This YouTube embed of George Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) will probably get taken down in the near future, so you should watch it while you can.

This is the newly restored color version of the 1902 film featuring a brand new soundtrack from Air that premiered at Cannes last year. Even though this version of the film has digital hits, I found it more exhilarating than a lot of the action films I’ve seen in the past year. The color restoration is gorgeous; it brings out a layer of the film that we’ve been missing for over a century.

Le voyage dans la lune may be 110 years old but it’s having quite the comeback. In the past year it got a restoration of a presumed lost color print, a brand new pop soundtrack that fits the material quite nicely and an extended love letter to the film and its maker in the form of Martin Scorsese’s Best Picture nominated (and wonderful) Hugo.

Air released their album, which comes with the above video, today. Unfortunately, the only ways to get the video legitimately right now are in standard definition, but there is definitely a 1080p cut of this floating around. You should probably just buy the album so you can see a (slightly) better quality version of the film.

If you get the CD/DVD package, the MP3+Video download at Amazon or if you grab the album and movie at iTunes you will be supporting the candler blog. Additionally, you can see if a screening is coming to your town. Probably worth checking this one out on the big screen.

Like most people, I was oblivious to blinking until The Conversation, which was the first feature that I edited. I had the repeated, uncanny experience of watching Gene Hackman’s close-ups and deciding where to cut—He put the tape down, and now he’s thinking about what he’s going to do with the tape and … cut. Very frequently, more frequently than I would have thought, the point that I decided to cut was the point that Hackman blinked. I thought, That’s peculiar.

Some of this may be familiar territory if you’ve read Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye, but there is also new material from an interview in the forthcoming The 8 Train by Joshua Melnick.

Murch is not only a master filmmaker but also one of cinema’s great professors. He is able to boil down the most complex aspects of light, time, space and the human brain into simple, articulate terms for our benefit.

If you purchase In the Blink of an Eye from the link above, you will be supporting the candler blog. Thanks.

Today would have been filmmaker François Truffaut’s 80th birthday had he not passed away in 1984. To honor his birthday, Google posted a very special doodle in place of their logo today for users in (at least) the UK and France.¹ It’s a shame inquisitive Americans weren’t treated to a brief introduction to the French master, but the doodles are easy enough to get to. Here they are:

(via MUBI Notebook.)

Over on Vimeo, user Wyatt Hodgson has uploaded his first video entitled “Balance Out of Life” (embedded above). It is the entirety of Godfrey Reggio’s landmark 1982 film, Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance, sped up exponentially bringing the runtime to just over 5 minutes. From Hodgson’s notes:

Video: Koyaanisqatsi at 1552% speed. (The year 1552 marks the publication of “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” an account of the mistreatment of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas)

Audio: “The Holy Egoism of Genius,” a track off the 1999 album The Seduction of Claude Debussy by The Art of Noise.

While this decontextualizes Reggio’s film (and does away completely with Philip Glass’s score) it isn’t any less mystifying than the original. Koyaanisqatsi has proven to have remarkable staying power for a film which is best experienced in a theater with live musical accompianiment.

Hodgson has reframed that experience. What does it mean that we can watch it online, windowed in a web browser, in as much time as it takes to take out the trash? I’m not sure, but questions like those are why I really enjoy this little experiment.

UPDATED 02/06/2012: Over in the comments on Vimeo, user stretta points to a sped up version of Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi score he posted that matches the above video. I think speeding up the whole film, audio and video, provides a completely different experiment than what Hodgson was trying to do with his piece. Still, this seems a noteworthy addition so I’m embedding it below. You can mute the video and play the audio, but be warned, it’s not easy to make it through all 5 minutes.

Didn’t see this one coming and we will try to get as many details up as soon as we can. Yes Avid have made their editing software available for the iPad at $4.99 and professional FCP editors around the world are suffering from mass schadenfreude. The price will jump to $7.99 after 30 days.

While I haven’t test-driven the app (yet), it appears to be a knock-off of Apple’s iMovie for iOS. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The screenshots and product descriptions make it seem like Avid is improving upon Apple’s lead, bringing more “precision” (their word, not mine) tools to the iPad.

Projects created within Avid Studio for iPad can be exported and shared with Avid Studio for the PC (yep, Windows only). I had never heard of Avid Studio until this morning (is it brand new?) so I can’t comment on it. After giving its product description a once-over though, it appears to directly compete with FCP X.

There was a lot of noise in the editing community when Apple killed Final Cut Pro 7. It was assumed that the “pros” would opt for Avid’s high-end tools and the cheapskates would go for Apple’s playthings.¹ Looks like Avid wants the low-end market as well. The more these two companies compete, the more innovative products we’re going to see in this space.

Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse is sure to win over hearts (even mine) this Valentine’s Day with a Princess Bride-themed menu to accompany a romantic screening of Rob Reiner’s 1987 film. Perhaps bigger news is that they are also launching two signature wines based on the film (“Inconceivable Cab” and “As You Wish White”). The wine, unlike the menu (which will only serve cinephiles and big-time nerds in Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Texas and Winchester, Virginia), will be available for order online sometime soon.

