{% blockquote Kristin Thompson http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/03/16/film-art-an-introduction-reaches-a-milestone-with-help-from-the-criterion-collection/ Observations on film art, March 16, 2012 %} Most teachers are familiar with Criterion and its high-end series of DVD and Blu-ray releases of classic and important contemporary films. In 1984, Criterion pioneered the genre of supplements, working at the time with laserdiscs. The team are 100% cinephiles, and they continue to set the standard for a rich array of bonus materials, all the making-of films, interviews, and documents that are of such interest to fans, scholars, students, and aspiring filmmakers. Now, with Criterion’s kind cooperation, we have produced a series of online examples tied to Film Art that will use scenes from several of their classics. {% endblockquote %}

I’ll admit that in college I had a chip on my shoulder about the film text books by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson. This had little to do with the books themselves and everything to do with my being a cocky teenager unconvinced that book-smarts were in any way a vital part of my film education. Watching and doing would be enough for me.

Of course, I’ve grown up since then and have since come to find their texts indispensable. One thing that has surprised me (and I’m guessing a few others) since school is how well the duo has adapted to blogging with their prolific site, “Observations on film art.” Without giving up their scholarship, which traditionally is reserved for prestigious (and paid) publications, they have found a way to stay on the cutting edge of modern cinema studies. David’s “Pandora’s digital box” series, for example, is perhaps the best writing available anywhere on the international transition from film to digital, simultaneously an act of journalism and a critical rumination on what cinema history will remember as a vital moment.

So I was pleased this morning when I read that Bordwell and Thompson (as collegians affectionately refer to their tomes) have updated their textbook, Film Art, to include content from the Criterion Collection. This is a milestone for film education and one that will be an incredible boon for students and teachers alike. I wrote a bit about modernizing textbooks back when iBooks Author was announced. While Film Art doesn’t go quite as far as I had envisioned in terms of integrating film clips and exercises into an ebook, it essentially provides the easy access to specific film illustrations that I wished I could have had in school. Here is a sample video, titled “Elliptical Editing in Vagabond”:

{::nomarkdown}

When I was in school, one of my professors relied on an ages-old VHS tape with clips roughly edited in the order of his lecture notes. Static would roll by between clips, that is if the VCR would even track well enough to make the thing watchable. Of course, I still was capable of learning the basics of film language, but better availability of high quality clips would have been preferable. Bordwell and Thompson and the Criterion Collection have done a great thing here.

One last thing. I think my favorite part of Kristin’s announcement of the new edition of Film Art is this part:

Central as the Criterion extracts are, we’ve made other changes. We’ve done a top-to-bottom rewrite of the text, trying to make it more conversational, more like our blogging.

A thousand times yes please. Their blogging voices are the ones I wish I could have read in school. Students, rejoice.

I interviewed Gayby writer and director Jonathan Lisecki for Turnstyle News.

Lisecki, who also has a supporting role in the film, is, himself, quite a character. When I sat with him to discuss the film, he had an ear to ear grin most of the time and would cut off into fits of laughter whenever he knew he had a good quip for me. He talks a mile a minute and, as he told me, has an answer for everything. You can instantly tell he loves what he does as a filmmaker; he is having the time of his life here.

This was one of my favorite screenings of SXSW, and talking to Jonathan was great fun. Hopefully Gayby will make the rounds. It has a lot of good laughs and is worth checking out.

Me, over at Heeb:

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller smoothly enter the world of live-action filmmaking (their last film was Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs). It’s perhaps no surprise that the guys who violently rained oversized steak dinners on unsuspecting Atlantic islanders would make a film filled to the brim with excess. It is, in a word, ridiculous. There are out of place explosions, talking ice-cream cones, and deaths and dismemberments that will have you rolling in the aisles, and you’ll quickly lose count of the expletives.

I reviewed Avi Zev Weider’s Welcome to the Machine, a documentary about humanity’s relationship to technology, over at Heeb Magazine:

Weider refuses to make up his mind about what kind of a film he is making. The film weaves multiple talking-head narratives with the story of the filmmaker’s family, but none rise to the occasion of actually telling a story. The film serves as a decent taste of the teachings of its characters, but nothing more.

Click through to see what else I have to say.

How does one even begin to review a film like Cabin in the Woods, whose very premise is a spoiler? That’s the question that has been bugging all the film journos (well, most of them) here at SXSW.

