It’s been a few weeks since the FilmAid broadcast and I’m still taken aback by the magnitude of what occurred: /Filmcast listeners donated over $13,500, and directors like Bryan Singer and Jason Reitman decided to join us to help raise awareness for a worthy cause as part of a 10-hour long broadcast. We’ve already released three parts to this broadcast — featuring Jon Chu, Rian Johnson, and David Wain — but there are many more interesting parts to come.
In the meantime, thanks to all those who participated in some way. Your tweets, donations, and kind words were a constant encouragement that a bunch of film geeks can do good for the world.
[O]ne key thing that I forgot is that to a large degree, these interviews function as a stand-in for the story itself. So you’re being asked to re-tell the story you already told on paper, for those who don’t know it, rather than have a conversation that builds on the existing information. I remember subconsciously chafing against this at the time, thinking, Why is she asking me these dumb questions? But I blame myself completely for that part.
I like Daylight Saving Time, and the advantages it brings more than make up for the slight disruption in my schedule. In fact, the most annoying thing to me about the DST changeovers is hearing people complain about them. The “lost hour of sleep” is especially rich. Who are these hothouse flowers who always get exactly the same amount of sleep except for that terrible day in March?
From the NYTimes and the former CFO of Lehman Brothers comes a frightening prospect: throwing your entire being into a specific endeavor, only to realize at the end of it that maybe it wasn’t all worth it:
I didn’t have to be on my BlackBerry from my first moment in the morning to my last moment at night. I didn’t have to eat the majority of my meals at my desk. I didn’t have to fly overnight to a meeting in Europe on my birthday. I now believe that I could have made it to a similar place with at least some better version of a personal life. Not without sacrifice — I don’t think I could have “had it all” — but with somewhat more harmony.
I had the privilege of shooting the Pacific Northwest Regionals Yo-Yo Championship this weekend at The Armory in the Seattle Center. I didn’t really know what to expect, but I had guessed that it would either be 1) a few guys doing some mediocre yo-yo tricks, or 2) an awesome display of talent from a subculture that I was only barely aware of. It was definitively the latter. Hundreds of people showed up at The Armory (dozens of yo-yo enthusiasts, along with their parents). These people have spent thousands of hours honing their skills and it shows. After watching them do a myriad of yo-yo tricks over the course of two days, I started to realize the appeal: there’s something magical about the ability to make a small, circular device at your fingertips appear to defy gravity.
For the entire shoot, I used only my Canon 5D Mark III and my 50mm f/1.4 lens along with my trusty 70-200mm f/2.8. There are unique challenges to shooting a yo-yo competition that I did not anticipate. You are shooting in a low-light environment, in a situation where both the subject and an object in the subject’s hands are moving rapidly. Thus, I had to shoot with the aperture wide open (f/2.8 or lower) but still be focused on the subject to get some decent bokeh out of it AND have a high shutter speed to freeze the action, lest both subject and his yo-yo become blurred beyond recognition. For most of these shots, I used an ISO of 2000 combined with f/2.8 and a shutter speed of 1/400th to 1/500th of a second. As expected, the Mark III’s high-ISO performance was exceptional.
I took a few hundred shots and only a few dozen were at a sharpness that I’d consider to be usable. There were two failures here: one is the fact that I haven’t mastered all the intricacies of the Mark III’s incredibly complex autofocus system, and the other is the fact that the 50mm f/1.4’s focusing motor just doesn’t feel like it’s well-designed for action. After some experimentation, I realized that all I really needed to make some compelling shots (compelling for me, at least) was to try and capture these performers’ expressions as sharply as possible. If the yo-yo was in focus, that was an added bonus.
Video on the other hand was much easier. I shot at 60 fps and ran the shutter speed fairly constant at 1/125, thus giving me the freedom to close down the aperture significantly. Even so, maintaining focus was challenging on some occasions. Note that I was going hand-held for nearly all of these shots, carrying a very heavy lens with no rig, and trying to focus simultaneously.
Here’s a video I put together of the event:
And here’s video of Zach Gormley, who I believe was this year’s champion. After you watch the mind-blowing things he does in this video, you won’t be surprised:
A small group of trolls somehow confuse these sites for a town square. It is not. This blog is not a forum where I am obligated to give equal time to every crackpot conspiracy theorist, birther or intellectually lazy wanker out there. To be blunt, I don’t give a flying fuck at a rolling donut about these jackhole’s opinions. These folk need to rapidly disabuse themselves from believing other people’s blog’s are an open invitation for whatever ignorance or ill thought out nonsense they are peddling. Therefore, consider this a warning not to waste your time: I do not care about the output of your cognitive biases, I am disinterested in the myths you cherish, I care little for the mass media rumors that influence you, or the heuristics you believe in. I especially detest the unsupported, commonly believed narratives that you constantly use in the artificial construct you erroneously call reality.
Over at /Film, we’ve just launched a fundraising drive to raise $10,000 for FilmAid. The request? Donate as much as possible at FilmAid’s website, even if it’s just $1. The reward? A 10-hour long broadcast of the /Filmcast, featuring lots of fun guests from our show’s past.
I will admit that I was a bit skeptical of FilmAid at first, as I know many will be. Why provide film and media training to a people that desperately also need basic necessities such as food and water? To be clear, those things are still important, and if you are a person who only donates to those types of causes, I still think that is great. But when you read about the work that FilmAid does, I hope you’ll realize that it’s also essential.
I know that crowdfunding at the scale I dreamed it is probably not possible. But I still have a vision that thousands of people will each donate a little bit. Whether we meet our goal that way or not, I hope we succeed and show that a few film fans can still change the world. Won’t you join us and donate today?
Here are a few shots and bits of dialogue from the trailers for A Good Day To Die Hard that didn’t make it into the final film. I hate it when movies do this. Assume some spoilers for the film follow.
Early on in the trailer, a woman is seen stripping out of a leather suit after riding a motorcycle. These shots in the trailer do not appear in the film.
Dialogue between McClane and his cabbie is different. The “Are you a cop?” exchange doesn’t take place in the film at all.
Instead of the “I could’ve done that” that he says in the film, McClane junior says “Don’t encourage him” in this elevator scene.
In the film’s climactic action sequence, McClane and McClane junior jump through a glass window through a glass ceiling and into a pool. This shot in the trailers appears to be taken from that scene (John McClane’s clothing matches), but I don’t believe this shot appears anywhere in the film.
