hello. my name is mike ambs.
i currently live in los angeles. i love to film things. and read on the subway. i'm pretty sure blue whales are my power animal.
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Tweets
- just watched #thething with @funshine and @lanbui - I am going to have nightmares :P we're about to watch the original now. #movienight
- love this :) !! http://t.co/6bOQW0Qt
- ugh :( this is what happens when I take things into my own hands.Feb 07, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @hopelarson oh, sorry about that :( people do that on a regular basis with me, I didn't know it was a bad thing to do *sigh*
- @vgkids I love the DVD packages you just posted photos of :) do you have any pics with the DVDs in? curious how do they fit in?Feb 07, 12 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- this is fantastic. also, I really need to start watching sesame street more often *nods* :) http://t.co/5293AT8s #3primarycolors
- this video update from @eerichmond is kinda' amazing - to be alone out there with a sunset like that :) ... http://t.co/M4nnyAOn
- @RuairiRobinson hmm... @kickstarter it ;) I would back $50 to that so fast! and!!! what if it could say "no problem".
- @RuairiRobinson does this mean you're going to make a little BLINKY figure? I would love to set it right next to my WALL*E :)
- packing up the last batch of @52hz #mixtapes for @kickstarter - I wanted to get these out last week, but the sudd http://t.co/SYwhaD9N
- I want to learn how to shoot video like this... so bad! I am determined to learn! http://t.co/nQxIs9Yj #depthsensor #dlsr
- @AngelineGragzin *nods* agreed :)
- we have a list going of people who want a #carepackage shipped to them :) but there are still plenty of @FToM but http://t.co/r05dPjgf
- always watching. always judging. #breaker http://t.co/FTWcfSYQ
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Posts
- Feb 09, 12
via pitchfork:
Bill Callahan covers Leonard Cohen for Mojo.
So Long, Marianne is my favorite Leonard Cohen song… I’ve listened to it more times than I can count. If I could sing one song well, it would be this one.
- Feb 07, 12
via thrashyerface, by Alex Billington
Billington: What are the defining factors found in this project and this story, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that made you decide to direct it?
Fincher: With this movie [Dragon Tattoo] - do I need to make another serial killer movie the rest of my life? No. But I hadn’t seen these two people [Mikael & Lisbeth]. I hadn’t been asked to direct… A love story is too easy. A story of friendship and personal intimacy, sexual intimacy, they are…
Billington: Something you hadn’t seen before? Or is it just the way…Fincher: I’ve seen people take odd people from different sides of the street to team up to solve a murder mystery. I hadn’t seen this one. I thought she, in conjunction with him, was a team that was unlike anything that I was prepared for. Then I saw the Swedish movie and I thought, “Interesting… The movie I have in my head is different.” Talked to [screenwriter] Steve Zaillian, he was halfway through a script, and when he sent it to me, it was kind of what we had talked about, which was: “Let’s bring them front and center. Is anybody really keeping track of the Vanger clan and who’s in the drawing room with a pipe? Or is all of this something else? An excuse for something else?”
I think that the modernity, the thing that made it a new take on the locked room mystery, was not the foundation of socialism on the Third Reich war profiteering… That’s perfectly good and that’s perfectly understandable, but that’s what [author] Stieg Larsson was about and what he was up in arms about. He certainly was talking about the dark black liquid underbelly of this other… Sweden is still - I still saw it on the list the other day of the top 10 countries for women to live in. It was number three or something. And yet, Larsson would say, and there are many, many reports that would say to you, there’s a disproportionately high rate of rape in this country.
So all those thing were interesting to me, but that’s all backdrop. I love Chinatown. I’m not really that interested in how water was brought to San Fernando Valley, except in this case it’s a very interesting sort of thematic way to hold this investigation together, and worthy of its place in the pantheon of movies. But the thing to me, ultimately, that was fascinating in the story was him [Mikael] and her [Lisbeth].
Billington: I have to ask, is it true that you have final cut at Columbia?
Fincher: Yep.
Billington: This is a rhetorical question, but would you have it any other way? You seem to be one of the only ones who has that nowadays.Fincher: No, that’s not true.
