Repo Man Director Alex Cox Plans To Edit Next Film With OpenShot 105
New submitter JonOomph writes "Director Alex Cox, the creator of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy, is making plans via Kickstarter for his next film, Bill, the Galactic Hero, a feature-length science fiction comedy set in the far reaches of our galaxy. He is challenging the norm by shooting the film on 35mm monochrome (black and white) film, possibly the last film to ever attempt this, and possibly the first feature film to be edited with popular open source video editor OpenShot." If you don't like spoilers, I suggest reading this short but fascinating piece on Repo Man (one of my all-time favorite movies) only after watching it.
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"Bill, The Galactic Hero"
In a sane world, that book would be required reading, for the 7th grade.
The film should have been made, and released in 2001. It's sadly, too little, too late - but for the bitter laughter of those who were wise to this, all along.
Instead, we get fed garbage and lies like "24" and "Zero Dark Thirty" - While we are still sending children to kill children.
Fighting the "Chingers" of this world... Yeah. Seven-foot insectoid monsters. You've got to NOT see 'em to believe 'em.
Openshot Kickstart Program (Score:2)
FYI:
The opensource video editing program also has its own kickstart page
You may want to visit it @ http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor-for-windows-mac-and-linux/ [kickstarter.com]
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I love seeing different projects supporting each other on Kickstarter. OpenShot is awesome, and this seems like a great way for it to be improved (in addition to the two new platforms, the OpenShot folks have some pretty cool features planned). I have to say, I'm more excited about enhancements to OpenShot, than I am about Cox's new film :-)
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Repo man is intense (Score:2)
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Re:Repo man is intense (Score:4, Insightful)
Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez, and whoever played Miller were perfect. Olivia Barash and Agent Rogersz were supposed to be ridiculous. Everyone else was an extra.
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Screw that! I ain't gonna be no repo man. No way.
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It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.
Probably not the last B&W - but theatre only (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well the intermediary could be 16-bit or even higher, but I doubt OpenShot supports such color depth.
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It will use anything supported by ffmpeg. You obvious wanted to post something negative before seeing what it it could actually do.
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It will use anything supported by ffmpeg
If that's the case, that may an incentive for ffmpeg to support 10 bit encoding into DNxHD, which would be nice to have. Currently, it decodes 10 bit, but only encodes into 8 bit (for DNxHD). Unless they use ProRes. Are there any other formats that are NLE-friendly (intra-frame compresion only)? Maybe MJPEG? But MJPEG would be 8-bit only, I think. Then again, 8-bit may be sufficient for what a b&w negative is able to capture... :-)
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IMX is intra-frame only, and supported by ffmpeg. ffbmc is better (and easier) at it. It's a flavour of MPEG2.
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I am not a video expert, but if I was digitising film footage that I had filmed in B&W for artistic reasons, I would scan it in full colour at the highest bit-depth my hardware could handle.
The colour of the greys, any colour artefacts of the grain, of any tiny scratches, all of these are things a cinematographer might want to retain.
Re:Probably not the last B&W - but theatre onl (Score:4, Interesting)
No - you produce a digital intermediate from your analog negative, edit the digital intermediate - cuts, transitions, etc, then hand that edited intermediate over to a film-cutter to assemble the analog master from the original negative, using the digital intermediate as a template.
It's much more complex than that, of course - but it's possible. Now as to why? Tonal range of 35mm film as mentioned above, probably. He'll need a good budget.
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Re:Probably not the last B&W - but theatre onl (Score:5, Insightful)
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The point being made was Cox is shooting on B&W film stock, then transferring to digital for editing/post, and since there's loss of the range of grey/tones when you transfer from analog to digital images, why bother? My point was even with that loss, the range of tones would still be greater than color film stock transferred to digital then desaturated, or shooting digital then desaturating.
Better now?
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The dynamic range of consumer digital cameras exceeds that of the human eye -- that is an area we see as uniform black, or uniform white, will contain detail we can't see.
The dynamic range of film - especially black & white film - is much wider still. That's why digital still photographers feel the need to achieve "HDR" (high dynamic range) by superimposing multiple shots at different exposures.
But what's the point of capturing a dynamic range that the human eye can't perceive? Well, you can bring it ba
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Yes, I was probably a little bit imprecise. Film and digital sensors give more shades than the human eye can distinguish *within the range available on the display technology*. That is, if zero is between the blackest ink we have, and n is the whitest paper, we can print two different shades between 0 and n which can't be distinguished by a human. But start looking at the darkest darkness, or the brightest light, and sure, neither film nor digital can compete.
But our blackest ink isn't black and our whites
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Can you still actually buy 35 mm. motion picture camera negative? As far as I know, one should be able to buy Orwo negative from Russia. But is Kodak still manufacturing B&W? Even Color negatives from Kodak are not so easy to get any more.
Maybe there is good b&w photo film available. I don't know. But for motion pictures, the stock has not really evolved for decades. So cinematographers started using Kodak Vision color negative even for b&w movies. Or digital. In the end, if the shoot is indeed
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6 of the ten top grossing movies of 2012 were shot on film...sure it's getting less popular but it's not like it's dead.
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Yes, but those would have been shot in 2011. Didn't Kodak file for bankrupcy since?
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You can still buy 8mm film. I think it's Japanese stock, but it's still there. Some people just want to do this weird stuff for some reason.
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It was the soundtrack.... (Score:1)
I loved Repo Man in the 80's and it was the soundtrack that made that film IMO. The punk persona it overlayed onto the themes of the movie seemed so hard core and bad ass to my then teenage self and seem so quaint and almost tame to me by the standards of today... a true "time bubble" of a movie.
and Pablo Picasso really is an A$$hole!
