Posts Tagged ‘entertainment’

actors head shots and a tour of the invisible, not a bad few moments of time

September 29, 2012

sometimes when bored with what i am doing or not doing i click on my TED Talks link to get a different perspective on the world and who knows maybe learn something to boot. the video below is one of those such talks. its a cute animated tour not too heavy and not too lite. at the end there is a quote from the poet A.H. Auden, i think, that best describes how i feel sometimes.

 Ted talk by john lloyd on a ‘tour of the invisible’

i do enjoy my abilities to create whether or not it’s for profit. i really don ‘t need the fame and fortune as i am blessed with a wonderful life now. it’s not always been that way but who has time to live in the past anymore. heck i can barely keep up with now.  it’s taken me way too long to learn to share things without thinking about a reward, even if the reward is good karma.

so it is with this post of a couple of portraits i took of my neighbor, we’ve lived in the same hallway for i don’t know how many years now. he’s career has been in the theater as mine has only as an actor and singer. not always is age kind to us. richard and i have spoken about what we’ve been up to, he’s doing movie extra work and i asked him about pictures, actors always need pictures, he said he had some but………………

well why don’t you stop by and i’ll take a look says i. one day we hooked up and i saw what he was using and offered to do new ones for him. well months later he did ring my bell and this is the outcome below. i am not a headshot photographer but i’ve seen my share.

simple shot: Key 22″ beauty dish camera left. overhead soft box.

serious

maybe this is the one he’ll use, i don’t know and it’s so hard for him to judge

which i liked but his right ear lobe looks too big. the next one i asked him to rough up his hair and this is what we got

we both like this one but probably not too business like

but i think these are much better than the one he was using no matter his choice. better than the one below where everything was in sharp focus, i had to blur the background on this one.

oh well it’s nice to help other people. good luck richard lyle thomas

jene

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NBC abominable Olympics coverage and it’s not even winter

August 4, 2012

i am very disappointed in the coverage that NBC is providing us here in america and who knows where else, on the olympics. my background having been involved in network television for CBS i have a pretty good idea of what it takes to produce a remote show. usually the network sends it’s best people out from NYC to supervise and run the technical aspect of coverage.

the essence of television, where it shines best is in live coverage of events. think back to world changing events you remember and ask yourself how do you remember it? most likely it will have been on a television set somewhere. i remember landing our on the moon, where i was and who i was with and remarking how the landing looked exactly like stanley kubrick’s 2001 a space odyssey to dennis sitting on the couch next to me.  do we remember where we were when we got the news of NASA’s challenger explosion?  i was in a network control room watching it every time it aired for over 12 hours that day.

my wife and i got so bored with the opening ceremonies that we turned it off as did our grandchildren ages 14 & 12 at their house.  groucho marx once remarked about how educational television was that ‘ every time it comes on he leaves the room to read a book’ but one can’t fault NBC for this boring event. it’s the other coverage or lack of that bothers me.

to me the olympics are the best of the best people competing in a sport. i for one would like to see the winners even if they aren’t americans on the podiums. hey what about seeing all three together, are the networks so afraid of another raised fist demonstration by the winners. it’s the contestants stage to do with as they want, their moment in the sun  to show the world something about them, they earned it. so if they want to make a political statement why not?

  isn’t this a political statement? reminds me of the cookie monster in a way doesn’t it?

so what we are getting is an edited american version of world competition  and winners faces in close-up. don’t you just        love how some american winners silently  mouth the words to the star spangle banner , it seems so artificial to me. but then  again i know the words, some may not and need a refresher course.

if you’ve gotten this far with me i am going into the individual posting of scoring. i noticed the final contestant in women’s and men’s gymnastics personal scores weren’t posted on screen, only the winning teams  score as if the individuals score wasn’t worth seeing. well not here in america no matter who the winner was. yes there has always been metal count and tooting your horn but hey these people are the ones who are fillers between the all important commercial breaks.  i haven’t timed it but normal television shows are only 21 minutes long these days. i remember the days when the shows were 46 minutes long. those long five minutes   have been lost.

what about the post game interviews with winded american athletes by corespondents asking silly questions. most europeans i know can speak at least three languages where we can only manage one sometimes not very well at that. so we only get interviews with the americans because of the dumbing down of the correspondent. great…… lets show the world how uneducated we really are. you’d think that NBC could find an interpreter to speak with the winner in their own language. it doesn’t take much to ask in russian or chinese how did it feel out there when?

so i am not even watching the best of the best nor counting metals. but wait NBC isn’t even showing all the events what about gymnastics like rings? see another article here. if these people are the best of the best in sports coverage along with tape delay then i think this network is in big trouble. least we now know of the twitter flap over Guy Adams who shared Gary Zenkel NBC Olympics president email address and had his twitter account suspended only to be reinstated after world got out.

