Aaron Stewart-Ahn on Nagi Noda

Aaron Stewart-Ahn, director of several Chris Walla videos, wrote the following on japanese multimedia artist Nagi Noda who passed away last week:

I was lucky enough to have met Nagi. It was one of the more interesting evenings in my life. What was supposed to be a short chat over coffee turned into an up til 3am ramble on just about everything. One time meeting a person is never enough, but she was extremely endearing.

Nagi exuded and lived art, as it was something to be lived. It made me feel like an amateur - so connected was her feeling about life invested in what she wanted to do. She had no barriers, pretty much laid as much of her life story in our awkward English (littered with impressive words) as she could. She talked about the unfairness of being a female director, how she felt she had to act twenty times as tough as she was just to get the modicum of respect necessary to do her job. She told me about the start of her artistic life lived with her parents - both artists themselves who had given her a sense of how difficult it can be to navigate the world of art. She also talked about the need for artists to not be divorced from the divine, past lives, a recent trip to Angkor Wat so full of meaning - which planted the seed in my head which led to me shooting there in my last video.

The drawing above was something she put down on the napkin in front of me - she told me it was the secret to the universe, but I shouldn't tell anyone. I think it's ok now. She said most of us look out at the world, but if you close your eyes and look up, you're looking at the universe through your mind, looking at the universe.


She struck me as free spirited, eccentric, and beneath it all incredibly strong. In one evening in her company she affected me greatly. I miss her.

from antville.org

Shameless Plug

http://www.artistwanted.org/thedak

vote for my photos. thanks. :)

when broadway actors toast at your wedding.

Best Wedding Toast Ever!!!! (Amy's Song) - The best home videos are here

Makes me want to work in musical theatre now.

Future of film school

Fom Crikey, Tuesday, 29 April 2008
A Canberra arts watcher writes:

The 2020 summit had one group thinking up big creative ideas to build a big creative Australia.

"Aim to double creative output by 2020" they said, and "link the creative arts and education".

A PowerPoint prepared for summiteers beforehand includes a graph showing a massive rise in spending on Australian feature films but notes "consistent success has not accompanied this growth". It's a coy way of saying the box office has been tragic, and most of us have been unimpressed and uninterested in Australian films.

Having twice as much to be disappointed in doesn't seem such a big, clever idea. Instead we should rethink the value we attach to feature films and the expensive machinery we use to train people and to make them. For example, some easy money for arts education in schools can be found at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS).

It has an annual budget of $20 million and a yearly student intake of little more than 50. The costs are easy to see. We're spending nearly $400,000 each on a tiny clique. What is hard to see is real benefit for taxpayers.

Maybe the School was relevant when films needed equipment beyond the reach of an ordinary punter. The world has changed but the school has not. Now there are many ways to learn to tell stories with pictures. Equipment is cheap and accessible. Avenues like Tropfest and YouTube can start careers, even aiming at feature film, without a government-funded short film.

Australian feature films are a cost to the wider economy, impossible without subsidy, and make a relatively small contribution to contemporary Australian culture. A dispassionate cost-benefit analysis would reallocate most money spent on them to cultural activities with more impact. Make television. Give some more to the ABC. Double the budget for performing arts. If it's really worth $20million a year to have a special school for visual story telling, put the priority on television, where the business is, or on digital.

The future lies with digital technology, the interactive and the adventurous, with games and stories told using modern tools. LonelyGirl15 was a watershed as much as Pamela was.

AFTRS sits like Miss Haversham with the windows closed, rereading 1950s issues of Cahiers du Cinema, dreaming of auteurs that might have been. It has a few digerati who struggle to open the curtains, but at its core the School is still a shrine to the idea of the art house feature film. There are departments for producing, directing, editing, cinematography, screenwriting, design and sound. Then there's just one for television, and one for "digital media".

It has always been a place where idealist film-makers turned teachers passed on to captive acolytes not only their craft skills but also the true faiths of their guilds, replaying among themselves obscure disputes over the rights of directors, the limits of a producer's authority, and whether documentary actually is really important.