Billington: Well, at least with a major studio. At least with Columbia/Sony Pictures, right?Fincher: No. I had it on Benjamin Button. I had it on Zodiac. I’ve had it since Panic Room.
Billington: To me, from what I’ve observed and from my standpoint, that makes for better films, right?
Fincher: Not always. I mean, look - I look back on stuff that I was… I can flip through channels and see on HBO a movie that I did years ago and I look at it and I go, “awwww I coulda made that better. I could tell that story faster now.” It’s a hard thing. I don’t know that final cut… it doesn’t protect you from people saying to you, “You should look at this. You should really…” It’s not always that polite. I don’t think final cut protects you or insulates you from people’s opinions. You’ve taken tens of millions of dollars to make a movie. It’s somebody else’s money. So you’re going into it and you’re hoping that if you can align this actor, and this actor, and this actor and get this chemistry between this, and make this work, and get to Sweden on time before it’s suddenly 30 degrees below zero every day and the sun is only out for three hours - you have all those things that are going on. I don’t know that final cut makes the movie better. Because when it gets right down to it, I didn’t have final cut of Fight Club. And that’s a movie that you would expect a movie studio to step in and go, “No, no, no, Mr. Fincher. Please.”
And yet, you know, because [producer] Laura Ziskin, may she rest in peace, and Bill Mechanic were people of their word, and because all discussions were had upfront about, “Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish, and here’s why it’s seditious, and here’s why it should be done at this kind of scale rather than at this lesser scale, and here are the…” You know, there’s a great place in the pantheon of risk takers if you go with this. There were many, many things that people… there were concessions that were made. This idea that a director is only really a director if he’s stomping his feet, crossing his arms, and holding his breath, it’s bullshit.
I wrote this, actually, to [Sony executive] Michael Lynton at one point because we were disagreeing about something. I said to him, “I’m smart enough to know that these ideas are going to be attributed to me whether they’re mine or not. If you come up with a good idea, I want to take credit for it.” I believe that. I mean, I honestly believe if you show me something that I want take - I will fucking run with it. You know what I mean? I’m no dummy. What I don’t want is those ideas that I know are not a reflection of any of the thinking that went into the making of this thing. I don’t want that stuff reflected. I don’t want it to reflect on me because it can be confusing. Look, nobody wanted to say “The Feel Bad Movie of Christmas”. Everybody thought it was coy. There were people who wrote articles about the fact that it was coy, that it was silly.
I laughed. I did it as a joke initially. And when I saw it on the screen, I thought, “Well, we are counter-programming because this movie does have a lot of… it is sinister and it has a lot of sodomy.” People are treated badly in this movie. That doesn’t mean that it’s not worth the journey because it’s harrowing. And as I watched the trailer over and over again, I thought, “You know, it is the feel bad movie of Christmas.” That’s a great sort of expression of what we want to say about it. We want it to be… it ain’t It’s a Wonderful Life.
And, in the end, you know, there was a lot of resistance. And, in the end, to their credit, [Sony execs] Amy Pascal, Michael Lynton said, “Okay. You want to do that. We’ll do that. We’ll go there for you.”
- Feb 07, 12
“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”
-- Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery.
It’s been a year since I first posted this, but today TimeHop reminded about Cecilia Payne and I thought that qualified as an automatic reblog.
- Feb 06, 12
1st spotted via Brain Pickings
In my nearly six years of writing and editing Brain Pickings, I’ve used the word “awesome” as an adjective exactly once. Today, this is about to change — because Three Primary Colors, a new collaboration between OK Go and Sesame Street explaining the basics of color theory in stop-motion, is nothing short of awesome. In fact, it might just be the finest treat for budding designers since Geometry of Circles, the fantastic 1979 Sesame Street animation with original music by Philip Glass.
- Feb 06, 12
Off and on I’ve tried tackling the metadata approach for a large-documentary project I’m assigned at work, as of today the raw footage consist of 2,864 movie files spread across the last 201 days. All of these files are stored on a network drive via gigabit ethernet.
This is a follow up post, mainly for Eric, about the iMovie + server workflow that I’ve been trouble shooting for months now at work. Long story short, iMovie doesn’t like working with alias files after all, so that set up ended up breaking on me fairly quickly once I got into tagging / key-wording media.
