Collected Data
"No one has even come close to mastering the medium, but it’s clear that holding on to the traditional rules of storytelling is a surefire way to make disappointing VR."
The best VR at the event were the pieces where the filmmaker created a world, and you experience the story from within it. The emotion evoked from the landscape and the characters in the world is the story. It’s not about watching a series of events; it’s about viscerally responding to the energy, the vibe, the spirit of a space.
Yes, everyone recognizes that this sounds like some trippy shit.
How Traditional Storytelling Is Ruining Virtual Reality Film
Watch: "New Doctor Who Companion REVEALED - Introducing Pearl Mackie"
"But broken down to the actual revenue per video segment, for news organizations, the model looks extremely challenging."
Let’s face it: Following the “Grow Fast” rule of richly funded tech companies, BuzzFeed dreamed big right from the outset. In its pursuit of television advertising dollars, it set up a 100-person studio in Los Angeles, mainly to produce video for brands, initially at a price tag of about $100k per campaign. At that price, the product had to be perfect. It means endless refinement and audience testing (the latter being crucially important in BF’s promise to max out social reverberation over more than 30 different platforms).
But despite its power and talent for producing video contents and mastering the “social lift”, BuzzFeed monetizes poorly.
Tremors In The Distributed Content World
"This is simply perfect artistry. With Dimitri Tiomkin’s symbolic score, perpetuating the omnipresent theme of duality, and William H. Ziegler’s masterful editing, Strangers on a Train is easily one of the top exhibits in the genre’s history."
Cinephilia and Beyond;
Even though a lot of film scholars over the years considered the movie at least to a degree inferior to Hitchcock’s landmark films such as Vertigo or Rear Window, this captivating story of two people meeting on a train and conversing about the execution of a perfect murder has forever remained a much desired topic of analysis and debate among film enthusiasts all over the world. What distinguishes Strangers on a Train from similar films, even within Hitchcock’s own canon, is the fascinating idea at the center of it–the motif of doubles, the inner battle of good and evil in all human beings–as well as impressive technical virtuosity we grew accustomed to when talking about the works of the British highly commercial artist. The suspense is so powerful it can be felt though the screen, the acting is great, mostly thanks to Hitchcock’s old friend from Rope Farley Granger and his antagonistic counterpart Robert Walker, the script… oh, the script. If acquiring the rights to Highsmith’s novel was a walk in the park—by purposely leaving out his name from the negotiation process, Hitchcock managed to get the rights for a meagre 7,500 dollars–the process of finding the right screenwriter and producing a satisfactory script was nothing less than a hike over the Himalayas.
'STRANGERS ON A TRAIN': A TECHNICALLY PERFECT PSYCHOLOGICAL CAROUSEL AS ONE OF HITCHCOCK'S BEST
"While the goal is creating "genuine, deeply convincing" interactions, Facebook is a long way from getting there, Sheikh said. Still, the company is working hard to solve that problem."
Now, though, Facebook is making multi-user VR much more social. During his keynote, Schroepfer showed how he and Mike Booth, a Facebook engineer located at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters more than 30 miles away, were able to jump together into a series of 360-degree photographs, with each person represented by an animated avatar, and each able to see all around them as they interacted.
They even pulled out a VR selfie stick and took an instant selfie, which they then uploaded directly to Facebook. This was totally social—no game mechanics at all. That’s because, Social VR product manager Mike Beltzner explained to Fast Company at F8, Facebook found through its research that playing games, even with other people, took away from the social experience. "The more game-like it is," Beltzner said, "the less you interact."
How Facebook's Social VR Could Be The Killer App For Virtual Reality
I’ve said it before and i’ll say it again; Social is the future of VR. Facebook did not buy into VR to make games and tell stories.
"The ultimate apex predator of mixed martial arts is back and he’s determined to find out who’s the best pound for pound fighter in history — among dinosaurs, that is."
