Five seasons of Breaking Bad masterfully compiled into the style of The Wire‘s five credit sequences.
Collecting from various sources, filmmaker Michael Marantz has edited together this very impressive inspirational and optimistic video. Recommended stuff.
The future excites me so much, that is why I made this video. We need to be inspired by the immense possibilities of the future and work extremely hard to achieve them. We can do it, we just have to commit.
On a bit of an editing thing lately and what better way to exhibit this, than three video demonstrations of how the process can drastically alter the original intention of a work.
First, one from the fan-editor’s fodder favourite:
A classic re-edit of a classic (and a prime example of why I almost never bother to watch trailers).
And finally, something a bit more cheeky…
So where the hell have I been? Everytime I wake up in the morning, I ask myself that same question. Usually followed by what the hell is a traffic cone, orange wig, empty cases of import beer and one pissed off monkey doing in my room? But enough about how I cured cancer, on with the update…
The deadly life threatening flu that I contracted has all but gone and has dropped down to orange alert, annoying tickling cough. Would have been over it faster, but have been keeping myself way too busy, mostly with video store work and helping out on a wintec short film, which has been interesting to say the least. Lots of very cool gear being used and at one point, there was a 30 ft crane on set that had me changing my pants several times from pure delight. But the set is on a farm that was at first stinking to high heaven of sheep shit and now after some wonderful winter weather, reduced to a mud field of very squishy proportions. Its not so bad, but for some reason, walking around the dark at night, the constant squishing sounds of the mud just gets to me, even though no said liquids are in contact with my person. Washing machine is getting its run for its money though.
Best part about this is the fact that to both of our surprises, my friend Rob who disappeared from my life years ago to Wellington, turned up out of the blue for this film and he’s awesome and reads this blog. But yeah, its an interesting shoot and only being a helping hand on this one, it’s always still facinating to me to watch how other people’s productions run. Especially the other low budget stuff, its almost overkill how professional this shoot is, there are a couple of industry professionals here and the set ups are being rigged in a very industry professional manner and that on the level of this kind of production is making for facinating sideline viewing for me. Details another time no doubt.
At the same time, I’ve been juggling my work and pulled off the ridiculous amount of hours at the video store this weekend (28ish in 48 hours), but meh I say. Worst off is the fact I have a couple of corporate videos that need cutting and the deadline is only a few days away and the time to do so is getting tight. Oh and forgot to mention earlier, but the damn computer with Pictures of You on it is now sitting in my room waiting for me to start chopping into it as well, that’s my job on it now, but that’ll have to wait just a bit longer as I vainly attempt to clear up my workload.
Also to mention, I finally got myself a copy of Auckland’s international film festival booklet and as thought, the list is sweet. Already planned several times to just go up and watch as much cool stuff as possible. One particular weekend has about nine films pencilled in as “yeah, I’d really like to go to this one and that one and oh, this one will be cool” blah, blah, blah. Fact that I’m working this year will probably mean I’ll be seening more festival films in Auckland than I did last year when I was living there. Go figure.
Oh yeah, and the national winner of the 48 Hour competition was announced tonight. Hamilton’s entry didn’t win and to my disappointment, Lemonade Coup didn’t get Cinematography (though they still get a nice panasonic dvx102… dastards), but it was a very interesting line-up of finalists. Auckland’s finalist was a surprising winner and it’ll be interesting to see how it actually compares to their finalists. My bet was on the Christchurch entry that come in second and was just great, but in the end, Lease, one of Peter Jackon’s wild card entries took the top spot.
Now its off to some much needed sleep, been getting so little in the past week, and that’s not gonna let up for a few more days, so here is two highly amusing videos of street magic and stuff.
I’m sitting here at six in the morning, bored and broken after a long haul of a graveyard shift. There is still an hour to go and it feel like an eternity away. So to whittle away the minutes and to make myself feel better, I’m putting a perspective on the week for this post…
Monday was a good start where I had coffee with a lady named Michelle who is interested in getting me on board as DP for her Wintec masters short film, yet to be titled. Very much enjoyed our discussion and I’ll probably take up her offer as we seem to get along well, which seems to be my deciding factor in a lot of things, don’t matter what quality the production is or will be, if the people are cool and fun enough, I’m in.
