pondering

Fire ballet at The Crucible
The Crucible, a sculpture and industrial arts organization in Oakland, is presenting a fire ballet rendition of Romeo and Juliet on January 10 to 13, and 17 to 20. The teaser video is exciting.

In the dazzling tradition of The Crucible's Fire Operas, this first-ever Fire Ballet is a theatrical spectacle that fuses ballet, classical music, aerial performance, and the fire and industrial arts into a compelling modernized rendition of Shakespeare's tragic tale. Choreographer Corinne Blum, formerly of the San Francisco Ballet, has been recognized as one of the West Coast’s most exciting, young choreographers. Dazzling fight scenes—expect real fire when tempers flare!

Classically trained ballet dancers share the stage with fire performers, while the aerial dancers of Flyaway Productions soar in the industrial vastness of The Crucible’s 56,000 square foot studio. Capulets and Montagues stage their brawls with urban dance and Capoeira in explosive fight scenes against a backdrop of flaming sculptures.

Link

DV Rebel's Guide
I'm looking into making some videos, and I just heard about this book: The DV Rebel's Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap. It sounds great.

Written by Stu Maschwitz, co-founder of the Orphanage (the legendary guerrilla visual effects studio responsible for amazing and award-winning effects in such movies as Sin City, The Day After Tomorrow, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), this book is a must-have for all those budding filmmakers and students who want to produce action movies with visual effects but don't have Hollywood budgets.

The Orphanage was created by three twenty-something visual effects veterans who wanted to make their own feature films and discovered they could do this by utilizing home computers, off the shelf software, and approaching things artistically. This guide details exactly how to do this: from planning and selecting the necessary cameras, software, and equipment, to creating specific special effects (including gunfire, Kung Fu fighting, car chases, dismemberment, and more) to editing and mixing sound and music. Its mantra is that the best, low-budget action moviemakers must visualize the end product first in order to reverse-engineer the least expensive way to get there.

Readers will learn how to integrate visual effects into every aspect of filmmaking--before filming, during filming and with "in camera" shots, and with computers in postproduction. Throughout the book, the author makes specific references to and uses popular action movies (both low and big-budget) as detailed examples--including El Mariachi, La Femme Nikita, Die Hard, and Terminator 3.

Link

Velvet Underground record sells for $155,401
A rare copy of my favorite album in the world, "The Velvet Underground and Nico," sold on eBay this weekend for $155,401. The seller, Warren Hill of Montreal, bought it for quarter at a street flea market in New York City in 2002. Apparently it's only one of two in-studio acetates recorded during the 1966 studio sessions that produced the album. Background on the buyer hasn't been announced. Record collector Eric Isaacson, who helped his friend Hill identify the album, tells the whole story in Goldmine magazine. From the article:

We pieced together that this was probably a surviving copy of the legendary Scepter Studios recordings, which had been regarded as lost (hence the application of the moniker “the lost Scepter Studios recordings” to these unheard sessions over the years). The recording is composed of the primitive first “finished” version of the LP that Andy Warhol had shopped to Columbia as a ready-to-release debut album by his protégé collective.

Though the same compositions and even a few of the same takes (albeit in different mixes) were used on the subsequent commercial release, The Velvet Underground & Nico is a significantly different creation. I had heard of these nascent recordings before — it was said by some that the master tapes had burned in a fire, by others that all of those recordings ended up being on the released album, and still by others that the only existing copy of that material was on an acetate owned by David Bowie and that he was known to tout it as his most prized possession. The truth about what we held was fuzzy until Hill managed to track down the N. Dolph referred to on the label for an interview.

Link

South Park creators: download our shows!
South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker gave a great interview to the libertarian magazine Reason. They talk a lot (and well) about free speech issues, but they really shine when tlaking about copyright:

Reason: When it looked like Comedy Central wasn’t going to rerun the Mary episode, people were still able to download it illegally online. Did you see that as a victory for free speech, or did you think, “My God, these people are stealing our intellectual property”?

Stone: We’re always in favor of people downloading. Always.

Reason: Why?

Stone: It’s how a lot of people see the show. And it’s never hurt us. We’ve done nothing but been successful with the show. How could you ever get mad about somebody who wants to see your stuff?

Parker: We worked really hard making that show, and the reason you do it is because you want people to see it.

Link (via Svardaman's MySpace)