Aug 25, 2010

100 Movie Icons

I came across these animated icons and had fun browsing all the different characters and movie icons. I was amazed that there were only a few I didn't recognize - thank you film history. I thought I'd pass on the challenge to you. How many movie icons/characters do you recognize? Click the image to enlarge, and for a hint at who the character might be the list of movies represented (in chronological order) is listed below.

Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens, Metropolis, Frankenstein, City Lights, Duck Soup, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Singin’ in the Rain, Rebel without a Cause, Seven Year Itch, Spartacus, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Dr. No, Lawrence of Arabia, A Hard Day’s Night, Dr. Strangelove (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), The Sound of Music, Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary’s Baby, Easy Rider, A Clockwork Orange, Shaft, The Godfather, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Taxi Driver, Annie Hall, Saturday Night Fever, Star Wars, Superman, Alien, Apocalypse Now, Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Scarface, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Amadeus, Full Metal Jacket, Robocop, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, The Silence of the Lambs, Reservoir Dogs, Forrest Gump, Léon, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Braveheart, Scream, American History X, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Lola Rennt, The Big Lebowski, American Beauty, Fight Club, The Matrix, Gladiator, Memento, Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain, Lord of the Rings, Kill Bill

Aug 24, 2010

A Decade From Ontario

In that dream state that seems to befall the best of us when referring to the passing of time, here I am ten years later. On a summer vacation in August 2000 I was off to southern Ontario with my family to explore Toronto, Ottawa, and Niagara Falls for the first time. It was marked by the purchase of my brand new D8 camcorder (digital!) just a few weeks before that gave me that opportunity to shoot in a way I never had before.

My reverence for this trip comes largely from the edits I managed to create on the fly - something that is far more complicated than it sounds. At 16 I had no computer of my own, no video editing software, and I managed to pull off three separate edits synced to music (while touring!) entirely in-camera.

The project was unnecessarily complicated in retrospect, but 10 years later I'm still impressed by the exercise I put myself through. Read the complete post for my Ontario Postcards here to fully understand what I had going on - and be sure to check out the playlist of finished postcards, now a decade old, below.



Aug 20, 2010

One Million

It certainly didn't happen by accident, but day after day that seemingly unattainable goal started to look more and more realistic. Three years and three months into the game and today my combined video views from YouTube, Vimeo, and Yobi.tv now total more than one million! That's a pretty respectable milestone if you ask me.

Divided up over a number of projects, I'm proud to say that the views didn't all come from a single video or from uploading someone elses' content or from a cheap attempt to go viral - no, the million views (and counting!) have come from simply sharing film school shorts, experiments, travelogs, parodies, and a variety of other original content that I've created over the years. And to be clear, the number doesn't include any of the corporate edits or videos that I've done and that others have uploaded to their sites.

It's a small time success story in that there are those who have achieved this milestone seemingly overnight - but, for my sake, the number simply means that people have been watching. Whether the number was 10,000 or 1,000,000 that's all I ever really cared about. The number is more or less a realization of a goal that seemed almost impossible to reach when I started out, and in that sense it's a marker for the determination and effort that I've invested in myself and the work I'm passionate about. It feels incredible to have reached one million views and have perseverance to attribute it to.

Thank you all for continuing to make the journey a rush!