Cynematik • Cyndi Greening

I love watching DVDs at home. No one kicks the back of my seat. Children do not cry. People do not talk. And, if I really need to, I can pause the film for a few minutes. I wish my screen were a little bigger and the living room a little darker but you can’t have everything. So, I was VERY disappointed when Netflix kept raising their prices for rentals. I’d always been an “8″ but had downgraded when the monthly $52.91 kept rolling around. It just didn’t seem worth it.

Well, I’m happy to report they’ve lowered their prices! Apparently the George Bush economy could not bear the climbing cost of the luxury of DVDs in one’s home. (Sadly, they’ve lowered all of the prices except the 8 per month.)

[Read more →]

“No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation.”
    Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924)
    28th U.S. President

[Read more →]

The evolution from hardware to software has advanced to the successful implementation of WETWARE! Wetware (the direct link between the human mind and a computer) has arrived. I wrote a screenplay about it ten years ago and have been waiting for this announcement! It was just a matter of time! Nature.Com has the article on a Paralyzed Man Who Sends Email by Thought from an implanted chip. Pretty amazing!

My screenplay was a bit more sinister. It was about the military implanting soldiers with a chip that could “broadcast” images of a soldier’s loved ones into what he/she was seeing. It made them the perfect killing machines because they were protecting those they loved. Perhaps, one day, that will be true, too.

Apologies

My sincere apologies for having been so sloppy about blogging. Alec turned 17 on the 20th and my parents arrived from Wisconsin on the 21st. They were staying with me while they looked for a place to live, so things have been a bit crazy! We’re at the end of the 10th week of semester, too. The documentary is progressing and the faculty art show is coming. So, things started to fall to the wayside. I’m back on track again and should be able to keep up, now.

[Read more →]

“If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.”
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882)
    U.S. Author

[Read more →]

Motion capture and CG character advancement is featured in the NY Times Article on Robert Zemeckis’ Polar Express starring Tom Hanks. Zemekis and Hanks have taken motion capture and digital performing to a whole new level. This method of motion capture seems to have reintroduced acting into the digital process. It’s visually stunning and very true to the original book.

According to the Times, “There was little that resembled a traditional shoot at a warehouse in Culver City, Calif., where the film was being made in April. In place of a soundstage, there was a domelike structure built of scaffolding that surrounded a playing area roughly 10 feet square. Attached to the scaffolding were several dozen infrared sensors, which could pick up and digitally record the light bounced back by the dozens of small reflectors on Mr. Hanks’s black bodysuit, as well as by the 150 smaller reflectors attached to his facial muscles. With his face dotted by the tiny jewels, as the crew called the reflectors, Mr. Hanks looked like the pincushion man from the “Hellraiser” series. But after a few days of working with the reflectors attached, he said, he no longer noticed them.”

Equally fascinating is Liam Kemp’s This Wonderful Life. Kemp received special recognition and awards at SIGGRAPH for the CG characters in his short film. I could NOT believe they weren’t real. Check it out for yourself. You can view the film at CG Channel.Com! It’s amazing!

[Read more →]

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
    Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642)
    Italian Astronomer & Physicist

[Read more →]

I like to put the SAME SEARCH CRITERIA in different SEARCH ENGINES and see what pops up. This weekend, I’ve been playing around with A9.COM and I’m finding all sorts of new and interesting sites. A9 uses Google, Amazon and several other sources to perform a sort of dogpile-style, metacrawler search. Since, the quest for new information sources is the heart and soul of blogging, I was pleased to find new things with this engine. (In particular, I’m always searching for sites with the latest production information and the latest buzz on recently completed films.)

A cluster of weblogs about film, filmmaking, computing, digital photography and networking kept popping up on A9. I spent quite a bit of time reading Weblogsinc.Com’s Documentary Films, Independent Films, Digital Photography, Digital Music, Design and Art Blogs. There was something interesting on each of those sub-sites.