Tuesday was mad rush day as we prepped footage from Pictures of you to be taken by Paul the Producer down to Wellington. Almost all color correction I did to enhance the images was pretty nef and took too long to tinker with and render at that point, so I just left the colors as they are on the raw footage and they looked fine enough as they were.
Wednesday was just lots of running around and getting shit sorted for Auckland, where I met and chatted with a super cool lady who worked in many high ranking jobs for various companies and produced serveral albums, artists and music videos. I was there to discuss a small filming job coming up in a few weeks, but the cool factor came in when she saw some previous film stuff of mine and totally dug it, much to my suprise. She’ll be going to Australia in a couple of weeks to meet up with some pretty cool unnamable directors looking for young talent to work with and help launch and she wants to push for me to be one of them… awesome.
Also got word that day that Peter Jackson was now interested in seeing some footage from Pictures of You in a couple of weeks.
Thursday, Paul heads down to Wellington and I rush back to Hamilton to make it to the VP1 class and then work and then some editing. Very tired that day.
Friday was pretty much a Dead Chris Day filled with drinking and sleeping, until having to work a graveyard shift, which wasn’t so bad compared to tonight as Saturday was spent doing much more drinking and parties and hooray, engagement party of Joe and Marama where there was lots of happy in the air and pretty half arsed speeches were given. Well… from Joe anyway. But many people not seen for a while were seen again and that was cool. Plus word finally coming in from Paul the Producer in Wellington that people are digging the Pictures of You footage and the biggest compliment I’ve gotten yet of the fact that it was filmed on digital and not film as that’s what it looks like to many. Which is just too cool.
But now… now I’m at work, totally not wanting to be here and started the shift with one really nasty waking hangover… but then again, this particular shift pays really well and on nights like this where there are no customers all night, there is much lazing and relaxing to be done. I just finished watching Art School Confidential which I quite liked, but its so not as good as Bad Santa or the greatness that is Ghost World.
Sigh… One thing I noted at Joe and Marama’s was that constantly writing stuff to this blog for people to read is cool, but quite often now when I talk to friends and try to tell them stuff and news, they’ve already read about it and I’m left with not much else to say, which is sad when you think about it. My internet life is getting to be far more interesting than my real life.
Holy crap this is one long post and looking at the clock, I think I just got paid $10 sitting here and writing it. Life ain’t so bad sometimes.
Again, posts getting infrequent. But then again, not much going on.
Some lovely bouts of drinking over the weekend. Had some ‘last’ drinks with some uni folks and got nicely drunk with Malcolm, who flies out next Monday, for quite an indefinite time. He shall be missed.
But the hangover was awesome and today is my third day off work and not much has been achieved. Editing on Spit-Takes became quite a scary task and though there is probably enough footage, at this point it’ll be debatable if anything worthwhile will be usable for Paul to take down on to Wellington. But in saying that, the current edit of Pictures of You is looking quite nice. I’ll be doing some basic colour corrections on the footage before its taken down tomorrow and hopefully be able to make it to a cheap Tuesday viewing of Black Sheep afterwards.
Also got caught with the consumerism whore bug and bought my first DVDs in a long time… actually, seven movies… Children of Men, Desperado, El Mariachi, Jarhead, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Sonatine and The Wild Bunch. Plus a random look on trademe and I’ve found an auction for a CD/DVD rack exactly like the ones I’m currently using. Which, like when the last one (the second) was purchased, it was due to a demand to get new shelf space for the huge overflow of guilty purchases. I’ve actually had this problem for about two years now and to actually find a third one is insanely good fortune (cause they were really cheap things to buy, but are reliably good for DVD storage) and by the looks of the pile that’s already built up, I’ll be need a fourth one really soon.
Who’s looking forward to 300, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Illusionist this week? The thought of all those movies has got me so turned on.
Computer is in the middle of an upgrade to make editing Spit Takes a lot more easier. Actually, prior to upgrade, computer is running pretty sweet, but the option of more flashy bits and bobs going on inside is always a good choice.