But!, on account of the recent updates to FCP X, I started testing out how it handled working with media organized on a server over gigabit. It turns out, if you go into the preferences of FCP X, that you can by default have it import footage without moving the original files or recomposing proxy files, meaning it simply creates aliases for you!, and it doesn’t mind at all if your original files are stored on a server. It can analyze for rolling shutter / face detection / stabilization, also while syncing audio and video files, fixing audio issues, keywording and sorting footage into folders / smart folders, etc!
In other words, FCP X solves every single issue I’ve run into over months and months of testing different file organizing and management apps that don’t hold up over a server. Amazing. Not to mention FCP X can do all of these things in the background, whereas other apps, like iMovie, are unusable until after they finish analyzing imported media (which, in this project’s case, can take upwards of 3 days). I do admit, FCP X is a different kind of editing approach than I’m used to, but for any features it lacks in comparison to FCP 7, it has so far made up with ease of media management and background processing.
- Feb 06, 12
“IFP’s unique year-long mentorship program supports first-time feature directors when they need it most: through the completion, marketing and distribution of their films.”
-via NoFilmSchool, IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Labs
On this weekend’s to-do list: finish filling out the application for IFP’s documentary lab program. I’m really just at the stage now where I need a lot of help with sound design, which I mentioned recently here. But, of course, the attention of IFP definitely wouldn’t hurt the film’s momentum going forward.
- Feb 05, 12
via emily richmond
There really is something special about being the only person around during a beautiful sunset… multiply that feeling by whatever the appropriate number is for floating alone in the middle of unmoving ocean, and I don’t think I could imagine a greater feeling of being exactly where I want / am supposed to be. I don’t know if I’m quite ready to brave a solo trip around the world via boat, but I am in desperate need of a night under the stars in the middle of the desert.
- Feb 05, 12
Anonymous have unveiled their second major release for this week’s installment of FuckFBIFriday. Their target this time around is Frank Wuterich, the US Marine that admitted to killing Iraqi civilians — and received no jail time for his crime.
Early Friday afternoon Anonymous began circulating news that the website for Puckett and Faraj, the high-profile attorneys that represented Sgt. Frank Wuterich in his recent trial, had been hacked. Wuterich admitted to leading Marines into two civilian homes in Haditha, Iraq in 2005, massacring 24 civilians including women, children and an elderly man confined to a wheelchair.
Anonymous members have hacked into the website for Sgt. Wuterich’s attorneys and have since defaced it with a detailed message explaining how the self-proclaimed “cold-blooded killer” became their latest target.
“As part of our ongoing efforts to expose the corruption of the court systems and the brutality of US imperialism, we want to bring attention to USMC SSgt Frank Wuterich who along with his squad murdered dozens of unarmed civilians during the Iraqi Occupation,
“Can you believe this scumbag had his charges reduced to involuntary manslaughter and got away with only a pay cut?”
“Meanwhile, Bradley Manning who was brave enough to risk his life and freedom to expose the truth about government corruption is threatened with life imprisonment.”
“When justice cannot be found within the confines of their crooked court systems, we must seek revenge on the streets and on the internet – and dealing out swift retaliation is something we are particularly good at. Worry not comrades, it’s time to deliver some epic ownage.”
In addition to defacing the website of his attorneys, nearly 3 gigabytes of email correspondence belonging to his attorneys have been leaked online.
“And to add a few layers of icing to this delicious caek, we got the usual boatloads of embarrassing personal information. How do you think the world will react when they find out Neal Puckett and his marine buddies have been making crude jokes about the incident where marines have been caught on video pissing on dead bodies in Afghanistan? Or that he regularly corresponds with and receives funding from former marine Don Greenlaw who runs the racist blog snooper.wordpress.com? We believe it is time to release all of their private information and court evidence to the world and conduct a People’s trial of our own,”
The announcement this afternoon comes only hours after Anonymous operatives posted a recorded phone message that they intercepted from the FBI and Scotland Yard. Hours later, The Associated Press reports that the FBI confirmed the interception and says it is going after the parties responsible. Source
Fuck FBI Friday is far from over, stay tuned for moar lulz!