Nothing says true love like a mutton, lettuce and tomato sandwich, which is, of course, on the menu. No meal is too difficult for the Alamo kitchen to concoct. I learned this last year when, at a SXSW midnight screening of The FP, the wait staff brought out waffles and SpaghettiOs for everyone. That was an unwelcome surprise straight out of the movie. This, however, looks like a delightful way to spend a holiday that is too often short on cinematic creativity.¹ Check out the menu (and a clip I couldn’t help embedding) below.

(via Eater.)

Apple® today released Final Cut Pro® X v10.0.3, a significant update to its revolutionary professional video editing application, which introduces multicam editing that automatically syncs up to 64 angles of video and photos; advanced chroma keying for handling complex adjustments right in the app; and enhanced XML for a richer interchange with third party apps and plug-ins that support the fast growing Final Cut Pro X ecosystem. Available today as a free update from the Mac® App Store™, Final Cut Pro X v10.0.3 also includes a beta of broadcast monitoring that supports Thunderbolt devices as well as PCIe cards.

Consider me excited for this “beta” of broadcast monitoring. Sounds like Apple is slowly (very slowly) filling in the gaps they left when they left behind Final Cut 7.

Also, 64 multicam angles? Holy crap.

(via Macrumors.)

Michael Leddy really liked The Artist. Well, he liked most of it:

There’s only one false touch in the film, and I’m not embarrassed to point it out: the intertitles use straight (“dumb”) quotation marks (" ") around dialogue, not curved (“ ”) quotation marks, aka “book quotes” or “curly quotes” or “smart quotes” or “typographic quotation marks.” Glance through an assortment of silent-film intertitles and it’s easy to see that proper quotation marks were the norm.

Technically, he’s right. Not all, but a great many silent films did use curly quotes, especially those that survive to this day. However, I think this kind of niggling misses the point of The Artist. Director Michel Hazanavicius is such a cinematic nerd I have little doubt his typographical choice was deliberate (unlike Brad Bird’s), or at the very least, considered.

The Artist may be a silent film about the silent age, but formally it is cut from the anachronistic cloth of the 1940s and 1950s. Hazanavicius makes this as clear as possible with allusions to Citizen Kane and the now infamous use of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score. Historicity is the last thing he is trying to sell.

I am now left to wonder, however, what was the point of using “straight” or “dumb” quotes? If I concede that the director did so intentionally, surely he had a reason. Perhaps it was a statement on the utilitarianism of post-modernity; that the curlicued flourishes of yesteryear have washed away with the career of the film’s protagonist, George Valentin. Sure, we have our own forms of frippery leftover (tap-dancing and puppies) but in the end the machines have won. Our punctuation is without personality.

Or there’s nothing to this at all.

David Bordwell’s growing series on the move from 35mm film to digital projection is absolutely stellar reading. In today’s entry, he tracks what the changeover is like for art house cinemas:

It’s comparatively easy for chains like Regal and AMC, which control 12,000 screens (nearly one-third of the US and Canadian total), to make the digital switchover efficiently. Solid capitalization and investment support, economies of scale, and cooperation with manufacturers allow the big chains to afford the upgrade. But what about other kinds of exhibition?

The long piece includes crack reporting from the Art House Convergence that took place just before Sundance this year. By my read, Bordwell offers the clearest, most extensive account of the state of the digital transition available today.

One thing I didn’t know is that the major studios are attaching all sorts of requirements to theaters that accept a subsidy in order to hasten the transition to the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) format.

More constraints appear if the exhibitor chooses to fund the changeover through the Virtual Print Fee. For example, VPFs oblige the exhibitor to screen only films supplied by the major companies–the ones that created the Digital Cinema Initiatives. If an exhibitor wants to play an independent distributor’s title on a DCP, that distributor needs to pay the fee, in effect helping to cover the theatre’s conversion. Other constraints are more obscure. I can’t report reliably on them because when joining a VPF program, the exhibitor signs a non-disclosure agreement pledging not to reveal details of the deal. But hints suggest that exhibitors could be prevented from “splitting,” that is showing two or more films in the same auditorium on one day. This is a practice that many art cinemas rely on because it allows them to vary programs in mid-week, or to compensate for having only one or two screens.

The first sign of danger, in my opinion, is that the studios (who comprise the Digital Cinema Initiatives, or DCI, which oversees the DCP format) require a non-disclosure agreement at all. Sure, it’s their right, but they’re effectively the only game in town. What are they hiding?

(h/t Ryan Gallagher.)

Here’s a Twitter exchange that I woke up to this morning:

@octopress Has anyone written a script to get Daring Fireball-style Linked List posts? How easy might that be?

— Robinson Meyer (@yayitsrob) January 30, 2012

@yayitsrob yes. @poritsky has done it here: candlerblog.com perhaps he’ll tell you how (and me).

— Octopress (@octopress) January 30, 2012

Fair warning: this is going to be one of those “how to code” type posts. I’ll return to the regularly scheduled film-related nonsense shortly.