Is Steampunk Dead?

Victorian costumes, airships, steam engines, bizarre old yet modern weapons, fueled by a little magic or Æther... The awesome Steampunk subculture has been a part of my life since I played my first Myst game on PC and I watched The City of Lost Children wide eyed.

Steampunk movies like Sleepy Hollow, City of Lost Children, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Army of Darkness (although more Dieselpunk) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen have always been some of my favorite movies. I am a member of steampunk groups on SecondLife, I read steampunk books, watch steampunk anime (Steamboy), play steampunk games (Myst / Riven, Thief, Final Fantasy) and now recently I have started making my own weapons, jewelry and costumes (for Halloween this year), (yes, I am a nerd).

The Rumors

Something has been worrying me. I hear rumors that Steampunk is dead. Internet forums, blogs like Gizmodo and other naysayers are announcing the death of steampunk. Their reasons... you can only make so many modified weapons, tea kettles, and "steampunkified" normal everyday gadgets for one lifetime.

But, gadgets are only a small part of the sub-culture. Alternate history, costumes, games, fiction books and writing, and Internet steampunk culture (like groups on SecondLife, blogs, and forums) continue to thrive and inspire new creative works. The most recent being a new book by George Mann called The Affinity Bridge (thanks to my friend Sara for the heads up) which was just released last month (July 9th, 2009).



The Evidence

There are also a few new steampunk style movies that have been released recently. Most notable are the 2007 adaptation of Neil Gaiman's book Stardust, The Golden Compass, the adaptation of Jeanne DuPrau's teen books City of Ember and most recently Focus Feature's "9" in which a group of sapient rag dolls, living a post-apocalyptic existence find one of their own, 9 (Elijah Wood), who displays leadership qualities that may help them to survive.

The uberpopular handmade craft selling site Etsy is also full of steampunk art, jewelry and creations that are very popular and sell on a regular basis. I also see steampunk art seeping into mixed media conventional art pieces, photography and mainstream jewelry.

So to all of you naysayers (I just like that word), I say Nay! Don your goggles, fire up the airship! Steampunk is not dead!

Disagree? Leave me a comment...

The Hunt For Gollum debuts online today!

If you haven't heard about the new Lord of the Rings "fan fic" film, The Hunt For Gollum, then you've been out of the loop. This was me Sunday when my sister-in law Hannah told me about it. (Thanks Hannah!) I felt kind of out of the geek loop. But I'm back!

Apparently it has been in production for almost 2 years and was created on a budget of $3000 by writer-director Chris Bouchard with all crew and cast working for free! The film is 40 minutes long and made its debut at SCI-FI-LONDON film festival this past Saturday. As of today the owners have released the film to the public on Dailymotion.com as a free view in HD! I haven't had a chance to watch it all the way through but the trailers are VERY well done, and rival anything that Peter Jackson has done in my opinion. The story from the official website is:

The script is adapted from elements of the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. The story follows the Heir of Isildur; the "greatest huntsman and traveller in Middle Earth" as he sets out to find the creature Gollum. The creature must be found to discover the truth about the Ring, and to protect the future Ringbearer.

The official website has all the great interactive content that a big name film would have plus "making of" and deleted scenes, downloads, stills, banners, etc.

Go right now and watch it! Leave me a comment or review here so everyone can see how awesome it is.

Here's the link to the Dailymotion The Hunt For Gollum channel

Full review of the film coming soon from The Horse (after I get a chance to watch it!)...

Summer Movies That Are Going To Rock Your Face Off!

This summer the movie studios have pulled out all the stops in the Action - Adventure genre for the summer blockbuster season. I'm just going to go ahead and say that May is going to ROCK YOUR FACE OFF!

So you've heard about the rumors and the hopeful release dates. I've got em all right here complied for you on The Horse. It looks like there's going to be at least one AWESOME geek movie released every single Friday night in May and more coming in June and July. So I'll start you off by telling you what "Josh" is going to see and I'll link you to a trailer for each of them. (no need to thank me...)

