A few discoveries

[dean]

Doing the usual look around the net for interesting things/people sent me cool stuff, so I thought I'd share.

First a short video about a cat with human hands:

The Cat With Human Hands	Small | Large

Yes, very creepy.

Next a video called 'I'm the Juggernaut b***h' which gave me a laugh, plus he even says the line in the movie.  Basically just a few clips from the Xmen animated series that has been dubbed.  Watch the language though, if you're worried by that sort of thing, otherwise enjoy!

Juggernaut video

The last is a couple of Tshirts I'm thinking of getting.  Am definitely thinking of the Zombie one, and I like the Transformer one but am not sure if it's too vague [not that I'd really care]:

[Scottie]

Holy crap, Dean! The Cat With Human Hands was awesome! You can really tell a lot of time and craft was put into making everything look just right. The way the camera looked and moved, the animatronics of the cat, the makeup on people's faces, even the color correction in post worked so well together. I'm jealous!

And you should get the "Zombie Food" most definitely. I wonder if they've yet made a shirt related to action movies with a quote something along the lines of "Railing Fodder," or "Norris Fodder." I've always wanted to die as a minor or obscure character but in a spectacular way, like going over a railing with a laser gun blasting or with a main character's round house kick to the head while I'm blasting dual laser guns.

[dean]

Yeah that cat clip was great.  I'm a big fan of Jan Svankmejer's work in stop motion, which this cat clip slightly reminded me of.  It's that extra surreal take on things which is fantastic and like you said, it's really well put together.  

Svankmajer's clips are especially wierd because they use people in their stop motion rather than just clay, which adds to the wacky aspect.

Here's clips of his "Food" series, including

Breakfast	Small | Large

,

Lunch	Small | Large

and

Dinner	Small | Large

.  Very nice surreal stuff, and makes me wish I had the patience for that kind of detail in stop motion [as you may know Scottie, my stop motion experiment was quite brief and simple]

Also, that 'Norris Fodder' Tshirt is a great idea!  I've still got some iron on transfers from a 'Rock God' tshirt I made for a Rock party which had my face on it, so I'm now probably going to do make one like that for myself!  Gotta think of a great layout for it though, or just keep it simple with just plain text.  At the moment I'm thinking of a pic of Norris with some slogan around it, or maybe one nothing to do with Norris, and just generic 'pathetic bad guy death' type slogan/icon.

You really gotta love the pointless action death: fire a million bullets at your target only to have him take you out with a light tap over the back of the head with the butt of his pistol.  Such a glorious death indeed...

[Shadowphile]

Saw a t-shirt at a convention one.

I'm going on an away mission with captain Kirk, to an unexplored alien planet.

AND I'M WEARING A RED SHIRT.

                       NO FEAR

[akiratubo]

The Cat With Human Hands was creepy as hell. O_O

[LilCerberus]

The Cat With Hands got the mood right. Albeit, the story left me with a few questions, but it definately had the right atmosphere.

I just got The World's Fastest Indian for my birthday, & the disk included this featurette, "Offerings to the God of Speed", a documentary about the real Burt Munro. In one scene, Burt's wearing this t-shirt that reads "Dirty Old Men Need Love Too".

A friend of mine is trying to open a silk screening shop, which we're hoping to turn into a vocational rehab business for the disabled. Right now, we're trying to come up with a name & a witty slogan.

[Scottie]

Dean,

I really liked the work of Svankmajer. Those videos are so technically well done I wanted to go out and do something like that myself too. It's my intent to put together a music video using that same sort of jerky stop-motion for a musical band around here. They didn't know what they had gotten themselves into when they signed on to make movies with me [dark dungeon laughter]. I figure to make a movie in that similar style while also attempting to conserve time would be to do the following:

-Use a higher speed camera with more frames per second than the usual 29.997 digital.
-Slow down motion of people so that a step for them is two or three steps in real life.
-Film them moving while being completely rigid (maybe on a trailer hitched to my car, or a Radio Flyer wagon, or even better, my big ass dolly, Bertha!)
-In editing, remove frames at a rate to be determined later to make the look jumpy, while also retaining the fluidity to people's motions.
-Final result, rigid fluidity, thus completing my patent for paradoxical motion as well as making me a genious.

I was going to do something like this because I really really really like the similar motion that is used in Tetsuo: Iron Man to hurtle the characters down roads at seemingly ridiculous speeds. The difference between my method and theirs is that in mine you can't see the character's feet because it'll be on a dolly or trailer. But in Tetsuo, you can see everything, and that really really really looks cool. But it also probably took a really really really long time to film it. Me = not a lot of time. Tetsuo = big budget. lots of time.

[dean]

What particularly impressed me about Svankmajer's work is the fact that, especially in 'Lunch', he uses clay as well as normal actors, so that when one character eats a chair leg, his mouth stretches out to huge proportions but it's all seamless [relatively] on film.  

I was at a gig at the start of the year for a band called Amorphous Androgynous and among some of the videos playing in the background was a twisted clip which was much like a Svankmajer video with kind of an freaky Alice in Wonderland vibe to it [it was a gig for the album 'Alice In Ultraland' so that makes sense'] and in the clip a little girl crawls into a set of drawers in one fluid motion but in that stop motion style.  Great stuff!

Also thanks for the tips on how to film something like that: Unfortunately for me I'm big on ideas but short on any real expertise/technical skill, so that helps, and if you do get that musical video off the ground post it here so we can see how it turned out!

Oh and another great T-shirt design:

Zombie Donkey