The History Of The Movie Trailer

Some people consider them the best part of the movie going experience - the Movie Trailer. Take a look at the evolution of the "coming attractions" from simple silent film splices, through the template style of the Golden Age of Hollywood, through Auteurs and finally into the Blockbuster era. This lesson is proudly sponsored by: http://BlackMagicDesign.com Creating the world's highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. For a full write up along with more trailers check out: http://filmmakeriq.com/2014/03/the-history-of-the-movie-trailer

Some people consider them the best part of the movie going experience — the Movie Trailer. Take a look at the evolution of the "coming attractions" from simple silent film splices, through the template style of the Golden Age of Hollywood, through Auteurs and finally into the Blockbuster era.

Learned a lot of things I didn't know about the movie trailer. More trailers from throughout history can be seen at Filmmaker IQ

Parsing Is Such Sweet Sorrow: Shakespeare through the lens of statistics

Nate Silver re-launches a vastly expanded FiveThirtyEight and amongst the new content we find a gloriously nerdy essay by Emma Pierson that begins with: 

More than 400 years after Shakespeare wrote it, we can now say that “Romeo and Juliet” has the wrong name. Perhaps the play should be called “Juliet and Her Nurse,” which isn’t nearly as sexy, or “Romeo and Benvolio,” which has a whole different connotation.

I discovered this by writing a computer program to count how many lines each pair of characters in “Romeo and Juliet” spoke to each other, with the expectation that the lovers in the greatest love story of all time would speak more than any other pair. I wanted Romeo and Juliet to end up together — if they couldn’t in the play, at least they could in my analysis — but the math paid no heed to my desires. Juliet speaks more to her nurse than she does to Romeo; Romeo speaks more to Benvolio than he does to Juliet. Romeo gets a larger share of attention from his friends (Benvolio and Mercutio) and even his enemies (Tybalt) than he does from Juliet; Juliet gets a larger share of attention from her nurse and her mother than she does from Romeo. The two appear together in only five scenes out of 25. We all knew that this wasn’t a play predicated on deep interactions between the two protagonists, but still.

From there she goes on to explore all of Shakespeare's lovers and how much, or how little they talked to each other, making an interactive visualisation that brings new perspective to the plays (for example, see how in the comedies there are separate relationships that draw our attention whereas the tragedies have the lovers front and center.)

Noise: A Short Film

Film inspired by the theoretic work of George Berkeley and basics of synesthetic perception. It's a game of imagination provoked by sound. Individual sounds penetrating into the apartment of the main character relieved of their visual designates evoke images distant from its origins. Now full film is online. video - Kijek/Adamski audio - Grzegorz Mańko trumpet solo - Tomasz Stańko cast - Wojciech Juchniewicz, Tomasz Stańko, Leszek Musiał, Izabela Pągowska, Oleh Kryzhanovskyy production manager - Małgorzata Kozioł make up - Magdalena Prusińska crane operators - Marcin Weber, Janusz Dybowski gaffer (stairwell scene) - Łukasz "Czacza" Proch artistic supervision - Hieronom Neumann Production © 2011 Stowarzyszenie Filmowców Polskich - Studio Munka, TVP S.A. With financial participation of Polish Film Institute Thanks to: AGICOA, Canon, Joanna Kijek, Katarzyna Wiechowska Realized as a part of "Young Animation" program (edition 2008/2009) with The Artistic Board: Marcin Kobylecki, Krzysztof Kiwerski, Maria Niedziółka, Marek Serafiński, Alina Skiba, Mariusz Wilczyński, Tomasz Wolf More at http://kijekadamski.blogspot.com/2010/12/noise-preview-screens.html and http://kijekadamski.blogspot.com/2010/08/noise-making-of.html. MAJOR SCREENINGS: Animator Festival, Poznań Warsaw Film Festival DOK, Leipzig Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival Anima Mundi, Rio de Janeiro Anifest Festival, Praha Interfilm, Berlin Kiev International Short Film Festival Festival "Premiers Plans" in Angers Gulf Film Festival, Dubai Festival Internacional Cine de Huesca Festival des Nouveaux Cinémas, Paris The Short Shorts Festival, Tokyo Eurasian Film Festival, NYC Anibar International Animation Festival, Peć Reikäreuna Film Festival, Orivesi 29 Cine de Bogota XXIV Fano Film Festival "2 in 1" Festival of Contemporary Cinema, Moscow 31st Uppsala International Short Film Festival Kaohsiung Film Festival LIAF, London CutOut Fest, Querétaro Unlimited - Das Europäische Kurzfilmfestival, Cologne 22nd Madrid Experimental Cinema, Madrid 38th Badalona Film festival, Badalona Exground Filmfest, Wiesbaden Tabor Film Festival Beauvais Film Festival "Żubroffka", Białystok Animateka Festival, Ljubljana Animated Dreams Film Festival, Tallin Festival of Contemporary Music & Media Art MIGZ, Moscow River Film Festival, Padova Dokumanimo, Moscow Roanne Film Festival Jour le plus Court, NYC Thess International Film Festival, Thessaloniki Brasil Stop Motion International Festival, Recife International Short Film Competition of the Festival Tous Courts, Aix-en-Provence Stoptrik Festival, Maribor Festival International du Film D'Animation "Animatou", Genève 5th CinEast, Luxembourg Ozu International Film Festival, Sassuolo 9° Sedicicorto International Film Festival, Forlì Lund Intl. Fantastik Film Festival Festival international du court métrage de Lille 27e Festival Européen du Film Court de Brest InVideo - International Exhibition of Video Art and Cinema Beyond, Milan 33rd Durban International Film Festival CineFiesta, Festival Internacional de Cortometrajes de Puerto Rico, Caguas 5th International Short Film Festival Wiz-Art, Lviv Imaginaria film festival, Conversano Festival Internacional de Cortos Metrajes "La Boca Del Lobo", Madrid Scratch! International Animation Film Festival, Lecce 7th Sardinia Film Festival, Sassari Filmets Badalona Film Festival, Spain, Badalona 10th In The Palace International Film Festival, Sofia Fest Anča Festival, Žilina 24th Istanbul International Short Film Festival, Istambul