Several of the usual stand-bys popped up. Sites like DocumentaryFilms.Net, HotDocs.Com, IMDB Indies, Assn. of Indie Video & Filmmakers, IFILM and IndieWire. Great resources for filmmakers. Happy researching!

[Read more →]

“Victory belongs to the most persevering.”
    Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821)
    French Dictator & General

“Beware the man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart, and speaks for another.”
    Homer (800 BC - 700 BC)
    Greek Epic Poet

[Read more →]

Morrie Warshawski, author of Shaking the Money Tree, and other books about independent film funding, has a list of Fundraising Links.

There’s information on everything from grantwriting for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to Grantmakers in the Arts and FilmFundOrg.

At the bottom of the Books Page, there’s a Audio Link to hosting a Fundraising House Party. It’s GREAT! Be sure to pay attention to FOLLOW-UP. According to Morrie Warshawski, this is where MOST of the money comes in.

For documentarians, there’s a book that offers a bread crumb trail through the PBS Jungle. (Personally, I might be afraid of the having the same fate as Hansel and Gretl, if I were following bread crumbs. I have not read the book but would hope the information is solid.) The current state of the international marketplace for documentary films is covered in a FREE PDF at Center for Social Media. And a User’s Guide to Film Distribution Deals can be found at Film Profit.

[Read more →]

“Never confuse movement with action.”
    Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)
    U.S. Author

[Read more →]

The debates have me feeling excited and animated. It’s neat to have so many people interested in the democratic process and the future of the country. This generation is so much more involved than my generation.

In addition to politics, computer animation has also been democratized over the last decade. Brandon Marsala sent a link to the visually appealing Rockfish. And our friends at AnimWatch send more links on interesting animated projects like Mr. Mille and A Tiny Tiney.

Conspiracy theorists on the web have a movie about whether or not a plane crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11. Also cruising around the blogosphere, Was Bush Wired?. Seems doubtful. As Stephanie Cutter (Kerry’s Communication Director) said, “If he was wired, what the heck were they saying to him in that first debate?” Still, it wouldn’t surprise me. Paging Karl Rove.

[Read more →]

“Evil is obvious only in retrospect.”
    Gloria Steinem (1934 - )
    U.S. Feminist

[Read more →]

It’s time to Pre-Register for the CHANCE to buy a pass or tickets at Sundance 2005. Sadly, every time I try to register, it fails. I have Netscape 7.x and Explorer 5.2 on a Macintosh (although I certainly prefer the faster and more efficient Safari). It just keeps failing. Argghhhh.

(Note: Finally, SUCCESS! I am pre-registered. There’s no advantage to registering early. The date and time are assigned randomly. Just make sure to do it before the end of October.)

[Read more →]

Pancreatic cancer claimed the life of Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida over the weekend. Derrida immigrated to Paris as a teen; he studied literature and philosophy at university. In 1967, he simultaneous published three major works Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference, and Of Grammatology — works which began to articulate his extensive and radical critique of Western metaphysics; a critique which draws, in part, from the writings of Nietzche, Freud, Heidegger, Marx and Levinas. Derrida has since gone on to publish over 45 books which have been translated in over 22 languages worldwide. His work has been read and disseminated by a broad range of cultures and disciplines, profoundly influencing fields as varied and disparate as art, literature, law, ethics, music, history, architecture and fashion.

At Sundance 2002, the documentary film by Amy Ziering Kofman and Kirby Dick entitled Derrida The Movie was screened. The film played to sold out crowds, sparked many lively post screening discussions among audience members and filmmakers, and received a great deal of critical praise from local, national and international press correspondents. A highlight: Robert Redford himself attended one of the screenings having heard such positive buzz.

Derrida started an erudite discussion about the limits of language and the language of film. Words cannot express what he contributed to the world nor what the world lost with his passing.

[Read more →]

“But psychoanalysis has taught that the dead — a dead parent, for example — can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.”
    Jacques Derrida (1930 - 2004)
    Algerian-born, Father of Deconstructionism

[Read more →]