Back from NYC

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Back from an exhausting but fun weekend trip to NYC for various family events. The weather in Manhattan was perfect. I only wish I'd been able to spend more time with family and less time in transit (traffic around NYC Sunday was brutal due to the 5 Boroughs bike ride and street fairs and car accidents).


With gas prices over $3 a gallon nationwide, I got myself a Discover Open Road credit card which offers 5% cash back on gas and auto maintenance purchases (and 1% back on other purchases). No annual fee.


Maria Sharapova lists her top 10 dream mixed double partners. Yao Ming?!


"Fluorescent Adolescent" by the Arctic Monkeys is my favorite new rock tune this year (here's the album). Alex Turner is a fantastic lyricist.


Help to fight global warming by having fewer children. Since U.S. citizens tend to be the world's worst carbon dioxide emitters, this is especially true for us. A simple way to encourage this would be to impose tax penalties on families for each additional child. Take that Shawn Kemp.


I was born without replacement teeth for my top two canines. Those two baby teeth have been hanging on forever. I went to a new dentist here in LA last week who recommended I get them replaced before they fall out. I asked how much it would cost, roughly, and she told me to talk to the receptionist up front. Always a bad sign when you ask how much something costs and get the runaround. The receptionist's quote: $8,000, not covered by insurance. Are you kidding me?! I may just have to go toothless if they fall out. At any rate, I'm going back to my insurance company on this one. That hardly seems just for a congenital condition.


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Little bit of that

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Seeing beyond sight: photos by blind teenagers.


It's been apparent to everyone that this season of 24 has been the worst yet. I gave up on it a few episodes in. The good thing is that low ratings have forced the show producers to take notice.


The Golden Ratio for making your butt look great is being employed by a jeans mfr called The Proportion of Blu:




I used to think those commercials by Citicard about credit card theft, where a criminal's voice would play over the lip movements of an old lady or other credit fraud victim were quite remarkable, the lip matching was so perfect. Then I used VocAlign with Pro Tools at school and realized it wasn't that technically difficult to pull off after all.


Now that the whole HD-DVD code story is a day old, the hot blogosphere story of the day seems to be this article in the NYTimes which cites an economic study (PDF) by Justin Wolfers and Joseph Price finding evidence of racial bias among NBA refs, namely that white refs call fouls at a higher rate against black players than against white players. The NBA did their own study that they claim shows that refs are not biased, but their refusal to release the underlying data from their study really weakens their position. Steven Levitt looked over the Wolfers/Price paper and found it sound. I suspect that if you'd asked a bunch of NBA fans and observers beforehand if they'd expect the study to find bias, and if so, how much bias they'd expect, they'd come up with numbers higher than Wolfers and Price found in their study. In other words, the study isn't that shocking.


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Tidbits

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Lousy placement of a Yahoo ad at a baseball stadium.


Mozy offers 2GB of free online file backup for Mac users. Their unlimited backup service is only $5 a month which is not a bad deal. You get backup religion the first time your hard drive dies and takes your MP3 collection to the grave with it (Disclosure: that link contains my referral code, and for every four customers I refer I get 1GB additional free backup).


"As Hotel Prices Rise, a Villa May Be a Bargain" - the headline says it all. I want to stay in a villa!


Mmm, now this is some fresh sashimi (YouTube)


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All you can eat

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After the production madness of winter quarter, I thought the spring quarter might be a more relaxing one, but it's turning out to be just as, if not more, busy.


Part of that is my own choosing. We're assigned to take 22 units of class this quarter as 1st years, and they recommend though do not require 1 elective. But I discovered that we're allowed to take as many electives as we want, and there's no difference in your tuition if you take no electives or a hundred.


I'm interested enough in all sorts of subjects related to film that this was like being set loose in an all-you-can-eat buffet. So I signed myself up for four electives for a total of 34 units of class. I also have to edit my 6-minute film from last quarter for screening during finals week, and I have given up three Saturdays to all-day workshops led by Stephen Burum, this year's Kodak cinematographer in residence (legendary for his longtime collaboration with Brian De Palma, his work heading up 2nd unit on Apocalypse Now, and his contributions to the American Cinematographer Manual).


