I’ve been incredibly busy these past few weeks (month?) and I’ve sort of fallen off of the online map aside from my twitter account, for it is so simple and convenient to throw short little updates up while I focus on other things. one of them being a short horror movie I was able to shoot for a 48 hour horror film festival that happens every halloween. this was my second year in a row doing it and It was a exhilarating. You start on a Friday night and go full-tilt without stopping until Sunday evening, but also it was because I was able to finally get to work with Johnny as well as Jenn on one of my creative projects.

The short airs wednesday night and it will be interesting to see how things play out. considering the judging audience will be Dan O’Bannon (whoa!) and (regretfully) Uwe Boll. But we like to have the extended cut (around 15 – 20 minutes long) to be out in short time and viewable to everyone.

I’m going to take a week or two to decompress after finishing A Sinner In Control and then blazing like a madman through this horror short. I have another musical endeavour lined up for this winter.. with possibly another film thing that’s been kicked around a bit after that.

The short screens tonight at The Celluloid Social Club. It should be interesting.

I just recently had the fortune to see the remake of My Bloody Valentine. 

You know..  I always stand by the belief that there is nothing wrong with remaking a movie. At the end of the day, these are stories and stories should be able to withstand the test of time by being told over again to new audiences. That’s what defines a good tale, as much as film makers would like you to believe otherwise. 

So it’s always been a huge source of confusion to me to why retelling, what are essentially the movie equivalents of urban legends, seems to be such an impossible task for people these days when we see remakes of Halloween and Friday The 13th and they have been just so absolutely dismal. Seriously, they are damn near, unmatchable wastes of effort and it seems to be such a simple concept to execute. It really does come off as if the people making these remakes have no idea what these original flicks were all about and just want an excuse to try and one-up other horror movies and leaving the idea of crafting a decent horror movie on the cutting room floor along with the out takes. 

And I guess this state of affairs is what made me like My Bloody Valentine as much as I did. This remake is in no uncertain terms, an old-school slasher flick. They simply don’t make them this good anymore and if you’re a fan of classic 80’s slashers you could do a LOT worse (like having to sit through Rob Zombie’s Halloween) than giving this flick a whirl.

You know.. I was really worried about Terminator Salvation. I didn’t know what to expect or what to think the entire development of this movie. I saw T3 and was pretty much sold on the idea that Terminator had just committed Franchise Suicide and then out of nowhere Christian Bale gets cast as John Connor and the rumours circulate that the movie is actually taking place in the man-machine war. 

“Aweome!” I thought, “Finally, someone out there in Hollywood gets it!” but then just recently I read that they bumped the rating down to PG-13 and then I almost completely gave up. Are you serious? a PG-13 Terminator movie? wow, talk about putting a muzzle on a movie that was supposed to be this grand send-off to a once great franchise. But despite all of this, I still kept my hopes up and was eagerly waiting for the release date until the first reviews started rolling in. And man, they aren’t good. 

Thanks, Hollywood. Thanks for reminding me how you’ve learned to suck so bad in the past 10 years.

Phew, it looks like the downtime was purely coincidental and the bay of pirates is up and operational again. 

I have to admit that this time in history with media and the internet coming together in this crazy head-on collision, at least for me, is probably one of the most exiting things I could say I was alive to witness. On one hand, yes, it is a complete deconstruction of the traditional business models of Film, Music and Software Development but what a lot of people often forget to realize is that it is simultaneously a reconstruction of how the future of these industries, and possibly entirely new mediums, will find their footing for the future. I have to tell you, it is inspiring beyond what I can really express to any functional degree. 

I mean, I can’t really understand why anyone would not see this era we have on our hands as anything other than a gaping vortex of opportunity, to be completely straightforward. (well, I guess if you’ve established yourself in the sale and trade of physical media you could see this as a bit of a threat…  but then there’s the whole issue of ignoring a “problem” until it got out of hand, when it was really a new way to do business but the moguls-that-be were too self righteous to notice.) I often hear musicians, specifically, complain louder than any other group that they wish they had the freedom or the options to try and engage their listeners and fans in creative new ways but the record labels they sign with keep them in a gilded cage, unable to make an effort. And low and behold, here we are when everyone is scampering the hallways of the big record labels trying to find just some way, ANY WAY to engage fans back into spending money on their products. 

Now, realizing that situation, I don’t think I can say this clearly enough: There is your opportunity. Seize it. If you cannot see that, then I really don’t think you’re fit to play the same role you’ve had before in this new world were now starting to find ourselves in. Albeit, that is just one example, but I really do believe that this kind of radical thinking is going to be the normal way of going about building a new way of selling, consuming and interacting with media in the future. I would point out the cool kids over at Revision 3 as people who get it. They offer on-demand, weekly shows catered to an audience that they know and it is absolutely free for anyone to watch at any time.  I often think of a quote said by Steve Jobs when I think about that kind of thing when he launched the iTunes digital music store:

“the way to beat piracy is to compete with it.” 

And he had the right idea, at the time. But he still got one thing wrong… he wasn’t really competing with piracy. He was, for the most part, stealing away pirates before they really got into piracy and pulled them away on the concept that convenience had value to it and iTunes was a lot more convenient than stealing music online. His store still cost money. I honestly think that the future of online media is not going to rely on the audience to pay the costs of production and supply the profit to make it viable. 

I may be wrong, I may be right, but I really do think that it’s the future of these businesses.

Okay, so here it is: my newest foray into building a somewhat regular place on the web. I’m going to try and treat this like a somewhat legitimate weekly publication with as many quality updates as I can coherently scribe out into this Wordpress control panel as much as I can. I’ve built this, obviously, on Wordpress and used a hack-n-slash version of Pixeled I mutilated for the theme and shoved in some graphics I had made in Photoshop behind the whole thing to make it look a little on the cool side. This blog is graciously hosted by Pixelghetto Design Studios so if you like what I ramble on about here and figure you can build yourself a blog and do something similar you would be doing yourself a favour and have them host, design and even build your future website. They do good work. 

But visit often! this blog is updated every Saturday and will generally post live when breaking tech & media news breaks. I have a feeling you’ll like reading it.