville was because Neville has Alpha Female hostage (even though Neville, of course, doesn't see it that way.)

Also, very briefly, you see just how many people Neville has killed in his quest for the cure. There are pictures of them on his wall. This is a big Moral indicator (and indicator that he must eventually die in order to pay for his sin.)

It would be nice if he learned Alpha Male could actually talk. That's always a cool and super-creepy moment in any film. Anyway:

So at the end -- what if when the three of them made their way down to the lab they found Alpha Female was really cured? As in, she's just like them now? And scared? Well, now you don't have the problem of "Why doesn't Neville just go into the chimney with them, tossing the grenade just before slamming it shut?" problem. And what if it was his blood that cured the night-seekers? And that by letting them attack him they would get the cure which would virally spread through the hive?

I know, it would require a few more lines of dialog and an extra scene or two to re-jigger the plot to go that way, and I certainly don't think that's the only solve. It's just a solve. Neville allows the night-seekers to kill him and in doing so cures them and saves the world. He would then be Legend indeed.

---

Sometimes I'm stunned by my complete ignorance of things so basic to Western culture as to be part of our visual canon. Lotte Reiniger's Prince Achmed is achingly beautiful. It's a shadow-puppet feature from 1926.



Arguably the first feature - length animated picture, with a distinct art deco style, it is beautiful, erotic, exciting, wonderful -- everything you could ever want in a movie. The figures have expressions... I'm not even too sure how they do it. Your mind. Will be blown. And hey, kids! It's cheaper and safer than taking drugs!

My sister is going to love the creatures in this movie.

--

Also: I just got the Ultimate Super - Duper Edition* of Blade Runner. I'm going to watch all five versions! Good thing I'm rendering mostly!

*not the official title

Cheapjack Mess!

"Millennium Crisis segued from stymied curiosity to doldrums to grudging small-scale fascination."
Look! It's a cheapjack-CGI-riddled mess of a sci-fi film! My favorite out-of-context pull-quote: "Is art supposed to exist in a vacuum?"
I'm thinking "In space, no one can hear you clean your room."

--

But wait, seriously, "liberal borrowing" from... Aeon Flux? I can't imagine what he's thinking of. We directly quote Star Wars and Blade Runner -- but Aeon Flux? Really? Really? Didn't Aeon Flux come out after we shot Millennium Crisis? And didn't it suck?*

--

But then "It's not a bad movie. Just much in need of improvement." for our movie Pandora Machine from the same site. I don't recall having seen that review before.

*Update: I looked it up actually, Aeon Flux came out a few weeks before we started shooting. And indeed, I saw it. But I can't think of a single thing we would have quoted from it visually or otherwise. Was he just thinking about the tight black uniforms the androids wear? I have no idea...

Henry Steady Review

Henry "Maduka" Steady got a review of his short Ace of Hearts. They actually play a substantial bit of the picture in the review.
Not a great review, but they certainly spend a lot of time with it!

A Fortunate Life

First of all, I get a great comment on my Ash/Bishop post (see below) from the writer of "Spoiler Alert". (Man, I feel so dorky. Of course, I did skip school in the 10th grade so I could walk to the movie theater in Menlo Park and see the first showing of Alien. I've never been the same since...)

Then I saw Greg Oliver Bodine in his one-man Christmas Carol. I was positively weepy throughout -- it's such a beautiful and moving Christmas play. (And what an amazing piece of writing. Dickens is clearly furious with anger at the wealthy who blame the poor for their troubles, but he knows better than to make a simple propaganda piece and makes such a beautiful story about people rather than about the general injustice of the Malthusians who scorn the impovershed.)

Plus, my lastest movie keeps getting reviewed. Not always the best reviews, but they spell our names right!

O So Wrong

Retire Trajan is an amusing blog, dedicated to what they believe is the over-use of a particular font. Gosh -- I just love specialists! They're so adorable in how they think things should be done in order to amuse them.
And also, completely wrong. Remember, as Claire Sommer says, "There's no reason to reinvent good design."