I had one day in April which was open, last Sunday, and I spent it doing homework and laundry. In May, I also have one day that isn't already booked by class, weddings, or workshops. It's amazing how quickly all my plans for going out and working out and trying out some restaurants and watching movies all just evaporated.


But for the most part, I'm digging all my electives, and I'm learning tons. The craft of filmmaking just requires a life-consuming commitment. Sleep is scarce these days, and I've found myself dozing off Grandpa Simpson style


Being a student has one great advantage, and that's access to student-discounted software. I've finally got Pro Tools installed on my desktop and I'm learning my way around it. You can do some amazing things with the software--it's like Photoshop for sound. Add the Pitch N' Time plugin and you can turn your out-of-tune karaoke rendition of "Welcome to the Jungle" into something Simon Cowell would be proud of.


One of the most enjoyable classes I'm taking is Music in Film, and our first exercise was to go through North By Northwest and log all the musical cues, when they began, when they faded out. When a director sits down with a composer for a "spotting session," the director will collaborate with the composer to select when music should come in and go out. What's fascinating about Bernard Herrmann's score for North by Northwest is how Hitchcock had Herrmann hold back on bringing in the musical cues until the last possible moment. In places you'd expect a swelling musical cue to come bursting through the speakers, there's nothing (the famous farm field scene is a great example).


Our professor talked about why that might be, and that restraint is really striking given how liberally modern movies use score to cue the audience on how to react emotionally to scenes. Most viewers never stop to think about why music comes in at a particularly point in the movie, and it's a useful exercise to do with one of your favorite movie scores. Our exercise for next week's class is to spot Monsoon Wedding, a really enjoyable movie, and not just because of its score. Listen to just the title credit score, and without having seen a single frame of the movie, you should be able to predict the theme of the movie.


Our professor took us on a field trip last Friday to the famous scoring stage on the Sony Studios lot. Named after Barbara Streisand, it's the scoring stage of choice for John Williams, and so many famous scores have been recorded there. On this afternoon, we had the opportunity to listen to a scoring session for an upcoming episode of The Simpsons by renowned composer Alf Clausen. While Alf conducted an orchestra in short cues to match the Simpsons footage projected on a large screen (some of the animation hadn't been finished and consisted of sketches), we sat in the control room and watched through the glass, listening to the music on one of the most sublime sound systems imaginable. It was inspiring to see how much work goes into a 7 second musical cue for a half hour episode of The Simpsons. Very few TV shows score with an actual orchestra. Lost, for one, and Desperate Housewives, though on a much smaller scale. That might be it. Who would've guessed The Simpsons would be among that elite group (I say that not to disparage the show, one of my favorite TV shows ever, but to express surprise that a half-hour animated satire would spend more on its score than most hour-long dramas).


Listening to the music in the control room elevated the familiar Simpsons musical cues to a sublime place. I refuse to believe people who say they can't hear the difference between an MP3 played off of their iPod and a well-recorded CD played over a good pair of speakers. From the live performance of music to your ears, much of the magic can be lost. To hear Clausen's score live was like setting foot on a place I'd only seen in postcards before.


I love hearing behind-the-scenes stories about film shoots from a wide variety of guest speakers and professors. Not surprisingly, in an industry full of storytellers and mercurial personalities, the stories that are passed around have the finely honed quality of mythology. I can't really share the stories here, but suffice it to say that events like the David O. Russell tantrum aren't new to folks in the biz.


The only downside of my crazy schedule this quarter, besides lack of time for sleep and exercise, is that I've been having a series of disturbing dreams, all linked. Last night was the most disconcerting episode yet. In this dream, I've shot and killed someone, and though no one knows I'm the killer, many people are suspicious and closing in on me. Feeling the net encircling me, I spend the entire dream in a sweat, with a sense of doom and guilt crushing all the hope out of me. By the time I wake up I can't remember who it is I'm meant to have killed, but for the duration of the dream, I feel the guilt of a murderer, and it's unsettling beyond belief. In that elusive way that dreams slip through your fingers like water, I can't recall the details anymore, but I'm certain I've had this dream more than once this quarter.


I realize that Freud's theories on dreams have been discredited, but I'd love to know what the current state of thinking is in the field of dream interpretation.