• May 1: X-Men Origins: Wolverine: (trailer here) staring Hugh Jackman (duh) and Liev Schreiber as Sabretooth. We see the start of Wolverine and his early story of the military conversion of mutants into killing machines and evolution into his X-Men character. Other characters we will finally see are: Gambit (Taylor Kitsch), Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins), William Stryker (Danny Huston). Directed by Gavin Hood. News flash rumor mill! Apparently the unfinished movie has been leaked onto bit torrent sites already and was rumored to be one of the causes leading to the arrest interrogation of the owners of the Swedish The Pirate Bay warez and pirate peer to peer site last week. I chose to "not participate" and watch it in the theaters.
• May 8: Star Trek: (trailer here)Probably the most anticipated movie of the summer. JJ Abrams (Lost, Fringe, Cloverfield) directs in this prequel staring Chris Pine (Smokin' Aces) as James T. Kirk and Zachery Quinto ("Sylar" on Heroes) as Spock. Fans have been waiting for this prequel for a long time. This is going to be huge!
• May 15th: Angels and Demons: (trailer here)Adaptation of Dan Brown's earlier (and better in my opinion) book and follow up to Ron Howard's adaptation of The Da Vinci Code. Howard returns to direct Tom Hanks (returning as Robert Langdon), Ewan McGregor and Stellen Skarsgård in this historical thriller about a murder and time bomb in the Vatican and the ever ellusive Illuminati. I'm a huge fan of this book and I've been waiting for this ever since I heard the rumor last year and posted an early review trailer at the time in this post.
  
  
  
• May 21st: Terminator Salvation (T4): (trailer here) The latest in the Terminator franchise. Christian Bale stars as the grown up John Conner and according to Entertainment Weekly, this one is set in the future with a grown up John battling Skynet after Judgment day. Much of the plot and characters are being kept secret by the studio and with good reason after the semi-bomb of T3. But, Christian Bale is definitely proving himself as one of the coolest actors in Hollywood after The Dark Knight. This one doesn't look too bad. I've been a huge fan of the the Terminator movies since day 1 so, naturally I will go see this one.
• May 29th: Drag Me To Hell: (trailer here) I loved the trailer for this! And Sam Raimi (Evil Dead, Spider Man) is the man. I learned almost everything I know about low budget film making from his movies and Bruce Campbell's books. It looks creepy and sounds like a good story. "A loan officer ordered to evict an old woman from her home finds herself the recipient of a supernatural curse, which turns her life into a living hell. Desperate, she turns to a seer to try and save her soul, while evil forces work to push her to a breaking point."(from IMDB). Staring Justin Long, Alison Lohman and Lorna Raver as Mrs. Ganush
• June 24th: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: (trailer here) The much anticipated sequel to Michael Bay's rendition of the super popular toy and cartoon franchise. Shaia LaBeouf and Megan Fox return for this next thrilling chapter in the Transformers saga. I'm in geek heaven!

Also in July comes Public Enemies (with Johnny Depp), the new Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, and ... hold your breath... G.I Joe: The Rise of Cobra! Because "knowing is half the battle..."

Seeya at the theater all next month!

Creating An Epic Soundtrack

This week I collaborated on a short film for a friends team with the Sidewalk Scramble, 48 hour short film making contest. Suction Horse Productions (my production company) couldn't sponsor a team this time like we usually do, so I helped my friends Kenneth and Kim with their team by creating the soundtrack and some foley sound for the short film. I wanted to share with you guys how I created the main track, what gear and software I used and my creative process for creating a soundtrack score song.

Inspiration

The first thing you need to have in order to create a soundtrack piece is not only your own musings or personal inspirations but the inspiration behind the film and all the main characters' inspiration and back stories. More specifically:

• Watch the final draft of the film to get a sense of the "tone" of the film. Is it dark / film noir? happy and colorful?, funny and lighthearted?, serious or emotional? These tones play a huge factor in how the music forms in your head.
• Consider the main character's back story and their mood. What attitudes are they bringing to the story?
• look at the locations, are they grungy, clean, industrial, folksy, rural, urban? Use instruments that bring to mind these locations...

Instruments and recording software

As a music writer or composer you must have at least a basic knowledge of recording and a few musical instruments at your disposal. Some of these may include:

• A fairly modern computer / laptop with a good amount of memory
• digital multi-track recording software. On the high end: ProTools, Cubase, or Cakewalk / Sonar (there are many other cheap or free digital recording tools available also. Just Google :-)
  
• or a software synthesizer / sampler like Native Instruments KONTAKT, Propellerhead Reason
• an instrument that plays your music: Guitar and piano are the most popular analog instruments, or a nice MIDI or standalone keyboard for your syth / sampler software
• a microphone (preferably a condenser mic) for recording foley or analog audio.
• a pair of decent speakers or headphones to listen to playback

Steps to create your score:

1. Use your inspirations (above) to form a basic rhythm and verse / chorus structure melody.
2. add bass line and drums
3. add harmonies and tones using your inspirations
4. consider "featuring" an instrument to signify a character or location in the film
   
5. consider adding sound effects or interesting / ethnic rhythmic patterns
6. layer alternate instruments or orchestra pieces but don't drown out your main melody. Enhance the original melody with layering.
7. listen to the rough draft. Is there anything you can perfect or fix? Does the featured instrument stand out.
8. Do a final mix using panning, EQ, compression, reverb or whatever other studio tricks you have available to you in your recording software.
9. burn the final mix to .WAV or .MP3 so the editor can easily "slice and dice" your precious soundtrack into the essential pieces that he needs to accent the film.

