sundance

Where photojournalism meets documentary filmmaking

I recently attended a lecture presented by the people behind MediaStorm, a multimedia studio based in New York but really based, well, online. MediaStorm is innovative in that it trains journalists in new storytelling opportunities on the web, as well as serves corporate clients, as well as engages in documentary projects for the web that combine still photography and video (see image above, a project on the new economic realities in the Midwest). Most of these have been created by seasoned photographers for whom video and sound are, er, ‘new’ tools. And indeed, it’s a whole new world out there. We can no longer understand photographers as those working with the still image when their cameras (see the Canon EOS 5D Mark II) no longer simply shoot stills. As the equipment moves more and more toward a single device that records both still and moving images, and beautifully so, the walls between disciplines continue to come down down down.

Documentary: What happened to the $%!#ing Winnebago Man?

For YouTube’s 5 year anniversary celebration, guest curator Conan O’Brien selected the Winnebago Man (see above) as a noteworthy video. With over 1.6 million views to date on YouTube, this (hilarious) video compilation of profanity laced outtakes from a 1988 Winnebago commercial starred a very frustrated salesman Jack Rebney, or better known as the Winnebago [...]

Robert Redford: “Mr. President, now is the time for clean energy.”

Thursday, May 20, 2010, marks one month since BP’s oil rig exploded in the Gulf Coast, killing 11 people and unleashing one of the worst environmental disasters our nation has ever seen.   Since then, millions of gallons of oil have gushed into the ocean, poisoning marine life and threatening hundreds of miles of coastal [...]

Donated hair for the oil spill cleanup? It may not get used…

Looking for an opportunity to contribute to cleanup efforts for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? The opportunity may be as close as your barber or stylist’s chair, or your pet groomer’s table. Non-profit organization Matter of Trust has done a tremendous job coordinating human and animal hair collection efforts for use in booms and mats that could help with soaking up spilled oil.

Highlights from ICFF

The annual ICFF, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair took place this weekend as part of NY Design Week, but to call it a furniture fair is a bit misleading. Its scope includes everything from textile, lighting and product design to new materials and technologies and yes, furniture.

Music video: Ben Harper & Relentless7

Ben Harper and Relentless7 – Skin Thin from Ben Harper on Vimeo. Filmmaker Daniel Stessen eschewed a traditional music video format for a quietly more cinematic approach for his friend Ben Harper and his band Relentless7’s catchy song “Skin Thin” off their new album, White Lies for Dark Times. The video was shot in upstate [...]

Behind Troll 2: The Best Worst Movie Ever Made!

Furry Vengeance might be giving it a run for its money loss, but the 1990 critter epic Troll 2 is still deemed the most amusing bad movie of all time by many aficionados of enjoyable stinkers. For one thing, it has nothing whatsoever to do with Troll 1. Even more astoundingly, it’s inexperienced actors—including a small-town dentist named George Hardy—flounder around Utah in a ludicrous story about a family trip ruined by man-eating goblins in burlap sacks.

Photographing tourists photographing

For his latest project “Shooting Tourists,” professional photographer Alan Powdrill turns the camera on picture taking (and video recording) tourists. He explains: The idea started with a visit to Rome, an amazing place definitely not short of holiday makers, all after that elusive shot that will make it’s [sic] mark on thier [sic] memory hard [...]

New Jersey global warming skeptic loves his solar panels

Lifelong Jersey City resident Adam Szpala describes himself as a climate change skeptic. And cap-and-trade programs? He “thinks [they're] crazy when the economy is suffering as it has been,” according to The Jersey City Independent.

But this contractor and rental property owner loves him some solar panels… and plunked down $45,000 four years ago to install them on his own house as well as the building next door he rents out. His incentive: cost savings on energy. Because he lives in New Jersey, which has had some of the most generous rebate programs in the country (they’ve dried up some lately), he’ll likely recoup his initial investment in just a few more years. He saves about $200 a month on electricity, and also receives Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SREC) payments to the tune of around $7000 a year.

