This Savage Art

So it goes a little something like this…Man needs money to live. Man takes job to make money. Money good.

Being in need of a serious cash infusion I decided to take a job offer to work on a show for 8 days out at Silvercup Studios in Queens. Laying cable, eating, crimping BNC connectors, eating some more, the usual day at the office. Mostly just wiring up what will turn out to be a human rat cage. The gig? The Russian version of Big Brother. It’s called Golod and it means hunger in Russian. The premise? Similar to it’s American counterpart, Hunger puts a group of contestants in living quarters for 100 days with all the beautiful amenities of the modern world except, you guessed it, food. Seems that it’s controversial and has gotten some attention in Germany. The experiment includes putting contestants out on the street to go make some money so they can eat. I smell contestant meltdown.

That’s all very nice but you know how difficult it is to communicate with a Russian crew when you don’t speak a word of Russian? Is this how Clint felt on The Good, The Bad and the Ugly? Seems that we worked it out though and everyone is cool. During a break I took a look around. Silvercup is where The Sopranos gets, uh, shot. So I got a look at Tony’s back office of the Bada Bing. Almost surreal to see it in this dull flat light not the dark, soft shadowy world that we see on the show. It was cool though.

I’ll try to due my best to report on what’s going on with the show but I will probably be wiped out so…until tomorrow. I need to go brush up on my Russian…

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The Thinking Writer has a great entry about why most screenplays out there are disastrously bad. It’s a concise and well thought out breakdown of larger problems that plague a majority of novice writers and probably a few not-so-novice. Take a look here.

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A cool article in the Times today about how film-friendly city policies have lured filmmakers to New York. The catch, a percentage of the film has to be shot here regardless of where the location is in the script. So if the script calls for scenes that take place in Kansas, well then, welcome to Kansas.

Don’t ya just love movies?

photo of cinematographer Tom Richmond credited to Angela Jimenez for The New York Times

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I’ve had so many issues with video technology it makes my head spin. When I bought my G5 system over a year ago, right out of the box I had to send the entire system back because of some issue I was having with the monitor.The most recent piece of equipment I bought for my editing workstation was a Sony DSR-11 deck I got from B&H here in NYC. Right out of the box it ate a DVCAM tape. These were Sony tapes! Sony didn’t want to help, B&H, forget it. It ended up going to a repair shop and having the tape extracted manually. A brand new deck! I don’t even want to talk about my iBook.

This entry is for one of those rare occasions where I praise a manufacturer for their practices. I purchased a G-Tech 500 GB RAID drive for my system about 7 months ago and I have nothing but good things to say about it. With a PCI card and a Firewire 800 cable you are ready to go into your edit blazing. Great real-time video streaming. Recently, I heard a grinding noise. Not good. Not good at all. In fact, scary. I posted an entry on Creative Cow, an excellent professional resource for all things video and web realated. In the G-Tech forum I posted my issue with the drive and got an answer the very next day. Now listen up all you manufacturers, this is how you treat a customer. Nick Kromer, the forums G-Tech rep, called me up at my home and offered to send me a brand new drive to swap out for the old one. It’s part of their 2 year warranty. This is how it’s done people. Build a great product and thank the people for making your business grow by giving them great support. I should be receiving my drive by the end of the week. A big thanks to everyone over at G-Tech.

You can link to their site here.

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Director’s Label is giving us a sneak preview of volumes 4-7 of their director’s series to be released September 13th.

The Directors:

Anton Corbijn
Jonathan Glazer
Mark Romanek
Stéphane Sednaoui

Beautiful…

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Wes Craven? That’s funny. David Lynch? Ha! Dario Argento?….don’t make me laugh. If you want to see what disturbing images can do to the human psyche view the work of Chris Cunningham. He might be one of the most talented filmmakers who has never made a feature film to date but that will soon change.

When Palm Pictures and the Director’s Label released their DVD box set collection of three of the most cutting edge directors in the music video, film and commercial realm, I snatched it up. I’m still reeling from Cunningham’s DVD. It is the rolling head, you can’t stop watching it and yet it shakes you to your primal core. Well, that was until my boy Jimmy Pop sent me a link to Rubber Johnny. This DVD has just been released by Warp Films and it’s not for the timid! What I saw was a bootleged link of the short from the newly released DVD. I don’t believe in taking money out of an artist’s pocket so if you want to see the full 6 minute piece on the net, Google away. All I can say is I’m still shaking…Check out this profile of Cunningham from Res Magazine

More info on Chris Cunningham.

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In a New York Minute…

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I guess a cavity search is next?

New York Times article updated 7/22

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[This Savage Art] has officially surpassed the 2,000 visitors mark since my first posting May 6th, 2005. Thank you all for stopping by and checking out what the blog has to offer. Feedback is welcome so feel free to drop an e-mail.

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I watch Entourage on HBO. It’s fun and the writing is smart. In the last episode the rising star actor Vincent Chase is about to sit down and watch his breakout out role in the fictional film, “Queens Boulevard” at the Sundance Film Festival (it was actually shot the same week it was going on this year). The director of the film, freaking out, blurts out that the film is 4 hours long. “This is my Deer Hunter“.

In this time when we are gearing up to watch movies on our cell phones and attention spans are shrinking to gnat sized proportions could you sit through a 4 hour film? Submit your answer below, results are immediate.

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