Yet another 100 Best Films list from AFI. The genres they chose are kinda odd, but there is a great interview clip with Harold Ramis in which he explains the duration of Phil's existential stay in Punxsutawney in Danny Rubin's original script. He also explains Phil's ingenious mechanism for keeping track of how many Groundhog Days he's lived through.
Harold Ramis talks about how much “real” time passes for Phil Conners.
The Writers Guild Foundation is having their annual Screenwriting Craft Seminar in LA. I went to one a couple of years ago and it was pretty good as far as panels go since they were crammed full of working and accomplished screenwriters. It's not nearly as advertised nor attended as those "commercial" seminars and there are way more panelists from recognizable movies/shows. It's pretty easy to talk one-on-one with the screenwriters, especially since about half of the attendees were also WGA members, meaning they've done at least some pro work. It's $150 for the general public. If you're itching to hear directly from people in-the-know, it's probably worth checking out:
Saturday, July 19. Tickets & Info: www.wgfoundation.org
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
I got a cryptic e-mail last week from Lo asking of I'd read Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins 2005. She also made me swear not to attempt to find it or research it at all. Um...OK.
I got a call from Beca today telling me that a package from Lori arrived with a comic book shaped parcel inside...plus Trader Joe's 73% dark chocolate!
When I got home and opened it up, there indeed was Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins 2005. Lori had also mailed me with instructions to skip the first story. I flipped open to look at the contents and see which page to start on, and my eyes landed on this double-stuff credit:
Pg. 27 IF A MAN BE CLAY!
Steve Purcell: Script
Mike Mignola: Pencils
"Oh my god! Look at this!" I exclaimed holding out the book to Beca. I had the pleasure of working with Steve on the ill-fated Frankenstein feature at ILM, and was a fan of Salmon Max and Gumby's Winter Fun Special before that. And Mike Mignola - well hell, you know who he is...
What can I say? Pure awesomeness! Complete "day the mail-away Boba Fett action figure arrived" awesomeness!
Best. Batman. Story...Evar.
But wait, there's more!
I finally found Scott Pilgrim, a comic I've been looking for for months after seeing a review on TRS which reminded me that Scott McCloud featured it in is epic lecture tour and told everyone to read it immediately. After finishing my Batman comic, I dove into the Canadian-style manga, and was blown away! More pure awesomeness!
I got the same feeling reading these comics tonight that I got watching Spaced the first time:
"Hey, someone went to the trouble of making this just for me. Kind of a small audience, but...thanks!"
I'll be reading Volume 2 of Scott Pilgrim later tonight and I'll be trying desperately to find Volumes 3 and 4 in Singapore this weekend!
Yay! Awesome stuff from awesome friends written by still other aweome friends and Torontonian manga masters! And now I've shared them with you...go get all this stuff right now. Go! I mean it. Admit it, your life could use some extra awesomeness right about now.
Gee whiz, I haven't even had the chocolate yet!
I've only had to wait a few months to be able to tell folks about the game that's being developed at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, but my friends on the game team have been toiling away for over a year in secrecy!
In any public presentation about the studio, we've all had to dance around our video game IP, usually joking about the fact that all we could tell folks was that it was a game for a handheld platform and that they had a 50% chance of guessing which.
So here's where you can find out all about it:
Official Star Wars: Clone Wars Website at LucasArts
Interview with Project Lead (and fellow giant dog owner) Feargus Carroll on IGN
"New Star Wars: The Clone Wars game coming to DS" at Pocket Gamer
This is really exciting news and the game team has been working really hard to make this an awesome game!
YouTube has announced a virtual screening room for Indie filmmakers. YouTube will highlight 4 new films per week. These films will be picked by an editorial panel. They are looking for submissions. You send your query to ytscreeningroom@youtube.com and see if they take yours. Filmmakers can have a "buy now" button to sell their work.
YouTube gets a Susan Ee thumbs up.
Susan Ee
A few years ago, I added this feature to Altera's SOPC Builder product, back in 2005 or thereabouts. I remember filling out info for the patent discovery process, but thought it died there. Today, I got email saying the patent has been issued.
Check it out: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7331022.html
Woohoo!
(Of course, the feature doesn't exist anymore... now nobody can use it!)
Downtown Cedar Rapids was under 31 feet of water yesterday. It's receding today. Cedar Rapids has the nearest airport to the university but the university is just south of that in Iowa City. 16 university buildings are flooded but the last I heard, the library is still okay. The University of Iowa library is special in that if you name any great American author, there's a pretty good chance that his/her senior or master's thesis is in that library. University of Iowa has the oldest writing program in the country and because of its prestige, it has attracted many of the greatest writers in America's history. And their very first collection of stories or novel manuscript, later published or not, may be sitting on those shelves.
I'm sad to know that the university museum is flooded. The last time I took classes at Iowa, I spent several hours wandering around that museum. My expectation was that it would be tiny and pitiful but I was blown away by their wonderful collection of African artifacts. It was a gorgeous gem of a museum.
Anyway, I'm now seriously wondering whether their summer session is going to happen at all. I would lose my flight tickets, a month of prepaid rent and a great opportunity to expand my writing... but it's hard to feel too sorry for myself in light of what others have lost.
Susan Ee
http://feraldream.com/
Unfortunately, Cinefex is not quite the magazine it used to be. Throughout the 80s, each quarterly issue concentrated on the effects of one or two movies and was not afraid to get very technical in its descriptions of advances in optical compositing or miniature construction.
Back then, there were only a handful of big effects-driven films a year to report on. These days, in order not to exclude anyone, Cinefex often reports on five or six films in each issue, and often the short articles that often feel like they might as well simply read: "So, they used computers to do the effects." Needless to say, I'm enjoying cracking open the vintage issues.
For my current research, I'm starting with issue #7, which is entirely dedicated to Willis O'Brien and has some of the best information on the effects in King Kong, Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young.
Found some great material for my chapter on the frequent inability of on-set puppets to live up to the expressive range of stop-motion or CG creatures that are intercut or share the screen with them. The full-sized Kong s great, but he won't make you cry. The next Cinefex issue on the stack has an article on Little Shop of Horrors, which is the stunning exception to the rule about weak puppet performances. Of course, they wrung a bit more fidelity out of Audrey II's performance by undercranking the camera...but I'm getting ahead of myself!
