The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead

Official trailer for the film THE DAMNED: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead, the authorized documentary of the punk pioneers. Directed/produced by Wes Orshoski, the film features all four original members of the Damned (Captain Sensible, Dave Vanian, Brian James and Rat Scabies), plus appearances by Chrissie Hynde, Mick Jones, Steve Diggle, actor/comedian Fred Armisen, Nick Mason, Duff McKagan, Lemmy Kilmister , Keith Morris, Dexter Holland and many more. Shot around the world over the past four years, the film makes its debut at SXSW in March 2015. The third prong in the holy trinity of UK punk, with the Sex Pistols and the Clash, The Damned were the first U.K. punks to release a single ("New Rose") and album ("Damned Damned Damned"), and the first to tour the U.S. Having logged hits in the punk, new wave and goth eras, they are one of the only surviving bands from punk’s first wave.

Mapping Color Alpha 1.0

The Mapping Color team has been hard at work for the last several months and are nearing completion of the first Alpha version of the application. Currently the system can analyze images for approximate or precise color location data, input data for mapping, output data results for use in user pipelines, display McAdam's limits, locate pigments, display theoretical color spaces and work within set tolerances for quality control applications. 

We're hoping to have real-time video analysis working within the next few months. There may be a limited opportunity for beta testing in the Spring of 2015. If interested, contact the team via email. Please include a detailed description of your current research/commercial work and how you'd like to use our app.

For more information on the project click on the image below. 


What Success Looks Like...

Episode #47 of this show DeBug (the most recent as of right now) is amazing. For anyone who has ever worked in VFX its not very surprising but its still pretty great stuff. 

These guys talk about the internal corporate structure at Apple, how meetings were run and what the overall work ethic is like. It may sound insane but it also is hard to argue with the success of this model when they are currently the second most valuable company in the world.  

Click on the logo below to listen online at iMore.com.

Original Star Wars Trilogy, Unaltered, Coming to Blu-Ray?

Disney/Lucasfilm is planning to re-release the original Star Wars trilogy, without any of the subsequent alterations, on Blu-ray, according to a report on ComicBook.com.

Star Wars: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi will be packed up in a release prior to the theatrical release of Star Wars Episode VII late next year, according to the report.

"Our sources indicate that the project has been under way for quite some time, but it's been challenging because of some damage to the original negatives they are utilizing," states the report. "The goal is to release A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of Jedi in their complete, unaltered, original form without the redone special edition SFX."

Should this prove to be true, I'd applaud such an effort. My primary gripe with the current Special Edition versions available is that they are now the ONLY ones you can watch. The Special Editions have been altered in ways that fundamentally change the nature of the stories themselves.

More importantly from a film preservationist point of view the unaltered versions represent a unique time in both cinema, pop-cultural and visual effects history. The techniques developed on those films were groundbreaking and should be preserved, warts and all. 

Filmspotting Episode #501

Adam Kempenaar emailed me last week to ask if I'd be interested in helping out with this week's "Top 5" on WBEZ Chicago's program, Filmspotting. I was asked to pick my #1 pre-CGI visual effects scene. While it was hard to just pick one, I finally did and chose one from my childhood. Adam and co-host Michael Phillips make some great picks. 

Its important to think about Visual Effects in the context of their relative history. There are amazing visual effects in most every movie released this Summer but the technical feats that give rise to great tools for filmmakers have evolved over time. So when looking to list the top five pre CG visual effects scenes its important to keep in mind when they were released. So in the past films like A Trip to the Moon, Citizen Kane, Seven Voyages of Sinbad, Thief of Bagdad, King Kong, Wizard of Oz, Gone With the Wind, Rear Window, North By Northwest & Vertigo are all pretty big effects films with a number of sequences, or scenes, that utilize some kind of visual effects. In the early days it was most likely optical compositing of matte paintings on glass combined with the live action photography. In many cases it was the animation, forced perspective and miniature photography that helped filmmakers take audiences to places they’d never been before. 

Other great works from my childhood include, Dragon Slayer, Alien, The Right Stuff, ET, Rob Botin’s work on The Fly and The Thing, Beetlejuice, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and of course, the original Star Wars trilogy. 

But the top scene for me would have to be the Empire’s attack on the rebel base on Hoth in Irvin Kershner’s The Empire Strikes Back. The compositing, animation and miniature work combined with pyrotechnics, live action and some beautiful matte paintings create a truly unforgettable sequence. With work by VFX Supervisors and animators like Dennis Muren and Phil Tippett and the whole crew at ILM that sequence is still impressive to this day.

As an honorable mention there is some amazing and groundbreaking work done earlier by Douglas Trumball in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Trumball's use of hard lighting on the miniatures, the use of opticals and particularly the traveling matte photography were incredible. Trumball also pioneered work using his “slit scan” photography technique to create the psychedelic “journey beyond the infinite” sequence in the film. Trumball’s subsequent work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind & Blade Runner also share his unique artistic signature.

Click on the image below to listen online. The Top 5 segment runs at: 1:14:38-1:48:41

Thanks to Adam Kempenaar, Michael Phillips and the whole Filmspotting gang for having me on.


© Matt Wallin. All rights reserved.