The season finale of House aired about two weeks ago but I only caught it last night in HD on iTunes. I was keen to watch this one because it was shot on the Canon 5D SLR using photographic lenses, the first time anything like this has been done for a major TV show.
I’m a big fan of shooting HD with these Canons, I use a 7D after changing over from a Sony HDV. There’re compromises, pros and cons between the two. However the convenience, ease and quality of output from Canon’s HD SLRs wins it for me.
So I settled down to watch House and see what a pro crew could get out of the 5D. I gave up after a few minutes. I’ve never watched House before and the story totally absorbed me. I just forgot about the camera aspect of it, it didn’t matter. Straight away that’s a good thing. Camera heads can discuss the colours and pixels and artifacts, but the story stood head and shoulders above all of this.
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Ok, I’m a bit late to the game with this one but I’ve only come across these colour pictures of Ireland taken in 1913. Now we can see how miserable we all looked…in colour!
The stills are part of a collection of autochrome pictures taken worldwide at the time. I find them fascinating, partially because as a child I thought the world was literally black and white up until around the fifties (yeah yeah yeah, look the logistics of the presumed changeover to colour didn’t weigh heavy on my mind at the time), but also because true colour pictures from that part of the century are rare. We are just so used to seeing the past in black and white.
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Alan Gilsenan is the acclaimed Irish documentary director whose work includes The Asylum, The Hospice and I See a Darkness. Last week in The Irish Times he listed the 10 most important rules he adheres to when making documentaries.
While it’s aimed at documentary makers and other media heads, it’s an appealing and humorous read with some good life lessons in there for everyone!
1. OPEN YOUR EYES AND EARS
Call me old-fashioned, but you don’t make documentaries sitting at your desk. You’ve really got to get out of the house or the office or the pub. But once you manage to finally shrug off your inherent apathy and venture out into the wild blue yonder, you need to look and listen.
Really look and really listen. Listen to people. To their stories. To what is said and what remains unsaid. Listen to the sounds of the wilderness and the hum of the city. See what is actually there before your eyes, not what you imagined was there or what you had hoped would be there. See the beauty in the ugliness and the ugliness in the beauty.
Then ask yourself what is all this really telling me? What is this not telling me? And when you realise that you don’t understand any of it, that none of this makes any sense at all, but yet you still instinctively feel that it may have some inherent importance, then record it.
Document it. Preserve it. You can sort it out later and maybe even begin to understand it (this is called editing and it is a dark and secret art).
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Yes Knight Rider’s KITT is back! At least for a 20 second ad anyway, and that 20 seconds is better than the whole series of the resurrected Knight Rider show from 2008. Voiced by the original artist, William Daniels, KITT is seen getting a tyre change and some pampering in a Kwik Fit. The ad launches this coming Monday. Hopefully this leads to a series of the ads!
The trailer for Sylvester Stallone’s new cock-a-block action flick The Expendables was released last week and while there was much excitement it. And that’s understandable, I mean Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same film? But that’s where part of the problem is, it isn’t really Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same film. And that’s just one of the snags.
First up, judging by the trailer (watch it here) the movie looks like an ’80s action flick and for me that just won’t do. Even in the ’80s action movies were tepid with humdrum looking and sounding action sequences. Then Die Hard came along and changed things visually. But The Expendables looks like we’re right back there with its uninspiring visuals.
Then there’s the ‘legendary’ line up, but there seems to be a lot of padding…
All the talk is of Willis, Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same movie but, again going on the trailer, there is a complete lack of Willis abseiling through a window on a firehose or Schwarzenegger urging people to get to a helicopter.
Basically, two of the world’s biggest bad-asses don’t seem to be blowing anything up or putting bullets through peoples’ foreheads. They just seem to be, well, talking. And while that scene looks cool, it may just be the best part of the film. So enjoy that scene again and again below.
…that the director behind some of my favourite music videos is a fellow Irish man. Meiert Avis’ early work featured U2 music videos from when they were an up and coming band and went on to include my favourite U2 video Where The Streets Have No Name. But I think his best work was with Bruce Springsteen for the amazing Brilliant Disguise video.
This almost anti-music video is a one take, 4 minute long, slow zoom into Springsteen from a wide shot to an extreme close of his face. While it may be difficult to watch it really aids the song’s lyrics about the dark side of a relationship, landing on the singers face as he delivers the lines ‘God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of’. According to wikipedia it was nominated for Video of the Year and, strangely, Best Editing, at the MTV musis awards.
Check it out below and the U2 video below that.
I’m trying to resist littering my blog with the videos of my favourite songs, this this one is different. If I Should Fall Behind was released on Springsteen’s album Lucky Town in the ’90s. That version had a big country twang about it but it still stood out. Years later Springsteen stripped the song down and got the rest of the band involved in the vocals to produce this version. It’s a brilliantly simple video and a version that everyone seems to fall for straight away…
There’s a friend of mine won’t listen to any cover versions of Bruce Springsteen songs, he says no-one could do a better version of them than him. He has a fair point, rarely do Springsteen covers sound as good as The Boss himself, but there’s a new generation of singer/songwriters that grew up with his music and whose concert set lists include some tunes from The Boss. Here’s two I think are at least as good as the originals.
First is Glenn Hansard with either The Frames or Swell Season or both, I’m not too sure, doing Drive All Night. It’s a shoddy looking video but the song sounds great.
Then there’s Sara Bareilles doing an evocative version of I’m On Fire, it’s a pity it’s so short!
There’s lots more of these re-imaginings on Springsteen’s youtube channel here.
The wonderful song Haiti Child is now in sale in record stores. Written by Elaine Doonan and Pete Fagen, all money raised will go to Haven Humanitarian Housing Fund in Haiti. The song really needs your support this week to get it into the charts. This will give it more legs which, in turn, will mean more sales and more money raised.
To get a taster of the song take a look at a rough-and-ready video I shot at the song’s first live performance in Kilkenny’s Matt the Millers a few weeks ago. I also shot a video for the song during its recent studio recording which I’m cutting and should have ready in the next few days.
It really is a cracking good tune and a great cause.
Ads, we all love them, they’re like small short films, and who doesn’t like films? The creative process needed to get across an entertaining story and product information while convincing the audience that they want the merchandise, all in less than a minute, is something special.
So say one of the world’s biggest brands comes along to your agency looking for one of these mini-films to be made, but, you know, it’s cold outside and it’s the Friday afternoon of a Bank Holiday weekend and you can’t be bothered dealing with a pretentious director. What do you do?
Well you could grab some incredibly evocative music, a bunch of pictures or some video of a computer screen, lump them together and BOOM…you’ve got a cracking ad! Sort of like the gems below. You can then start pulling random numbers out of the air and bill your client that amount. Brilliant.
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