I’m like super-famous now… October 25, 2009
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Greg Chiaramonti, Movies, Pop Culture, Science Fiction, Transformers.Tags: autographs, Documentary, DVD, DVD extras, movie sets, Movies, Princeton University, Revenge of the Fallen, Shia LaBeouf, Transformers 2
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That’s me in a scene from the making-of documentary on the Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen DVD… I was at Princeton University back when they were filming the movie (check my previous post about it here), so it was cool to see this scene pop up with Shia signing autographs – I knew right away I must be in there somewhere. After hitting the slow-mo and stepping thru on pause, I could see my cap and glasses in the back row there.
If you have the 2-disc special edition DVD, on the main menu, go to “The Human Factor: Exacting Revenge of the Fallen”. Then click on “Domestic Destruction – Production: United States”. The scene starts at 00:06:43.
An “Objectified” Review October 18, 2009
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Apple, Apple iPhone, Creativity, Digital Lifestyle, Documentary, Electronic Music, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Movies, Technology.Tags: Helvetica, Documentary, Gary Hustwit, Apple, Objectified, Industrial Design, objects, Jonathan Ive, movie review, design philosophy, Creativity, design inspiration
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This past week, after much anticipation, I watched the documentary film Objectified, by Gary Hustwit. His Helvetica (see my previous review) was one of my favorite documentaries ever, so I’d been looking forward to this for some time. It’s just cool to see a well-done film about design. Overall, didn’t enjoy this one as much as Helvetica – probably more due to my background in graphic design, as Objectified is more about industrial design. However, it’s still a great film, and I enjoyed it more upon a second viewing.
The interview with Jonathan Ive, one of the chief industrial designers at Apple (he was the main designer on the iMac, MacBook, iPod, and iPhone), was a highlight. He really explained (and embodied) the obsession to detail that makes Apple a standout in its product design. There are many other great interviews with prominent industrial designers speaking of their design process and philosophies on items as mundane as toothbrushes to as iconic as cars and the first laptop computer.
I think the most effective scenes in the film are the close-ups of objects in use, such as forks and plates, chairs, faucets, alarm clocks, etc. – filmed in such a manner as to focus on the object itself. Just felt somehow like you are observing these everyday objects in such a way as you’re seeing them for the first time. Really well done. Similar to the scenes in Helvetica showing the font in signs and storefronts, but more subtle and probably harder to achieve this effect with objects, searching for the right framing to make it work. I also dug the scene showing the front end of cars, which are sometimes overlooked in the design process – producing some unfortunate “faces”.
As always, Mr. Hustwit’s films have a great soundtrack with some cool electronic/ambient grooves, and Objectified doesn’t disappoint. His movies always get my design juices flowing. Hopefully he will continue with the design theme for the next documentary. What’s next, maybe architecture?
Objectified is available for download on iTunes:
http://www.itunes.com/movies/Objectified
The King of Final Cut Express September 26, 2009
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Animation, Apple, Creativity, Editing, Final Cut Express, Greg Chiaramonti, Music, Video, Visual Effects, Web Video, YouTube.Tags: alternative music, Apple, Apple software, compositing, digital video, filmmaking, Final Cut Express 4, folk rock, king, king of anything, luma key, music video, rock music, Snow Leopard, special effects, video editing, YouTube
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Just completed this new music video for my song “King of Anything”. Once again, I used Final Cut Express 4 to edit the video and create all of the effects and compositing. I went kinda retro on this… my cheesy green screen (a neon green tablecloth from Party City) got a bit roughed up from trying to film my cat on it, and I didn’t feel like heading out to buy a new one, so I used a good old Luma Key to composite video I shot of myself and guitarist Mike Z. against a blank wall. It added sort of a transparency effect that I feel makes the video look kinda old-school, classic rock, you know? I did the same for my “Crashing Down” video. I even added some noise and “Bad TV” effects to make it look more retro. And if you notice certain things start to look a bit shaky… it’s the Earthquake effect. I utilized Earthquake to give elements a shaky film projector feel in King of Anything. Overall, it’s been fun working on these videos – FCE4 is a little quirky sometimes, but for the most part it’s a smooth experience. Especially since I learned to render scenes to video as I work in order to see the effects in final form and to make “real-time playback” smoother.