WALKABOUT out on DVD

In the novel Nicolas Roeg’s WALKABOUT (1971) is based on, “The Children,” by James Vance Marshall, the two main characters, a 16-year-old girl and her younger brother must make their way through the Australian outback after surviving a plane crash. Along the way they encounter an Aboriginal boy on his walkabout, the Aboriginal rite of passage. Roeg’s film maintains the same central narrative, but in his version the two children, credited only as Girl and White Boy, are abandoned in the outback by their father, who has driven them there and tried to shoot them before lighting the car on fire and killing himself.

Naked News: The pope, stolen sex toys, and free spiked condoms

• Pope Benedict XVI called abortion and same-sex marriage some of the most “insidious and dangerous” threats facing the world today. (Can we start replacing that phrase “Is the pope Catholic?” with “Is the pope an ignorant doddering asswipe?” instead now please.)
  
  
• In news that actually belongs in this century, the Minnesota Legislature has passed a bill that would give same-sex couples more end-of-life rights in the event of a partner’s death.
  
  

THE LAZY ENVIRONMENTALIST: Lazy Band

THE LAZY ENVIRONMENTALIST airs Tuesdays at 8PM E/P.

Working on Lazy Band reminded me just how challenging pursuing a creative goal can be. The women of Raining Jane who I attempt to green on this episode have been on the road for ten years writing music, refining their sound, and jamming on stage for audiences all over the country. To be that dedicated to a vision is rare. To be so in love with doing something such as playing music is a gift in itself. To see it through amidst cramped hotel rooms and thousands of long miles logged on the road requires levels of perseverance that go beyond what most of us believe we are capable of doing.

JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, “I am trying to break your heart”

Boing Boing unearthed this cover Wilco’s (one of my favorite bands incidentally) “I am trying to break your heart” by a Chicago band, JC Brooks and the Uptown Sound, which injects a decidedly party mood and soul sound to this song. It’s an interesting spin and I wasn’t sure about it the first time I [...]

Post-Pop in St. Louis

I am loving Andy Magee’s artwork. A friend sent me a link to a show he’s doing in St. Louis at the Mad Art Gallery. The first image I saw, a take on Warhol’s Marilyn, is made entirely of sweetener packets. Equal, Splenda and Sweet & Low turned into art? Sugary sweet!

Mother goose goes on museum tour

The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena posted the cutest photo series on their Facebook page. On the morning of Friday, May 7, a bold mother goose and her gosling waddled through the lobby of the museum to get a gander at their pond in the sculpture garden. It’s good to see the youth being exposed [...]

Little girls do “Single Ladies” and the women’s movement takes two dance steps backwards

Wrong. This is just plain wrong. Think “Little Miss Sunshine” — except this is real life. We really hate agreeing with Fox News (it’s like one of the signs of the coming Apocalypse), but 8 year old girls should not be dressed up in sexy Pussy Cat Doll outfits and then taught how to gyrate [...]

Will CRUDE director be forced to surrender his footage?

As the world struggles to absorb the devastating implications of the oil spill currently glugging untold barrels of crude into the Gulf of Mexico, while the companies involved point fingers at each other and decline to fully admit their mistakes, another oil-related drama has been playing out in a federal court in New York.

Chevron, the oil giant at the center of Joe Berlinger’s documentary CRUDE, which opened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2009, has petitioned the court to allow it to subpoena more than 600 hours of footage shot for his film. The film tells the story of a group of Ecuadoreans who are suing the oil company, contending that it poisoned their people by dumping 18 billion gallons of toxic oil waste into their rivers and onto their land in what has become known as “Amazon Chernobyl.”

Chevron is seeking a dismissal of the suit, which has dragged on for years, and believes that the footage may help its case. But Berlinger’s attorneys have argued that the director should be offered the same privileges that all investigative journalists receive, allowing them to protect confidential sources and information. They insist that forcing him to turn over the footage would violate his rights under the First Amendment and constitute a breech of the confidentiality agreements he’d established with the people who appear in the film.