This, thankfully, is not a dream. ESPN Experts? More like ESPN Expert:




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World's 50 Best Restaurants

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This list of the world's top 50 best restaurants brought to you by S.Pellegrino. The top 10:


1 El Bulli (Spain)

2 The Fat Duck (UK)

3 Pierre Gagnaire (France)

4 The French Laundry (USA)

5 Tetsuya's (Australia)

6 Bras (France)

7 Mugaritz (Spain)

8 Le Louis XV (Monaco)

9 Per Se (USA)

10 Arzak (Spain)


Alinea cracks the top 50 with the best showing of any new restaurant to the list, landing at #36.


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Nibble

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One of the things about LA bike culture is that cruisers predominate. Going down the beach boardwalk on your tricked out road bike doesn't impress anyone. Perhaps "The Ride" by Ellsworth is a suitable compromise: a high-tech cruiser. What a beauty, at least until someone knocks you off of it and steals it.


A whole lotta free MP3s over at WuTangCorp.com, home of the Wu-Tang Clan & Killa Beez.


Weng Weng, the 2' 9" Philippine dynamo, Agent Double 0, lives on thanks to YouTube. I think I'm impressed that someone actually took the time to write that rap.


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Glimpses of the short Peter Jackson shot on the Red prototypes

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Here are some 4K res JPEGs from the short. Here's a short snippet of the short at 1K res (you'll probably have to try one of the mirrors at this point). It's such a short clip that it's hard to draw any sweeping conclusions, but that little bit is pretty sweet. In particular, it has a film-like DOF (Jackson's DP shot using Cooke S4 primes and Angenieux Primo zooms).


Here are some war stories from the shoot itself courtesy of HD For Indies. At this point, I'd sell my car to get one of these Reds, but I don't think that would be enough (literally!).


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The rule of "four to fourteen"

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From an interview with Renaissance man and film editor extraordinaire Walter Murch:


BLDGBLOG: When you’re actually editing a film, do you ever become aware of this kind of underlying structure, or architecture, amongst the scenes?



Murch: There are little hints of underlying cinematic structures now and then. For instance: to make a convincing action sequence requires, on average, fourteen different camera angles a minute. I don’t mean fourteen cuts – you can have many more than fourteen cuts per minute – but fourteen new views. Let’s say there is a one-minute action scene with thirty cuts, so that the average length of each is two seconds – but, of those thirty cuts, sixteen of them will be repeats of a previous camera angle.



Now what you have to keep in mind is that the perceiving brain reacts differently to completely new visual information than it does to something it has seen before. In the second case, there is already a familiar template into which the information can be placed, so it can be taken in faster and more readily.



So with fourteen “untemplated

Dead market for digital goods

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China, with a population of 1.3 billion, purchased 244 legitimate copies of Windows Vista in the 2 weeks after it launched there. Pirated copies sell for $1 on the street.


I'm certain it's no different for any other digital media product--CD's, DVDs, any other software. I'm doubtful China will be a viable market for any digital good in my lifetime.


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Optical Heterodyning

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Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs have developed a prototype of a heterodyne light field camera that allows you to change the focus point of an image after it's shot. Essentially, if you didn't set the DOF focus range on the right portion of the image, you can adjust it in post. It does this unblurring by increasing the DOF by 10X.


I imagine that in the future, consumer point-and-shoot digital cameras will have all sorts of features like this built in. With memory growing cheaper by the month, future point-and-shoots will allow even the worst photographer in the world to take an in-focus, properly exposed photo. I foresee camera in the future snapping multiple exposures of an image so you can simply select the right exposure afterwards (you can do this to some extent by shooting RAW today, but most photography novices shoot JPGs).


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The free and the not-so-free

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"Let's Get Digital 1" is a free digital song compilation from Insound.


Two reports on the Red 4K camcorder from NAB (Part 1, Part 2). Peter Jackson shot a short movie with two Red prototypes to show in 4K at NAB, and a version of that should be available to download from Red.com in a couple days according to a forum post by Jim Jannard.


Also at NAB, Panasonic debuted the AG-HPX500, the big brother to the HVX200. The HPX500 shoots DVCPRO HD with 4:2:2 sampling on 3 2/3" CCDs, and unlike the HVX200 it accepts interchangeable lenses. It will retail for $14,000 which is good for what it does (though whether or not you agree depends on whether you're a pro in the biz or just your average joe).


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