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It was the "beer" :-)
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Not only is it a great social satire; it's possibly the best 80s coming-of-age story ever. The punk version of Stand By Me.
Bill, the Galactic Hero (Score:4, Interesting)
By Harry Harrison, I've read this book. It was funny, had a bit of a hitchhikers guide feel to it.
Although it was written earlier.
Re:Bill, the Galactic Hero (Score:5, Interesting)
They cross interstellar space through use of "Bloater Drive" - becoming bigger than the galactic gulfs, then shrinking back, when their nose-cone approached the destination!
Brilliant! I suppose it was the direct antecedent to improbability propulsion.
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By Harry Harrison, I've read this book. It was funny, had a bit of a hitchhikers guide feel to it. Although it was written earlier.
A lot of earlier stuff had that HHGTTG feel; Robert Sheckley for example. Phil Dick's heroes often spent time arguing with grumpy household appliances, and so on ...
A terrible idea... (Score:1)
A black and white Sci-Fi comedy set in the outer reaches of the galaxy? For a real retro look, why not go 1-D and have a silent movie?
Most cinemas are converting to digital like crazy - which means the number of places you could see this will be limited and the audience even more limited.
I'm not investing
Re:A terrible idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
which means the number of places you could see this will be limited
Just because it's being shot on film, that doesn't mean it won't be a digital end product.
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Though, we could just support OpenShot directly... turns out that they've been running a campaign for almost a month already: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/421164014/openshot-video-editor-for-windows-mac-and-linux [kickstarter.com]
Interested (Score:3, Interesting)
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It would take a lot of editing to get digital footage to look like it was shot on 35mm and it still wouldn't look as good as going from 35mm -> digital.
It's not self control he's looking for, it's the "look" of 35mm film he wants.
Hipster that pitch up (Score:2)
Just as long as they fund it.
Re:Interested (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm backing this film, not because I give a damn about him filming on 35mm b/w stock, or because I care what video editing software he uses (he could use iMovie for all iCare), but because I loved the original book, the screenplay was what Harry Harrison and Alex Cox were working on when HH died, and I get a copy of both for US$25, while supporting the whole crowd-sourced film-making concept.
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Yes. People who think vinyl is better than CD are idiots. The best vinyl recordings have been measured to be good for around 60dB of dynamic range. By comparison, CD is guaranteed to have a full 96dB of dynamic range, by simple fact of it being 16-bit LPCM. Vinyl cannot handle low frequencies without distorting, and becomes increasingly distorted above 5kHz. CDs made from a proper band-limited input are distortion free for the entire Nyquist range, from 0 to 22kHz. On top of that all, CDs are erasure
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They are mistaking correlation with causation.
Uh, if there is a correlation, doesn't that mean that vinyl does sound better?
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you're right. i meant to type "the vinyl". yes, vinyl is worse, but the vinyl of a particular record may be better due to mastering.
why vinyl might sound better in practice (Score:2)
One plausible reason someone might find vinyl sound better is that the analog electronic circuitry is vastly simpler than that of a CD player, so there is less chance to mess it up.
For the high frequency, the digital circuits could produce prominent interference because the wave shape of a digital signal has a lot of harmonics (square wave as opposed to sinusoidal). It's the same reason that on some computers you can hear whenever you move your mouse or when your CPU is doing work.
For the low frequency, the
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that's a great video, thanks for posting.
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Whoops (Score:2)
He better get use to loosing all his work then, OpenShot is one crash happy application, I couldn't even edit a ten minute clip without a crash. I assume the Dev knows about it, hard to miss with all the forum posts. I'll just stick to Avidemux for smaller clips, maybe Kdenlive for larger projects.
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I was lead to believe both form's are acceptable.
What? (Score:2)
How do you edit FILM with software?
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How do you edit FILM with software?
The same way we've been doing it for over 20 years?
You digitize it and create a digital intermediate, edit it, do all your other post mojo, spit out either a finished digital copy and/or spit out an EDL and have a lab matchback to film by cutting a negative to conform to your edits.
Needless to say, that's a huge simplification (the post workflow can be loooooooong, with lots of hand-offs to different specialists) but that's the basic idea.
Did you think editors were physically cutting film? That went away by
Why? (Score:2)
chloraphylies (Score:2)
Harry Harrison (Score:5, Informative)
That should be "Harry Harrison's classic Bill the Galactic Hero." He also wrote Soylent Green aka Make Room Make Room, the Stainless Steel Rat books, and many other great works that should be in any true geek's collection.
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Watch out for the later BtGH books which were not written by HH at all and are a pile of poo.
Repo Man or Repo Chick? (Score:2)
i want to be excited about this, but Alex Cox seems to have lost it recently. i know Repo Chick had an incredibly tight budget, but still... he seems to have become lost in his own world. he even claimed that Repo: The Genetic Opera was a ripoff of Repo Man. sorry, Alex, you can't assert a claim to every dystopic story involving repossession.
i guess we'll see if this project gets funded.
Moviedrome (Score:2)
Alex Cox's work as a director lives on, but for UK cinophiles of a certain age, he's also remembered for his 'Moviedrome' series where he introduced TV sceenings of films (BBC2 sunday night, IIRC) with a pre-screening commentary. I certainly watched many classics for the first time on Moviedrome, and many films which weren't available on VHS or highly unlikely to be screened anywhere else on TV.
Did anyone else... (Score:2)
I need to get out more.
Sid and Nancy (Score:1)
...which according to John Lydon [johnlydon.com] is complete horseshit
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