Erkki

I just got tickets for 33 movies at PÖFF, and this means I’m going to watch 33 movies in cinemas during the next two and a half weeks, starting tomorrow. It’s a similar number of movies for the third year in a row, but I think this is the last time I’m going to do it at such a scale. It’s a bit overwhelming to make a plan to see this many movies. This time I mostly did it out of habit and because I was gifted a pass that gave me 30 free tickets that I can only use for myself. I deliberately chose movies that would not be in cinemas after the festival, so it’s going to be a hit and miss probably. I think I also chose very different movies than on previous years, because I’ve seen a lot and I don’t want to necessarily see something similar to what I’ve seen before. That’s why I think that next year I will even not have a lot to choose from that won’t remind me of something else. Also, on my mind lately is how to get back to watching higher quality movies, rather than a wide variety of different movies. Mubi has been great for me but it seems to be endless mediocrity lately.

Has anyone seen Dirty Computer, the "Emotion Picture" by Janelle Monáe? I just watched it and it's visually amazing. Kind of a cross between movie and music video, I guess in the same way as Beyoncé's Lemonade, which I haven't seen. It reminds me a lot of Claire Boucher's (Grimes') videos and it's really just perfectly shot. I don't know if it should be called movie? But then again I'm not sure if calling it an "emotion picture" is a bit pretentious, as if something completely new had been invented. Anyway, it's worth a watch, but most of it is just her music videos + some more stuff in between to tie some kind of basic boring story together.

BTW. I realize I should have added an example. I don't know if I have a favourite, but this was pretty good analysis of some cultural aspects of The Love Witch He looks at what the critics think are the influences on this film and then contradicts those with what the filmmaker Anna Biller has cited and explicitly referenced herself and then connects it to feminism and the male gaze of film historians. There's almost always something surprising an insightful (to me) similar to this in his videos.

I've recently discovered a good film criticism channel on YouTube by Kyle Kallgren called Brows Held High: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0KaZd_ki4l2EUc1GY9u5Ew I find that he draws interesting connections between things that I haven't usually thought of myself. Somewhat thanks to him being educated in theater IIRC. He is occasionally awkward and somewhy explicitly dwells on being awkward in the videos, but I got used to it. But anyway I find some of his reviews / vlogs really intriguing.

I feel like I should give Annihilation another chance. I watched the botched release on Netflix that was 480p or something. And then I kept noticing all the other problems. Maybe a second watch sometime in the future if I manage to forget the plot... I second that American Vandal is great and that Mute is horrible garbage and one of my biggest disappointments in a director ever.

Sounds like I might want to check it out eventually despite the samey writing and cutscenes/gameplay separation. I will probably get the game after Sony releases a PlayStation with support for 4K Blu-Rays, although I still don't have a 4K display.

Yeah, I caught up with the series now, that was a great episode.

Oh yeah, I think it went well! Of course I did about half of the amount of shots I had planned, this is becoming normal. There was a lot of hassle moving the camera and lights around. Also there was a lot of trouble with a certain performance in the finale, but I think we got a good result. Just one minor scene left to shoot now, outdoors. Well, and a stop-motion animation, which I have very little idea how to shoot but I should be able to pull it off with relatively few stress compared to today.

Well fuck me, I let my to-do list grow so long that I forgot to pick up lights from rental today. I feel so stupid. Luckily they are not essential for the location, there's enough natural light there... But I still would feel much better if I had some extra, so now I'll have to spend probably a good part of tomorrow dealing with finding some lights... (might be difficult here on a Saturday) [edit]Yay, I got the lights, and even a better one, from a guy on local facebook group.

Approaching the last big shoot that takes place on Sunday. Getting into a minor pit of despair again, as I'm not sure it's going to turn out as good as I want. I was originally thinking of using a gimbal (handheld camera stabilizer) for these scenes, but I've only used it for a tiny minority of shots so far and I'm not very confident that I can plan good shots with it. There will be about 8 or so people involved in this shoot (plus 10 or so extras) so I'm not going to use that time to experiment and will use static or panning camera mostly. It feels like I'm slightly compromising my original vision, but I really want to get this over with and don't want to risk needing another day at the location and wasting people's time. I'm actually pretty sure that I don't want to take on another project that is this long after I'm done with this*. I really want to make some small 3 minute movies that can be done in a weekend to get better at turning ideas into good audio-visual stories. I think a problem is that I spent most of my youth being not that interested in storytelling and I'm still kind of unsure about how to approach this plan. * and actually this Sunday will not be all, I thought of another small scene to add after the credits and there's a stop-motion animation dream sequence that I still have no idea how to shoot exactly.

I'm older!