- Feb 05, 12
- Feb 05, 12
photo by Mike Ambs - @erica_hampton and I just finished installing the nerf gun wall arsenal rack thingy in xander’s new bedroom :) we feel it’s necessary to point out that his room will also feature a giant-giant wall map of California, a reading nook, a lego sandbox and a drawing table. so, it’s not all glasses of milk and ultra-violence.
- Feb 04, 12
Golan Levin’s AMA Video Uses Experimental 3D Cinema by FITC
Golan Levin is a creator, performer, innovator, engineer and MIT graduate whose work has been seen around the world, and FITC gave you the opportunity to ask him anything via Reddit. Golan has answered your questions in the video below, which was created by James George (@obviousjim) and Jonathan Minard (@deepspeedmedia), artists-in-residence at Golan’s lab who are researching new forms of experimental 3D cinema.
The work of James George and Jonathan Minard explores the notion of “re-photography”, in which otherwise frozen moments in time may be visualized from new points of view. Despite the sometimes wildly moving camera, the video was in fact shot with a stationary Kinect-like depth sensor coupled to a digital SLR video camera. To compose their shots, the filmmakers developed custom openFrameworks software that aligns and combines color video and depth data into a dynamic sculptural relief.
In a process of “virtual cinematography”, James and Jonathan rephotographed Golan’s 3D likeness — selecting new angles, dollying, and zooming — to compose new perspectives on the data as if playing a video game. Fixed camerawork is thus transformed into a malleable and negotiable post-process, in which shots can be carefully recomposed to highlight and inflect different latent meanings.
This experiment developed out of concepts and collaborations born at Art && Code, a conference on 3D sensing and visualization organized by Golan’s laboratory, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Artist-hackers assembled to explore the artistic, technical, tactical and cultural potentials of low-cost depth sensors, such as the Kinect. As an outcome of the conference, James George, a creative coder interested in cinema, and Jonathan Minard, a documentary filmmaker interested in new-media technology, are now collaborating on the development of open-source tools and techniques for augmenting high-resolution video with depth information.
- Feb 04, 12
This photo of Mike was taken the same day as this photo of Xander B. Like the portrait of Xander, this photo was also way over exposed….and the focus is a little off too, but I like it!
My order of dark room chemicals came in the other day and I keep reading and re-reading directions on how to mix the chemicals, development times, etc…I’m a little nervous to get started! I’m sure it will be fine once I just spend an hour or so with no distractions :) I have a few sheets to process and I’m excited to see how they came out :)
I’ve been slowly making this my new profile picture around the internets.
- Feb 04, 12
1st heard via yvynyl:
Mesita - Onward, Upward
Last time we heard from James Cooley, the 23-year-old Coloradan sent along an incredible song called “The Coyote”. IMHO, this song’s even better. Hold on to your seat!
Says James, “I’m self-taught and can’t read a note of music. I record everything in Audacity. I went to college for audio engineering but dropped out. I’ve been bouncing around and living in different cities the last few years working retail & grocery jobs and spending my free time recording. I’m not sure where I’m headed now, and I’m damn broke but having a fantastic time for sure.”
Look for his The Coyote LP to be released this spring.
- Feb 04, 12
Onedreamrush / 42 Below Vodka / China by Universal Everything
Directed by Matt Pyke, animated by Maxim Zhestkov and sound by Simon Pyke
Short film for the Onedreamrush 42 second film festival in Beijing, alongside directors including Harmony Korine, Mike Figgis and David Lynch.
- Feb 03, 12Susan G. Komen Foundation Also Stops Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research:
In addition to pulling funds from Planned Parenthood for The Susan G. Komen Foundation also decided to stop funding embryonic stem cell research centers making it fully transparent the organization has evolved from non-political non-profit to a partisan advocacy organization.
That means the loss of $3.75 million to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, $4.5 million to the University of Kansas Medical Center, $1 million to the U.S. National Cancer Institute, $1 million to the Society for Women’s Health Research, and $600,000 to Yale University. That’s a loss of nearly $12 million dollars in research money to eradicate breast cancer this year alone.
- "There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to..."Feb 03, 12
“There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over treetops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.”
- Virginia Woolf in The Waves, quoted by the excellent American Roulette, via mills
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