What a lot of people don’t know is how the academic/research worlds are designed to reward individual achievement rather than real progress. It’s all about being published, earning tenure, and getting more funding. Not that these individual researchers don’t care about progress - it’s just a very inward-facing system. I hope this crowdsourced approach catches on.
So here I am smack in the middle of The Parallax View (1974) with Warren Beatty when they hit me with this amazing montage sequence. It was really unexpected and quite brilliant - and more importantly, it changed my entire perception of the film.
This clip won’t spoil the movie for you, but you’ll appreciate it a lot more on a big TV screen. What’s happening here: the subject (Beatty) is being shown imagery to gauge his emotional/physical reaction to certain types of stimuli. I was mesmerized for the duration.
If you like political thrillers/conspiracy films, rent this one.
Last night we screened the first 9 episodes of A Good Knight’s Quest at the Sunset 5 theater in Los Angeles for the Independent Television Festival. It was fun seeing our series on the big screen, and it played surprisingly well on that format.
After the screening there was a very short Q&A and one of the questions asked was “where do we see this going?” I spitted out something about extending the series to television, but what I didn’t stress was how happy we are with where the show is at right now. It’s available to watch on the web, freely, at any time from anywhere in the world.
Of course we’d love the opportunity to bring the series to other platforms, like television proper, video game consoles, and optimize it for consumption on mobile platforms like iOS and Android. If that meant reshooting the series from scratch, developing other storylines from our rich storyverse, or hiring programmers to build an app or video game – I’m all for it. For the time being, we do the best we can with the resources at our disposal, and we try our hardest to serve our existing audience.
Producing for the web is a balancing act of dealing with the frustrations of working under extreme limitations and the satisfaction of overcoming those limitations to deliver a product that competes with shows produced for 10x the budget (or much more). And later, the immense satisfaction of seeing your scrappy little web series take off, regardless of viewership.
The season finale of GKQuest airs this Friday, and I hope some of you have the time to catch up with the series. We also announced this week that we’ve received a little more funding from The Escapist to shoot a 2nd season. So yeah! Onward.
Whaaaa??
via winniecooper.net
I’ve been sitting here trying to wrap my head around these numbers. If MGM considered HTTM a “one-weekend picture,” meaning they needed to bank on its opening weekend to break-even or make money on it, what’s up with the $50M budget? And where did all that money go? It could have, and should have, been made for half that (like The Hangover at $25-35M). This was a mistake on the production level, not necessarily in the creatives or marketing (which was pretty fantastic actually - HTTM was everywhere this week).
Listen, I’m not an expert when it comes to this stuff, but clearly the math is screwy and the whole model is unnecessarily risky. It’ll be interesting to see what happens next weekend with mixed word-of-mouth.
Kwame Kilpatrick’s Facebook Page is pretty much awesome.
Photos from Monday night’s premiere of A Good Knight’s Quest
A Good Knight’s Party: The premiere party for A Good Knight’s Quest
I’ve sent out some invites, but I know I missed a ton of people. If you’re in the LA area and want to celebrate with us, just shoot an email to party@agoodknightsquest.com. There’s a limited number of spots available so please let me know soon!
New poster for the Elm Street remake
If my last audio post didn’t do it for you, here’s more Hood Internet + R. Kelly. Get on it.
I love my brother’s Facebook page.
“Making independent movies is great, because you don’t have to deal with people who have never made movies.”
So many great Bill Murray quotes in this interview.
The screenwriting entry on Uncyclopedia is full of useful information and isn’t passive aggressive at all.
Of all the Camera Directions in existence, “CUT TO:” has been the most useful. Previously to the invention of “CUT TO:”, scenes would not end. Directors would foolishly try to overlay scenes on top of each other by bringing in new sets and building them over top of previous ones. Actors would not leave. Sets became claustrophobic as more and more props cluttered the scene. However, now that “CUT TO:” has been invented, directors know when scenes are supposed to end, and screenwriters can further tell them how to do their jobs with “DISSOLVE TO:” and “SMASH CUT TO:”.
Lil’ Clooney
