http://trfilms.com/notes TR Films Online: Journal Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:07:55 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I’ve been using a Letus 35mm lens adapter of late, and recently added a selective focus lens to my kit of primes. You will recognize the effect from TV commercials - also, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly used the exact same lens for some parts. This video was directed by my ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=37 Yesterday Jesse and I put our Wolf Man movie online… check it out :) http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=36 I saw it earlier this year dubbed in Italian because I had a hunch that the lapdance would be in the European release - sure enough, it was. It was nice to rewatch it in English, too. The extended version is better than the one released theatrically because the cut ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=34 The movie of the year opens in NY today. Expertly done documentary; there’s a great deal of humor, and spectacular depth. A really excellent film about war. Trailer here. http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=33 I was a very big fan of The Power Of Nightmares (available at the Internet Archive, also serialized by Wholphin) by documentarian Adam Curtis. A new series of his was broadcast last month in England, called The Trap. I watched it following links from Disseminate, and I’d recommend that anyone do ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=32 It’s like V for Vendetta, but for rightwingers. http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=31 Karl Marx (our friend) has been working on an album-length remix of Holst’s “The Planets.” It is complete, and listenable/downloadable at this new webpage. Happy birthday, Mark. http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=30 Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Werner Herzog speak at the New York Public Library. (Event info.) He spoke with the Director of Public Programs there - apparently a friend of his - and was as insightful and entertaining as I could have hoped. Some memorable things he said, while ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=28 An Inconvenient Truth (see it if you didn’t yet) seems to have had the DVD cover, poster, etc. designed by a fan of the great horror manga Uzumaki. Uzumaki is a wonderful comic series in which a whole town becomes obsessed by/ infected by the uzumaki, or spiral shape. People go ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=35 I thought the main theme of The Queen was how Tony Blair sells out his progressive beliefs as soon as he thinks it will make him more powerful. He betrays the principles of everyone who believes in him to support a conservative power figure who doesn’t even respect him. (I ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=27 Some obvious similarities between the Mel Gibson film and the Jackass oeuvre: 1. Running toward the camera in slow motion, pursued by a huge ferocious animal. (It was this shot in Apocaliptico, exactly like the opening credits of Jackass Number 2, that made me laugh out loud and comment how similar ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=26 The Departed and Flags Of Our Fathers were great, and I urge anyone to see both. I found these meta-moments amusing: 1. In The Departed, one of the main characters gets to enact a film director fantasy and beat the shit out of his production team for not properly shooting an expensive, ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=25 Finished this music video I’ve been working on over the summer. View it here. Thanks to Gutz, who sang this song at 125% speed fifteen or twenty times. Gutz on MySpace. http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=24 Tony Jaa is the most amazing working martial arts star. Yesterday Mark and I saw him give a demonstration at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens and it was absolutely out-of-control. He did this form and used this high kick to launch an autographed soccer ball into the ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=23 Miguel: They should make a plugin which detects which areas are out of focus and applies more blur to them, narrowing depth of field even further Sam: There’s probably a way to simulate that Miguel: If digital cameras can tell the difference, so can After Effects Sam: All you’d need is a plug ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=22 At Monkeytown. Selfish Me is screening at 10.30 PM on May 18. I’ll be back from LA on Monday night; can’t wait to see the film on the huge screens. (Check out the rest of the Monkeytown film screening & other fun events calendar, too.) http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=21 Check out a new music video for Don Lennon, directed by my friend Sam Stephens. Last Comic Standing. Shot on HDV, a format Sam says is a pain in the neck to manage in post-production (weird compression and huge files). I was the Director of Photography, and my main note about ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=20 My friend Matt directed this commercial for Firefox; he is in contention for some cool prizes. I was the Director of Photography for the short. We shot on the AJ-SDX900, a nice powerful camera. Still, even with the 2/3″ chip size, it’s imposible to acheive any depth-of-field. It’s been a ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=19 Hello everyone! The Tribeca Festival screening schedule has been posted! So get your asses in gear and go see “Too Tough to Die”! http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=18 An interesting blog by John K. (The creator of Ren and Stimpy, among lots of other achievements.) Fans of Being There will be happy to hear that the director Hal Ashby intended to make all the raw footage available to editors-in-training. Edit your own Peter Sellers vehicle! Sounds fun. The link ... http://trfilms.com/notes/?p=17