Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

Just in time for the debates, parents can outfit their kids and send a political message at the same time. LowerCaseTee has clothing for kids with messages a mother can love.

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“I bid him look into the lives of men as though into a mirror, and from others to take an example for himself.”
    Terence (185 BC - 159 BC)
    Roman Dramatist

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Apple Pro has a story on Jeremy Coon, Editor & Producer of Napoleon Dynamite. Sharing details about the budget and production process, it also has information on the post-production process using Quicktime DVD-R’s of Dailies to stitch the film together very quickly.

Coon even shares the Sundance Negotiations on Distribution and reveals that he gave away too many “points” in the end. A surprising number of details in the three articles.

I had the chance to talk with Jeremy and director Jared Hess at Sundance 2004. They were funny guys. It will be interesting to see what their next film is. I hope they avoid the “sophomore slump”.

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“Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.”
    Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
    Swiss psychologist

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It all starts with the script! Here are some of my favorite screenplay sites. I tend to like the PDF formats best because they’re easier to read on screen. While I hate reading on screen, most scripts are around 120 pages and I don’t really want to print them all out.

Movie Scripts
Daily Script
Simply Scripts
Script Database
Northern Lights
Lontano
Horror Suspense Scripts
Drew’s Script O’ Rama
Classic Movies
Screenwriter’s Utopia - Ten Best Unproduced Scripts

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“We do not remember days, we remember moments.”
    Cesare Pavese (1908 - 1950)
    Italian Author

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Working on these documentaries makes the search for archival footage quite the treasure hunt. Worth1000 Bug’s in Life photo compositing contest amused me today. It was not footage related but I enjoy their compositing contests. The amount of work they spend on one image makes me contemplate the HOURs and HOURs filmmakers spend compositing things into movies (like Pirates of the Caribbean). How many thousands of hours must that have taken? It’s so much easier if you’ve got live action footage. Speaking of which …

The Prelinger Archives is one of the world’s greatest archival sources (British Pathe and WGA are also great). Some of their collections were recently referenced on BoingBoing are Panorama Ephemera, Industrial Films and Educational Films. Happy Hunting!

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“Dreams have a poetic integrity and truth. This limbo and dust-hole of thought is presided over by a certain reason, too. Their extravagance from nature is yet within a higher nature.”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
    U.S. Author

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Robert Pappas has directed a documentary about the lies, distortion and political spin the pervades contemporary media. Orwell Rolls In His Grave reveals the “Big Brother” nature of the media. It notes that 12 years ago there were 50 corporations running the media. Now, there are only SIX. Like Uncovered, Outfoxed, and the 800-pound-gorilla (or perhaps it should be guerrilla) of documentary films Fahrenheit 9/11, “Orwell” takes a hard look at how little critical thinking goes on about information represented in the media.

At Sundance last year, we saw Egyptian-American Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room. A documentary that contrasted the American Media’s point of view with Al Jezeera’s Arabic point of view during the bombing of Baghdad, the film generated quite a bit of hostility and disbelief in the audience. The American audience seemed to have trouble reconciling conflicting points of view. Little wonder that Orwell might be spinning in his grave.

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“To want fame is to prefer dying scorned than forgotten.”
    E.M. Cioran (1911 - )
    Rumanian-born-French philosopher

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Animation, by definition, is a series of still images that create the illusion of motion because of an optical phenomenon known as Persistence of Vision (I sure do miss Liz Levy’s blog!). The computer age makes it easy to create the illusion of motion and now, Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.Net points us to a page of Flickering Stereoscopic Images that create MOTION and the THIRD AXIS right before your eyes.

A few months ago they had a link to the 1882 Transit of Venus Reanimated. In 1882, astronomer David Peck Todd shot 147 consecutive plates of the transit of Venus across the sky. Now, two modern astronomers at the Lick Observatory have scanned them and turned them into a Quicktime movie; a film “shot” years before Edison made his first moving picture.

Similarly, in 1612, Galileo made a series of sunspot drawings at approximately the same time of the day. Published a year later in Istoria e Dimostrazioni Intorno Alle Macchie Solari e Loro Accidenti Rome, Galileo’s 1612 Sunspots Reanimated are visible centuries later.

Of great interest to me, Argument from Design generated a 1865 Quicktime Virtual Reality Gentleman using old images. I’ve been a fan of Hans Nyberg’s Stunning QTVR Panoramas for quite some time.

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“Humans are the only animals that laugh and weep, for they are the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.”
    William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830)
    English Essayist

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The third sculpture in the Public Art series, Spot is the second outdoor piece. The Will Bruder designed Burton Barr Central Library in Phoenix is the home of the first public piece. That piece was a combination of metal and painted canvases. The Kay Culbertson Memorial is due to be installed in the Special Needs Computer Center in early 2005.

Mesa Community College was the lucky recipient of the second piece. The MCC Longmore Entrance piece will be installed in early 2005. That welded steel scuplture will be about eight feet tall. I’m hoping to capture her making that piece on film. Welding is such a vibrant visual process.

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“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.”
    Eugene Ionesco (1912 - 1994)
    Romanian-born French playwright

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In addition to keeping this blog updated, I may be blogging Sundance for Cinema Minima this year.

Sadly, I’ve spent the last 8 years telling everyone what a great deal Sundance was and encouraging them to attend. Since I teach at Mesa Community College, the new pricing structure may be a significant challenge for the students I’ve been encouraging. I was also working with Alec’s high school. That seems even MORE difficult.

While I’m disappointed about that, I’m excited about the possibility of blogging for CinemaMinima. I am an avid film attendee at Sundance (minimum of three per day) so it will be exciting to help start the buzz on a great new film. We’ll have to see how it goes.

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