Monthly Archives: February 2013

God save the green [film tour]

GOD SAVE THE GREEN is on a GREEN TOUR in ITALY:
A film by Michele Mellara & Alessandro Rossi

The full schedule for this growing film event is planted on:
www.godsavethegreen.it

The GREEN TOUR OPENS in:
Bologna 7 al 13 marzo Cinema lumiére:

and is in Rome @

Roma Casa del Cinema:
20 marzo ore 19:15
21 marzo ore 18:00
23 marzo ore 18:00
24 marzo ore 16:30

www.mammutfilm.it

Get CentUp (sent up)

I love this Indiegogo campaign

You throw a few pennies at a project you like and you are reminded to support non-profits you endorse.
Indiegogo campaigns are becoming everything we’d want to see: smart, funny, useful and popular. Have you supported any films on Indiegogo recently?

We’re baaaaaaaaack! from Len Kendall on Vimeo.

Learn code, learn story. Get under the hood, kids.

I never thought I would be posting Bill and Zuck bragging about their early coding experiences, but here I deny it and do it. Why? Because I too started to code as a kid in 1980, in school, in Naw Haven, Connecticut. I wrote a program in BASIC, called “2 minute football”, with my older brother Greg. A player had only two minutes to come back from 9 points down and win. No graphics at all. Just a number matrix and a flashing ball.

Then as a freshmen in college I coded in Assembler language and Pascal. I made a Cat & Mouse graphical video game that challenged me more than 4 years of latin in greek in high school. Solving problems for credit, what a blast. I went to work for IBM and for 3 years sold software solutions. With the money I shot my first films. What I knew as “Problem Solving”, I began to call… “Conflict”.

I love Coding because it’s problem solving in a controlled environment. It’s logical (plan, design) , abstract (math) and narrative (code begins and ends, like a story). But Code serves another primary purpose, learning form your own mistakes, debugging your own thinking process. Coding allows to do stuff we just could not do before. Coding empowered me with new knowledge and experience. And now that film is digital, Code and Story go even more together.

Thanks to Code.org for activating the EDU button in the global algorithm, and for joining two key pieces of the puzzle: kids and problem solving.

Let’ fit more puzzle pieces together.

.Danny
CINEMAHEAD

http://www.code.org

Academy Award for “Searching for Sugarman” (sweden)

The Swedish documentary “Searching for Sugarman” won an Oscar today, and I am both grateful and overwhelmed.

I am grateful for the film itself, a simple piece about a one-of-a-kind life-journey. Sugarman” is an unlikely hero who makes a unique personal choice revealing not only his own true nature, but also ours.  The film shines a  light on the unanswered dilemmas we all must face: who are we and what is our purpose in life?

I am overwhelmed with honoring and congratulating Kaj Ivanovic who took the credit as post-production colorist [Chimney Pot post-house, Stockholm] Kaj  helped turn diverse found-footage materials into an academy-award winning aesthetic in support of an unforgettable narrative.

Kaj has been part of the Cinemahead family since 2004. He brought to life the first Karlstad film workshop series (with Daniel Wirtberg, Jonas Bergergård, Sara Broos, Jenny Jansdotter and others).

Congratulations Kaj!

 

 

Under the surface.

Inspiration is waiting to meet you around some corner, on your personal film adventures. Look at this Galapagos Terrapin  showing us how to go forward without fear, how to be following only one’s own nature. [shot on HERO3 GoPro, Islas Galapagos, 2013]

Do  you remember the first time you ever felt inspired? What happened?

[The Pope resigns] like in Nanni Moretti’s “Habemus Papam”.

Pope Benedict XVI resigned today, and the film Habemus Papam [We have a Pope] by Nanni Moretti immediately came to mind. Habemus Papam is a farce about the human limits of a holy man, who succumbs to the dilemma: to be or not to be Pope? The film screened at the 2011 Cannes Festival, to mixed reactions. Fact and fiction don’t seem so far apart. What other movies have predicted the future?

Resources:

http://www.filmschoolrejects.com/reviews/cannes-review-nanni-moretti-habemus-papam-we-have-a-pope.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/may/13/cannes-2011-review-habemus-papam

I was introduced to Nanni Moretti as a kid in Rome, Italy. My history teacher at the “Alfieri” middle school was the austere Mrs. Barbieri, Moretti’s aunt. She spoke a few times in passing about her teenage nephew Nanni and his attempts at making a super8 feature film. History proved her right: today, Nanni Moretti’s early pictures stand as masterful low budget debuts. Films made by young filmmakers about the pains of being young people are still not common today, despite the lower costs of digital film.