Of course the technical details about digital recording and songwriting are beyond the scope of this blog, but I hope this helps out those of you who are looking into moving into film scoring. Enjoy!

Photo by PeteWright on Flickr

Best Book to Movie Adaptations

Valerie Thomas: I guess we thought that maybe Susan Orlean and Leroche could fall in love, and...

Charlie Kaufman: Okay. But, I'm saying, it's like, I don't want to cram in sex or guns or car chases, you know... or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end, you know.
I mean... The book isn't like that, and life isn't like that. You know, it just isn't. And... I feel very strongly about this.
~ (from the 2002 film Adaptation staring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep)

I love this quote from Adaptation because it embodies the struggle that screenwriters go through in adapting a book to a film. I've attempted an adaptation before and it was alot harder than I thought it would be. You can't just pull chapters verbatim from the book and set them in scenes. So much more goes into an adaptation, like:

• the emotion that the character will convey
• establishing the background for a character
  
• conversion into a classic three act type structure
• making the screenplay dummy proof (suitable for the common man) with appropriate exposition and establishing scenes without spelling everything out and ruining the mystery or storyline.
• worrying about writing "Spec" (technically correct and easily sellable to Hollywood) so you won't be made fun of or rejected outright.
  
• worrying about how close you should stick to the classic three act story structure and Campbellian Monomyth

There are definitely more issues that screenwriters have to deal with but those would be beyond the scope of this blog. (Hopefully I haven't lost most of you by now ;-).

To move on, I've been reading adaptations for a long time and they are some of my favorite types of books. I just love comparing the differences in the film and the book and then finding the hidden story lines and subplots that didn't make it into the film adaptation. So, as promised, here are some of my favorite adaptations:

• Jurassic Park- by Michael Crichton
• The Da Vinci Code - by Dan Brown
• The Lord of the Rings - by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Forrest Gump - by Winston Groom
• Dreamcatcher - by Steven King
• Fight Club - by Chuck Palahniuk
• The Shawshank Redemption- by Steven King
• The Club Dumas (The Ninth Gate) - by Arutro Perez-Reverte
• Harry Potter series - by J.K. Rawling
• The Chronicles of Narnia; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - by C.S. Lewis
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(Blade Runner) - by Philip K. Dick
• Johnny Mnemonic (a short story from the book Burning Chrome) - by William Gibson

Next time you go watch a new movie, check and see if its an adaptation then pick up the book. Result=increased enjoyment!

(photo by Andrei Z from Flickr)

Josh Self is the writer and editor for The Horse, The Wedding PhotogBlog, Storycrafter, and a writer for The Terminal, Birmingham's most popular hyper-local blog. He always watches the movie first and then reads the book...

Movie trailers for winter 2008 and summer 2009

~ The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ~

I remember seeing a teaser for this during the Olympics. This is coming out Christmas day 2008. Adapted from the 1920s story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who is born in his eighties and ages backwards... right up my alley!



~ Angels & Demons ~

According to IMDB the official release date for the new Dan Brown movie based on the best seller is going to be May 15th 2009. As you all may know, I'm a HUGE DB fan and I've been anticipating this movie since the rumor started shortly after Da Vinci Code came out.

Super sneaky secret website! I heard a rumor about this so I investigated and found it. Apparently one of the trailers for A&D has the words "Altars Of Science" hidden in the Illuminati logo. If you Google that phrase you'll find a paid link (the first link) that will lead you to the hidden website. I'm not going to give you the link here because that would ruin the fun. But definitely go check it out if you're a fan to find a video feed.

Still no official word from Brown or Doubleday (Brown's publisher) about his new manuscript tentatively tittled The Solomon Key. The subject matter will deal with the history of the Freemasons and their influence on our founding fathers in the U.S. and possibly Skull and Bones or other secret societies. Robert Langdon will return as the main character as well.


