Follow Your Inspiration

1-Second Nap Your Way to Powerful Solutions. "I should mention that you should never take your superconscious inspiration for granted. Like the story The Boy Who Cried Wolf, if you don't take action on your superconscious revelations, they will occur with less and less frequency. Inspiration is a personal gift. Your inspirations make you unique. To not act on them is to waste untold potential." Many of my script ideas are from dreams and flash of daydreams. Let your inspiration be your guide to unrealized potential of yourself.

Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System

Apple Pro Training Series : Optimizing Your Final Cut Pro System is probably the best reference book for all levels of FCP users. I wish this book came out early last year so that I wouldn't have to jump through many trials and errors when I started out in the post production field.

People think an editor works alone, but he is actually supported by many people, not just assistant editors. With increasingly sophisticated and complex digital editing systems, editors are overwhelmed with options beyond making simple cuts of early days. Before becoming an editor, before you make single cut, you better be knowledgeable in this digital technologies have to offer in order to succeed.

This book goes beyond using FCP for editing, filled with technical details of emerging digital technologies that are employed in the professional field. Any aspiring editor should be well-aware of the technologies and terminologies in this book in order to secure a job, in my opinion. The book can be daunting at first, but the details become clear and handy as you get more exposure and gain more experience handling FCP systems and digital, high-definition elements.

I believe you'll appreciate this book more and more as you start out as an assistant editor, prepping editing stations for the editors, setting up & troubleshooting FCP systems for clients, and become more versatile and proficient in the taming wild, proliferating technical details of digital video and editing.

I'm waiting for the day when I will implement and manage XSAN at a post facility beyond my humble editing system in my room, with the help from this book. I simply wish there was a book like this for Avid editors as well. And I eagerly await for next edition of this book as technologies progress.

Digital Domain sold to Michael Bay?!

This news is sooo last month, but I wonder what James Cameron's part in this deal. Is he preping another special effects company for his new movie(s) and venture to 3D films?

I guess this also means Digital Domain is fully committed for Transformers live action film due next year. More than meets the eyes!

X-Men : Extreme Makeover

The secrets of anti-aging of actors in X-Men 3 and more. I don't know about you, but Ian McKellen looked weird without his wrinkles.

The site features awesome archive of past sfx interviews. Go check it out.

I Liked It, Didn't Love It

I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out offers a good overview of the development process inside the studio system as well as production companies. Everything begins from a script, and I hoped I could gain an advantage as to find specific details about development process from this book. However, despite what Amazon reviewers said about this book, I felt the book lacked specific details and lacked concrete examples from the writers of this book who are development executives themselves. With light 176 pages, they fill the book with somewhat trivial info, like discoursing into the history of film itself in a chapter.

I would've more welcome their experience as how they developed materials into a full-fledging film production, to a theatrical release, but you won't find that in the book. I wonder if their UCLA feature film development classes' notes are any different from this book.

If you are completely unaware of a film development process AFTER a script is finished and enters a market, this book is for you. This book is intended for future development executives, and does a good job introducting that career path. But if you are somewhat familiar with the process, skip this book, and concentrating on the writing your scripts.

Cars

Now that Pixar is a part of mighty Disney empire, its feature animations are big summer animation releases, until Disney animation studio can get their acts together. John Lasseter finally returns to the directing duty after long absence with a fine form. The early net reviews were quite mixed, but I knew I could trust John and his Pixar team and I had a blast of time with other kids in the theater.

The movie is lush and glitters like sunlight reflecting on water. If it weren't for the talking cars, the scenes were breathtakingly real. I never described any Pixar animation as photo-realistic, but this movie certainly showcases Pixar technical prowess. They are only few years away from making realistic humans for their animations, save for Final Fantasy: the Spirits within. He also features somewhat over-the-top directions, even though the movie is set around race cars. Pixar animations have featured extremely streamlined, efficient storytelling, but I felt some of the scenes in this animation were a little sentimenal, sometimes indulgent, and showy. I think John Lasseter wanted to push his directorial skills to the limit with advances in CG technologies as well as healthy competitive spirit with other Pixar directors, mainly Brat Bird, in my humble opinion.

It's clearly not John Lasseter's best efforts to the date, but the movie is still the best I've seen in this year. Now if you will excuse me, I gotta go buy some Cars toycars for my kid cousins.

Ratatouille trailer is a hit! Brad Bird's direction in this little piece is simply superb. I especially loved it since I'm going to Paris later this month to sample their finest cheese, wine, and beautiful parisians. Oui, j'adore Paris!

One Man Band, a short animation attached to Cars was disappointing considering their previous excellent efforts. The idea was fine, but somewhere in the execution, it lacked... pathos. I certainly hope this doesn't mean Pixar's story department people are spreading too thin to work on many projects at once in their pipelines.

All about 24p (with DVX100)

Excellent, technical overview of the Panasonic AG-DVX100A & 24p post production process by Adam Wilt. A must read for editors working today and tomorrow.

What Netflix could teach Hollywood

"The result is a vast movie meritocracy that gives a film a second or third life simply because--get this--it's good.

That's right: every day, almost two of every three movies ever put onto DVD are rented by a Netflix customer. "Americans' tastes are really broad," says Reed Hastings, Netflix's chief executive. So, while the studios spend their energy promoting bland blockbusters aimed at everyone, Netflix has been catering to what people really want--and helping to keep Hollywood profitable in the process.