By the way, does anyone know if a new version of FCE is coming out for Snow Leopard? I haven’t upgraded to SL yet, but I’m planning to soon (actually, I’m ashamed to admit, I’m still on Tiger… I never got around to Leopard and then decided to wait for SL, but still procrastinating. I’m pretty happy with the setup I have so not in any real rush, though some of the SL features look cool and I do want the latest iLife, especially GarageBand. And the speed increase will be nice.).
Welcome to the [stupid] future. January 12, 2009
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Apple, Comedy, Digital Lifestyle, Digital Media, Illustration, Movies, Parody, Pop Culture, Science Fiction, Star Wars, Technology.Tags: Apple, bespin, cloud city, Comedy, comic strip, comics, cyber, cyborg, funny, future, lobot, Movies, Parody, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Star Wars, Technology, The Empire Strikes Back
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Hey everyone, sorry I haven’t posted in a long while… been busy with some new projects – my next album (in the final mixing phase, also developing the album art), plus this fun new science fiction parody comics site, stupidfuture, that I’m co-producing with a friend. We’re both drawing the comics, plus posting related commentary about the featured sci-fi references. I’m posting as “Nigel Matrix”, and my friend is “Raven”. (Long story… we used to be a “cyber-grunge-techno-pop” sci-fi concept band/multimedia experiment back in the day. Yeah.)
Please check out stupidfuture for more comics, plus links out to our blog, youtube site, and cafepress store. Enjoy!
Helvetica – The Movie. August 2, 2008
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Creativity, Documentary, Graphic Design, Movies, Typography.Tags: corporate identity, David Carson, Documentary, fonts, Gary Hustwit, Graphic Design, grunge design, Helvetica, logo design, modern, Neville Brody, Paula Scher, Ray Gun Magazine, Stefan Sagmeister, type, Typography
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Yes, a movie about a font. No, it’s not an action-adventure about typefaces saving the world, however, it is a documentary by Gary Hustwit about how the font Helvetica changed the world – and continues to affect design choices that impact how we interact with society and culture. I’ve been strangely addicted to this film ever since downloading it to my iPod last week. Don’t know if it’s the sense of design that permeates the cinematography, or the cool, understated electronic/ambient soundtrack, or just that fact that I’ve never seen a film so purely about graphic design. Being a designer myself, it was incredible to see some of the most famous desingers from every era, including Neville Brody, Stefan Sagmeister, David Carson and Paula Scher. All of these designers I studied back-in-the-day during college. Especially Carson – I loved his Ray Gun magazine and it’s complete revolution against design standards, which ushered in the grunge font era. I guess I cut my teeth in design during that era, and it was always controversial at the time among my professors and old-school designers. Carson mentions the issue where he replaced an entire article with Zapf Dingbats because he thought the article was poorly written and boring, so there was no need to read it anyway – and I remember passing that issue around in one of my design classes.
All of the interviews were well done and it was great to see the wide range of opinions on the use of Helvetica. The respect the older designers had for it, and how some of them only used variations of Helvetica in their work. The font was a bold step into the future, back in 1957, and many corporate logos made the switch to Helvetica at the time to clean up and focus their identity. By the seventies, some desingers associated Helvetica too much with corporate blandness and conformity, so the psychedelic and more experimental fonts were introduced. In the 80s, post-modernism and a further step away from Helvetica ensued, with more playfulness and expressiveness. By the 90s, deconstruction and total disregard of design rules led to the grunge era, where anything was possible. Now the pendulum is swinging back to clean and modern and helvetica is becoming respected once again.
Overall, I just found it awesome to get a window into the personalities of these great designers I had read so much about. And the interviews were separated nicely with clips of Helvetica in use on signage throughout the cities where the designers lived or worked. This film probably has a niche audience of designers and visual artists, so I’m not sure how interesting it would be for the general viewer. Though, as one of the type designers in the film points out, when he mentions what he does nowadays to a stranger, he often gets a story about a particular font the person must use at his office, etc. So in a sense the general public does have a stronger knowledge of and use for fonts than in the past when it was only the designer who had access to this. And with the proliferation of myspace and other social networking websites, many more people are experiencing being designers first-hand as they customize their sites. So maybe the film would prove interesting to a wider audience in this sense.
It definitely switched the graphic design portion of my brain into overdrive. Almost inspires me to dig up an old copy of Fontographer and start designing my own typefaces again.
Learn more about the film here: http://www.helveticafilm.com/, or search for it on iTunes.
