Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

The expectation many had that the next-generation HD format would take off once the format war was over is pretty much a forgotten dream at this point. Sales of Blu-Ray haven’t experienced the massive jump people expected once wait-and-see consumers saw that HD-DVD was well and truly dead.

Consumers are balking at the $300-plus cost of most Blu-ray players especially because only limited movie titles are available in the format.

“People aren’t going to pay three times as much for a platform that’s only half-baked,” said Steve Wilson, a consumer electronics analyst with ABI Research.

The problem with both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray formats, of course, was largely the library. Perhaps it’s only obvious to me, but when you’re touting the superiority of the platform as a prestige format, you might want to consider releasing Citizen Kane – a movie with a long history that most people would display proudly in their collection, and something more likely to be cherished by someone who just dropped $399 on a player – instead of, say, Ultraviolet – a movie whose design concept can best be described as “blurry, obviously fake, and designed above all to not be viewed in HD.”

This in turn feeds the price question. Why should people pay a prestige price for a player where the majority of titles are movies that people just flat don’t care about seeing in HD – many of which are $20+ on the new format when they’re already in the bargain bins on the old? I just purchased Alien, Aliens, and Alien 3 on DVD for $5.99 each – movies I care about having in my collection (well, Alien 3 more for completeness’ sake). With the already high quality of DVD picture and sound, spending $25.99 for each of them on Blu-Ray would just feel wrong.

Of course, Blu-Ray could get an extra push from indie producers. More and more indie directors shooting on HD would mean an influx of content – some of which would be kept inexpensive to draw in new audiences, and which would help sell the new format to off-the-wall and indie film fans. Of course, it could provide this extra push – if Blu-Ray didn’t seem determined to exclude these producers from the new market.

Where are the POD solutions for Blu-Ray at this point? No, I’m seriously asking – where are they? CreateSpace, which is owned by Amazon, is still negotiating a deal to allow them to offer POD Blu-Ray. Kunaki? Lulu? Who knows? Neither one even mentions it. Why not?

It may have something to do with the $3,000-a-person entry fee the industry is imposing, otherwise known as the AACS DRM scheme. It appears that there’s been a real problem playing Blu-Ray discs that don’t include AACS, so everybody who wants to publish to the medium has to purchase an AACS license, and every title must include AACS – regardless of the wishes of the publisher and/or the artist.

Creative Commons-licensed material? Who cares? You’d better slap some copy protection on it.

Want to release a public domain film to Blu-Ray to help preserve our film history (or make a quick buck off of an HD release of The Last Man on Earth)? Sure. As long as that public domain film is one you’re willing to pay $3,000 to copy protect.

And forget about a sales system like EZTakes, that provides its DVD images DRM-free – but with the purchaser’s e-mail address embedded in the burnt copy.

Forget, too, about the share-friendly independent spirit that provokes legal statements like this one (found on my newest DVD, available soon, plug plug).

Low- and Micro-budget filmmakers will find themselves blocked out of the new next-generation disc market for as long as AACS is an expensive necessity and the artists are blocked out of making their own decisions as to how their content should be treated. The result? Well, unless the major studios wise up on their releasing schedule, a homogenized blend of movies nobody cares about seeing in High Definition, and a marketplace completely priced out of the range of the regular consumer.

After all, there’s one further aspect I’ve barely even touched on that is just as blocked by this current model – one could argue that DVD’s would never have become the consumer mainstay they are today if not for the bins of $1 DVD’s at the front of every major retail chain today…

I believe I’ve re-edited this footage 3 times already. See, the original performance had music that I just didn’t have the license to sell in hard copy form. So every time I get it in my head to share the play, I wind up cutting the old music – and learning a bit more about editing.

For now, here’s a bit of the opening sequence to the upcoming Three Shots Fired Point Blank: The Special Edition DVD. “Adult Content” will be posted to YouTube later.

Sometimes, you have to experiment with new equipment and work out all of the logistics before you find yourself thrust into using them. This, I have realized, is actually the core reason behind the virtually unwatchable student films that have been mercilessly mocked, well, everywhere.

So here’s Shaolin Boogaloo’s student film. A tale calculated to drive you hungry!

PBM – Take Two from Glen Williams on Vimeo.