While many would assume that St-Pierre would be the modern-day equivalent of a T. rex, he says he wouldn't want to be that particular predator. "I wouldn't want to be a T. rex because T. rex had the hardest life ever," he says. "They hunted some of the most dangerous and ferocious herbivores and they had to compete with other T. rexes. It was probably the hardest life ever."
St-Pierre says he would prefer to have been a dromaeosaurus, a small but nasty dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous. Think of a meaner version of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park and you’ll have the idea. “It was very smart,” St-Pierre says. “Pound for pound, it was probably the best killing machine ever.”
GSP is back — as host of the dinosaur show The Boneyard
“Even the insects, they could kill us,” he said. “I wouldn't last a day, and it would be a bad day.”
“You know in my sport I try to be, so to speak, the apex predator in the octagon,” St-Pierre explained. “So with this show, I'm on a quest to find out who is the all-time, baddest, meanest apex predator that ever lived.
Georges St-Pierre talks 'The Boneyard,' getting back in the octagon
The 2 pilot episodes premiere April 14th at 9 and 9:30pm.
"If you’re going to kneecap a creator’s ability to tell a story, you’re going to reduce the quality of the story along with it."
Where the camera is positioned, how it moves within the scene, what type of lens is being used, the way your eyes are being guided around the frame or used to form bridges across cuts, composition, lighting… These are the foundations of movie making. The basic elements of the language of cinema itself. What I don’t understand is why creators would want to abandon huge pieces of this language and thus greatly diminish their storytelling capability. What is there to gain in this scenario? It’s like asking someone to convey a complex topic using only the vocabulary they had in the third grade.
Why I don’t believe in “cinematic” VR
"Unlike the fictional-feature-film industry, where job titles tend to be more distinct, nonfiction credits are more fluid."
For many documentarians their opinion on the credit issue hinges upon audience perception: how puzzling it is for viewers to see the credit. Mr. Berlinger ranks it as “incredibly” so, while Mr. Curry said it may be a little confusing. The concern is that when audience members notice a writing credit, they may think that the dialogue spoken by subjects has been scripted and is therefore not genuine. If a documentary has been written, it suggests that the film could be more artifice than fact based.
You Say True Life, I Say Scripted
"Give the people you work with or deal with or have relationships with the respect to show up at the time you said you were going to. And by that I mean, every day, always and forever. Always be on time."
Recognize excellence. Celebrate weirdness, and innovation. Oddballs should be cherished, if they can do something other people can’t do. But also everybody needs to understand that there are certain absolutes; there is a certain line. That no matter how much I love you — you may be my favorite, but if you show up late, two days in a row, I’m sorry — but you’re going over the side.
Anthony Bourdain's Life Advice
"He was also a fantastic nerd, a man who despite his chiseled frame, athletic genius, barely concealed rage, and millions of dollars, was willing to admit that he was more interested in dinosaurs than sports."
Now, with MMA light years away from the shadowy spectacle it was when GSP made his UFC debut back in 2004 (his job done, I guess), the former champion of the world has finally found a way to spin his world-changing success in the Octagon into an opportunity to indulge his first and truest love. On April 14th, the History Channel will be premiering a new two-part television special called The Boneyard With Georges St-Pierre in which the former fighter will travel the world looking for dinosaur bones. After two years of self-imposed exile the world's most dangerous nerd has found a new home.
GEORGES ST-PIERRE IS NOW THE HOST OF A TELEVISION SHOW ABOUT DINOSAURS
"When it comes to making tough budgeting decisions, it appears Canadians are more inclined to cut their cable rather than their internet service, which is seen as a necessity these days."
It's important to remember that most Canadian households still subscribe to traditional TV — more than 11 million at last count.
But there's no denying that cord-cutting numbers keep on rising. Some industry analysts had speculated that the new CRTC-mandated $25 skinny basic TV packages would help stem the tide. But there appears to be little interest in the new offering.
Cable cord-cutting numbers soar in Canada thanks to Netflix, high prices, says report
"Facebook killed TV. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably as close to the truth as you can get in three words."
