Ultra Cheap Hipster Glasses

There is a certain type of glasses that is very "in" at the moment. Unfortunately, like most fashionable items, they are not cheap. However, you may not have realized that if you have seen the movie Avatar, you already own a pair! All you need is your RealD 3D glasses and some black gaffer's tape.

Voilà! You are ready to go see Vampire Weekend.

Any interested party can buy the pair of glasses in this photo for $500.00
Warning: Since these glasses have a different polarization on each eye, they may cause headaches. Oh Irony of Ironies! 

Got My Jailcard.

We just finished production of the Jailcard music video which will be the first single from Jane Lui's new album Goodnight Company. Check out these cool kids:

Pictured: Myself, Angela, Anthony, Sonali, Kayla, Matt, Marc, Jane and AppaThe video features a really cool dance sequence choreographed by Matt Gutierrez. The people pictured are the core dancers who did an amazing job. In addition to the dance scene which took place at night, we also filmed near the LA railyard around sunset. The cinematography in both scenes was done by the very talented William Eubank.

I'm really happy wth what we came up with and am excited for when it's done and everybody can see it. I'll start cutting it together as soon as I return to Switzerland. Look for it soon!

If you read my last film update about the video for Goodnight Company, its still coming but just a bit after Jailcard. Stay tuned.

2 Year Anniversary Giveaway Winners

Congratulations to Caitlin, Kwonwoo, and Zowik who are the three winners of a copy of
H.R. Giger's Sanctuary on DVD.

I want to thank everyone who entered the contest. I will be personally emailing everyone who entered to offer them a small token of my appreciation. If you missed the deadline to the contest, feel free to use this form and and I may be able to do you a small favor.

This giveaway was very successful, so I plan to do more in the future. Stay tuned

KammerOperSchweiz (Swiss Chamber Opera)

I recently produced a short promo film for the Swiss Chamber Opera.

This Swiss Chamber Opera or KammerOperSchweiz is a new, traveling opera that specializes in the performance of small operas written in the Baroque Era.

This film is a GlamourGeek Production

2 Year Anniversary DVD Giveaway!

August 21st will mark the 2 year anniversary of this blog. It is also my birthday. To celebrate, I am giving away 3 copies of my documentary H.R. Giger's Sanctuary on DVD. Here's the trailer:

If you want to be one of the three lucky people to win a DVD of H.R. Giger's Sanctuary then simply Use This Form to tell me you what is your favorite (or least favorite) post from theautomaticfilmmaker.com and why. If you are new to my blog, start by browsing some of the categories on the left. The insightfulness of the responses will influence how I choose the winners. If I choose you, I will contact you for your shipping details sometime after the 21st.

If you are impatient, you can buy H.R. Giger's Sanctuary on Amazon right now

Here's that Entry Form Link again

Anyone who enters is eligible. No purchase necessary. If headaches occur consult your doctor. 

Inspired by Man Ray

I was recently compelled to recreate a famous Man Ray image after taking a picture of the Sternwarte in Zürich.
Sternwartezeit

Man Ray was an American photography who earned his fame amongst the surrealists of Paris. He is also my favorite photographer. Let me share one of my favorite anecdotes about him:

One day Tristan Tzara came over to Man Ray's studio in Paris and presented him with a flyer for an upcoming Dada event. The flyer said the event would feature a film by Man Ray. Man Ray thought that was a very nice joke because Tzara knew very well that Man Ray had not made a film. Tzara was serious however. He suggested that Man Ray make a camera-less film in the style of his Rayographs. Man Ray thought this was plausible,  so he acquired some 35mm cinema film and took it into his darkroom. Cutting it into strips, he laid it out onto a table and proceeded to sprinkle salt and pepper on some parts, toss thumb tacks onto others and various other things. He then developed the strips and spliced them together with some loose-ends of some other cinema film he had been experimenting with. When the filmed was shown at the event, it caused an argument in the audience as to its merits as art. This argument lead to a brawl that the police had to break up.

It is amazing what was so controversial in the past that it caused a fight. I attribute it to the cognitive dissonance of the new. When people are exposed to something they have never seen, or imagined before sometimes the brain can't handle it. I strive to create something like that.

Watch Man Ray's film "Le Retour a la Raison"

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The Polaroid Image System

I recently acquired a Polaroid Image Première camera and have been having lots of fun with it.
The Polaroid Image System (known as Spectra in North America) was a new integral film format introduced by Polaroid in the 80s. Its main distinguishing feature is a wide image format instead of the square format of the popular 600 series. The Polaroid Image System also offered more features and better build quality than the 600 series. My particular camera has a 125mm f10 lens, an ultrasonic autofocus system, focus display in feet or meters, a 10 second self -timer, autofocus on/off, autoflash on/off and exposure compensation +/- 1.5 stops.
very expired filmEven though the Image System is more "professional" than most of the other Integral Polaroid cameras, it is still essentially a fully automatic camera. That said, once you learn how the camera operates, you can coax it into doing what you want most of the time. When you press the shutter button halfway, the camera meters at and autofocuses on an area in the center of the frame. Since this camera is a viewfinder, not an SLR, you can only tell if you have correct exposure/focus by reading the display line. A green light indicates exposure is good and a number is displayed to tell you the focus distance. If you want to focus on something that is not in the middle of the frame you can press the shutter half-way and then reframe. If you are working with a bright background or a spotlight situation you can use thebeautiful DOF, beautiful wife. exposure compensation switch. One thing that is a little strange is that the camera always flashes to some degree unless the flash is turned off.

In my opinion, the best thing about this kind of instant film is the size of the format. It is a medium format camera with an image area larger than the average (9.2 x7.3cm), which means you get great amount of detail. At this point I am limited by the resolution of my scanner and not the film. You can also achieve really beautiful shallow depth-of-field in the right situations.