Update: now that I've seen this font I know why it's used so much. I'm totally using it for the Pandora Machine logo!

A Meeting With Chance

It sounds like I should either get $50 or go to jail, but today I had a meeting with Chance. Chance Shirley is making a super tres double-plus cool movie called Interplanetary which I can't wait to see.

I also saw Montserrat Mendez' reading of his screenplay about the Rosenberg trial. It's called "Trial." And it's pretty brilliant. He was looking for notes. I told him what to do. Some simple cuts and a little focus is all that's needed. We could make that picture for $2million with some big name talent in the lead roles (really terrific roles).

Brian Schiavo is making our spaceship! Here is a WIP picture (and a picture of one of his three cats, this one is, appropriately, name "Pandora.")

To get that music out of your head

Here's a little sumpthin' sumthin' to get all that awful Christmas music they play in all the stores out of your head for a while. The name of the piece is Shchedrik and it's a Ukranian folk song, but you'll recognize the melody as "Carol of the Bells". You'll find this to be the finest version you've ever heard -- it's arranged by the brilliant Nikolai Kachanov and performed by the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York. I recorded them Wednesday night at St. Joseph's on 6th Avenue.

Shchedrik.

Amusingly, my brother David described my "band" Prague Spring thusly:

"Flock of Seagulls meets New Riders of the Purple Sage
meets10CC meets Enya in Gotham at the end of a poignant episode of Law
and Order."

Upper Montclair

It's been a long day -- and it started yesterday. Recording a concert and suddenly in prep for a fill-in on a feature. Maybe I should start at the beginning:

--------------

So my dufus friend Eve who has a masochistic desire to make everything harder than it outta be tricked me into saying "yes" when she asked if I could sub in for another sound mixer for a day on a movie she was producing -- calling me at 3:30pm for a 5am call the next morning.

This is how the day went:

9:02am
"Answer these questions in your head 1. if I had been an hour later for call, would the van have left without me; 2. have we got our first shot off yet?"

"No. And... no."

9:44am
"I wrote a text to my producer: 'Have you noticed that on our sets we never have closed rehearsals or anything like that? I guess that's why we get done on time.'"

10:01am
"Exterior shots. Feels like the temperature is going down even though it's later in the day. Interesting."

10:19am
"Hail. Huge monster hail. Well, we shot the wide, the reversal wide, and one person's closeup. We ain't getting the other actor's closeup."

10:27am
"Am warm and cozy inside now. Production, of course, is panicked."

11:07am
"We're actually doing nothing. Crew is playing on trampoline in back yard. We're lit. Camera's up. Talent is wired for sound. I have a weird profile picture of me. I'm mixing from the stairs in the kitchen. Somehow I intuited that the camera wouldn't be facing in this direction."

11:24am
"Snow is coming down mightily now outside. We won't be able to go back outside to finish that scene. If only we hadn't waited. We had a full crew at location at 6:30am. A friend of mine said 'So they brought a crew out to location in case they got any shooting done.' And somehow I'm the one with the rep for being sarcastic."

1:16am
"Done with lunch."

3:55pm
"Yes! There's a shot with no dialog (but where they want wild sound) in the (now) rain! Here's the excellent boom operator Seok Jun Lee and I huddling under our only umbrella. I have to get Seok to work on my next movie before he figures out he could be making money doing this. Wow, even camera doesn't look happy with their Arri 535 out in the rain."

4:43pm
"Wrapped."

It still takes almost 2 hours to get home 'cause of the sleet and yukkitude.

Anyway, tomorrow I'm back at Solar Vengeance. I gotta look at Act III 'cause I haven't told Emi what a superstar she is for at least two days!

Russians

Tonight I recorded the Russian Chamber Chorus of New York at St. Joseph's on 6th Avenue. Catastrophic failure of Metacorder lost all the music 'till intermission.
But at least we got a good version of their "Carol of the Bells".