Transformers 2 filming in Princeton! June 27, 2008
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Animation, Movies, Pop Culture, Robot, Science Fiction, Transformers, Video, Visual Effects.Tags: autograph, director, entertainment, fantasy, filmmaking, Isabel Lucas, Megan Fox, Michael Bay, motorcycle, movie extras, movie production, New Jersey, new movies, Princeton University, Ramon Rodriguez, Revenge of the Fallen, robots, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Shia LaBeouf, Transformers 2
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Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen was filming over on the Princeton campus this week!!! I hung out there the past couple nights after work – it was awesome! I noticed Michael Bay right away – he’s really tall and had a bright red cap on. Then Shia LaBeouf started hanging around waiting for his scene, and eventually Megan Fox, Isabel Lucas and Ramon Rodriguez turned up. One of the spectators near me had a huge, fluffy white sheep dog, big as a baby bear, and at one point Bay and all of the actors noticed and came over to pet it for a bit. Got to see Megan Fox and Isabel Lucas up close… real nice…
Mostly they were filming shots of the leads running around the campus, with a bunch of college student extras running, too. I managed to get a few blurry photos – there was a lot of security constantly watching us for cameras. Got yelled at a few times. There was a large amount of lighting and camera equipment, trucks everywhere. Bay kept yelling at the extras to reset the scene quickly and making them run over and over before the sun went down. Bay also rode a bike around the set, since the actors were set up far from the camera for some scenes. While preparing for his runnng scene, Shia started jumping in place, and then he was swinging from a branch high up on a tree (it reminded me of that goofy scene in the Indy Crystal Skull movie where he’s swinging like Tarzan with all of those CGI monkeys).
On the second night, Megan and Shia were riding on a red sport motorcycle that I believe is a new female Transformer. Megan was driving so maybe it’s her guardian, the way Bumblebee is to Shia. Shia was great – he stepped out a couple times just to sign autographs. I managed to slip through a sea of screaming college girls (all of them seemingly texting and talking on their cells while simultaneously sticking paper and pens in Shia’s face…) to get his autograph. Total mayhem. At the end of the night, after most people had gone, a few of us hung out for a while, and it paid off since we got to catch Bay going to his van to leave. Bay was really cool – he even waited a moment while I fished for a pen in my pocket to get his autograph.
It was just perfect weather the past few days, so it was nice chilling out on campus and watching the action go down. I heard they did one car crash scene on Washington Road earlier in the week, too.
William Gibson, the original Cyberpunk, at Barnes & Noble in Princeton June 26, 2008
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Books, Creativity, Digital Lifestyle, Futurist, Internet, Movies, Science Fiction, Technology, Virtual Worlds, Writing, cyberpunk.Tags: Barnes & Noble, book signing, cyberpunk, cyberspace, future, Idoru, Johnny Mnemonic, Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition, Predictions, Princeton, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Spook Country, Starbucks, steampunk, Technology, Virtual Light, William Gibson, Wired, Writing
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It was a television sky… well, not really, it was just a normal New Jersey sky I guess, a couple of weekends ago, when Mr. William Gibson, the cyberpunk author, visited Barnes & Noble at Princeton MarketFair. I’d seen it advertised on a poster in the store about a month prior, so decided to meet the man who had inspired me for so many years. I got into his work during my college years, through Wired Magazine and the Johnny Mnemonic movie (which I still think is pretty cool, despite it not achieving much success or critical acclaim. Hey you gotta love a movie where Newark, NJ of the future is the central set piece… ). I enjoyed the trilogy of books that included Idoru and Virtual Light, also. His last book, Pattern Recognition, was incredible and one of my favorites. He bascially started out predicting the future in his stories from the 80s, including Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive. He even coined the term “cyberspace”. However, he’s realized now that the cyber future is basically here already, so his latest books Pattern Recognition and Spook Country (which I haven’t read yet, though now I own a signed copy) reflect this with their present-day, high-tech scenarios. You get more of a sense of the future being upon us and things changing in this moment, not so much things that are coming further down the line.
Gibson seems like a very soft-spoken individual, and at first when he was reading a chapter of Spook Country, he had trouble competing with the various Starbucks cappuccino machines in the B&N. It was almost like a real-life Steampunk ambient soundtrack… Eventually, he increased his volume and took some questions. I asked how his highly visual style of writing had developed – had he had any formal art or design training or interest in those fields? He said that he started out having aspirations of being a musician or visual artist, but eventually realized he wasn’t making the progress in those areas that he’d hoped for, but he still needed to do something creative so he turned to writing. He wanted to find some way of expressing his “life experience” and felt that science fiction needed a more realistic perspective injected into it, as it had often been written by people who were just writing pure fantasy and had no life experience to bring into the story.