i guess i am not mainstream america in that i see so much money being spend on sports and salaries when people are starving on the streets of the world. what a cruel fearful world we live in, when we are all only a step away from destitute. where we only get to see the winners in close-up fearful they to might do something embarrassing. television is a neat place with neat homes and nice people using bright shiny products.

what we get for our money is a nice neat boring world scrubbed clean by some network bosses not wanting to show a world as it is or could be. i’d rather read a book.

and what about the london 2012 olympic  fonts they must have been jobed out to the lowest bidder who had a total lack of typographic training.  i think graphic high should be able to do a better job than this. and all of this 4 years after the chinese olympics. is the west really in deep do do or what? if the chinese weren’t doing such terrible things and planning more to the tibetans i might consider moving there, except for lithium? or kiss your arses good by tibet. as lithium is used in battery production which we seemed to be needing more and more of, oh well you get the drift.

say good night gracie

thanks for flying with me. jene

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‘Robbie’: A Short Film That Proves Sometimes You Don’t Need a Camera to Make a Great Film

July 28, 2012

reblogged from no film school

We write a lot of posts about cameras here on No Film School in order to make our readers aware of what options are out there and what each particular camera is capable of. But as you know, the camera doesn’t make your film. The story is the most crucial part of any narrative film, and you don’t necessarily need a camera or a crew to make that film a reality. Sometimes, all you need is some public domain footage, the right music, and an editing program. This what Australian filmmaker Neil Harvey used to create his beautiful short film Robbie:

The film-making process involved downloading about 10 hours of footage from the NASA archives and compiling a list of shots which resonated with me at some level. I did this over about 2 or 3 months when I had the spare time. From there, I put these selected shots on an editing timeline and watched them back until characters and narratives began developing in my mind. That is when I met Robbie.

Whether you use Harvey’s method of having your story emerge out of compelling images or you write a script and then find the images that fit, with some effort and creativity you can make a great film. If you’d like to dive in and make your own found footage film, there are some good resources for 720p footage at The Internet Archive’s 35MM Stock Footage Collection, and NASA, and if you’re looking for a more extensive collection of footage –albeit SD– check out FedFlix, and the Perlinger Archive.

Link: Short of the Week – Robbie

thanks to nofilmschool

jene

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The Clock, Christian Marclay @ The Lincoln Festival thru aug 1, 2012

July 13, 2012

are you looking for something to do in this sweltering summer heat here in the city that never sleeps. well this might be right up your alley at the Lincoln Center festival. see link here for line updates. for some reason new yorkers don’t mind standing in line because there are so many of us wanting to go somewhere from buying our groceries or being entertained.

Artwork That Runs Like Clockwork

Christian Marclay/Paula Cooper Gallery

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour film montage, “The Clock,” is coming to the David Rubenstein Atrium in Lincoln Center.

By
Published: June 21, 2012

This summer the city that never sleeps will have another glimpse of an artwork that doesn’t relent much either: “The Clock,” a spellbinding, time-telling 24-hour wonder of film and sound montage by Christian Marclay, the polymath composer, collagist, video artist and pioneer turntablist.

An assemblage of time-related movie moments that had its debut in London in autumn 2010, Mr. Marclay’s “Clock” is already a popular classic. It is also a functioning timepiece; a highly compressed, peripatetic history of film and film styles; an elaborate, rhythmic musical composition; and a relentlessly enthralling meditation on time as an inescapable fact of both cinematic artifice and everyday life. Perhaps the ultimate validation of appropriation art, it thoroughly demonstrates how existing works of art — in this case films — become raw material for new ones.

“The Clock” counts off the minutes of a 24-hour day using tiny segments from thousands of films. Bits of “High Noon,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Laura,” “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather” and “A Clockwork Orange” speed past, mixed with early silent films and less familiar foreign ones.

As the action, music, sound effects and dialogue of one film bleed into those of another, each segment specifies a time, sometimes through spoken words, but mostly through shots of wristwatches, clocks, time clocks and the like. All are synced to real time. When it is 11:30 a.m. in “The Clock,” it will be 11:30 a.m. in the world outside. Exactly.

The first New York showing of “The Clock,” at the Paula Cooper Gallery in January 2011, had people lining up around the block in a relatively deserted west Chelsea in the dead of winter. Now, for 20 days starting on July 13, Lincoln Center will present the piece in a specially built theater in the David Rubenstein Atrium on Broadway between 62nd and 63rd Streets. Admission will be first come first served in a setting — lined with movie-palace velvet curtains and outfitted with enormous couches that blur boundaries between living room and screening room — that accommodates only about 90 people at a time.

