Arrgh gumpghyowser aahh ouch schhhh.
Faudrait que j’aille � Paris, l� o� on sait prendre soin des gens.
Oh, and happy new year to all of you.
What have you been up to since Christmas?
-Read Disgrace in two days.
Strong. Disturbing. I’m sure it’s already been optioned and will become a movie very soon (which is not necessarily a good thing).
-Saw Les Ordres (subtitled, which meant B. could watch it too).
That movie had made a very strong impression on me when I was a teenager. I know people who were put in jail during the October crisis and it’s amazing to think that this happened in Quebec, not so long ago. I was also amazed to see how I remembered entire lines and shots from the movie, even though I probably only saw it once or twice before.
-Saw House of Sand and Fog.
Since we’ve been deep into this whole « house thing », B. and I thought we had to see this movie. Overall a good movie, interesting in its shift between the point of views, but needs a tighter structure and less melodrama at the end (Cut that violin, will you? The images and emotions were strong enough.) One thing is for sure: see this movie and you’ll never look at your unopened mail in the same way again.
-Bought a laser printer.
With this new screenwriting thing I’m doing, printing drafts of 120 pages can take forever on an inkjet printer. It can also empty the cartridges very fast. Last time I needed to bring a draft to the producer, I visited 4 printing shops and neither one of them could print the script on the spot. Getting the screenplay to the producer on time turned into a nightmare, so I did a bit of research online, read the advertising brochures that came to my door and picked the HP LaserJet 1012, for 200$ (after rebate, full cartridge included). Installation was no problem at all (even though a lot of people complained about installation problems on epinions and cnet) and the machine is the fastest laser printer I’ve ever used. It’s also cute and tiny, which never hurts, right?
-Ate a lot of old style doughnuts.
Baked by my brother in law, just like my mom used to make them. Heaven with a glass of milk.
-Ate fabulous turkey soup.
Made by Blork, who has been feeding me like a little pig he’s planning on eating for New Year’s day. Maybe I should start to worry…
-Took a walk in beautiful old Boucherville.
Found the house of my dreams, facing the St-Lawrence river (any beautiful river/ocean would do).
-Finally made Mozilla my default browser.
That should make a lot of you happy.
Striking the right balance between hi-tech and lo-tech.
There’s a very interesting interview with Walter Murch on Apple’s Web site (linked via 2Blowhards). Murch is a famous film editor who was in film school in Los Angeles with Coppola and Lucas and who has been working more recently with director Anthony Minghella. There’s also a great book of conversations between Murch and Michael Ondaatje about the art of editing.
Murch, whose credits include �Apocalypse Now� and �The English Patient,� has a history of pushing tools as vigorously as he pursues the fluid cut. Still, he turned industry heads by choosing to cut �Cold Mountain� � an $80 million picture � on Final Cut Pro and several off-the-shelf Power Mac G4s. To keep it interesting, Murch conducted his experiment halfway across the world in rural Romania, where the film was shot to capture the look and feel of 19th-century North Carolina.
Are new editors missing anything by learning on non-linear editing systems instead of older systems, or is that older editors waxing nostalgic?
I think there are only two areas where something is missing. When you actually had to make the cut physically on film, you naturally tended to think more about what you were about to do. Which � in the right proportion � is a good thing to do. The cut is a kind of sacramental moment. When I was in grade school they made us write our essays in ink for the same reason. Pencil was too easy to erase.
The other �missing� advantage to linear editing was the natural integration of repeatedly scanning through rolls of film to get to a shot you wanted. Inevitably, before you ever got there, you found something that was better than what you had in mind. With random access, you immediately get what you want. Which may not be what you need.
I was in film school in San Francisco in 1990 and at the time, digital filmmaking tools weren’t available. I had to learn to cut movies on antique looking machines such as the upright Moviola and the 6-plate Steenbeck. Ah, the magic of the light coming out of 16mm footage viewed through a Steenbeck screen! I remember how surprised I was when our teacher showed us how to make a cut. I couldn’t believe you actually had to cut the movie and splice it back with tape, repeating the same movement from the picture track to the soundtrack. How exciting it was to actually hold the movie in my hands, cut it and put it back together, while checking the cut over and over again to get it right! I had often heard people refer to movies as a craft and it’s exactly how it felt. It was like weaving or even macram� (only the results were more interesting, of course).
A couple of years after I finished the film program, the school built a new Fine Arts building with all the most recent high tech tools available for the students. I felt envious yet I was glad I got to learn film editing the old fashioned way. The « cuts » I’ve done since then, on Premiere or Avid, are just not the same thing as the splices I did in film school.