When he introduced the film at the premiere last night, producer and co-writer Joss Whedon implored the audience to enjoy the film and not tell anyone what it’s after the credits rolled. He recommended we just call it “awesome” and tell our family and friends to see it.

So here’s the thing: this movie is awesome. It manages to be a great horror film and a great comedy and a great something-something-lips-are-sealed at the same time. It’s increasingly rare to find a film that turns a genre on its head while still staking claim to a level of originality, but that’s exactly what we have here.

So what happens in Drew Goddard’s movie?

Everything… Goes… Nuts.

You think you know why a group of stereotypical hardbodied coeds are in for a horrific say at the eponymous cabin in the woods, but you really don’t. (One hint: Goddard wrote 9 episodes of Lost. Cabin will make you wish he wrote the final season.)

It feels like Goddard and Whedon knocked it out of the park on this one. This film is fun and refreshing. It’s good for the horror fan and, well, the Whedon fan in us all. I had a blast.

Go see it when it comes out in April and let’s talk specifics then.

My first piece for Turnstyle News:

These screenings are basically marketing ploys, booked to help build positive buzz (ugh, did I really just use that word?) about a film before its release. A skilled marketer can pick out fests that will work to the advantage of the project at hand, but a misfire won’t really hurt a film’s image all that much. The reason is simple: festival audiences tend to really like movies.

I come to SXSW this year without having seen a single film in advance, not even the shorts. The linked piece here is about how these big screenings sometimes seem out of place, but ultimately it’s a win-win for everyone, including the makers of smaller, indie fare.

Give it a read. More to come at Turnstyle during the fest.

{% blockquote -Neetzan Zimmerman, Founder of The Daily What, March 9, 2012 %} Can a computer look at this video of a diseased cat and know that humans will laugh at it? Probably not. {% endblockquote %}

I just attended a session at SXSW called “Man Vs. Algorithm: Online Video Curation Face-Off”. It offered the following description:

Human or Machine? Who really knows what videos you’re going to like best? Online video curation is in a heated battle between algorithmic curation and human, editorial selection. Let’s settle this debate once and for all.

Settle it they did not. The session’s moderators, Marc Hustvedt, co-founder of TubeFilter and Head of Strategic Partnerships at Chill (a position and company I’ve never heard of), and Neetzan Zimmerman, editor of The Daily Wh.at, were supposed to actually do some kind of experiment during the session. It didn’t pan out because, as Hustvedt tried to explain, it would just be too hard to do in a session that short.

Instead they talked about video curation on the web, both the kind done by computers and the kind done by editors like Zimmerman, whose track record is somewh.at (I couldn’t resist) prolific. The conversation of man vs. machine really boils down to editors vs. algorithms. YouTube, for example, parses all kinds of data to determine which videos humans would like to see.

However, humans can do better because of that impulse that tells you “this is a something.” The above quote from Zimmerman is about the viral video “The OMG Cat,” which is just a short clip of a cat with lockjaw. The expression makes the cat look like it is surprised, like it is more human. Zimmerman rightly points out that a computer can’t see the inherent value in something like that.

The virality of online content is something that seems almost impossible to measure. Zimmerman mentioned in the session that he can’t really explain in finite terms what it is that makes one cat video better than another, but he certainly knows it when he sees it. It’s possible that there is something happening in our bodies when we have a “gut feeling,” something more chemical than visceral, that computers will one day be able to replicate.

Anyone who has ever launched a story or a video or had a scoop knows that it’s almost impossible to explain how it is that something goes from just existing to being an event. When you write (or, critically, read) online long enough, you can start to tell what’s going to hit and what’s going to get lost, but there’s no perfect way to predict it. It seems for a computer to fully understand viral videos, they would have to fully understand humans.

Thankfully, I think humans are going to be necessary in the editorial game for years, if not generations, to come. Now enough blogging about blogging; I’ve stories to find.

Stu Maschwitz has put together a great post on how Fountain can help you write smarter. He highlights the newest implementation of Sections and Synopses in Fountain for Makrked to help build a story. As always with Stu, it’s never just about the technology. His closing here about outlining a story is beautiful:

Of course, the answer in arch-building is to use a wooden frame, or a centring. You build the frame, and lay the stones over it. When you remove the frame, the stones remain in place. The shape of the frame defines the shape of the arch, but the frame itself is discarded, an now-useless artifact of the arch-building process. The arch, however, is more beautiful for the precision of the frame—and appears to hold itself together impossibly, an intoxicating combination of monumental might and graceful weightlessness.