This particular model of camera also has a trick that allows multiple exposures by engaging the self-timer. The film won't come out until you flip the self-timer switch back. If you close the camera half-way, the timer is re-engaged and the camera will expose the film again. You can see examples of multi-exposure here and here.

As opposed to the 600 series, which built special features into single-function camera, the Image System had many accessories built for it. The kit I bought came with a special effects filter set.
Now the big question: What film do you use with this thing? A few years ago I would have not bought this camera, because I would have feared that the film would soon cease to be available. That is different now thanks to The Impossible Project, who is manufacturing new film for integral polaroid cameras. In fact, when I got this camera, Impossible didn't make any Image/Spectra film. They only offered expired original Polaroid film, of which I bought several packs. I didn't know if or when they would produce new film for my camera. Thankfully they announced about 2 weeks ago that they have manufactured their first batch of PZ 600 Silvershade for Image/Spectra cameras. My first two packs just arrived. I look forward to them producing their new Colorshade film for this system as well.

Just a few years ago the future of instant film was doomed. Now it seems we are at a new beginning.

 

All Polaroids in this post were taken with either the very expired film that was with the camera when I bought it or the more recently expired Polaroid Image film from The Impossible Project.

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Jane Lui @ Cafe Henrici

Here is Jane Lui performing her original song "Long Ago" from her show at the best cafe in Zürich back in May

This song will be on her new album Goodnight Company coming later this year.

 

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The First Music Video Shot Entirely on a Camera Phone -- The True Story

With all the buzz about the iPhone4's video capabilities, I thought it would be appropriate to tell a story from the archive. This is a story of the harsh mistress that is internet fame and of pushing technologies beyond the cutting edge. It is also a story of self-congratulatory exaggeration. It is the true story of the first music video shot entirely on a camera phone:

iPhone/iPad Friendly Video

 

Set your judgement aside and come with me way back to 2004.

(Ripple dissolve - Chimes sound effect )

Random Nokia 3650 PhotoCamera phones were first becoming popular in the US, and I had recently picked up a Nokia 3650. This shining piece of technology had a 0.31 megapixel camera that also recorded 176x144 video, though limited to 12 second or 96kb clips (whichever came first). In addition, I was equipped with an unlimited GPRS plan from T-Mobile and an account with the now defunct proto-twitter service Textamerica. I was posting photos and short messages regularly from my phone way back in the early mid-2000s. I was a true member of the avant garde. Little did I know that my penchant for pushing the envelope would catapult me quite nearly to internet celebrity.

The night was February 30th, 2004. I was visiting San Diego for the weekend. It was late, so a group of friends and I were at the only place to go in track-home-laden North County San Diego -- Denny's. As it got later, we all became slightly punchy. My friend Haber (known only by his last name) was punchier than most and I began to film him with my camera phone. I discovered that you could stop and start within a clip, which allowed for basic in-camera effects like making things disappear. At one point in a video clip, my other friend Dave told Haber to get down from something he had climbed on to. That line was born to be a sound sample.

Later that night I returned to Haber's place, where I was couch surfing. I got the idea to throw together some loops in Garage Band and edit the grainy clips into a "music video". Haber, who is one hell of a guitar player, added the pièce de résistance -- a kick ass guitar solo. I inserted an MTV-style music video title and named the "band" XFYA, since everyone at Denny's that night had been in my high-school band, FYA (like ex-FYA, get it?). I hastily uploaded the video to Textamerica (Archive.org Link), giving it the title "the first music video shot entirely on a nokia 3650", and promptly went to sleep. The next morning, Haber Get Down had been seen nearly 10,000 times. It spread like a small brush fire through the nascent Web2.0 and went on to be viewed nearly 200,000 times (which was a lot for back then). It was even written about by several prominent bloggers including BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin who wrote "It's kind of lame, but it's still a first."

Filming "Cornelius Swarthout"To continue riding this wave of internet celebrity, we made an attempt to shoot a planned music video on my camera phone. We recorded a few songs the next night and filmed the second music video shot entirely on a camera phone: Homage to Cornelius Swarthout.

Alas, I was too far ahead of my time. Youtube didn't exist yet and web videos didn't have as much ability to go viral. Some TV shows appeared interested, but the video had too little resolution and television didn't really "get" internet video yet. (I actually sent a a mini-DV of this to a cable channel! Imagine 176x144 badly encoded video blown up to 720x480. Yuck!) Haber Get Down was forgotten. Over a year later, the Presidents of the United States of America claimed that they were the first to film a music video with cell phones on their song Some Postman. XFYA, being essentially a fake band, had no chance at refuting this. I still stand by my acheivement though. Granted, their video may have been better -- but we were first.

Ok, setting this silliness aside, something did strike me during that time. It was something people are only starting to talk about now. When we were filming Homage to Cornelius Swarthout, I thought about how liberating it was to be able to make a film with a pocketable device. I thought to myself that some years in the future we would have HD video camera phones, and the boundries of where and when cinematic stories could be created would be broken down.

We are seeing this now. When the iPhone 3GS came out, I made another music video, which was the first ever to be to be shot on that device -- Technologic Overkill. It was sort of an inside joke to myself about Haber Get Down (Technologic Overkill was the name of my moblog on Textamerica). Other videos came shortly after (1, 2, 3). Now with the iPhone 4, people are creating and even editing HD videos from a device that fits in their pocket. The results are pretty good (1, 2, 3).

Back in 2004 again. I had another thought that day while filming my second camera phone project. More important than where and when videos could be created with a pocketable device was who would do it. In the future, any kid with a camera phone could create the next masterpiece of cinema. I know Haber Get Down is far from a masterpiece, but I think it was an interesting step towards the future -- or it could just be a blurry camera phone video.

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