Archive for June, 2010

More ‘Summer Arts’ goodness…

If you missed out on “FernGully” director Bill Kroyer’s lecture on Monday, don’t worry, there’s still plenty of CSU Summer Arts goodness to go around. Here are a few upcoming film-related lectures. We’re very lucky to have all this amazing artistic talent visiting Fresno.

Tomorrow, July 1st, 7pm, Wahlberg Recital Hall – Animator Tom Sito will talk about how the lessons of the Golden Age artists of animation remain relevant to today’s modern digital media. Sito has more credits that you can shake a stick at, having worked on classics such as The Lion King, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, Aladdin, Dinosaurs, and Shrek.

Monday, July 5th, 8pm, Wahlberg Recital Hall – Pixar Animation Studios animator Andrew Gordon has worked on Ratatouille, The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, and Toy Story 2. He just finished production on Toy Story 3. No word on the focus of his discussion, but I’m sure it’ll be quite interesting!

Thursday, July 15th, 7pm, Conley Art Lecture Hall – Toy designer, inventor, and entrepreneur Mark Trageser will talk about the toy business including working with designers, filmmakers, and toy companies.

All events take place at Fresno State. For a full calendar listing of all the events and to purchase tickets online, click here. Let’s get out there and support Summer Arts!

Dem Reviews: Twilight – Eclipse

This was one of the worst piece of shit movies that has ever had the good graces of having an audience with my retinas. Sorry, that was the opening line of the review I had prepared before going into the screening of the latest entry in the “Twilight” series this evening. We’ve all seen the hoopla around the books, the mom’s who’d gladly go to jail to get a grasp of Taylor Lautner’s barely legal ass, the children camping out for days and that has definitely played a role of me wanting to shit on the series. So this evening, I was offered a chance to peep out the film so I decided to go check it out blind as I have never read any of the books nor seen any of the movies. A “n00b” in the truest sense of the form, I knew I was way outside my territory going into this but I had to be objective. And guess what happened? I actually thought the film wasn’t the steaming pile of shit I assumed it was gonna be. Read more…

Dem Trailers: Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows

UPDATE: You can now catch the trailer in beautiful HD over here on Apple’s site. Noice!
Quite epic, that trailer right there. Set to be in theaters this coming weekend in front of prints of “Twilight: Eclipse”, Warner Bros. has released the trailer for the two-part finale to the Harry Potter film series today via the internet and it looks pretty damn fantastic. The last film in the series was kinda “meh” in my book but I’m hoping that we get an awesome finale in these two films, I’m just a little worried about the book being successfully split into two parts. Guess we’ll have to wait and see but so far… yeah, this shit looks kinda dope! What do you think?

Fresno was scouted for “Iron Man 2″

OMG, did u hearz this?!11 Dumb Drum caught up recently with Fresno’s film commissioner Ray Arthur, who gave us some details regarding the Fresno connection to one of this summer’s biggest blockbusters, Iron Man 2.

Dumb Drum: So we heard it through the grape vine… (Get it? Fresno, ag, grapes, raisins, har?) … that Fresno was somehow involved in Iron Man 2. True? What’s the story?

Ray Arthur: Either through IMDb or Production Weekly I had received a listing for “Iron Man 2″ that listed my friend Scott Allen Logan as Location Manager. I contacted Scott in late December ’08 to propose City Hall and other locations to him for IM2. I forwarded a few photos of City Hall to Scott and we kept in touch for several weeks. Location Scout Scott Trimble came to Fresno on Friday evening, March 13, 2009, to shoot City Hall for IM2. On March 16, I received a non-disclosure form from “Rustic Films,” the fake company that Jon Favreau was using to keep IM2 locations secreted. Iron Man, Rustic … get it? I had worked with both Scotts before on previous projects.

Ray goes on to tell us that no specific scene shooting was ever planned for Fresno City Hall, that it would simply be plate shots for visual effects. But no additional photography occurred past March 13. Principal photography for IM2 began three weeks later on April 6, 2009. While we can confirm that Fresno wasn’t featured in the final movie, Ray tells us there’s no ruling out that Scott Trimble’s location photography may have been used as basis for some of the futuristic architecture in the “Stark Expo” sequences. Either way, pretty neat! Now let’s start the “Fresno for The Avengers” campaign right now! C’mon Joss Whedon!

Random Goodness: AT-AT Day Afternoon

I swear this video has to have been based on my  doggie Monty. I’ve been saying for years that he’d be a perfect AT-AT for Halloween but I just never go around to making him a costume to test the theory but with the release of this video by Patrick Boivin really makes me want to try to do it this year. I’m sure he wouldn’t be able to last more than 2 minutes with it on before ripping it off but it just might be worth it to try to replicate these results in real life. Adopt an AT-AT today… or just a Min Pin and dress ‘em up :)

“FernGully” director Bill Kroyer to speak at Fresno State tomorrow

Director/Animator Bill Kroyer will speak at Fresno State on Monday as part of this year’s CSU Summer Arts festivities. Kroyer, who’s best known to me as the director of FernGully: The Last Rainforest (aka. the original Avatar), also has a lot of other VFX credits to his name, which include: Starchaser, The Jetson’s Movie, Tron, Cats & Dogs, Scooby-Doo, Garfield, The Green Mile, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc. According to the Summer Arts website, Kroyer will be discussing “the evolution of photo-realistic imagery and captured motion and how those developments have broadened the scope of visual effects filmmaking while presenting challenges to the artist and animator to keep the art of animation ‘stronger than real life.’” Well that’s a mouthful, and it should make for a pretty interesting lecture! It’s all going down tomorrow, Monday, June 28 at 7pm at the Wahlberg Recital Hall (Music Building) at Fresno State. Tickets are $7 students/seniors, $10 general admission and can be purchased online here. Get out there and support CSU Summer Arts!

Local filmmaker Matt Sconce to premiere his feature film this Friday

We’re all about local film here at Dumb Drum, and this Friday one of our fellow filmmaker buddies, Matt Sconce, will be premiering his first feature-length film “Stricken” in Avenal. Despite being incredibly busy getting everything ready for the big night, Matt found time to “electronically” sit down with us for an email interview.

Dumb Drum: Congrats on finishing your film! So how did you first get involved in filmmaking?

Matt Sconce: I got involved in filmmaking after winning an American Idol Music Video contest with my wife in 2004. I have always loved to tell stories and I decided to move in the direction of writing and directing. In 2006 I made my first comedy short “Nine to Five Ninja” for a www.dvxuser.com film festival contest and then my first serious short for the same festival “Stricken”. Stricken won best sound design and was nominated for best horror film of the year at the Action on Film Festival in Pasadena and that motivated me to write the feature script based on the short concept. Read more…