photo credit: © 2010 CEA

I was lucky enough to be one of the 110,000 people in Las Vegas for the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show this past weekend, and I had a somewhat unexpected reaction to what I saw.  I expected to be surrounded by a dazzling array of innovative (if not bizarre) consumer products, on display for the world to see and fall in love with.  What I encountered was thousands of products that showed little to no original thought, and a collection of giant companies continuing to refuse to work together to improve the lives of their customers.  Here are a few observations: (more…)

In just a little over one week I will hopefully be wrapped on doing VFX for Terminator: Salvation. When I do finish, I will be quitting. Not just quitting my job at the company I work for, I’m quitting VFX entirely. I have spent the past 7 years of working long days (and often long nights) doing CG for films and commercials, and then spending my ‘free time’ at night and on weekends making short films and videos for this site and others. It is almost impossible to write, plan, film, edit, and distribute something while sitting in an office for 8 to 16 hours per day, 5 to 7 days per week. I’ve done it over and over, and every single time it was hell on wheels. I have finally reached the point where I must stop one or the other, at least for a little while- or else I will go insane!

I listen to NPR on the drive to and from work every single day. I read the news. I know how incredibly unsound a decision it is to quit a well-paid, stable job in the face of the worst economic collapse in decades (if not ever). But I have been saving money for years, and have recently decided to use that money to support my dream instead of putting it as a down payment on a house as I had always planned. I came to Los Angeles in 1998 to go to film school. I went to film school to make movies. I graduated and have been working on other people’s movies ever since, with my own projects crammed into the spare hours left over. So now, despite the economy, I have decided to make a run at this ‘Directing’ thing full time, while I still can. The plan is to take at least 6 months (if not several years) off from working a day job to focus on doing what I came here to do.

Everyone whom I have talked to about this has been surprisingly supportive- not a single person has tried to caution me or otherwise convince me to change my mind. In fact, this decision has almost been more nerve-wracking given how little opposition I’ve heard. I am mildly terrified, but also more excited about it than anything I’ve done in a long time. My VFX skills are not going to disappear, and I have an open door at my current company to return, should I burn through all my savings and need to come crawling back for more.

What does this mean for The AV Club? First up is the completion of Team Apocalypse, a new pilot we have been working on for quite a while now. And then more Psycho Bob episodes. And after that, more web series, music videos, short films, spec commercials… anything that seems worth making! So stay tuned to this site- there will be plenty of new content, news and updates as this exciting chapter begins!

-Andy Cochrane

I saw “Wanted“. It is really bad.  So incredibly laughably bad.  I invented a word to describe it:

“Rawful”

Rawful = ROFL + awful.  I enjoyed my time watching this film, but not in the right way, and not for the intended reasons.  I will not give this movie the time it would take to tell you what I think; I’ll leave that up to the real movie reviewers.  But on the upside, there were shots in “Wanted” that were shot on the RED One, and while I am pretty sure I could pick them out, they were not nearly as mismatched to the film footage as the Viper/Cinealta vs. 35mm mismatch in “Collateral”.  So that gives me hope for the camera.

The title says it all. This is a MAJOR game-changing revelation for creative industries such as the one I make my living in [entertainment]. Here is the heart of the issue:

For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren’t renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.

That is all well and good, but it’s not safe to just assume that if a book is from this period it is free and clear. To determine the copyright status of a book you would need some sort of convenient, searchable database of all the books that are covered by copyright. Oh wait, here’s one compiled by Google, combined from the ones created by Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders and U.S. Copyright Office records. Whelp, that should make adapting something into a screenplay much easier- no rights to clear, no royalties to pay.

On a personal note, I do think part of this stinks- if the author is still alive they should receive some kind of compensation for their ideas, even if they forgot or didn’t know to renew their copyright. And on a professional note, anyone up for “The Great Gatsby Ultra 2000″?

I wanted to post this a few weeks ago when the bootlegs hit YouTube, but I couldn’t stand how dark they all were. The film that shall appear very soon on my IMDB profile finally got a trailer released on the web in HD. It ran in front of Indy 4; for the unlucky many who got suckered into that suckfest, hopefully this trailer was a highlight of your time spent that night in the theater. This has been a huge part of why there has been little visible production so far in 2008 from the AV Club- I’ve been living in a dark room filled with computers and fellow VFX nerds making some seriously awesome effects for this film. Here is the description of the film, taken from the Apple site:

“I was born under unusual circumstances.” And so begins “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born in his eighties and ages backwards: A man, like any of us, who is unable to stop time. We follow his story set in New Orleans from the end of World War I in 1918, into the 21st century, following his journey that is as unusual as any man’s life can be. Directed by David Fincher and starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett with Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, Jason Flemyng, Elias Koteas and Julia Ormond, “Benjamin Button,” is a grand tale of a not so ordinary man and the people and places he discovers along the way, the loves he finds, the joys of life and the sadness of death, and what lasts beyond time.

As usual I won’t do any kind of behind the scenes look at this film, I’ll leave that to the people whose job it is to do such things, but I can say that when all is said and done, I am extremely proud of the work I and my co-workers have done for this film. Working on a David Fincher film is an amazing experience on every level; I only hope that there are more opportunities in the future to do so again. Once I wrap on this project, expect more new videos from the AV Club!

UPDATE: The LA Times just did a glowing review of this trailer, go read it if this film interests you at all!

As I said in the previous post about our recent experiences with the RED One digital cinema camera, there is a lot of info out there about the camera and its use. Instead of creating more noise, I’ll first link to those sites that I found most useful in my own search for info on how to approach filming on a RED One.

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This video is a promo for Pangea Day, which happens on May 10. The event is an attempt to unite the world through film in one night each year. Certainly a noble goal, hopefully one that they can at least make some headway towards attaining. I wanted to post this video so that you can see the caliber of film that we can anticipate on the program- extremely good and thought provoking. It looks like there are a whole bunch of places that you can go to participate and observe Pangea Day, so if this tickles your fancy, go figure out what you will be doing on May 10th.  Via Shape + Color.

When I saw the first teaser trailer for “Speed Racer” I said to myself, “Man, that looks like ass”. Then a bunch of other people said the same thing, so I decided that I didn’t really need to speak up too vocally about it. Then the newest trailer came out, and suddenly I was hearing a lot of “Oh man, I saw the first trailer and thought it looked bad, but the new trailer is AWESOME!”. Well, those people have seen a trailer that I am now convinced never existed. (more…)

Check out the commercial I directed for the Babelgum Online Film Festival! Shot by Craig, starring Jeff, and post-productioned [yes I know that's not a word, but it was fun to write] with a bunch of help from a new accomplice, Aaron.

Peter Jackson’s first feature film, “Bad Taste” (1987) is available for free, in its entirety on the interwebs. Woo. Quickie description for those not in the know:

A team from the intergalactic fast food chain Crumb’s Crunchy Delights descends on Earth, planning to make human flesh the newest taste sensation. After they wipe out the New Zealand town Kaihoro, the country’s Astro-Investigation and Defense Service is called in to deal with the problem. Things are complicated due to Giles, an aid worker who comes to Kaihoro the same day to collect change from the residents. He is captured by the aliens, and AIaDS stages a rescue mission that quickly becomes an all-out assault on the aliens’ headquarters

Also, there are a bunch of other very “B” movies on the site, so if you enjoy such things, you’re welcome. Tip of the blog hat to Ajit for spotting this gem, bigger tip of the hat to the internet for making media more accessible every day.