panopticist

High-Def Backyard Shootout

2008-07-14T03:54:51Z

Amateurs are doing amazing things these days with consumer-grade high-def camcorders, especially Canon's HV30 MiniDV unit (which retails for about $800) and its predecessor, the HV20. The impressive clip below is the work of a Memphis college student named Kyle Shields, who acquired a new audio library and wanted to test out some of the gunshot sounds. So he used his HV20 to film a short backyard shootout with a friend. The ominous music, the well-crafted audio track, the Saving Private Ryan-style green filter, and Shields's talent with the camera combine to make this a very cool little experiment. I wish video technology had been this advanced when I was his age. To watch this in actual high-def, go to the Vimeo page. There's a whole channel on Vimeo devoted to people's experiments with Canon's HV30 and HV20 camcorders. The selection is hit or miss, but some of it is quite good indeed. [via my pal Jonathan Hayes.]

Mikhail Gorbachev: Smiter of Zombies, Bringer of Twinkies

2008-07-02T17:20:00Z

I guarantee this is the weirdest and yet most rewarding thing you'll see all day. It's a video for a Russian metal band's tribute to Mikhail Gorbachev. On the video's Vimeo page, the director, Tom Stern, writes:

I did this video for a Russian Metal Band called ANJ. It is pretty crazy. When I saw the lyrics it seemed to be an earnest tribute to Mikael Gorbachov (that's how the Russians spell it), so I was a bit confounded about what the video concept should be, but then I had a brainstorm to take it way over the top and I think it was just the thing. Suffice to say it's half Russian History allegory as told through an old zombie movie made in the Soviet Union, and half animated Soviet Propaganda posters.

(Vimeo videos can stutter when they haven't loaded completely, so let this finish loading before watching it.) [via Mark Lisanti.]

Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure, One of the First Pornographic Cartoons Ever Made

2008-06-11T00:50:00Z

Created anonymously by a group of professional animators in about 1929, the silent short Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is a gleeful exploration of the penetrative arts. The four-and-a-half-minute short follows the travails of the uncomfortably well-endowed title character as he wanders a barren landscape in search of satisfaction. Along the way, he encounters a self-pleasuring maiden, various sexually aroused animals, a surprised husband, and a donkey-humping farmer, whom Harton challenges to a duel. A penis duel. Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure is one of the earliest examples of an animated porn film. According to its Wikipedia page, several famous animators supposedly made the short for a private party in honor of the pioneering animator Winsor McCay, whose work greatly influenced Walt Disney and is still held in high esteem by Maurice Sendak, Chris Ware, and other luminaries. This totally isn't safe for work, so be careful. I'm pretty sure the intertitles in this copy are not the originals. The Wikipedia page includes this backstory quote from Disney animator Ward Kimball: "The first porno-cartoon was made in New York. It was called 'Eveready Harton' and was made in the late 20's, silent, of course—by three studios. Each one did a section of it without telling the other studios what they were doing. Studio A finished the first part and gave the last drawing to Studio B. ... Involved were Max Fleischer, Paul Terry and the Mutt and Jeff studio. ... A couple of guys who were there [at the party] tell me the laughter almost blew the top off the hotel where they were screening it."

The Y2K Empire State Building Flash-a-Thon

2008-05-30T19:45:00Z

For its latest cool project, the merry pranksters of Improv Everywhere arranged for hundreds of people to stand along the Brooklyn Bridge at night and fire camera flashes in sequence, capturing everything on video from a fair distance away. I love the increasingly larger scale of Improv Everywhere's missions. But I thought I should note that on two different occasions back in 1999 and 2000, a group of my friends organized a very similar project at the top of the Empire State Building. Led by my pal Tom Igoe, a world-class tinkerer who teaches at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, a group of several dozen people gathered on the skyscraper's southern observation deck to do waves of sequenced camera flashes. The New York Times ran a story about the 2000 event a couple of weeks later. Both Flash-a-Thons were captured on video, the second from two locations downtown: one at the Tisch School of the Arts on Broadway and Waverly, the other from an apartment on East 18th Street. In the low-res compilation video below, the flashes go left to right and then right to left, and then there's some assorted mayhem at the end. You can read more about the 1999 and 2000 Flash-a-Thons on Tom's site.