~ Valkyrie ~

Also releasing Christmas Day 2008. This is going to be a tough choice. I'm also a huge Tom Cruise fan... and I love "based on a true story" movies. This looks great! Well acted, filmed and great production design and costuming.

Other upcoming films of interest to me are:

Terminator Salvation (Terminator 4)
Watchmen (based on the classic graphic novel)
(trailers by Comingsoon.net)

Fog at the Summit, Netflix movies and Robot Chicken Season 3

Fog at the Summit
Originally uploaded by Josh Self

One of the pics I snapped at work this morning. Whats up with the fog? Don't get me wrong, I like it. It puts me in a good mood. This is coming from Flickr so... update in a minute...

Ok, so what exciting things did I do today... I cross trained in the bakery at work. Just one more step toward trying to know everything I can about my job, so I can impress people... I guess? So, I got certified to work the bakery today and I'm teaching the next "Train The Trainer" class by myself next month.


I went out and bought Robot Chicken Season 3 tonight at Target, cuz I was bored and my fiance is out of town with her family for a wedding for the next few days. So, I told myself I needed something to entertain myself. Just some mindless laughs, and politically incorrect skits with toys... Lots of funny stuff on these 2 disks.



I also got "Lawrence of Arabia" from Netflix but I didn't realize that it is 3 Hourse and 37 minutes long! Holy Scimitars Batman! I've never seen it before and I wanted to see a young Alec Guinness at his peak. I also heard the movie was "epic amazing" and all film making types should watch it. Here's some stats from Wikipedia:

The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 1962, and won seven, including Best Picture.

Lawrence of Arabia won 7 Oscars

* Academy Award for Best Picture — Sam Spiegel
* Academy Award for Best Director — David Lean
* Academy Award for Best Art Direction — John Box
* Academy Award for Best Cinematography — Freddie Young
* Academy Award for Original Music Score — Maurice Jarre
* Academy Award for Film Editing — Ann V. Coates
* Academy Award for Sound — John Cox

It was nominated for

* Academy Award for Best Actor — Peter O'Toole
* Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor — Omar Sharif
* Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay — Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson

[edit] BAFTA Awards

Lawrence of Arabia won four BAFTA Awards

* BAFTA Award for Best Film from any Source — Sam Spiegel, David Lean
* BAFTA Award for Best British Film — Sam Spiegel, David Lean
* BAFTA Award for Best British Actor — Peter O'Toole
* BAFTA Award for Best British Screenplay — Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson

It was nominated for

* BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Actor — Anthony Quinn

So, I'll get around to watching that some time this week or I may just pop in Speed Racer (original anime series) Disk 3 before the fiance gets home and complains about it. I've been on a Speed Racer kick ever since I saw the new Wachowski Brothers remake a few weeks ago. I used to get up at 6am every Saturday morning to watch Speed Racer when I was little. I guess that explains my obsession with Anime now.

So, what do you guys think about my obsessions?

Mo Rocca visits to add punch to 'Piece of Cake'

al.com: Search: "Mo Rocca visits to add punch to 'Piece of Cake'
Sunday, June 25, 2006
BOB CARLTON
News staff writer
Comedian Mo Rocca, all dressed up in his groomsman's tux, walked up to the bridesmaid and pulled up a chair.
'You're a knockout,' he told actress Alison Britt. 'Would a really hot chick want to dance with a dork?'
She said yes, and they hit the dance floor while the Birmingham band Silk E Smooth and a couple of dozen extras swayed to a disco beat in the background.
The bespectacled Rocca, formerly of Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show with Jon Stewart' and currently a correspondent on 'The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,' is in Birmingham this weekend shooting scenes for the independent short film 'Piece of Cake.'
It's a comedy about the events leading up to and surrounding a wedding, and Rocca plays Gordon Stints, the brother of the bride. Friday, he filmed the wedding reception scene at Park Lane in Mountain Brook.
'I'm a lawyer with the social limitations that oftentimes come with being a lawyer,' Rocca said between takes. 'I know a lot of unhappy lawyers. Any story involving a lawyer with a happy ending is very special.'
Birmingham filmmaker Jennifer West, the film's writer-director, said she wanted Rocca to appear in her picture after seeing him perform earlier this year at the Alys Stephens Center.
'I've always been a fan of Mo's,' West said. 'I went to see his show to see if he would be approachable. I definitely wanted a name actor to kind of propel this for (film) festivals.'
Rocca - who's also a panelist on the National Public Radio quiz show 'Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!' - joked that he must have impressed"