The Editblog

One of my movie memories that goes back many, many years was watching Siskel and Ebert giving their thumbs up and thumbs down to movie after movie after movie. I would love to know how many episodes that I TiVoed over the years. Gene Siskel died in 1999 and Richard Roeper took over and used his thumbs with Roger Ebert for some 8 years. That show was good as well. Ebert had battled cancer over the years and had to take an extended absence from the show in 2006. Further complications kept him away from the show until it ended and they left him disfigured from the various surgeries in and around his neck and jaw area. There’s a good summary on Wikipedia.

The purpose of this post is to point to a November 19 article titled Siskel & Ebert at the Jugular that Roger published on his blog. It’s an amazing essay on his current physical apperance and what it’s like to “to resemble the Phantom of the Opera.” When great writers open up about personal issues you get the best reading, hands down. But just as good as the essay are the hundreds of comments that follow. Ebert personally responds to many of them and his comments are a great extension to a great essay. It’s a good Sunday afternoon read.

Self-Reliant Filmmaking posted their Best Film List, By Alphabet. There seem to be some rules.

1. Pick one film to represent each letter of the alphabet.*

2. The letter “A” and the word “The” do not count as the beginning of a film’s title, unless the film is simply titled A or The, and I don’t know of any films with those titles.

3. Thanks to some clarification by The Siren, movies are stuck with the titles their owners gave them at the time of their theatrical release.

4. Films that start with a number are filed under the first letter of their number’s word. 12 Monkeys would be filed under “T.”

5. Link back to Blog Cabins in your post so that I can eventually type “alphabet meme” into Google and come up #1, then make a post where I declare that I am the King of Google.

6. If you’re selected, you have to then select 5 more people.

Sound like fun so here goes:

This was much harder than I thought. As soon as you decide on one movie you like with a particularly popular letter then you will think of 3 others. And then there’s the letters Z and X. They present their own problems. And also there are some letters where you really can’t think of anything! If you are a movie buff then give this little exercise a try.

Report: Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Chinese Democracy’ due Nov. 23 >> LiveDaily

Well this is probably the most official word that has ever come out about the release of Chinese Democracy for what Guns N Roses fans that may be left out there. Even though it’s probably not really Guns N Roses without (at the very least) Slash on the guitar. So enjoy this You Tube clip of “The Blues” until the album (supposedly) drops in November.

Here’s some fun weekend viewing. The latest of Wired had a page in their music section called Director’s Cuts. From the magazine:

Six emerging auteurs who are making music videos cool again.

Here they are (and they are pretty cool):

(more…)

Check out this behind the scenes video from photographer Chase Garvis that details a recent promo shoot for the Kung Fu HD network. They used the 1000 frames per second Phantom HD camera to record a kung fu guy fighting the elements. I know you’re asking the same question I did … there’s a Kung Fu HD network?

I’m not a big Nine Inch Nails fan but I have to say that after reading this article on Wired about their current tour and the high-tech show they put on I have to say that I really want to see it. This one line from the article says it all:

For the band’s current Lights in the Sky tour, Reznor has not only raised the bar for what’s possible in an arena tour, but has also produced what could arguably be one of the most technologically ambitious rock productions ever conceived.

I love a big arena rock-n-roll spectacle. This makes me wish even more that Pink Floyd would tour again but that’s not likely since founding member Richard Wright recently died.

Holy crap this is amazing. Things Best Said pointed to a promo for the UK’s Channel 4 special Stanley Kubrick programming. When promotions go right!

If you love those pop culture top 10, 100, 1000 lists then you have to pick up the June 27 & July 4 issue of Entertainment Weekly. The issue attempts to name and explain the “1000 best movies, albums, books & more of the last 25 years.” One category is tech: The 25 innovations that changed entertainment. Avid makes an appearance at number 12:

The website doesn’t have any description so here’s that EW says about Avid, from the magazine:

The movie-editing software was among the first to let filmmakers splice and dice digitally.

That’s pretty good list placement for a tool used in such an unseen and under-appreciated craft like editing. Avid placed above such things as Netflix (#16), Amazon.con (#19) and the Game Boy (#20) …. of course who really knows how official these kinds of lists are anyway. But they sure are fun to read and discuss. Click over and you can view the other lists online, like movies, television and music among others.

If you go to the movies regularly you’ve probably seen promos for those concert special events that are broadcast to select theaters for “one night only.” I recently worked on a multicam concert for Toby Mac and his new Alive and Transported concert gets the big screen treatment on Monday, June 9.  You many remember Toby from his song “Gone”, it was one of the early HD videos featured in Apple’s Quicktime HD galleries. If you want to see a fun, high energy concert on the big screen then this is a great one to see. It was originally shot on Panasonic Varicam and has been uprezed to 2K for the digital projection. I was amazed at how well the image held up. Unlike a lot of multicam concerts that take a live switch as the base of the edit, this show was completely cut from scratch by myself and my friends at Broken Poet Productions. You can really dig into the material and find the best stuff. The music and the stage show are both very high energy and the edit supports it. The final CD/DVD version of the show is just over an hour and 15 minutes … and has 3278 edits.

First up … If you’ve never seen the Honda Cog commercial then click right here and check it out. In an age where we Tivo our programs and skip the ads as fast a possible to avoid being sold to every eight minutes, it takes something really unique to make us pause and actually watch, rewatch and discuss an advertisement. The Honda Cog ad really did a good job as it was unique and there was though and care put into its creation. Explore the ad from its Wikipedia page and you’ll see what I mean.

Honda has followed up the Cog piece with a new one involving skydivers called Difficult is Worth Doing. They attempted a “live” commercial as they used the skydivers to spell out the word Honda. It doesn’t seem as impressive as the 600+ take Cog commercial but there is a real urgency as the skydivers fall. Apparently it’ll be edited into the final spot in June. Here it is:

Second, how about trying your hand at identifying 20 movie soundtracks! I missed most of them but it was fun to try. This is citizen advertising…. how often are you going to hear an excerpt from The Last Starfighter these days?

Find the answers here.