Sci Fi 2012 Film Festival review

I saw 10 films at this years festival and still managed to miss a few...
Osombie (well who wouldn’t want to see a film about Osama bin laden as a zombie)
Dimensions
Manborg
Radio Free Albemuth

The programme was excellent and seems to be attracting talent as well as cultivating genre in a very positive way. The full list is on their website: http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/films

Here's my quick reviews of some of the films that were on offer.

Extracted

Highly recommended my favourite from the festival, great idea, acting and editing. This is a really solid piece of work deserving of mainstream release. What would you do if you found yourself trapped in the memories of a drug addled criminal accused of murdering his girlfriend.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/extracted

Death

Also very well done and worth watching. An inventors family must pick up the pieces of his life to rescue his soul before the house is foreclosed. For some reason it felt a bit like a made for TV movie rather than a feature film and I still haven’t quite figured out what was missing.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/death

Cycle

This is the arthouse psychedelic film of the festival that will have you pondering reality and the future of high tech simulations. I really liked that it was difficult to tell what was live action and what was CGI. Only the Q&A revealed the truth of it’s production.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/cycle

The Last Push

Potentially very grim story that takes the audience on a literal and mental journey through the solar system with a satisfying conclusion. Surprisingly good for a film set almost exclusively in one room. I particularly liked that you get an impression of the arduousness of what real space travel might be like without labouring the point.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/last-push

Sol

The American style frat challenge (with a nod to ‘Lord of the Flies’) was probably my least favourite of the festival. It had potential but the acting was raw and the editing too loose for my liking leaving characters not as well formed as I felt they could've been. Interesting idea particularly in light of the recent release of the Hunger Games.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/sol

Hell

German eco-apocalypse where Earth is a burnt desert landscape, civilisation has collapsed and our protagonists must navigate a world inhabited by savage cannibal survivors in hopes of finding water. Very well done definitely worth watching, in my top five.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/hell

Robo G

Light hearted very Japanese film about three employees who failing to finish building a robot in time for a convention decide to employ a 73 year old retiree (keen to impress his family) to impersonate the robot at the convention.
The resulting success of their robotic imposter is the start of an adventure where they navigate the challenges of hiding the truth from everyone while not losing face with their boss. Perhaps my favourite scene is the one where they get the student audience to suggest how they might’ve made such a convincing robot while hiding their ignorance of the subject.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/robo-g

The Captains

Shatner interviews the actors that played the various Star Trek captains. This Shatner driven project is typically quirky and self deprecating and worth watching if only for Avery Brooks’ odd musings. There are also some revealing and endearing commentaries on acting in a big budget TV series.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/captains

The Golden Age Of Science Fiction

A review of Campbell's editorship of Astounding magazine through the eyes of his authors, especially interesting for the diverse views on his legacy and personality.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/documentary/golden-age-science-fiction

Ghost With Shit Jobs

Humourous close to the bone near future docu-drama style film made about a group of white people (‘ghosts’ in Asian slang) working in a future depressed north American economy viewed from an east Asian perspective. The film ponders the future of east west relations and the potential outcome of a rise in the Asian region prosperity. Worth watching the ‘brand police’ virtual janitor is especially amusing given plans of the London Olympics this year.
http://www.sci-fi-london.com/festival/2012/programme/feature/ghosts-shit-jobs

There were of course other worthy events as well as films around the festival that would’ve been worth going to but ahhh only so many hours in the day!

Quark art to web banners via Photoshop

Quark EPS files to animated Gifs in two easy steps

What do you do when the creative/artistic director of the agency your working for uses Quark to layout web banners?
 
Yes, crazy as it seems, some creatives are still holding onto that stalwart of layout programs Quark Xpress even for web banners.

Few London studio's use Quark now unless they have a large body of work invested in it and/or an advocate on staff.

Quark export window make sure you pick RGB as your colour space

In this instance each Quark page is made up as a frame in the animation and sized proportionally to the banner in question. (MPU, leaderboard and sky respectively)

It works, perhaps not the quickest method but it gets the design across.
 
I’m lazy I don’t want to spend hours recreating the art in Photoshop if I don't have to, especially when it’s going end up as highly compressed gif or jpegs with barely a second or two of viewing time. 

So, here’s a working method I stumbled on late last year.
 
For all it’s foot dragging over the years Quark still does what it does very well and since the creative director had made the banner art in proportion to the final art we are at a good starting point. 

It's possible to place the EPS files directly into Photoshop. Even CS2 supports placing these as smart layers. The other smart thing that Photoshop does when placing EPS files (ie literally file > place) is proportionally position the placed file within the document frame.
 
Since the source art was proportional Photoshop correctly placed the EPS with no distortion. All of which meant successive frames lined up more accurately than my first attempts to manually convert, copy and paste the EPS into the artwork file.

It's important to export the EPS files out of Quark as RGB to avoid any unintended colour shifts. 

The reason I really like this method and hence this quite techy post is that it has minimal in-between steps so it's fast, accommodates the art directors creative methods and gives a quality result without having to resort to hacks or time consuming artwork recreation.

Now obviously this isn't going to work for every banner but in this case it was perfect.

The method in short

One of the finished MPU ads

• In Quark save each page as an EPS file choosing the obvious defaults and using RGB colour space.
• Open a new file in Photoshop with correct dimensions for your banner.
• Place (file > place) each EPS into your Photoshop document.
• Set your frames and timing and 'save for web'

Found any old school or unique methods for creating web banners please do leave your comments!


That's it for today, enjoy!

Tristan Perich's 1-Bit Symphony

1-Bit Symphony CD cased chip music and booklet

As you may have gathered from the title of this blog it's about my passions and the interesting moments in music, art and technology that I come across each week and want to share.

With that in mind I recently discovered Tristan Perich's work, on the BBC radio program Digital Planet.

Needless to say I was fascinated by the idea of a modern day music box and found my way to Bang On A Can who sell the CD cased chip music piece.

Tristan Perich's '1-Bit Symphony' is an interesting experiment in electronic music both hiding and revealing the process with it's clear plastic case, components laid bare, and black-box chip that stores the code that runs the piece.



A printed version of the programming is also included in the package, on a fold-out insert, but you will need a magnifying glass and an electrical engineering degree to fully appreciate it. (To be fair a skim of the code does indicate notes played but it's otherwise impenetrable.)

The actual music is minimalist in style (could 1-bit music be anything else?) and classical in structure. The piece benefits from being plugged into speakers rather than listened via headphones although 1-Bit chip music hardly needs audiophile kit for full appreciation.

You can also buy a digitised version of the audio from Amazon but this seems to defeat the point of the exercise. Alternatively Tristan and his co-conspirators perform regularly both in Europe and the US which would doubtless be interesting.

It was also no surprise to read that Tristan has a background in maths and computer science which are clearly in evidence here. 


The performance method and construction are unique and fascinating but I found the music hard to listen to at length, it is however equally worthwhile as an object and an idea than as actual music.

If you have seen Tristan perform or have comments to make please feel free to post them below.

For more details on Tristans work visit:
http://bangonacan.org/store/product/181
http://www.tristanperich.com/
http://www.1bitsymphony.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p002w6r2