More Golden Compass

In this post Laini Taylor says that she hates the screenplay of The Golden Compass.

"And, everything felt so rushed and smashed together. There was no space around the important moments. Just this barreling forward, trying to get it done."

I agree completely with that statement.
I think she's right about what's wrong, but wrong about why it's wrong. To me, all those issues are an editing issue (and I seriously doubt the writer/director or the editor had any meaningful say in them whatsoever). For some reason it seems it was decided that a big-budget fantasy epic needed to fall under a particular running time. Dunno why.

In any case it seems that a re-edit would solve the "gobbler" problem she mentions (which is a big plot-driving problem). A re-edit should also make a bigger deal out of the Golden Compass itself (which is interesting because apparently the aleothomiter -- however it's spelled -- was not the "golden compass" until after the book was published) and make Lyra's reading of it a more important plot point. I ain't seen the shooting script, but I understand Weiss' script was better than Stoppard's, so I dunno how much footage is actually out there (technically you'd want to see the script super's notes to see what was shot.) And I have to stop using parentheticals for the rest of the week ('cause I just used up my quota.)

Oh, I see why she's wrong. It turns out Laini Taylor has a horrible, twisted, sick, prejudice against robots. That explains everything right there. Some of the best writers were robots. My robot friends tell me that Hemingway was an early M-Class robot. I believe whatever the robot overlords tell me.
Did I say "overlords"? I meant "protectors."

Jen Thomas Emailed Me

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New Zoo Review

Anthony found this review of Millennium Crisis. Wow, our distributor is really on it. We're still over a month away from our street date.

"DIrector Andrew Bellware gets points for having the guts to try a sprawling science fiction epic on an obviously impoverished budget, and its a shame Millennium Crisis doesn't work better than it does."

And the review even comes with a pull-quote!
"I didn't feel compelled to hurl a brick at the television." [Emphasis added.]

From now on just call me Andrew "Points for Guts" Bellware.

1.4 million

There are 1.4 million band profiles on myspace.com.

And I ever wondered why I couldn't get a record contract?

Montseratt Mendez is working on a screenplay for us. I told him and Mac Rogers that Pandora Machine will be shooting a movie in March and it's all a matter of who gets me a screenplay first. And I told them they weren't the only ones writing screenplays...

Hopefully that'll work.

I'm also using a program called Logmein to control my computers. It seems to work pretty well and it's free (for up to 5 computers).

Are you very bored? Do you like waaaaaaay too much information? I mean detailed data about the filmmaking business (with footnotes) and long essays on Wittgenstein? Do you? Well this is just a bit you'd get from reading the fascinating and sometimes complicatedly maddening Mr. Kronmeyer's blog:

"[Film studios tend to] adopt a small stable of transacting partners, perceived to be successful, or at least consistent. “Film distributors exhibit a strong tendency to contract repeatedly with the same sets of principals. They also allocate more resources to the films produced by those with whom they have had prior interactions – approving larger production budgets, marketing these films more heavily and scheduling them on more attractive release dates.”

One might think such a course or pattern of dealings only could be based on shared economic success. The fact of the matter, though, is “these films actually perform worse at the box office. Distributors therefore would almost certainly benefit form allocating their resources more evenly across exchange partners,” Sorenson, O. & Waguespack, D., Social Structure and Exchange: Self-Confirming Dynamics in Hollywood 2 (Sep’t 7, 2005)."

That's a big argument for diversity, ain't it? I think Mitchell calls that "F your friends."

There's a whole label category called "Pictures of Drew" on this blog (this "marvelous blog" remember). Now I'm feeling I have to fulfill the label by having more pictures of the least-photogenic person I photograph.
The color of the fluorescent lights on the subway is pretty spectacular. Camera phones struggle and put all the weight of decades of chip design into balancing skin tones, but the green still smashes through. Yes!

I think I should make a feature with this color scheme (perhaps with more ruby-red added.)