Film inspired by synesthetic perception, visualizing sound disconnected from what creates it. It's a game of imagination provoked by sound. Check out the making of the film. Full credits here.

Life After Pi: A Cautionary Tale About Art And Bankruptcy

LIFE AFTER PI is a short documentary about Rhythm & Hues Studios, the L.A. based Visual Effects company that won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking work on "Life of Pi" -- just two weeks after declaring bankruptcy.

“Life After Pi” is a short documentary about Rhythm & Hues Studios, the L.A. based Visual Effects company that won an Academy Award for its groundbreaking work on “Life of Pi”– just two weeks after declaring bankruptcy. The film explores rapidly changing forces impacting the global VFX community, and the Film Industry as a whole.

This is only the first chapter of an upcoming feature-length documentary “Hollywood Ending,” that delves into the larger, complex challenges facing the US Film Industry and the many professionals working within it, whose fates and livelihood are intertwined.

Ken Burns' New iPad App Turns U.S. History Into Beautiful Mixtapes

Ken Burns finds meaning in the chaos of history in this short film created for his new iPad application. The Ken Burns App sets the stage for an innovative look at more than two centuries of American history from a curated look at selected excerpts from the entire library of Ken Burns films. The app can be found in the Apple app store at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ken-burns/id723854283?mt=8 With Florentine Films and Big Spaceship Kid Koala - Original Music Ryan Whittier - Original Music Finishing Effects - TraceVFX

The app, simply called “Ken Burns,” allows the user to surf an overarching timeline year by year, seeing how clips from each film line up chronologically with – and, as Burns says, “speak to” – each other. Zoom in on 1869, for example, and a cloud of clips from The Civil War, The West, and The National Parks orbit in parallax formation around one another; swipe to 1930, and it’s clips from Jazz, Prohibition, Baseball, Huey Long, Thomas Hart Benton and The Dust Bowl. You can also watch its six playlists straight through – they range in length from 20 minutes to an hour long – or select individual clips à la carte.
 

The concept came out of a conversation Burns was having two years ago with MacKinnon, who is the music entrepreneur behind Hear Music and has known Burns since they worked together on music components for 2001′s Jazz.

“Ken and I were talking about how his films were in the search engines of iTunes and Netflix, and they’re always the top-rated thing when they run on PBS, but there wasn’t a digital place where all of his films were presented as one thing, as an integrated body of work,” says MacKinnon. “Then he paused for a second, and looked at me and said, ‘I really love my iPad.’”

Download the app but only if you are prepared to lose your day to it.