Rants, Remembrances, and Ruminations

48 Hour Film Festival Group B

I missed Tues. night's exhibition, but I heard that the entrants shown were heads-and-shoulders above last year's.

Wednesday night's showing was, at least to me, most impressive. It was exciting to see what kind of array of talent, funds, and creativity went into each one.

Synthetic
I don't know how many lesbian movies will be made because of the softball prop, but it came as no surprise when I saw the opening seen of the two women smooching. This film's strong point was the writing for some choice lines between S. Steven's and his girlfriend's lover. Some of the action shots(opening a phone, closing the phone, all the phone shots) seemed too long. But let's be honest, a 7 minute film completed in under 48 hours really cannot be criticised. Sometimes it takes me that long deciding what I want to do on a weekend.

Organized Art
This was from the winner of last year's competition. A well-done and genuinely hilarious mockumentry about the life of the mafia in the art biz. This one had a killer intro. and good film quality throughout. Dialogue was on average funny and choice in some places. My only missive is that one seen where they throw someone off a building. We found out during the Q&A that they photographed the guy and inserted him in for about 5 frames falling from the top of the screen behind the car. Quite clever work, it looked just like someone threw a dummy and had we never had the Q&A, that's what I would have assumed happened. But that was the only thing about it that I found odd. It was one of the early favorites of the evening.

Where are the flying cars?
This was a sci-fi short that the director tried to do as a 'period piece' because he couldn't create a spaceship(in his own words). The story was unique in the use of the phrase, since they split it between two sentences(quite creative). The big thing about this one was that they drove 5+ hours to Jockey's Ridge in Nags Head to film a beach scene. That's 10-12 hours for those shots alone.

The Super Best Buds
This, in my opinion, deserves some sort of honorable mention. The group shooting this short was mostly high school kids, 4 of which comprised a team of super hydrophilic individuals known as the super best buds. They had a lot of creative pluses working for them. First of all, they incorporated the prop(softball) as a character in the story(probably the most integral of any use of a softball in any of the films), which I thought was spot-on for this type of short. Secondly, their crew seemed to be keen on their technical capabilities and time constraints used whatever they had to their advantage. Third, the story and the character execution seemed to be a lot of fun for the kids and everyone involved, which I thought transferred well to the audience. Their use of the line I thought was the funniest of the evening. Their humor, I thought was the most genuine.

Silo
This short had a good idea as far as a buddy movie, but the script needed more fleshing out. Good production value and acting overall.

Scarred
Many people liken this look to Japanese horror, although I caught more of a Se7en vibe to it, myself. This team was honest in the Q&A and said they had no acting pool, and played the film to their strengths. It works really well as an abstract piece with some great shots and sound. Good use of the required line as a physical prop as well.

Strangers
This script had a good concept but was dangerously close to stalling out in the first couple of minutes. But it got better as time went on and the ending was honestly a good albeit predictable twist. I agree with Woody in that a good editor could have really made this one a contender. Sadly, this one was submitted late and couldn't be considered. But this one had it in the script dept.

The Gift
Ike's film this year deserves a better adjective than "tour-de-force", but it's the first word to come to mind. Lighting, acting, color, sound, post, makeup, all of it I thought came together to make something formidable this year. One of the main things that I heard people comment on was the transitions used(and the fact that they were the only movie with transitions). I , myself, was really impressed with them, but thought it was a little overused(At least during the course of 7 minutes. Here again, read my 48 hour disclaimer, hindsight being 20/20). My biggest gripe was that something happened somewhere between the rough and final cuts where the whole thing was more pixellated than the other shows. I'm not technically savvy enough to point at what step of the process and say what happened. Hell, it could have even been something that happened at the presentation that night, but the overall picture quality had become more pixellated than I remember the rough's being. Nonetheless, Ike's was the Spielberg short of the evening, and my #1 pick, not just because I know him.

Unforced Entry
This was another team that had very little budget and manpower behind them. If they were first-timers, I would say it was a very solid start that had an ending I was pleased with(I love twists). Two major points about this movie that none of the other movies had.

1. The shot with the locksmith in slow-mo with the cigar smoke billowing out of his nostrils was just bad-ass.
2. Layered dialogue! I'm surprised more people didn't add more ambient conversations to give depth to their scenes(where applicable). They managed to do it in one scene and it just made me realize that no one else had that.

That being said, the movie(like many others) could have used more time at the editing table. The sound had some bad ambience at times and was just not present in others. Here again, reference my 48 hour disclaimer.

My votes for audience favorites were as follows

• The Gift
• The Super Best Buds
• Scarred

In hind-sight, I should have voted for Organized Art, and I may have had I watched it after Super Best Buds, but it didn't work out that way.

On the whole, I don't believe anyone who had their show presented last night should feel anything less than proud for accomplishing such a feat. I've already offered my services to Ike as a PA for next year as a show of support and just because it all looks like a lot of fun and a great learning experience.