Today, Netflix sends and receives 700 million little packages a year, a logistical operation that has few peers outside of FedEx, UPS or the post office itself. The company's new head of operations, in fact, used to be the postmaster general.

Netflix has 39 of these warehouses around the country, one in each major metropolitan area. Because first-class mail service takes only a day within a 50-mile radius, most customers get a new movie two days after dropping one in a mailbox.

You can understand the doubts, too. At a time when cable and phone companies are running fat data pipes into homes, Netflix can seem a lot like the Sears catalog of the early 21st century. Surely, home movies will soon look more like iTunes than Netflix. Downloading, not envelope stuffing, is the future--or so people have been saying for years.

The problem is that the studios have sold the exclusive digital rights for most movies (which don't apply to physical DVDs) to a television channel, like HBO. The agreements last for years and, since they bring in millions of dollars, the studios aren't about to stop signing them.

So what's saving Netflix--allowing it to thrive when the technology to obliterate it already exists--is yet another attempt by Hollywood to hold onto a fading business model. Remember, this is the industry that filed lawsuits in the 1970s to prevent people from watching movies at home. "At the heart of any good investment, I tell investors, is a contrarian thesis that they and the company believe very deeply," Hastings said, "and that the rest of the world thinks is crazy." Netflix proved itself, but can it last? The distribution business is in such flux that's hard to place a bet, yet.

Underemployed, underpaid, over-qualified.

In any competitive industry, underemployed people regularly work at underpaid positions that they are over-qualified. For every working professional, there are 10 or more equally qualified people who can do the same job, maybe cheaper or better or faster. (That's how you secure professionals for your low-budget projects, but that's another story.)

I just got a reply back from an editor job I applied for a week ago, and the producer responded back to thank everyone applying for the position. (Now that's rare considering you normally don't hear a peep unless you are asked to come in for an interview.) He mentioned that he went over 400(!!) responses before he chose a well-qualified editor for the position. Simply. Amazing.

Honestly, I've been slacking off a little these days since I was fortunate enough to secure few gigs last few months to support myself. Until now. This reply email was a cold bath of reality for me and lit hot coals burning my feet. To the Final Cut Pro system!

Oh, I do remember who treated me professionally and who cared not or had no professional decency. Sure, I might not be successful enough to make them care, but I do remember that the best revenge is living well, succeeding in my chosen profession.

So the moral of the today's story is: get rich or die tryin'? No. Be prepared to work hard until you make your breakthrough. What's that breakthrough? When I don't have to worry about lining up next gig and missing my rent, I will consider THAT as my breakthrough.

First Time Director

by Gil Bettman should be THE bible to every novice director dreaming of breakout. I've been on too many indie/student productions where everything that can go wrong, did go wrong, ended up being disappointments for everyone involved because the directors were unprepared or uninformed. Every aspiring director should study this book front ot back and measure himself up because making a movie involves more than shooting stuff with cameras.

This book is also invaluable to other participants in a film production because it provides you with an insight how a director works and reasons for his "madness". For an example, an actor would gain insights to the demands of a director on the set, even though that demands may seem unreasonable to the actor. Or an editor, like yours truly, can collaborate with the director more efficiently and creatively. You don't have to read the whole book for this as Mr. Bettman wisely included a summary at the end of every chapter, even though I strongly encourage to read the whole chapter pertaining to your profession.

"The director is responsible for everything, even that which he has no control over." is the mantra that every director needs to remember in the process of making a movie. It's not an easy job, unlike a popular image of a director sitting in his director's chair calling shots. But this book makes it a lot easier, by informing the seemingly impossible tasks that befall upon a novice director. I wish I had this book when I was in film school, and it may have led me to a different sort of path in this industry.

How Japanese style Illustration works

PingMag has a greata article on Gez Fry. You might have catched one of his illustrations. His take on American comic, "In America for example they treat comics like artwork. They keep it really clean and collect it, which sounds cool from an art point of view, but the whole industry is completely deteriorating because it takes too much time and effort to create the pics. They can’t ever get a long story like this and have to keep it really simple - therefor the reader’s finally lost interest!... On the one hand it’s a real shame to throw things away, but then you have to make a choice: art for the sake of collecting or art for the sake of the story - which makes the story more fun to read.

First of, they have an assembly line to make the comic: 6 different people each in charge of different aspects of the comic, which then often feels a little disjointed. In Japan there is quite a hierarchic system: one boss having a vision and a style telling all his assistants exactly what to draw… which seems to work better for the story in the end." I guess that's one of the reasons people subscribe to Auteur theory in Films.

X-Men the Last Stand

X-Men the Last Stand
Originally uploaded by beatmania.

As the last movie of the supposedly trilogy of X-Men movies, it tries too hard but ultimately fails achieving one supreme goal: failure to entertain. There are a lot of ideas that are thrown together hastily that offers no payoff despite all the "sacrifices" made by the beloved X-Men characters.

If you were expecting Wolverine kicking major ass, as aluded in the trailer, you'll be disappointed. Do you remember the awesome fight of him and Deathstrike in X-Men 2? The sacrifice of Jean Grey to save other X-Men against the mighty tide? Magneto lifts Golden Gate bridge, but it's not awe-inspiring as his escape from his plastic prison.

Sure, it made a boat load of money over last weekend, there WILL be more X-Men, but don't expect an entertaining action movie for your discerning tastes.