David Hughes

Notes From Afar

Tag: Film (page 4 of 6)

14 November 2010

The Social Network Soundtrack

the social networkThe Social Network is the recent film from David Fincher about the founding of Facebook.

Tim Van Damme recommended the soundtrack on Twitter, and at $5 – yes $5 – it seemed a veritable bargain; quick preview confirmed that to be so.

It’s a dark suite of electronica, which having since seen the film doesn’t quite fit at times, but somehow that works for this film – possibly due to the quality of the music in its own right.

I particularly like the version of In The Hall Of The Mountain King which accompanies a tilt-shift view of Henley Regatta in the film.

Highly recommended.

27 October 2010

Blade Runner Revisited

This is fantastic.

From Vimeo:

An experimental film in homage to Ridley Scott’s legendary futuristic film “Blade Runner” (1982).

Created by extracting 167,819 frames from ‘Blade Runner’s final cut version, then assembling all these images to obtain one gigantic image of colossal dimensions : a square of approximately 60,000 pixels on one side alone, 3.5 gigapixels.

A virtual camera was then placed above this big picture which creates an illusion, because contrary to appearances, there is only one image. It is in fact the relative movement of the virtual camera flying over this massive image that creates the animated film, a kind of “zootrope effect”, like a film in front of a projector.

The whole concept echoes one of the signature scenes from the film where “Deckard” (Harrison Ford) analyzes a photograph via voice recognition software.

16 August 2009

Grand Central Station Waltz


One of the things that I kept thinking about in New York was how important films and TV shows had been in setting some of my expectations about the city, and also in making it feel oddly familiar at the same time.

I saw a number of locations from films in my all too short trip, but by far the most striking was Grand Central Station.

Grand Central Station was one of the highlights of my visit; it is simply beautiful and yet beautifully simple inside. There’s none of the clutter you see in UK stations; just a wonderful open space crafted from marble with the most stunning painted ceiling above.

Looking down across the concourse made me think of the wonderful scene in The Fisher King where Grand Central Station waltzes around the main characters:

Amazingly Grand Central Station wasn’t closed for shooting, and so the odd confused looking rail passenger can be fleetingly seen in the background.

A fittingly beautiful scene for such a beautiful building.

14 April 2009

Objectified

I’m more excited than perhaps I should be about seeing Objectified; the new documentary from Gary Hustwit director of the excellent Helvetica.

But you see it’s not just any screening that I’m attending.

Not only is it the first screening in the UK, but it will be attended by Jonathan Ive the design supremo from Apple. Apple fan boy? Me?

Even the trailer is wonderfully cool:

31 March 2009

The Matrix Has You

In the words of Neo “whoa”. I can’t believe it’s ten years since The Matrix was released.

I can remember seeing the “What Is The Matrix?” teaser trailers and knowing from those that I had to see this film. But even the brilliant teasers and trailers couldn’t prepare me for just how cool this movie was and still is.

As a big William Gibson fan it felt like the closest thing to Neuromancer I’d seen on screen and sadly still is.

I love the style and innate coolness of the movie; the kung fu and bullet time sequences are just brilliant. Keanu Reeves plays the slightly mono-dimensional Neo perfectly, but Hugo Weaving as Agent Smith is the performance of the film.

I think it’s high time I watched it again.

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