It’s time for another installment of my soon-to-be-award-winning series (that I in no way stole from Stephen Colbert), “Who’s Honoring Me Now?”

This time around, it’s the WILDsound Summer One Page Screenplay Contest, that has selected my work – “Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah” – as one of 30 finalists! On June 13, they’ll announce the top ten. Those ten will then go on to be read at WILDsound’s June screenplay event.

There are all sorts of answers to this question. You have to find a person who fits the part, you have to learn to settle for something that isn’t quite what you imagined, you might get an actor who has an approach you hadn’t consider, yadda yadda…

Of course, when you’re shooting a film with a budget of roughly enough to buy everybody a Slurpee, casting is made difficult by the fact that this is the company your casting call will usually keep.

In our film, “DECLARED!” People at a bachelor party time travel to 1776, to Liberty hall, to the signing of thwe Declareation of Indipendence. The party people let a slinky down the steps of Libertyu hall, thus scaring the Declareation signers. The document is never signed, we never get our independence and Estonia takes over America in the 1800’s. The people at the bachelor party ahve to go back to 1776 again and fix things right.

There may be stunts involved for the actors, and some nudity, we don’t know yert. Salary ism a also an issue, we’ll let you klnow.

Oy.

I feel I should point out three things – and the spelling isn’t one of them, because that hardly needs pointing out.

1. Who brings a Slinky™ to a bachelor party?
2. Thomas Effing Jefferson is going to get scared by a Slinky™?
3. Either you’re going to have nudity or you aren’t. If you’re going to post looking for actors, you should definitely know “yert” what the case is going to be.
4. I place no confidence in someone who says “There may be stunts involved for the actors” to look after my safety. This is the kind of person who says, “We decided at the last minute it’d be really cool for you to leap out of the third story window to get away – but don’t worry, we put the mattress from Joe’s apartment down to break your fall.”

I know that’s actually four points, but given the typos of the ad I think I’m justified.

The only problem? I can’t help but admit that I would totally buy this movie from EZTakes.

Just taking a moment out from worrying about the next President to enjoy a kitten, instead.

One of the things I always find odd is how long animation in the United States has remained a children’s medium. Which is not to say that there haven’t been animations aimed at mature audiences – but for the most part the commercially viable animation has been in the children’s section. And yes, we can talk about the rise of anime in the marketplace, but that’s still not American animation, now, is it?

Every now and then, we catch glimpses of what might have been in American cinemas if the artists had had their way – Ralph Bakshi notwithstanding. There’s Walt Disney’s concept images for The Song of Hiawatha – a darker movie in tone than anything else he had ever produced, which was ultimately abandoned in favor of the more kid-friendly Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. There’s the still kid-friendly but more wild and woolly The Thief and the Cobbler, which was canceled midway through production and the unfinished footage sold to hackwork animation studios that have released it in butchered form on DVD.

And there’s this clip from over at AMC today, featuring a very Fleischer-like rendering of John Carter, Warlord of Mars.

Why were these shorts never produced? Well…

Burroughs and Clampett wanted to make a serious since fiction adventure while the studios (in typical studio fashion that foreshadowed decades of missteps) wanted to make a sci-fi slapstick comedy.

sigh.

Sometimes, you just have to wonder. What is it that drives Uwe Boll?

Honestly – when I see something like this video (with some not-safe-for-work language), I start wondering if this mad German filmmaker may just possibly be pulling an extended Kaufman on us – and getting hella rich in the process.

I mean, really – Michael Bay, sure. Boll’s movies are, strangely, more entertaining than the majority of Bay’s work.

But George Clooney?

Right now, a lot of people are lining up to dance on HD-DVD’s grave. It appears it’s all over except for Toshiba’s quiet, lonely sobbing. Engadget reports that, hot on the heels of Netflix ditching HD-DVD from its rental service, Best Buy is breaking its long-held neutrality in the next-gen DVD war.

Starting in early March the store will showcase Blu hardware and software on its shelves and website, and switch from its current neutral stance, to recommending Blu-ray to any customers that ask.

If you’ve voted for my video on Project Breakout – Thanks! The vote isn’t over yet, though, and you get 15 votes a day. Which, it appears, you can use on a single video if you’re so inclined. To move on to the finals, all I need is to finish in the top three for one of the weeks of the initial stage. Help get the ArtMachine on television! Vote early, vote often!