Latest episode of House is finally out after much waiting and it is awesome. Best one in a long time and good one to watch after waiting so long for it to come out. The wait for the next episode of Heroes better be just as good in comparison to the wait… oh it better.
Anyway, trailer for 28 Weeks Later is up and I must say I am most intrigued to see it. Though Danny Boyle and Cillian Murphy did Sunshine instead, which is looking more and more awesome, this sequel actually looks half decent enough to go see. Plus zombies. Everyone loves zombies. Just like how everyone loves wild flowers and mutant hamsters.
Much tiredness going on for the last few days that’s affected my regular blog updating skills, but increased my catatonic movie watching skills. But stuff has been happening…
Professional help of awesome was given to the editing of Pictures of You over the weekend. My role in its post production is to go round to Ben’s house, watch him edit for a minute or two, start playing his xBox for an hour or two, look back to see he’s still editing and then play some more. By Friday the cutting was looking alright, but, after an actual professional editor had herself come and had some fun on it, I returned on Sunday to find a rather different looking film, many time better. Heidi (editor extraordinaire) has proposed to keep helping out on the cut of the film and I think Ben secretly breathed himself on huge sigh of relief. Just as long as evidence of some pretty bad camera work is still kept left out. She’s pretty damn awesome editor too if I haven’t mentioned it yet.
Capturing of footage on Spit-Takes is next to done. Still one scene left to film and tomorrow will be the recording of the voice-over track and a rough cut should be done by Saturday, just in time for mega drinking… hopefully.
Jon’s operation has been totally successful and there have been only minor complications at worst. Awesomeness as he’ll just be recovering now and we’re all breathing sighs of relief and joy.
To add to the joy, Dylan Moran is back for another performance and this time, this year, I shall have money to go. Plus in June, Mike Patton and Peeping Tom are playing at the St James and I’m even more in for that. Amusing as it’s only being out of Auckland, do I go to more shows there. Just got an announcement for the Mountain Goats to come up and my jar of happy-joy will burst with happy-joy delight.
And the upcoming coolness that will be Stardust finally has a trailer out and it looks awesome. You can check out the youtube clip…
…or download a proper quality of it here.
For ultimate viewing, one should watch both at the same time while wearing 3-D glasses and getting a massage from midget monkeys… hot.
Realising to myself I haven’t updated the blog in several days, which is pretty slack by recent standards, but I have been a tad busy lately… And its starting to get very cold around now, really quickly…
Picked up a ridiculous amount of video store hours this week which is almost killing my social life if I actually had one. Though there are some small drinks planned this weekend, which will no doubt feel very deserved.
Editing on Pictures of You continues and starting to take shape and form more and more. A minor set back of hard drive space happening when it was realised the external purchased by Ben was a USB and not firewire… silly, silly man.
Spit-Takes: A Mouthful of Comedy is almost done shooting! After much shooting over each other’s clashing schedules, there just remains voice overs, a cafe scene and miscellaneous montage shots to be done. It’s good considering daylight savings has kicked in and that leaves a lot less time to shoot during the day by our timing of things. Editing commencing soon too.
In negotiations for a job for the museum, but that’s at a really early process and not much can be said about so.
Oh, and I’m now a paid tutor at Uni starting Thursday. Which just gets the mega lolz from people considering I dropped out of that place years ago. It’ll be interesting to see how this situation will turn out. No doubt it’ll involve masses of students, things on fire, a small child saying “don’t drink the water” and me riding a rhino into battle… Awesome.
But not quite as awesome as blowing up super-huge sand sculptures and playing them backwards, in reverse…
There was also a really cool Stardust trailer-of-sorts up on Youtube over the weekend, but it looks like that’s been taken down. It was very loose in how it was put together and obviously not the proper final trailer (much like the first 300 one), but the film looks really good and with such an awesome cast and being based on one of my (if not the) favourite books, it’s gonna be great. I always dreamed I’d adapt or be involved in adapting it into a film, but it looks like they’ve done it right with this one and besides, I’ve still got my plans for that Tolkien rings thing book and that one about that English boy and magic school… Oh… wait…