Join us on top of the Old American Can Factory for an evening of music and films!

Friday, July 9, 2010
8:00 PM Doors
8:30 PM Zlatne Uste
9:00 PM Films

On the roof of The Old American Can Factory
Gowanus / Park Slope
232 Third St. @ 3rd Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11215
F/G to Carroll St. or M/R to Union

This Friday the “Brasslands” trailer and Zlatne Uste, the subject of our new feature documentary will be featured in the Kickstarter Film Festival as a part of the Rooftop Films Summer Series.

Come out Friday night for a peek at our new project, the incredible music of Zlatne Uste, and an evening of other great kickstarter-supported films!

It was done in collaboration with two amazing photographers, Shaul Schwarz and Julie Platner, and edited by Bryan Chang.

Filmed in Port-au-Prince with the Canon 5d.

The online trailer for the book was produced as a collaboration between your very own Meerkat Media, Penguin Books, and Thomas Pynchon, and may or may not feature a cameo voiceover by the reclusive author himself.

An animated short has been recently created using the wikipedia model — 51 animators across the globe submitted scenes on facebook, the masses decide on which they like, movie get made.

Also: Steve Vai shreds wicked axe pixels in this love story between an electric guitar and a violin.

Article in the NYTimes
Trailer on Facebook

P Bear’s tracks are whimsical yet thoughtfully constructed, taking us through unexpected little turns in a Eno-like instrumental landscape. NPR’s Stephen Thompson says that the music “pings and plinks and whirs and clatters like a toy machine, but it’s also made with the understanding that, when programmed correctly, robots can convey the soul-sick pathos of grieving poets.”

By his website, it seems Podington Bear is enthusiastic about the confluence of music and online media, as he encourages people to remix and appropriate his tunes for all their non-commercial fancies. Recently, the Podington Bear blog has featured a number of music videos using a mix of found footage and music visualizations to create a fantastic aesthetic of digitally-constructed organic warmth.

I love this one, where old family vacation style film is layered underneath a watermark visualization of the music.

The Beach from P Bear on Vimeo.

He recently wrote about the cognitive phenomenon of “inattentional blindness,” where our visual systems prove to be pretty picky eaters. Even when we think we’re visually focused — watching a movie, or just observing the world around us, obvious visual cues can pass by completely unnoticed if they’re unrelated to our immediate attentional framework.

For example, in a study done by a couple Harvard psychologists, subjects were instructed to watch a video of people standing in a circle passing a ball around and to count the number of passes the white team made. Afterwards, they were asked if they saw anything out of the ordinary. Most people said no.

Then they were told to go back and check out the fact that in the middle of the scene, who walks by, but a GUY IN A FREAKING GORILLA SUIT. Haha oops, they say, slapping foreheads, stupid cortical visual processing…

Morris relates this to how we have difficulty noticing subtle continuity errors in films (eg: guy wearing a different shirt in one cut to the next). Ultimately it may be the cognitive basis for our tendencies toward linear narrative, and our ability to fill in the blanks and to imagine human intentionality and causal sequencing when movies really are illusionary, constructed of fragments.

He uses examples such as Luis Buñuel’s “That Obscure Object of Desire, ” where two different actresses play one character, each appearing periodically, until by the end they switch shot by shot.

The essays Errol Morris has written for this blog are absolutely fascinating, especially this one about his journey to discover the temporal authenticity of a set of photographs from the Crimean War.

Also, here are some more wicked amazing videos from various inattentional blindness experiments. Be cool; try them on your friends!