This is a post worth revisiting often.

Richard Brody found a French book on cinema he had never heard of (a rarity). To borrow Brody’s word, the author, Roger Boussinot, was a “prophet.” Take the following excerpt from his 1967 text, “Le Cinéma Est Mort, Vive le Cinéma!” (The Cinema Is Dead, Long Live Cinema!), discussing how technology will advance to the point that everyone will be a filmmaker and how it will impact the form itself:

Here, there’s something absolutely new that will emerge: …the character who evolves in front of the camera… is a raw reality that must be raised, as such, to a sort of abstraction, which is just what’s needed for it to attain a communicable truth: neither particular nor universal (this doesn’t exist), but relative. So, goodbye strict numbered shooting script, with the precise definition of shots, camera movements, placement of actors—that is, the cart before the horse. Between the cinema of theatrical convention and the cast-fishing of conventional journalism as practiced by Jean-Luc Godard, there’s a new form to discover in the realm of fiction.

That bit, written forty-five years ago, aptly describes the current state of indie cinema. Great find.

Last week, after a long wait, Readability, the bookmarking and text-reformatting service, finally launched on iOS. Now that I have been using to for almost a week, I have a few more thoughts on how the app fits into my workflow, but more than anything I found myself with questions about the service itself.

So I contacted Richard Ziade, founding partner of Readability, to pick his brain about the iOS launch and the company’s future plans. He was only too kind as he patiently answered my questions over email. Here is what he said.

How has launch week been going? Crazy around Readability HQ?

Things are going great. The response has been just tremendous so we’re very excited.

The Hoefler & Frere-Jones fonts featured in the iOS app are absolutely gorgeous, particularly on the iPhone 4/S retina display. Can we be expecting them to come to the Web app anytime soon?

That’s more of an H+FJ question. I don’t want to steal the thunder of any announcement they may want to make. But yes - they do look amazing!

H+FJ has been dangling Web fonts for a while. After seeing Jason Kottke’s redesign this week featuring the Whitney typeface, I imagine I’m not alone in wishing they’d make their way into Readability in a desktop web browser.

Agreed. They’re incredibly polished.

You’ve launched within other apps (Reeder, Pulse, etc.) but how different (perhaps necessary?) is it to have your own app on iOS?

It’s important because it helps with user adoption and gets the brand name out there, but make no mistake about it: we’re incredibly invested in the development community around Readability. If someone builds a better reading client than our own, we’ll be the first to stand and clap.

Apple files Readability under “News” in the App Store. I’m always confused as to what to call this kind of app, usually settling on the term “read later service.” What would you call it?

Most broadly I’d probably call it a “reading tool” or “reading platform.” The emphasis is on comfort and flexibility.

How has the web changed since the original Readability bookmarklet? Has there been backlash to stripping ads? Have publishers gotten better about making their sites more readable?

I think “backlash” is probably too strong. I think we did raise awareness about the importance of comfort around reading and that publishers are starting to pay more attention to it, which is a good thing.

Your subscription service pays sites that get bookmarked most in Readability, but, currently, there is no difference between a free and a subscription account? Why make the service and the app free?

We didn’t want to associate features or encumber usage with a tiered plan. We wanted to decouple the two.

What are the common reasons you have found that customers choose to go premium?

Mainly to support writers and publishers.

Your support documents state that “premium supports the costs to run the service, continued development” and paying publishers. If all of your customers go with a free account, how does Readability intend to make money?

We’re still navigating towards a plan in that respect. Right now, we just want to build a big and engaged community.

Would advertising be a potential revenue stream?

Potentially. Anything is on the table.

That’s perhaps a little ironic for a product known for stripping ads toward the end of making “the Web a more pleasant place to read.” Are you suggesting that advertising could be pleasant?

Of course advertising can be pleasant. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been around for two hundred years! I think if a balance is struck where the reading experience is respected then there are all sorts of possibilities. Also – relevance helps. I’m into tech. Show me tech stuff, not soda ads.

What should we be expecting from Readability through the rest of 2012? Anything you can share?

More integration into more apps, services and experiences. We are a platform first and we want to galvanize a community.