Now it's a horse and carriage school after the Model T.

The feature film clergy, both inside the school and outside, have welcomed the appointment of Sandra Levy as the new director like Catholics celebrating the accession of Queen Mary. But broader forces of change cannot be resisted forever. Like the Elizabethans, a fresh vision and a golden age may be only around the corner.

Getting rid of the clergy and doing something smarter with the $20 million might bring it closer.

My off-the-cuff, didn't think before i spoke, reply (that probably needs some editing but i'm too lazy):

can't disagree nor agree entirely.

most (arguably) esteemed/olde-and-renowned film schools anywhere on this planet need to rethink filmmaking for the future, not just AFTRS. TV isn't the future (in fact, it's also arguable that there are less local programmes that make it overseas thann local films.) - the internet's probably our best bet.

but it's not just that. for the perceived 'international success' that the writer seems to be rooting for, i'd argue that 'filmmaking' need to be approached far more holistically than the way it is taught now. there are clear cross-disciplinary approaches to motion-picture storytelling that encompasses animation, video-gaming narratives, and user-created-content-internet-youtube-shite.

i'm frustrated with how lines are constantly being drawn in the industry between TV studio production, film production, and animation; and how storytelling in video-games are structurally similar to conventional 'cinema', but no one seems to like acknowledging that.

the problem isn't that we're spending money on expensive equipment - it's on the education of how stories are told. the fundamentals. across all them disciplines. it doesn't matter if we give more money to the ABC or to TV if 'filmschool' graduates still have lecturers who quote from the french cahiers and champion 'the idea of the art house feature film'

so what film schools should do, in my humble opinion, is to make every potential storyteller go through FUNDAMENTAL storytelling core subjects, the same way design cores are taught to potential designers in design schools - before they choose to specialise in a field (or choose to be inter-disciplinary, if they so desire).

and at the same time, employ sessional educators from across the industry. i agree that there shouldn't be inside, stodgy lecturer-cliques in film schools - they age in thinking along with the school. sure, we need someone to teach us film literacy... but what about art literacy? animation literacy? video-game literacy? literary literacy?

it's a changing world. film is just a means to an end.

"Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?"

ACT I SCENE 2. A road, morning. Enter a carriage, with JULES and VINCENT, murderers.

J: And know'st thou what the French name cottage pie?
V: Say they not cottage pie, in their own tongue?
J: But nay, their tongues, for speech and taste alike
Are strange to ours, with their own history:
Gaul knoweth not a cottage from a house.
V: What say they then, pray?
J: Hachis Parmentier.
V: Hachis Parmentier! What name they cream?
J: Cream is but cream, only they say le crème.
V: What do they name black pudding?
J: I know not;
I visited no inn it could be bought.

metaquotes: Pulp Fiction, as performed by the King's Men

uniqlock.

Because it rocks my world and I like their culottes.

Hi!

Hello! It's the girlfriend hijacking this blog to say :

You can create a story from just about anything!

It's true. Right now, I'm watching Lobster Wars on Discovery Channel and simply put, it's a show about fishermen (mostly Canadian) going out to sea to catch .. lobsters...

And who knew that a show about lobster fishing could be so riveting?

What will happen to the deckhand that got pissed at his employer and jumped ship? What happens to the trawler Rachel Leah, who isn't bringing in as big a haul as the fishermen would like? And all the anger when the fishermen find crabs (not the STD kind) instead of lobsters caught in their traps! Even worse, watch fishermen cut the traps of other boats who have encroached on their territory! The drama! The scandal!

And just for fun, here's a bunny video. Because bunnies are awesome. (And this bunny video has garnered 1,779 responses so far on youtube. Further proof that you don't need a plot to get people talking.)

Dark Roasted Blend: Nightmare Playgrounds

Dark Roasted Blend: Nightmare Playgrounds

Creepy playgrounds. (think, sculptures with bleeding eyes. cows on lampposts, and a crocodile impaled with cutlery.)

Massive potential for a one location, one story idea. 

(someone sponsor my ticket to prague, the ukraine, or stockholm NOW...)