This is not new, but I've started to love this song, especially after I got some new speakers. https://emmaruthrundle.bandcamp.com/track/g-teborg

I actually haven't listened to the podcasts for a while before they stopped, for mainly two reasons: I almost don't play games now, so I don't care about the topics most of the time Since I don't play, I don't have any activity that could go with listening to a podcast at the same time (used to be e.g. Minecraft). Wait, I actually still play Spider Solitaire (the awful ad-ridden Microsoft one) in parallel of consuming some content, but I now tend to consume insightful/instructional YouTube videos instead of entertainment. I watch too many movies and that fills up my "free" time. Did a Thumb really cut their fingers off? Was it Vanaman? Sounds like something he would do. I'm technically on Slack, but I haven't really checked it out. I feel like I already have enough chats and interruptions during the day, I am very hesitant about adding another source of that. Still trying to keep the Movies forum alive, but sometimes I look at the top 5 threads and see that I was the one that replied last to all of them... :|

Well, what do you know, I think might have to change my opinion. The last two episodes of the season were great, and there was actually a nice payoff for the slow burn that happened before. But still I was on the verge of giving up earlier and I still think each episode in a series should be entertaining on its own.

I think this forum is nearly dead, but I found another thread to update. I just watched 2 Tsai Ming-Liang movies in a row. The first was Vive L'Amour, which I thought was quite interesting, reminding me of Chungking Express, but that didn't always do good for it as the visuals were definitely not on par. There's stuff to like there, but I think the dramatic structure could use a lot of improvement - maybe I'm just not super compatible with Tsai Ming-Liang. The Wayward Cloud, a daring movie as can already be seen from the poster. It was completely different than I expected, and I really loved the first half, and it actually reminded me of Chungking Express in a much better way than Vive L'Amour. I just loved some of the shots and scenes in this, and it was really entertaining in a way that a lot of movies aren't. But then the second half started turning this into a really misogynistic piece, with one of the worst feeling endings I've ever experienced. Just ruined a potentially great movie for me. [edit] Actually it makes me think... since Tsai Ming-Liang keeps hiring the same actor (sorry, forgot the name), would it make sense to take several of his movies and make a new fan movie out of it? I feel like there are a lot of parts to like, but I can't say for any one movie of his that I like the whole thing.

Very nice. Makes me want to go back to taking photos - I’ve completely stopped that when I started with filmmaking

It does look good, except there seemed to be some obvious photographed backgrounds in one episode where Jimmy & Kim were discussing something outside, that were not properly colored (the leaves of trees didn't look as green in some shots as normal). Also I'm finding that it looks really darker than what my eye expects to see in office/home environments. But that's probably quite common, I just haven't watched that many shows in recent years. [edit]On second thought, maybe those are just different trees or they are very much in blossoms? It's in Ep. 7 38:00 or so. I can see movement so they are not photographed backgrounds.

Wow, in the 3rd season the show is getting worse and worse as the pacing gets more and more glacial. Have they forgotten that we know where this is leading to? The episodes don’t really have dramatic arcs any more and are we supposed to read some profoundness into showing the dead relationship between Jimmy and Kim for several episodes without any major movement? I think we got it the first time.

Maybe you posted it here? This is not a new thread, I renamed it recently, though.

I didn't win, the czech office did a really elaborate titles sequence partially ripped from Death Proof (and others) and won, and I think a US office came second with a mildly racist black & white film imitation. Thanks for the note about the ping pong. I wasn't very happy with that part myself and my audio recording capabilities/skills were really crappy back then. I'm currently actually trying to learn about sound design and mixing to avoid any stupid mistakes in the future. Also got myself some decent entry level monitoring headphones and speakers. The syncing with the music kind of happens accidentally sometimes. I'm not sure how exactly, but it has already happened to me at least 3 times that I edit the video and then I go through some songs in the YouTube audio library and the first or second track I pick somehow mostly syncs up with my edit. I guess I did help a little bit afterwards with the office video. But another time it was completely baffling even to me how it happened, with this video I did most of the video editing before picking this song (although now that I watch it again it syncs up less than I remembered):

A video I made in our office in Spring for an internal contest can now be shared. I even kind of got paid for it since I did it during work hours

I put most of the movie together roughly as a test (still haven't shot 3 key scenes) and it was 16 minutes... so with those key scenes it could approach 20 minutes. Also, I find that it seems quite boring when watching through those 16 minutes without any music. For original rough cut I added some jazz that created some tension in some places but when I remove that it seems really dull. I'm not sure if I can license this song that track that I used originally nor if I want to. But maybe I can get a friend to make some music that fits. Anyway maybe it's not just the music. I'm worried that it's going to be a really boring movie. :/ [edit] just watched Tommy Wiseau’s The Room and at least I hope my dialogue and the actors’ delivery is slightly better than that movie.

Actually depending on how well it turns out, I might go for perpetual license as well, but that could double the cost.

Us$ No, I’m just thinking of not showing it after that. I’m actually licensing another song over credits and that costs even more. Together the music licensing more than doubled my budget

I envy the technical skills on display, but I found The Double Life of Veronique to be incredibly dull. The only thing that might make it interesting would be trying to solve the puzzle of what it was, but then that's not the movie any more.