My editor and friend Rob Ryang is one of the best people I know. He's low key funny but he makes me laugh harder than anyone, which is always a big help when we're editing my far too serious videos.
Robert of course came to prominence for his Shining trailer which I post on a weekly basis. When it first was circulating through email through some filmmakers, I immediately wrote the email address at the end blindly telling them I wanted to work with them. The next day I read about Rob in the New York Times and thought, well fuck, I'm not going to get to work with him. A few weeks later I heard back and here we are, I haven't worked on anything without Rob since.
Strangest of all, he was recently featured on Al Jazeera. Yes, that Al Jazeera. Click here to watch Al Jazeera's story on trailer mashups and to see Rob's sense of style. Ahem.
I used to cut things myself and although I'm competent I knew that I had hit a limitation - I wasn't an exceptionally gifted editor. And I was tired of working in self imposed exile. I don't cut like Rob does, I tend to like to boringly hold on shots, and we have disagreements sometimes but I often defer to him when he makes his case. Rob is like a writing partner after the fact - he's just as important to my work as what I do.
Rob and I have that sick compulsion of remembering pretty much everything we see, and this little gem he captured himself on tivo as it happened.
And here's another overlooked work of Rob's - he was asked to recut indie films into studio films, so he took David Lynch's Blue Velvet and in some ways I think this is even better than Shining. Lynch saw this and was not happy about it all. Boo for not having a sense of humor.
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There's a picture of the demolished, meteor stricken plastic chair in my backyard. Anyway, all I'm doing today is taxes and cleaning inside and outside and getting my bicycle fixed. Rode my bike in NYC for the first time in weeks and of course nearly get in a really bad accident due to a jerk driver. They purposely cut me off and nearly caused me to plow into a parked car. So I caught up with them to give them the finger and it was an elderly couple. Oops.
The other thing I had to do today was go get a real New York bagel, just one of those foods you can't get anywhere else. I used to hear New Yorkers talk about how bagels are different here, and have heard various silly theories such as how there's flouride in the water here. Now that I live here I know what they mean. Even bad bagels are chewy and don't have that crumbled sour thing that bagels on the west coast do. I no longer eat bagels outside of NYC unless it's catering on set and I have no other options. This here is from La Bagel Delight and if you click on the link you can read an excerpt of Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies in which the place features. It's considered by some to be one of the best bagel joints in the city, despite it's ludicrous name. A Thai man is their secret weapon, hand rolling every bagel at 4am, which is why you see it twisted. Some of my best memories of Brooklyn involve me cycling up to that place at 6am when they're hot as they hand them to you.
But I really miss Tokyo ramen joints, myself. I could wax poetic on the layout design of my favorite one in Shibuya, maximized for pure efficiency with ramen I have never ever tasted in the US... And it's probably not even that high quality. Getting food like that at 1am is much appreciated by an insomniac and fan of the midnight snack like me.
Robert of course came to prominence for his Shining trailer which I post on a weekly basis. When it first was circulating through email through some filmmakers, I immediately wrote the email address at the end blindly telling them I wanted to work with them. The next day I read about Rob in the New York Times and thought, well fuck, I'm not going to get to work with him. A few weeks later I heard back and here we are, I haven't worked on anything without Rob since.
Strangest of all, he was recently featured on Al Jazeera. Yes, that Al Jazeera. Click here to watch Al Jazeera's story on trailer mashups and to see Rob's sense of style. Ahem.
I used to cut things myself and although I'm competent I knew that I had hit a limitation - I wasn't an exceptionally gifted editor. And I was tired of working in self imposed exile. I don't cut like Rob does, I tend to like to boringly hold on shots, and we have disagreements sometimes but I often defer to him when he makes his case. Rob is like a writing partner after the fact - he's just as important to my work as what I do.
Rob and I have that sick compulsion of remembering pretty much everything we see, and this little gem he captured himself on tivo as it happened.
And here's another overlooked work of Rob's - he was asked to recut indie films into studio films, so he took David Lynch's Blue Velvet and in some ways I think this is even better than Shining. Lynch saw this and was not happy about it all. Boo for not having a sense of humor.
-
There's a picture of the demolished, meteor stricken plastic chair in my backyard. Anyway, all I'm doing today is taxes and cleaning inside and outside and getting my bicycle fixed. Rode my bike in NYC for the first time in weeks and of course nearly get in a really bad accident due to a jerk driver. They purposely cut me off and nearly caused me to plow into a parked car. So I caught up with them to give them the finger and it was an elderly couple. Oops.
The other thing I had to do today was go get a real New York bagel, just one of those foods you can't get anywhere else. I used to hear New Yorkers talk about how bagels are different here, and have heard various silly theories such as how there's flouride in the water here. Now that I live here I know what they mean. Even bad bagels are chewy and don't have that crumbled sour thing that bagels on the west coast do. I no longer eat bagels outside of NYC unless it's catering on set and I have no other options. This here is from La Bagel Delight and if you click on the link you can read an excerpt of Paul Auster's novel The Brooklyn Follies in which the place features. It's considered by some to be one of the best bagel joints in the city, despite it's ludicrous name. A Thai man is their secret weapon, hand rolling every bagel at 4am, which is why you see it twisted. Some of my best memories of Brooklyn involve me cycling up to that place at 6am when they're hot as they hand them to you.
But I really miss Tokyo ramen joints, myself. I could wax poetic on the layout design of my favorite one in Shibuya, maximized for pure efficiency with ramen I have never ever tasted in the US... And it's probably not even that high quality. Getting food like that at 1am is much appreciated by an insomniac and fan of the midnight snack like me.
1 Comments:
wax poetic then...
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