A little more than a week ago, the ruling came back.

What do you do with a public art display when it comes down?

For New York City-based artist Amy Wilson, the answer to that question was recycle it… into something useful that she could sell.

Wilson was one artist of many participating in the Downtown Alliance’s Re:Construction public art program, which “[recast] construction sites as canvasses for innovative public art and architecture.” Her work, It Takes Time to Turn a Space Around, was located at West Thames Park, and consisted of a 130′ x 5′ digital print on vinyl of original watercolor (her primary medium).

PLEASE GIVE

In PLEASE GIVE, director Nicole Holofcener returns to some of the same themes that plagued her 2006 film FRIENDS WITH MONEY, namely money and what to do when you have too much of it. The answer in that case was to donate lots of it to worthy causes unless that worthy cause involves someone you know, in which case it’s impertinent to give a monetarily un-endowed friend a bundle of cash. If that friend has any luck, however, her day wage job will lead her into a situation where she can meet a rich person who’s just bored and lonely enough to marry her, hence solving her money problems for good.

Modern chair foosball

Jakob Maurer, Rupert Adlmaier and Thomas Egger are new heroes of mine. The three designers made an incredible foosball table from different pieces of furniture: a dresser, a kitchen table, and a pair of rollerskates. Instead of little soccer men these furniture geeks made two different teams of chairs. Team one are classics of the [...]

Similarities in airline logos

As our Sunfiltered fans are (I assume) a handsome, sophisticated, and well-traveled bunch, I thought this find by Kottke would be of interest to our globe trotting readers. It seems that a LOT of airlines flock to the more obvious of symbols-birds-when designing their brand logos. The bird and circle combo motif is especially popular. [...]

Jump around: Jordan Matter’s jumping photos of dancers

It’s not a big surprise to anyone that peruses through my Flickr or knows me that I’ve been a long time fan of jumping photos as both a participant and as the photographer. My friends and I however look like complete amateurs compared to these fantastic photos taken by photographer Jordan Matter (recently covered by Em and Lo here) of dancers leaping through the air in various iconic or familiar areas of New York City, such as Parisa Khobdeh at a Yankees game. Matter explains:

Dancers Among Us is a collection of NYC dance photographs featuring members of the Paul Taylor, Mark Morris and Martha Graham Dance Companies. This is an ongoing project that began in the spring of 2009. There were no trampolines or other devices used for these images, just thousands of hours of training.

A couple more after the jump that I really liked!

Full Frontal Fashion highlights

Designer Karen Walker Think of this as your FULL FRONTAL FASHION cliff notes Karen Walker is as cool, sweet, clever and real as the covetable clothing she creates. Now she is telling FULL FRONTAL FASHION all about her abiding love affair with fashion… Bradford Shellhammer chats with Swedish designer Viktor Tell about global-soccer-champion tribute socks. [...]

San Francisco MoMA turns 75

Though today is its official birthday, the San Francisco MoMA has been celebrating its 75th year with an Anniversary Show that opened in 2009 and will run until 2011, highlighting works from its outstanding permanent collection that runs the gamut from Braque, Brancusi and Bourgeois to more recent acquisitions from Olafur Eliasson and Ron Arad. SFMoMA not only boasts an impressive collection, but also the bragging rights associated with mounting Jackson Pollock’s first solo museum exhibition in 1945 and collecting early works of then unknown and often controversial artists like Jeff Koons, Frida Kahlo, Bruce Conner and Larry Sultan.

Geekiest marriage proposal ever

Warning: only hardcore nerds — or those with a soft spot for hardcore nerds — will find this YouTube footage touching. It goes on for a while, you can’t quite see what’s going on, and there’s no climactic applause and shouts of congratulations at the end. But with a little background info, it becomes more [...]