Quote of the day
SwfMill glitch art
Swfmill is a program that will convert Flash .swf files into .xml and back again. I found a bunch of those cheesy Flash banner games here. I ran some of them through SwfMill and messed around with the XML files, and they turned out a little like this:
Video Jukebox entry
So I made this video for the Video Jukebox here in Winnipeg. You picked a song out of a hat and had 48 hours to make a video to go with it:
Can I kick it? from R Hill on Vimeo.
Compared to some of my other music videos, the rhythm in this was simple and easy to follow. I need to learn more about rhythm so I can do more complex things with it other than straight Mickey-Mousing.
The Video Jukebox was raising money for the upcoming Plastic Paper which I’m excited about.
“Trope”
Recently an acquaintance was describing an online film contest, and said most of the entries were, “filled with tropes.”
I like tropes. I’m fascinated by tropes. For a certain meaning of the word.
Here is a picture:
Calvin’s father is speaking. Calvin is thinking. There is a very good chance that you knew this. But why do you know?
And who was the first to think, “I need to show someone’s thoughts in my comic. How will I distinguish this from what they speak? I know, thoughts are puffier than speech.” I am impressed by someone who could make that mental leap.
The linguistic definition of a trope is along the lines of “using a word in something other than its literal meaning.” And that’s similar to what’s going on in this example. You can’t literally depict someone’s thoughts with an illustration, so we’ve invented the thought bubble to make it possible. And thoughts aren’t literally “puffier” than speech, but that’s how we depict it.
Does nobody say “cliche” anymore?
So I realize I’m being overly pedantic, but it feels to me like we’re losing a very nice word when people throw the word “trope” around in circumstances that have nothing to do with non-literal representation.
I think I partly blame movie reviewers. At some point, it became the in thing to say stuff like, “This movie uses the old trope of: good guys wear white hats, bad guys wear black hats.” (Which in itself is a fine use of the word. There’s no literal reason why someone would pick their hat colour based on their morals.) But they would never use the word “trope” in a complementary way, they wouldn’t talk about movies with “novel and innovative tropes.”
And it’s progressed to the point that people will use “trope” for anything where they recognize a pattern, without any consideration as to whether it’s trying to convey that non-literal meaning.
Is the “final girl” in a horror movie a trope, or is she a convention of the genre?
Cliche is a perfectly good word. Motif, another perfectly good word. Use them. Love them.
Bloody mary?
I don’t personally care for the bloody mary, but I would love to see charts like this for more drinks.
For example, there must be a reason why I like the saltiness of an olive with a gin martini but not with a vodka martini, and maybe if I saw the flavours of each charted out, it would be more clear.
Mouse or keyboard?
Maybe I’m atypical in this matter, but if you make your Flash game so that I control it with the keyboard, I would really rather not have to switch back to the mouse just to click “next level.” Especially if your first five levels are each ten seconds long? (Maybe your later levels are longer. I don’t know, because I stopped playing.)
“Photo realistic”
Here is some Youtube video of a robot that illustrates an issue I have sometimes when people describe a movie’s special effects as “photo realistic.” If I looked at a still photo of that robot, I might not distinguish it from a real guy. But if I watch it in movement, I instantly know it’s a robot.
I have the same problem with a lot of computer graphics in movies. They’ll look perfectly fine to me in stills, but there is something wrong with how they move. The things where actor’s face wrinkles are ironed out, like Patrick Stewart in Wolverine or Jeff Bridges in the new Tron movie, have this problem.
“We just need to find the right writer and director”
Oh, just that? Good to know the hard part is already done with.
From here via BoingBoing.
Movie Ratings
So I ran a scraper called Outwit Hub on the Rotten Tomatoes site and pulled a bunch of data. It’s not every single movie, but I think it’s a good representative swath. I used a good starting point and branched out one degree from there. I got over 2500 sample movies and the rating of each according to to “Top Critics,” “All Critics,” and the general “Audience.” I’ve graphed those all out relative to one another, and also relative to the reported box office, plus I did a series of them where I marked movies that were tagged with particular genres according to colour.
Most of what’s shown by the data isn’t too surprising: Action movies do good box office. Documentaries, even those rated very well by critics and audience, do not. The general audience is more forgiving to things rated poorly by critics. General audience rating correlates much more strongly with box office than critical rating.
Not all movies had box office data available. On the scatterplots with box office as the vertical axis, the band of dots along the bottom is movies that didn’t have this data available. I left them in because it would have cut my sample size in half.
I may need to do more. For example, see how almost everything is classified as “drama?” There are a bunch that are “horror & drama” or “action & drama.” There’s a Bill Martell article where he argues that “drama” is the default and that any good genre movie is really “drama plus genre” so it might be worth separating those that are classified only as drama and those that are classified only as genre.
In the Blink of an Eye
I’ve been reading Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye lately. It’s the second edition, which means it has almost half of it devoted to digital editing. I also read an “editing & post-production” book and “The Conversations” and watched a documentary called “The Cutting Edge” which are all pretty Murch-heavy. I need to find other editors who wrote about editing to balance out all the Murch I’ve just absorbed.
Hmm.
http://www.amazon.ca/Healthy-Edit-Creative-Techniques-Perfecting/dp/0240814460/
The title chapters make it sound a little elementary, just bound up with medical analogies. But I read an excerpt of a “Case Study” for a movie about a Reindeer.
http://www.amazon.ca/Cutting-Rhythms-Shaping-Film-Edit/dp/0240810147/
This one seems promising to take it in a different direction. The chapter titles show that it is primarily focused on rhythm, which is a narrow enough focus that it probably gets deep into it.