Congrats to all, and I hope all the teams come back next year!

Jeffrey Williams 2.0, PASSED OVER.

Ok, lemme explain.

When I first set up my personal web site, I wanted it to be as minimalist as possible. So the design went up with some obligatory text and aside from my photoshopping and blogging, not much was developed with it.

I began work on the redesign and came across a number of things.

1. Table-less design does work with a little more practice


2. A lot of the content I would produce can actually be handled by MT. I feel dumb.


3. 1024 and 1280 are old and busted. Centering the design focus and repping out the edges is the new direction


4. I needed a more original design. My alpha is too much a rip of Spoono for me to feel comfortable with it. So I'm ditching it and starting over, but I did want to show it to people first, especially in Firefox and IE side-by-side(the Firefox version is MUCH prettier, I might add). I just wanted to see if it could be done...
   

So as soon as I figure how to use iframes in MT. I'm redesigning the blog. Wheee! JW.O v3, here we come!

I have been having a very bad day.

from Another 48 Hours

Reggie Hammond: All right, knock this shit off! I HAVE BEEN HAVING A VERY BAD DAY! I just got out of jail this morning! Already I've been shot at, I was on a bus that flipped over seventeen times, bitch tried to stab me in the back room, and somebody blew up my Porsche! I am in a BAD goddamn mood! Now I usually don't step in on things like this, but this man Jack Cates is gonna help me straighten out the rest of my day! So I suggest you all back up, and let us go about our business!

Ever had one of those days where the moment you look at your computer at work that you know that the whole day is going to be hell? I do now. Ol' Eddie Murphy, though, he knows exactly how to express what I feel.

Beam Me Up, Scotty. (James Doohan 1920-2005)

from the BBC

Karl Rove

from CNN

I'm no Capitol Hill player, nor am I a peanut farmer. However, this looks to be something Rove will get himself out of at the cost of an aide or two. Maybe I'm wrong and Rove will get sacked, but my gut says that Rove stays.

I think that he leaked the information out or had a sufficient role in it to warrant dismissal. At any rate, Rove and Tim LaHaye, Jerry B. Jenkins scare me enough where they are that they ought to be out of capitol hill, period. Just something about those guys gives me the creeps.

Especially Rove, look at this man.

The guy looks to be perfectly content to eat my liver in front of me... Or do a rather uncanny impression of the stay-puft marshmallow man, who is also an agent of Dozer.

Pirates' Ownage(ninjas);

This is for Woody and all the other pirates out there.

...We'll see how long this lasts before the C&D...

The world grew a little smaller today.

from the BBC

A series of bomb attacks on London's transport network has killed more than 30 people and injured about 350 others. There were three explosions on the Underground - which police said left 33 dead - and one on a double-decker bus in which an unknown number died.

For me, it used to be that wars happened on television. B&W film of the world wars, colorized Korean and vibrant Vietnam. The Gulf War went straight to video and the latest have all been streaming the internet. But each time, it was on a screen of someplace I've never been.

This morning, a place where I have been, a tube I took several times was bombed in London between Kings Cross and Russel Square.

Today, for me, the world just got a lot smaller.

Instructions?! Me on Eclipse 3.1

Instructions? I ain't got no need for `em! I don't need no Instructions! I don't have to read your stinking instructions!

I know I'm not the only one around who hardly ever reads the instructions for software nowadays, and I think there's a good reason. A lot of the documentation these days makes the assumption that you've come out of your WWII fallout shelter for the first time in 50-60 years and the first thing you want to do is use photoshop.
And for a while, things were good.

Then I installed the new Eclipse 3.1. I started a new java project, added a file, did the obligatory "hello world" application. and tried to run the app.

But the run function wasn't where I thought it would be. Aroo? This window shows me what programs it would use to run it, but it's not running?! My gut reflex was "Well, this sucks, I'm uninstalling." followed immediately by, "wait, give up on something just because it doesn't work the way I thought it would, when I haven't read a thing about it since it was in first beta?"

So I sat down, started with one of it's tutorials of running with it, and in no time, "Hello World" was glaring at me from the console tab within the program.

Neat!

The Java IDE's I've used in the past were kludgy, often written in Java, memory instensive, and wouldn't do what MSVS could for it's languages with half the overhead.

Today's Eclipse is much, much better. "Code proofing" while you type, preformatting as you go, a lot of what Eclipse does for you is quite slick, and the overhead is not as bad percentage-wise as older IDE's were(At least it didn't require me to install Apache or IIS unlike other IDE's I can think of).

The only catch was that I needed to learn a little about "planet Eclipse"(to paraphrase a former co-worker) before I dived into it. But if you do any coding using Java or C++(which I haven't tried yet), I really recommend it. The price is nice as well.