Michel Gondry and Boris Vian: a match made in heaven

There has been much talk this week about the woes of the visual effects industry. Snubs at the Oscars did not go unnoticed, including that of Ang Lee’s acceptance speech that failed to acknowledge the artists who helped him develop the look and visual flair of Life of Pi. Some think of visual effects as a tool to make the world appear believable and realistic, but it is far more than that, both in Lee’s film and in Gondry’s.

Appropriately, here is a reminder from Michel Gondry that visual effects are integral to the plot; they move the story forward, capture the viewer’s imagination and convey the author’s magical play with words. Michel Gondry’s “L’écume des Jours” is based on a classic French novel by Boris Vian, published in 1947. It is considered by many to be one of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. A love story above all else, the story evolves in a world full of poetic and dream-like imagery, a world in which surrealist references abound; a flower grows in the main character’s lungs, threatening the couple’s happiness and their house shrinks around them.

RIP Chris Marker

If there ever was a “motionographer”, an artist who used film and pen with equal eloquence, it was filmmaker Chris Marker who died today on his 91^st birthday. His name does not resonate with everyone because Marker was a recluse, refusing to be photographed and seldom accepting interviews and yet, he collaborated with the greatest film directors of our time, most notably Alain Resnais. Terry Gilliam brought Marker back to the attention of many with Twelve Monkeys, a film he based on Marker’s iconic La Jetée.

His films were always intensely personal and poetic, challenging the very notion of narrative, of documentary, and of memory. Marker used cartoons, graffiti, text, photographs, voice-over, and various means of image processing in much of his work, animating and ‘writing’ images with a profound sense of poetry. He will be missed.

NATPE 2010 Coverage

Photo by Todd Ehlers

NATPE 2010 Day One: “It’s the content, stupid!”

There is no better place to get a snapshot of the state of the industry than at the NATPE conference, the largest conference of content production in the world. Though the conference is held in a city that prides itself on its “what happens here stays here” mantra, the spirit of NATPE is more than ever about the sharing of knowledge and collaborative relationships of content producers, advertisers, distributors, and designers.  As Lew Klein, President of the NATPE Educational Foundation, said it: “what happens here must go out.”

Monday kicked off the conference with a remarkable range of speakers, starting with an inspiring keynote address by David Zaslav, president and CEO of Discovery Communications. Zaslav, who oversees operations of content that goes out to no less than 173 countries and 1.5 billion subscribers conveyed his intimate knowledge of every single show produced on all 100+ networks in Discovery Communications’ arsenal. Zaslav attributed Discovery’s success to programming excellence and brand clarity. (more…)