Solid detective work.
Parking Lot Movie
I really enjoyed this. Available for $0 on Amazon Prime. A great antidote to overhyped action hero fare, and probably the sort of thing someone who appreciates abandoned malls would like.
There’s probably nothing worse than poets working in parking lots.
What’s A Tut?
I don’t know. But I probably need some.
I Keep Doing This
Total motor skills fail.
Get Jack To Where You Once Belonged
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDcrzD18gLs
That’s better.
Is This The Same Guy?
The narrator from the Gibson mini-doc sounds like the voice we all must have heard on half a billion educational videos. Who is that guy? Is it the same person narrating the above (always timely) video on maintaining classroom discipline? It’s twenty years before the Gibson video.
Down in the Sand
Alan Splet, who worked with David Lynch, remains my sound design hero. And we all acknowledge Ben Burtt. But these Doooooon guys (Mark Mangini and Theo Green) put on a show. I realized from the first minute watching it that the sound was going to be fantastic, and a new article provides some insight:
By way of explaining it to me, Mangini ground his work boot into the soft patch of sand that he had dusted with Rice Krispies. The sand produced a subtle, beguiling crunch, and Villeneuve broke out into a big smile. Though he’d heard it plenty of times in postproduction, he had no idea what the sound designers had concocted to capture that sound.
“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something I got really traumatized by with my early movies, where you spend years working on a screenplay, then months shooting and editing it, and then right at the end, the sound guy comes and you barely have enough time.”
By hiring his sound designers early and setting them loose, Villeneuve could even take some of their discoveries and weave them into Hans Zimmer’s score, producing a holistic aural experience where the percussive music composition and pervasive sound design can sometimes be mistaken for one another.
And much like a band, the sounds of “Dune” benefited from some intriguing vocalists. To create the Voice, a persuasive way of speaking that allows Paul and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) to draw on the power of their female ancestors — a witchy order called the Bene Gesserit — Villeneuve and his sound team cast three older women with smoky, commanding voices, then layered their line readings over those of Chalamet and Ferguson.
– Kyle Buchanan, NYT
One of the older women with a smoky voice? Marianne Faithfull.
High In The Sky . . .
. . . is what you would have to be to come up with this.
Inversion is building earth-orbiting capsules to deliver goods anywhere in the world from outer space. To make that a reality, Inversion’s capsule will come through the earth’s atmosphere at about 25 times as fast as the speed of sound . . .
Inversion aims to develop a four-foot-diameter capsule carrying a payload equivalent to the size of a few carry-on suitcases by 2025.
And one day, a shortcut through space could allow for unimaginably fast deliveries — like delivering a New York pizza to San Francisco in 45 minutes.
As you might imagine, there has been no shortage of venture capital to bolster this vision. Story here.
Anamorphic Tesla
“I made from washing machines, televisions, computers, radios, printers, microwaves, videos, speakers, lamps, and various electro appliances portrait of Nikola Tesla, without his invention of alternating current would have none of them could work. This anamorphosis is 3D installation with the resulting 2D effect.”
– Czech artist Patrik Proško