So the past few days I’ve been down in Smithfield a bit for the Ava Gardner Independent Film Festival. I feel like I got a lot more out of it this year than previous years as far as having an ability to look at people’s work & trying to figure out what did they do right & wrong & what can I learn from it. One of the things that I noticed a lot of people doing wrong that I also see in a lot of commercially successful films is having the music way too loud. Another thing that has been my theory for a while that I really am trying to concentrate on within everything I do is making things using what’s available instead of trying to make a big grand statement. Better to alter a script to fit the personalities of the actors available than to hope actors can pull off a good performance. Also I’ve been noticing lately (& not just at AGIFF) that it’s getting to the point where a straight ending is almost a bigger twist than a twist ending to a story, which is kind of bizarre.
Kirk Adam did this little doc thing of me making mead that was part of the film festival. Here you go:
So the season finale of Breaking Bad was tonight. Good episode, good season. I kinda didn’t like the last fifteen seconds where they showed the lily & I almost felt like it would’ve been a good series ending place if it hadn’t done that (of course I don’t mind some loose ends in a plot as I feel it’s a bit realistic). But of course one season to go. I wonder if Walt will survive the series.
Last Night’s Dreams:
I’m in heaven sitting on a curb. Surprisingly heaven seems a lot more like a refurbished downtown Detroit than I ever would have anticipated. A group of five guys who look like 50 year old mobsters come out of the processing building meaning they’ve made it here. One of them has a cold. The one with a cold goes up to a pretzel vendor & gets pretzels of all of them & licks the pretzels of the others’ while his back is turned before presenting them. Heaven doesn’t seem quite like I expected.
BMI audits Spotify & ends up bleeding the company & its backers for millions in artist revenues. The principal backers of Spotify of course are the four major labels, so in the financial shake-up they collapse. I’m not sure if it’s all good news or if it’s the end of the idea of people making money off of recording music.
1.) i agree with your assessment of movie flaws. Although i noticed this more with hollywoody movies and things from the 80′s where the music even if it’s not loud it’s non-stop. I like how a lot of recent films don’t clutter it up with music.
2.) All this time you talk about Breakin Bad, i thought you were watching that breakdance movie.
3.) Yesterday i was counting change out of a cup so i can take it to the coinstar & it made me think of tracking sales of Spotify etc. . . . and then that made me realize that the internet based musician is basically a busker going home with a handful of coins and a few bills.
Yeah, the non-stop music or the loud music, hard to say which is worse. But when the drums are unintentionally louder than the nuclear explosion, that’s not too good. I know that when I tried screening my cartoons without sound they didn’t work properly because people don’t notice they start without a sound cue & I do dislike it when credits are ran on silent at the end of the movie because it seems to give them a false sense of importance. But the really loud music seems like such an easy & obvious fix. For a while I thought it was because of me watching movies on inferior devices, but I think it’s just from lazy people in the sound department ripping audio straight off an ultra-hot CD without adjusting it.
You should check out Breaking Bad. It really only functions I think if you start from the beginning as it’s kind of about likable characters becoming total assholes.
i don’t think it’s from the incompetence you speak of. I think it’s more to do with “IN YOUR FACE” production values that’s really popular since the 2000′s started.