Credits are fun

I don't know how much viewers notice opening and closing credits, but I really enjoy making them. There's a lot of room for creativity. It's a place in a video where the illusion of continuity between image and sound is broken. You can change the typeface, manipulate the music, include non-music audio, or drop in b-roll. The "art" of it is more clear than in live-action footage. Anything you drop in that's not words on the screen can be a surprise.

It's also a place where viewers are thinking about the video as a whole, because the credits are talking about the video. In my current project, I'm using some b-roll from after the main event to break up the credits. I wonder if the audience will be distracted from the credits themselves?

They'll probably be looking for the remote.

B-roll we can believe in

Wow, that Obama infomercial was well made. Lots of "low horizon" shots, very modern. But you know, I never thought I'd get tired of listening to that guy. Those even tones, that mellow modulation. If he gets elected, he should come on TV every night and read us a bedtime story so we can all get to sleep.

This ad, on the other hand, totally rocks:

'Milk' premiere

Had a good time watching stars arrive for the premiere of Milk, right down at the Castro Theatre. Hordes of No On 8 demonstrators mixed with screaming fans of James Franco and Sean Penn. I took a few pictures. The highlight was not seeing the tall and lovely Franco, nor seeing Diego Luna (not a Club America supporter!) but hearing someone yell out to a couple of the well-dressed arrivals, "Who are you?!" Everyone laughed. Great fun.

Learning By Doing: Transitions with two tracks

The "two-camera" part of my two-camera project is over. I've been editing video of Pastor Dawn Roginski's ordination and installation at my church. (The short version is a few entries down, "Something I've been working on.") The ceremonies were shot with two cameras, and the bulk of my work has been switching from camera to camera.

The Ordination's already finished. On the Installation, I just reached the end of the synchronized two-camera part of the footage. Now I just have to splice together a few pieces of footage to make a graceful conclusion, and add on the credits and the credits music. There'll be some surprises breaking up the credits, too.

Something I Learned: It turns out it's really hard to do a cross-dissolve between clips on two different tracks. It may actually be impossible. I ran into this on the short and at first I did a fade-in-fade-out transition (picture fades to black and the fades back in) that looked super cool but was insanely complicated. Then I realized I could just put the adjoining clips on the same track. You can only ever see one track at a time anyway, so I just cut out the clip below and pulled down the clip I was using to the lower track. Then I just put the playhead between the clips and chose the standard cross-fade.

There may be better ways of handling that, but hey, I made it work. By the way, I can't show you that transition, because I ended up changing it later anyway.

Early Hou Hsiao-Hsien films that never got made

Merry informs us on her Chinese-music blog that Taiwanese pop act 13 Band has a new album entitled "Horse-faced Sailor's Summer."

Review: An Autumn Afternoon

When I pointed out the new Criterion edition of Ozu's An Autumn Afternoon at our local video store last night, my friend asked me what it was about. I hadn't seen it in about 15 years, but with a late-period Ozu film, you have an excellent chance of being right if you simply say, "It's about a father and his daughter, who's getting old enough to get married."

Made in 1962, this was Ozu's last film, and it's even more about his favorite subject than his other late works, if that's possible. The plot, concerning Shuhei Hirayama (Chishu Ryu), a modestly successful executive, and daughter Michiko (Shima Iwashita), winds gently through the movie's 112 minutes. But An Autumn Afternoon is mostly just a meditation on the theme of aging and family relations. Old age and youth, and despair and hope, bounce off each other in a series of connected encounters. Hirayama's newlywed son argues with his wife about money, a middle-aged friend brags about his young wife, and a younger middle-aged man who served under Hirayama's command in the Navy reminisces with him. Hirayama encounters one of his own elders, too, a former middle-school teacher who's down on his luck. A small reunion in his honor leaves everyone, in subtle ways, closer to the grave.

All this builds up to something, but not through the clockwork of a typical plot. In Ozu's world, tradition is the force that overshadows everything, but each event feels driven by characters rather than by a march toward some predetermined destination. An Autumn Afternoon is even less plot-driven than most Ozu films, giving us a series of mirrored events that simply reflect on its themes. Though it seems to drift along, it's compelling because of the growing sense of approaching separation, sleep, physical decline, and death.

All this plays out against the backdrop of a thriving Japanese city in the delectable light of long fall afternoons. The "pillow shots" that Ozu used as buffers between scenes reached as high an artistic level here as they ever did. The images of smokestacks, office towers, and modern apartment buildings portray the churning prosperity of postwar life. The cheery soundtrack, which plays even throughout many dialog scenes -- Ozu always asked his usual composer, Kojun Saito, to write in the style of "home music," a kind of generic background music popular with Japanese families, according to biographer Donald Richie -- contributes to this feeling. Yet the screenplay, and even a few pillow shots of barrels of industrial waste, undercuts that optimism in interesting ways.

All those images are in full splendor on the Criterion disc, a clean and vibrant transfer. Ozu was an adventurous and inventive filmmaker, embracing first sound and later color, though the latter only for his last few films. As in Good Morning, his use of color is extravagant, with many bright red and yellow set props and even a hot-pink apron in one scene.

No single film can sum up Ozu's work, but this release of An Autumn Afternoon -- and I'm not even considering the commentary -- is a good introduction to his late period.