Exploded Diagram

Motion

Motion from Apple is an eye-popping new application for motion graphics.

This looks like a big winner.

Congratulations to Dion and all the Motion developers.

2004 Projects

We are working on Michael Moore's new feature documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11. This film is a complex mixture of original 24P HD and standard-definition stock and archival footage.

We are pleased to be working with Rhino Edit on the HD conform and Technicolor Digital Intermediates (TDI, Burbank) on the film recording.

Gary Rizzo from Skywalker is the Re-recording Sound Mixer.

Marie and Bruce in Park City, UT.

Bob Balaban remarked in the Q&A after the premier screening of Marie and Bruce at Sundance that the interminable party scene seemed to continue after the movie stopped. It would be difficult to describe local reaction to the film better than that.

Dennis Harvey's Variety review, while taking pains to position the film in as marginal a market as possible, did skillfully describe the challenge that Tom Cairns took on in bringing Marie and Bruce to the screen.

Harvey's review struck me as an honest - and rather flattering - response to an alien phenomenon.

The Hollywood Reporter however, wanted clarity: the film must either be a satire, or it must be absurd. Having elements of both satire and absurdity was evidently too much to bear.
Comparing the dreams scenes to Harry Potter (!) and the dialogue to Ionesco, the Reporter's Kurt Honeycutt concludes that Wally Shawn didn't know what he wanted to say. Hmmm. (Honeycutt couldn't tell us either).

I hope the film soon finds an audience more comfortable with its ambitions.

"Spotlight"

This new piece of interface architecture from Apple could be a great beginning, and I am inclined to think that it will eventually involve (the however unfortunately denominated) "piles".

I have had to create an identical set of organizing categories in my Mail Client (Eudora) my Text Storage Utility (DEVONthink) my Web Browsers (Safari and Firefox ) my Contact Manager (Address Book) my Calendar (iCal) my Documents Folder and my RSS Aggregator (NetNewsWire).

Why are they not on some level the same categories?

Why do I have to rebuild them everywhere? Why doesn't the OS rebuild them for me on some deeply satisfying level? Certainly this common set of categories is as important to my interaction with the computer as anything else about me as a user.

One problem is to find things; the other is to be able to structure them so that you don't need to find them over and over again.

The Joy of Three

We have been working on two projects that employ three electronically-blended HD streams to form one continuous projected panorama.

While we have edited several ambitious three-stream projects in the past, these two will break ground in the complexity and fluidity of the composite image. Besides taking advantage of the visual possibilities offered by the extremely wide field of view, each will make use of multiple areas of focus, high-resolution motion graphics and both original and archival film footage.

The scale of these installations is a significant part of their interest: one will be projected on a surface 12 feet high by 48 feet wide.