It may be a challenge to get in, even in the wee hours, which is when I want to go, but I intend to make every effort, and recommend that you do too. The piece will run Tuesday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. and then settle in for three 38-hour weekend marathons beginning at 8 a.m. Fridays and running to 10 p.m. Sundays. It will be closed Mondays and ends on Aug. 1.

more information on the artist Christian Marclay can be found at the New Yorker here

enjoy, but i won’t be standing in line myself they give me the willies.

jene

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Hugo dances with Pina and comes out a wallflower

March 3, 2012

i hope my war correspondence phase is over but it just seemed to boil up on top of my mind these days. i am not able to shoot any images  due to having rotator cuff surgery, hey it’s spring. so i am out of it for a few months. we are putting together an exhibit for may, june, july out in lancaster, pa but more on that later.

i am not the best patient as i get feeling a bit better and want to get back in action, luckily i have mary watching over me so i don’t lift my arm, ouch it hurts to do that, but she’s there to help me, mostly from myself. but the other day i was feeling good enough to venture out and we decided to catch up on movie watching. seeing movies in suburbia is best done weekdays afternoons. we had the theater mostly to ourselves – just six other people there.

we have been going to movies, having seen the Artist, thinking it was a wonderful movie hoping it would win and we weren’t disappointed as i had been so many other years by the academy voters. having lived in LA years ago and worked in movies i often wondered if they, the academy members and i were seeing the same movies. this time we were happily rewarded.

the descendents didn’t move me at all, nor did the dull photography, set in hawaii. yes i’ve seen the vog there but lets have some lushness and color, this is a movie.

so we tuned into last sunday  for the academy awards broadcast hoping we would be delighted. the first award for cinematography went to robert richardson, won as director of photography on Hugo i had work for him and martin scorsese on Bringing out the Dead and seeing him create magic. he’s considered by some a bit of a odd ball but marty must love him as they’ve done three movies together these days. robert’s credits are amazing –  a who’s who’s of films.

this is one of the first years we had seen most of the academy award nominees except for Hugo which we thought would be full of kids, yes we do make up stories. so afternoon going was preferred as absent of children. we were a bit taken back by an admission price of $14.00 each, but hey you can’t put a price on a good time. after all it was in 3D and we loved wim wenders’  Pina in 3D. i even wrote about that here.

we thought the 3D added intimacy to the dance experience so we were up for Hugo. during the coming attractions previews  they showed the titanic as a 3D movie, interesting CGI has come a long way. i remember when it started down in culver city and the IATSE didn’t want anything to do with it until the members pushed the union into action to organize it. now it’s a multi million dollar budget item on most movies.

but here we are at Hugo. a lovely picture, robert did a wonderful job and deserved the award, one of three he’s earned but we were disappointed with the movie a as whole. there were times when my mind wandered, more than once, and i thought we were watching a pixar picture or shrek type of cartoon character, the story just wasn’t there. we think a good half hour could have been chopped on the cutting room floor.

this is marty’s love letter and a lovely tribute to the beginning of films and Georges Méliès’ work it did seem a bit out of place in this story. movies are dreams isn’t a new story but even dreams can go in some strange places, like saturday morning cartoons. oh did i mention such details as CGI dust as i explained to mary this very expensive production value. i wonder if the admission price could have been lowered by a buck had they deleted the dust.

Hugo, a boy living in the paris train station walls who’s trying to unravel a mystery left to him by his father, the automatron isn’t interesting enough we have to add a villian – the train inspector. main adversary to hugo was snatched from scooby doo cartoon character, who even has a dog that chases hugo. hmmmm

then the screen writer seemed to want the station inspector to be part love story/villain. if the story of Hugo  isn’t interesting enough who’s trying to unravel his personal mystery there comes along another grown up toy seller and his daughter, there always has to be a girl, friend to hugo who helps hugo solve the mystery. the father turns out to be none other than marty’s love: the Georges Méliès, the father of film character. happy ending

hey so what we get a short film history along with some dust. none of the nitrate film exploded burning down half of paris along with a happy ending. all that for $14.00 not bad although i remember going to saturdays matinees for $.25 oh well times change.

this is a movie that is hindered by it’s medium, 3 D. while Pina is enhanced by 3D. i am not a big fan of things whizzing before me. i remember Phantom of the Rue Morgue in 3D whoa that was a scary movie with bodies fall in your lap but clocks, dogs and stairways zipping past and through one please.

so if you’ve gotten this far you may have guessed i didn’t care much for the movie, had they saved me a buck of two by cutting out the CGI dust particles i might have enjoyed it much better but i notice details. 3D has come a long way and i am sure we’ll be seeing much more of it in the future.

i think Hugo would have been a wonderful movie story without all the special effects but we all have to learn to edit ourselves. as it is hugo is a lovely love letter to the craft of film making. it just doesn’t dance well, but we all need love.

i’ve gone on much too long with my prattle, oh well.

jene youtt

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