John Menick

As a commenter on the Gothamist points out: “Imagine what would happen if this space-age surveillance and hardline police resources were put to use against actual terrorists, rather than bike-riding college kids.”

Got to love the little greenscreen demo in the article’s photo. I guess those two lamps behind the talking head help matte in the background. It also looks as if here background is not a physical place at all, but an info-graphic.

One of the things that is interesting about the article, at least from a US perspective, is that most of the cameras-in-the-courtroom anxieties rehash what was debated about Court TV years ago. For example: ” And in California, a judge said on Friday that he would allow full television coverage of the rock producer Phil Spector’s murder trial, declaring that it was time to discard ‘fear of cameras in the courtroom.’”

Unconsciously mimicking Court TV Primetime’s “Seriously Entertaining” tagline a representative from Datadiar, the tech company hosting the video, claims: “It may be difficult to understand why we do this for free,” she said. “We are objective. We are in the middle. We are only lawyers and professionals, and offering information. It’s not like television.”

Granted, Datadiar is online, and may be able to claim it is literally not television. (Even though the rep is making a qualitative claim as well.) But can this coverage ever be objective? Will it devolve into entertainment? Sure, it may not literally be TV, but is it worse, i.e. … YouTube?

Just days after a suspicious auction of an infamous window, an eerie new 8mm film surfaces capturing the first lady and President Kennedy moments before the assassination. And it’s released on President’s Day no less.

Except for the footage’s crisp, Kodachrome-bright imagery, there is nothing obviously outstanding about its 39 seconds, but, like the dodgy window, its origins are fairly strange. Is it possible to ask without a hint of conspiratorial innuendo why it was released now? As with the window auction, Dallas Morning News has the most detailed coverage:

After the motorcade passed, [the cameraman] Mr. [George] Jefferies returned to his office, not aware that the president had been shot.

After he had the film developed, “I showed it to a few people and then put it in a drawer, and frankly, I forgot all about it.”

He casually mentioned it more than a year ago to his daughter and son-in-law, Bonnie and Wayne Graham, who live in suburban Fort Worth. They asked to see it, and Mr. Jefferies later gave it to them.

Mr. Graham called Mr. Mack about a year ago to ask if the film might be valuable. The curator not only thought it might have historical value, he asked Mr. Graham if he’d be interested in donating it to the museum.

“I talked about the tax advantages, and he sounded interested,” Mr. Mack said. “As far as I know, he didn’t shop it around before he gave it to us.”

After museum officials acquired the film, they had it professionally restored to bring out the original color and eliminate scratches, he said.

Though the movie is the sixth in the museum’s collection, and is of far less historical interest than the Zapruder film (which is owned by the federal government), its public release generated intense interest.

Torrent and more info available via The Thing.

From Errol Morris’ First Person.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was one of the greatest achievements in the history of mankind. And engineering a video setup that could capture the event and beam it back to Earth so that half a billion people could watch it — that was pretty impressive, too. But the version of the footage that the world saw on TV was muddied and degraded. Luckily, a pristine version of the raw footage was recorded onto 14 inch magnetic tape reels and sent to NASA for safekeeping. One snag — NASA now has no idea where that tape is.

Via DVblog.

Talks DV and TM.

* “Shoot all scriptwriters,” he wrote in his popular, long-running Village Voice column, “and we may yet have a rebirth of American cinema.”

* “The original plan for the film was that every shot would be digitally placed over archival footage. So that literally, the film would be “shot” in 1945 Berlin; the actors would be green-screened over archival. There was a scene in a butcher shop, for example, and I had to find every camera angle we needed in a butcher shop in 1945 Berlin. If there was a scene outdoors, a destroyed park or a zoo, I had to find those camera angles. There was interplay between the writing, directing, and archival research: what I could find that was in Paul Attanasio’s script, and whatever else I found in my research that might work or that piqued Paul’s interest, or Steven Soderbergh’s… A colleague of mine in the art department, Joanna Bush, created an amazing database of all the footage I’d collected. It was organized based on the geography of Berlin. So that on Steven’s computer, he could click on a map of Berlin and it would find all the archival footage that I had gotten on a particular plaza or a particular street or a particular location, and pull up all that archival footage and all the stills. Steven could know where he was situated in Berlin, and the art department could recreate a particular strasse. We’d know the ruins and we’d know how much that area was bombed out and all that.” More…

* “My first exposure to the subject came in a book by another medical anthropologist, Margaret Lock, whose Twice Dead (2002) is a brilliant comparative anthropology of Japanese and North American attitudes to brain-death as the criterion of death. Hence the title: a person is ‘once dead’ when technical criteria establish that the brain has stopped, while the body is still ticking over quietly on a ventilator; ‘twice dead’ when the heart is stopped and the organs harvested.”

* “What, he wondered, did we want to do? Did we want to eat, to drink, to fuck? Uh, dinner sounds cool.”

* And last, but not least, the Athanasius Kircher Society 2006

An excerpt from from Digital Content Producer’s article on the tapeless HD workflow of David Fincher‘s upcoming Zodiac:

“There is the danger, of course, of technology getting obsolete, but we’re better off, certainly, than movies done many years ago because, at the end of the day, we are creating so many high-quality masters,” Mavromates says. “We will have about six original digital negatives for this movie, the original data, different HD versions, a film master, and all those HD DVDs out there. They’ll be able to re-master this movie some day, if they want to — they won’t have to piece it all together from scratch. To me, this is the future of how movies will be made. Digital cinematography is still in its adolescence, and it will mature very quickly, so our workflow will only improve along with it.”

That is certainly Fincher’s firm conviction.

“We could lose data some day, but let’s be honest — that’s always been the case with film, as well,” Fincher says. “Somebody find me a good print of Lawrence of Arabia, or a decent restored print of Rear Window. Everyone says we won’t have the resolution of 35mm, but the truth is, 35mm is maybe 4K, and that’s before they do things to it. You have all this color space with film, but you don’t ever use all that color space. As soon as you drop an orange filter over [the lens], you have suddenly limited your blue and green color space, for instance. And by the time you dupe it to inter-positive, then to inter-negative, and go to three dupe negs or six dupe negs, and make 3,000 release prints, then you are looking at something, in most cases, just over 1K. So I think it’s silly to get attached to [film] like that.”