A couple of people asked if he planned on making more movies from his books, especially his earlier books like Neuromancer. He doesn’t think so, as he wasn’t fond of the screenwriting process. He hates the fact that you need to provide an ending and most of the details to studio execs, as his normal writing process is just to start writing and see what develops – often not knowing the ending until way into the work. Plus, he believes his early books were “an 80s future” and not relevant to today’s quickly-changing technological world.
Overall, it was very cool meeting the man. It got me all fired up to try writing again… I have a few stories I’ve worked on over the years, but I ususally try to plan them out in too much detail and then I get stalled with actually writing it. I like his method of just letting it develop more organically and seeing where it leads. Thanks, Mr. Gibson, for taking some time to hang out in NJ and sign my old tattered copy of Wired from 1995.
LOLcloverfield – More Final Cut Express Fun April 20, 2008
Posted by gregchiaramonti in Animation, Apple, Cloverfield, Creativity, Design Software, Digital Audio, Editing, Final Cut Express, GarageBand, Greg Chiaramonti, Movies, Pop Culture, Science Fiction, Sound effects, Video, Viral Marketing, Visual Effects, Web Video.1 comment so far
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So I just uploaded this video to the “When Cloverfield Hit” web video contest… Top three videos get judged by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves, and grand prize winner receives $4500. My video stars me and my cat, Kenobi, in a parody of both Cloverfield and the whole LOLcats internet subculture.
I just found out about the contest last Sunday, so I had to work fast as the deadline was only a week away. But now that I know the capabilities of Final Cut Express (see my initial review of the software here), I was confident I could complete the video in time. I wrote the script on Sunday night, took some footage with my digital camera on Monday of the skyline from the building I work in, and also shot most of the footage of myself and the cat Monday night. It was a mix of using my handheld video camera for shots where I needed more detail, like of the cat against green screen (in this case a bright green plastic tablecloth from Party City that I threw on the floor), and using my digital camera’s video features, which have a cool grainy quality to them that I thought would add to the hand-held camera look. I wish I had taped down the tablecloth to the floor before trying to coax my cat to play on it, but I wasn’t thinking – so I had a lot of shadows to deal with when keying out the background. Plus the cat kept trying to play under the tablecloth, of course, or scrunching it all up. I did manage to get a few good seconds of him in monster mode, which I looped in the final film.
I think it’s awesome how Final Cut Express allows you to easily mix different video formats into one project. I had no trouble mixing/compositing layers of video cam and digital camera footage – no settings to worry about. As far as keying out the background of the cat, I wound up using a combination of chroma and luma keys, plus I messed with the gamma settings to equalize the green/shadows a bit, allowing the keys to work better. Only had a few minor spots of green left, and those I took care of with the Garbage Matte filter and also hid with some cloud layer generators. Hey, it’s far from perfect, but it will do for a web-quality video.
Spent the rest of the week mostly editing, visual effects and sound, plus a couple extra shots were needed (realized I had to make the room look messed-up a bit after the big shake-up at the end). I used Apple GarageBand to generate the sound effects – some of them were a couple layers of different sounds, and the “meow-monster-roar” sound is my own voice doing the meow with a ton of filters on it. I also used GarageBand to record all of the dialogue, which I did as one track, exported to iTunes, and then imported into FCE. Once in FCE, I put the track into a separate “sequence” and cut it up into individual master clips saved to the browser. Then when I switched back to the main sequence, I could pull the clips down into the timeline and match to the scenes they belonged to. For the helicopter reporter’s voice, I added a vocal transformer effect in GarageBand that shifted my voice deeper. Also added some reverb and echo to the dialogue tracks in GB. I used some of my original dialogue from the actual video I shot for certain parts, and for these I added reverb using FCE’s audio effects.