You can see some clips here (Italian only)

Io sono un autarchico” 1977 (“I am Self-Sufficient”)

Ecce Bombo” 1978 (…)

Both films have vision, personality and an in-your-face – uncompromising desire to mix open wounds and a pinch of salt. Moretti cracked a small opening in the italian film traditions. He appeared on scene and never left, without dominating it, but with an impossible-to-ignore brutally honest take on paradoxes and contradictions of human nature: a dark self-criticism blended with utopian optimism about politics, love and family. Every Nanni Moretti film is an unsentimental drop into the bloody battleground of hypocrisy we call “middle-class life”.

 

How to Package your next Movie?

I recently spent some time in the Yasuni region, in the Amazon. We could start to learn some tips & tricks from the plants and animals in the jungle. Each has an organic solution to is basic needs: plants need space to grow high and get more light. Animals need to reproduce. The story of nature is an un-sentimental cycle of survival efforts.

Look at this post on organic packaging from Evocative via GOOD.is

http://www.good.is/posts/mushrooms-based-packaging-and-designing-a-circular-economy

[Resources] Starting making cents?

By now, you’re probably used to seeing Facebook “LIKE” buttons attached to content all over the Internet. The team behind CentUp wants to take that concept and monetize it — giving money to the people who create content as well as to charities. A few cents per person for a given blogpost can really add up when you think how popular some content gets. A $20 contribution earns you 2,200 cents for when the product launches!

What is CentUp?

CentUp is an intentionally simple button that lives next to all kinds of web content. It lets people toss a few cents at blog posts, photos, videos, and songs they really love. The kicker? Half that money goes to charity.

Click here to find out more about this project at indiegogo.com!

Twinkies -land was in Milwaukee

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This still by Dick Blau [Milwaukee, WI 1995 ] is a peak into the stop-motion animation process of “The Twinkie Movie”, a film by Chris Smith (in the foreground, to the right, by the 16mm Bolex). I [Daniel Aleg] am the head on the top left, moving the conveyor belt in the back, through a wall of Twinkie boxes. Chris’s awesome idea was this: Twinkies have souls, and they try escaping from the distribution chain in a quest to return to Twinkie-Land, far away in the desert. The story had won a funding competition from Hostess and became the official celebration of the 60th product anniversary. The shoot took place in the glorious Kenilworth building in Milwaukee. It was my first week in town.

Watch the Twinkie Movie here

The final product shows why Chris Smith later emerged as a unique cult-filmmaker: he is a cinematic wonder, a Mozart of film. His working is like thinking directly in film form, ideas in action without language or symbolic translation. He often skips the script phase all together to shoot simple stories, using simple story structures but extraordinary characters. One example of his risky but inimitable low-budget approach is his first live action feature “American Job” –http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112345/ – Shot during one summer mostly as a solo-crew, the story was a simple masterpiece: a midwestern kid needs a job, but he can’t keep a job for the life of it. So he tries a sequence of low-level repetitive, demeaning, mind-numbing jobs (the ones that require “teamwork”).

I was happy to find “American Job” on several “best ever” lists. But the most famous cult-film Chris made, he made with Sarah Price – also from our UWM Film class: “American Movie” – http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181288/?ref_=sr_1 with Mark Borchardt and assorted other Midwest phenoms. American Movie won Sundance (as a doc) and was picked by Sony Classics for theatrical and DVD release. It has become the narrative of record in the meta-cinema doc genre (films about people making films). Mark Borchardt – who went on to more “Late night with David Letterman” fame, had – during the shooting of “American Movie” a brief part in my own meta-cinema film “Czar Of Make Believe”, in which he played himself, a cinematographer on a low budget set, and on which Chris graciously helped with some lighting.

So this picture from my mentor Dick Blau means a lot to me.  Dick and  the filmmakers on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) faculty made our Film Department the best “worst-kept” secret among small film schools in the country. And the motto “we keep the school out of your filmmaking” is unforgettable. It was life-changing to be part off our graduate-school class at UWM.  The name Milwaukee-Wood was coined by an indie magazine after “American Movie” won best doc at the Sundance Festival. You look up what year…