The Scandalous Origins of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours

2008-05-27T14:50:00Z

There's no current hook for this post about a little-known Hollywood scandal. It's just something I've been meaning to post about for a couple of years. The bare details have been mentioned online, but only in passing, and as far as I know the scandal has never been officially reported anywhere. So here it is: Much of the plot setup and some of the dialogue in Martin Scorsese's excellent 1985 film After Hours—a significant portion of the movie's first 30 minutes, in fact—were brazenly lifted from "Lies," a 1982 NPR Playhouse monologue by Joe Frank, the great L.A.-based radio artist who's gotten a lot of love here on Panopticist. Joe Frank never received official credit for his contributions, and he appears to have been paid a generous amount of money to settle the plagiarism suit and keep everything quiet. It's possible that this scandal was reported in the film-industry trade press around the time of the film's release, but neither Nexis nor Google reveal evidence of any media coverage. I learned of the similarities in 2004 or 2005 through chatter on the unofficial Joe Frank mailing list. The closest thing I've found to a reference in a traditional media outlet is in this March 2000 Joe Frank profile in Salon, which mentions that Frank was "paid handsomely by producers of a Hollywood film (which he won't name) that plagiarized his dialogue." The Wikipedia page for the screenwriter of After Hours, Joseph Minion, mentions that the film included some "minor details" borrowed from Joe Frank, and that Frank successfully sued over it. But the theft was far from minor. Many of the details in the film's first half hour are similar, if not copied outright: the chance meeting of a man and a kooky but sexy woman; the woman's offer to set the man up with some of her artist roommate's plaster of paris bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights; the man's late-night phone call to the woman; his cab ride to meet her, at the end of which his only cash flies out the window; her wearing of a loosely tied bathrobe when she answers the door; her tale of having been raped by man who came down the fire escape; and so forth. Here's the entire monologue so you can judge for yourself. It's 11 minutes long. If you've seen the film, much of this will sound very familiar indeed: (If you don't see the Flash audio player, here's a direct link to the audio file.) Joseph Minion apparently created the script in his mid-twenties as part of his work at Columbia's Graduate Film Program. It was later optioned by Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson, who showed it to Scorsese. Minion's IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise. There's also a weird twist: The cabbie who drives Griffin Dunne downtown is played by an actor named Larry Block, and he's apparently the same Larry Block who appeared on many of Joe Frank's shows for KCRW in the 1990s. Was the plagiarism discovered during the making of the film, and the role given to Frank's friend Block as part of the lawsuit negotiations? Whatever the reason, it's hard to believe Block's casting was just a coincidence. If you have any insight into any of this, post away in the comments...

Photos of Boston, Massed

2008-04-29T14:54:44Z

A guy in Boston took 3,000 photos over the course of three days and then stitched them together into this excellent stop-motion video: The music is "Dry Lips," by Lightspeed Champion. [via The Big Noob, again.]

Best End-Credits Blooper Reel Ever

2008-04-29T14:05:47Z

Here is Peter Sellers in the hilarious outtakes sequence at the end of Being There, the 1979 Hal Ashby film that was the second-to-last film Sellers made. When I was a kid I thought this was the funniest thing ever. Blooper reels were rare in major Hollywood films back then, so I'd never seen anything like it. I remember feeling amazed that I got to see secret scenes that weren't in the movie. Quaint, I know. According to the Wikipedia page for the film, Sellers supposedly didn't want the outtakes to be included in the movie, "since, by all accounts, it was his attempt to show his skills as an actual actor as opposed to just a comedian. The inclusion of the blooper reel is sometimes blamed for Sellers' failure to win that year's Academy Award for Best Actor." I find that last sentence hard to believe, but who knows. [via Coudal Partners.]

Cool Photos From the Set of Lost

2008-03-20T17:40:00Z

Brad Smith of The Big Noob went to Hawaii for a vacation in January, and his Flickr set has a bunch of excellent photos from the set of Lost. He was there during the writers' strike, so production was shut down, and he was able to wander into or near locations that have played a major role in the show, including Jacob's shack, the main beachfront camp, and the pier where Kate, Jack, and Sawyer were captured at the end of season 2. Here is Mr. Eko's church: I hadn't seen a single episode of Lost until last November, and then I watched the first three seasons in three weeks. It was fun, and now I'm all caught up. Here's my little Lost obsession, and I haven't seen any major analysis of this anywhere: What's with the whole doppelgänger thing involving Juliet, Penny, and Jack's ex-wife? They all look very similar, and it's clearly not an accident. The resemblance has been noted in a few places, even on the show itself, in passing, but the larger issue of what this means has not been deeply explored, as far as I know. What does it mean?

Surveil Yourself

2008-03-19T15:04:28Z

A Brooklyn-based photographer named Izaz Rony is offering a new kind of portrait service: You tell him where you're going to be on a particular day, and what you'll be wearing, and he shows up in the general vicinity and snaps your picture, without you knowing exactly where he is or when he'll be there. "Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject," he writes on his site, MethodIzaz. "The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person." [via Khoi Vinh.]

Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Shot-for-Shot Remake

2008-03-17T13:38:14Z

Here's an excellent treat, and it's something I've been wanting to find for years. Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a shot-for-shot remake that two Mississippi kids made over the course of eight years in the 1980s. A few weeks ago a complete copy was floating around on one of those secret BitTorrent sites. Here's the first ten minutes. (The audio level is low throughout, so you may have to turn up the volume.) Enjoy. Jim Windolf wrote about the remake in the 2004 Vanity Fair feature "Raiders of the Lost Backyard." That same year, the producer Scott Rudin bought the rights to the boys' story, and Daniel Clowes is apparently working on a script (or he was at one point, anyway).

Splitting the Audio Atom

2008-03-16T21:30:00Z

For the upcoming update to its popular Melodyne audio-processing plugin, the German company Celemony has done the impossible: It has developed technology that can analyze polyphonic audio and break it up into individual notes, which can then be pitch-shifted, time-shifted, and otherwise mucked with. What this means is that the audio of anything from a guitar chord to a full symphony orchestra can be twisted into an entirely new piece of music. It's long been possible to pitch-shift monophonic audio, such as a singer's voice, or to pitch-shift an entire music track. What has never been possible before—and this is truly revolutionary, in a way that will eventually have a major impact on the music you listen to, whether you ultimately know it or not—is the ability to break apart complex, polyphonic audio into its constituent parts and rebuild it into something else. To name just one application of this technology (and I'm sure someone will do exactly this): You could take the vocals-only version of the Beatles' "Because" from Anthology 3 and completely reharmonize it into a new piece of music (even on the fly, with a MIDI keyboard), and it would still sound very much like John Lennon and the Beatles. Celemony's (slightly cheesy) promotional video explains everything:

Eric Clapton Is All Thumbs

2008-03-16T20:40:00Z

Late last year a Finnish media artist named Santeri Ojala got a lot of attention for a series of hilarious YouTube videos in which he lifted concert footage of various guitar heroes and overdubbed his own intentionally awful playing. The bad musicianship was funny enough, but the verisimilitude made it even funnier: Ojala was great at matching each player's hand movements and timing, and he sprinkled lukewarm applause and other sound effects throughout. The videos were like alternate-universe versions of rock-god cliches. A month or two ago, YouTube yanked the videos and suspended Ojala's YouTube account, apparently due to copyright complaints from several of the guitarists. Many of the videos have now resurfaced on YouTube, and because I never got around to posting them the first time, here's one of the best. Eric Clapton does jazz: More: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Vai, Slash, Eddie Van Halen, Metallica, Jake E. Lee with Ozzy Osbourne. Also, Yngwie Malmsteen, complete with symphony orchestra! Inspired by Ojala, someone else contributed this Oscar Peterson-Joe Pass train wreck:

iPhone Wallpaper: George Crumb’s Agnus Dei

2008-03-08T21:45:00Z

After living with thwarted technolust since last June, I finally got myself an iPhone on Monday. Verdict: amazing, beautiful, world-historical. I quickly got tired of the generic wallpaper, so I poked around in my files and found a scan of a gorgeous music score by the avant garde American composer George Crumb, whom I posted about two years ago. I spent a few minutes turning the score into a 320x480 graphic, and now it greets me each time I pick up my phone. Even though it's too small for the details to be visible, it still looks super-cool on the high-res iPhone screen. (I've uploaded a much bigger copy of this score so you can see it in all its glory; you can view it here.) You can download this and use it on your own phone:

Leonard Schrader’s Astonishing Movie-Poster Collection

2008-02-20T21:51:07Z

From Vanity Fair's website, an amazing slide show of lobby cards—"the gorgeous promotional posters that were a common sight in movie theaters from the early 20th century through the 1960s." They're from the collection of the late screenwriter Leonard Schrader, the brother of screenwriter-director Paul Schrader. The slide show itself is here; Peter Biskind's introductory essay is here. To read more about this incredible trove of Hollywood ephemera, visit the collection's official site.

New on PBS Kids—2 Girls, 1 Cup: The Show

2008-02-02T15:10:00Z

This hit the web a few days ago and hasn't gone wide yet, which is a surprise, because it's hilarious. It's the latest top show at Channel 101, the L.A.-based web-video operation also responsible for such brilliant goofballery as House of Cosbys, Yacht Rock, and The ’Bu. This is by excitable House of Cosbys creator Justin Roiland, the funniest writer-actor-animator-director-pervert-scatologist working on the web today. Ladies and gentlemen, 2 Girls, 1 Cup: The Show. (If you're unaware of the 2 Girls, 1 Cup phenomenon, make sure you read this Wikipedia entry before deciding to watch this.)