The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. They still seem to wish people would watch shows on TV instead, just as newspapers that put their stories online still seem to wish people would wait till the next morning and read them printed on paper. They should both just face the fact that the Internet is the primary medium.
They'd be in a better position if they'd done that earlier. When a new medium arises that's powerful enough to make incumbents nervous, then it's probably powerful enough to win, and the best thing they can do is jump in immediately.
Whether they like it or not, big changes are coming, because the Internet dissolves the two cornerstones of broadcast media: synchronicity and locality. On the Internet, you don't have to send everyone the same signal, and you don't have to send it to them from a local source. People will watch what they want when they want it, and group themselves according to whatever shared interest they feel most strongly. Maybe their strongest shared interest will be their physical location, but I'm guessing not. Which means local TV is probably dead. It was an artifact of limitations imposed by old technology. If someone were creating an Internet-based TV company from scratch now, they might have some plan for shows aimed at specific regions, but it wouldn't be a top priority.
Why TV Lost
"Punk rock started in 1976 on New York's Bowery, when four cretins from Queens came up with a mutant strain of blitzkrieg bubblegum."
"And then, as mysteriously as it had appeared, it vanished, leaving only memories of its audacious visual imagery in its wake."
In the era we live in, ecstasy is in short supply. Escape from reality is one thing, and it’s in high demand right now, packaged and sold in a seemingly endless series of comic book and blockbuster franchise films that bludgeon audiences into submission, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Rather, I’m examining a group of films made in the early to mid 1960s that openly celebrated life, and our connection to it, through a strategy of sensory overload that sought to make the viewer almost a participant in the film’s content, to convey, without restraint, the sheer joy of existence in world of seemingly endless possibility. Perhaps it’s impossible to make such films today; perhaps we have lost our connection to the real world to such a degree that only CGI effects and amped-up soundtracks reach mass audiences.
Ecstatic Cinema: Romantic Experimental Filmmaking in the 1960s
"How could anyone but nerds relate?"
Zach Blumenfeld;
In a way, 2112’s message isn’t all that different from the rebellious ideology that characterized the burgeoning punk movement at the time. Bands like The Ramones and the Sex Pistols were nearing the apex of their cultural influence in 1976, turning wholly away from the bombast of mainstream rock and embracing the power of the individual to create music — no matter that individual’s musical skill. Punk represented the resentment by the masses of a commercial music apparatus that had abandoned its populist roots; it was a sort of taking back music itself. In this regard, Rush’s mentality going into the creation of 2112 — “fuck it, we’re doing this our way” — matched the rising tide of artistic protest against the “rock establishment,” propelling the band firmly out of the fantastical bubble they’d constructed with Caress of Steel and bringing them before a receptive audience in the real world. In the process, they established themselves as heroes of the misfits, the young people who feel left behind by society. Many of their later standout efforts, from “Tom Sawyer” to “Subdivisions”, express the challenges of individualism first heard in 2112.
Rush’s 2112 Turns 40: A Battle Against Conformity
"The Boneyard with Georges St-Pierre"
Mixed martial arts superstar Georges St-Pierre is regarded as one of the greatest champions in the history of the sport, but there’s something he loves even more than fighting: dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts. Now, in his first ever break from the ring, Georges is embarking on a globetrotting journey into the heart of modern palaeontology.
The Boneyard with Georges St-Pierre
Tune into History Canada on April 14th at 9pm ET/PT.
"Mr. Baillie creates a film that represents less the world as it seems to exist than one that’s been refracted through his being."
Manhole Dargis for the NYT;
In many respects, the image is perfectly ordinary, the kind that you chance on if you’re driving along, say, a California road, as Mr. Baillie was when he popped out of a car, seized by inspiration. Yet, as the camera continues to float left and Fitzgerald begins singing (“All my life/I’ve been waiting for you”), something magical — call it cinema — happens in the middle of the first verse. As the words “My wonderful one/I’ve begun” warm the soundtrack, a splash of red flowers on the fence suddenly appears, as if the film itself were offering you a garland.
Bruce Baillie, a Film-Poet Collapsing Inner and Outer Space
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