Editing went smoothly, but then I had a lot of trouble trying to render my final movie. It would get halfway through and then crash, leaving an unplayable file. Even when I tried to do a straight DV render without compression, it would make it about 75% thru. This is where I had to slow down and do some technical research. Busted out the old FCE pdf manual and googled some stuff online. Found out I was basically overloading the renderer with my tons of audio tracks and also I had a couple of separate sequences linked to the main sequence which had a lot of video layers and effects. I had to break down and learn about the orange and red lines across the top of the Timeline… These lines tell you that sections of your movie need to be rendered in order to play in real time when previewed. And these can also be a problem when rendering for output. So I went through, selecting a few clips at a time and doing Sequence>Render Selection>Video, on both my main sequence, and for each of the other nested sequences. (By the way, using nested sequences really helped out a lot with compositing – I used them for the news clip scenes, since I had to distort the entire scene to fit over the shot of the laptop, and also added the BadTV effect). I also did the “mixdown” render on the audio tracks. All of this pre-rendering creates rendered files somewhere on your hard drive that are linked to the reference clip in the timeline. If you then decide to further edit the clip, the associated render file will be deleted, and you may need to render again if you get an orange or red bar above it.
Once everything was rendered (and it didn’t take as long as I thought), I then exported the video as an MPEG for the web. Finally, it all worked smoothly. Then it took a couple hours to get the thing uploaded to the Cloverfield site – the upload kept timing out or something, but it worked in the end.
So please check out my video if you get a chance, and you can also comment and vote (from April 22, 2008 thru May 13, 2008 ) if you register at their site. Thanks!
UPDATE! The contest has ended and my video didn’t win the popular vote, though it was Most Viewed for a while and was also chosen as one of ten Staff Favorites. Hopefully Matt Reeves had a chance to check it out, since his staff seemed to enjoy it! The links to the contest site no longer function, but I’ve posted the video on youtube at http://youtube.com/watch?v=qcHi_OqS6b8, or check it out right here:
U2 3D Movie Review March 1, 2008
Posted by gregchiaramonti in 3D, Computer Graphics, Digital Media, Movies, Music, Pop Culture, Technology, Video, Visual Effects.Tags: 3ality, 3D movie, Bono, concert, concert film, digital projection, Music, Spacehunter, The Edge, U2, U23D, Vertigo
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This past weekend I went to see the new “U2 3D” (http://www.u23dmovie.com/) concert film at my local AMC. Very cool movie! 3D has definitely come a long way with this new technology developed by 3alitydigital. U2 is one of my favorite bands, however I believe that the 3D tech far outshined the concert itself. Definitely worth seeing in the theater to get the best experience from the effect.
The concert itself, from the Vertigo tour, was okay – sort of a stripped down version of the PopMart and ZooTV tours the past. Shots of Bono in messianic poses, Edge sporting standard skull cap, and Mullen looking sort of robotic on the drums are all really cool in 3D – especially the overhead shots of the drums. However that’s basically the whole concert – not a lot of visual variety other than the lighting effects and different angles on the crowd and stage. I found that the 3D had the side effect of making the band appear rather small and more human rather than “larger-than-life” as in most concert films. You got a sense of just how freaking huge the stadium is, how much space there is between members of the band on stage, and the depth of people in the audience. At times I felt like I was viewing the concert via Google Earth, which was great, but somehow left me feeling more of a “detached observer” than intimately engaged in the show. It was really cool to see each cone of spotlight in deep perspective. Truly, this is realistic 3D. It’s a long way from “Spacehunters: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone”… (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacehunter:_Adventures_in_the_Forbidden_Zone)
It was also cool to see the 3D space used by graphics and video collage – transitions between shots were often interesting as some elements faded in/out in the foreground (appearing to float in the middle of the theater) and others in the background. A couple sequences used words flying out at you in 3D, mirroring the graphics on the stage displays. Overall, the 3D effect and the cinematography itself was more often the star of this movie than the band or the music. There didn’t feel like any real progression or climax to the film – it just sort of ended at some point. I was too involved with watching the visuals to get stirred up by the music, and from what I could tell most of the crowd in my theater were transfixed and quiet, not seemingly too excited by the music end of it. Not to say the band wasn’t good – they are extremely well-polished at this point, and Bono’s vocals were awesome, especially a bit of operatic voice he showed off at one point. I guess the movie was presented more as just a realistic view of the show. You are here, watching it as it happened (although from what I’ve read, it was stitched together from a few different shows in South America and Australia, and even one show without an audience to get close-up shots of the band – so maybe that’s one reason the concert seemed to feel “flat” to me). There’s no behind-the-scenes or anything to give it the sort of dramatic framework or momentum toward a climax as most concert films. But if you like U2, or are just interested in seeing a really incredible 3D effect, you should really check this movie out while it’s still around. Most theaters only have one or two viewings of it because I believe they are actually streaming it live via satellite, so check it out soon!
