Polonia and Asobi Seksu

My hiatus on blogging has been very long this time, sidetracked as it were by what was supposed to be a quick trip to Poland. And then I helped Dan-ah make her first music video for one of our favorite bands Asobi Seksu.


Asobi Seksu - Me & Mary from Aaron Stewart-Ahn on Vimeo.

My last video got nominated for an award at a film festival devoted to cinematography, Camerimage. Which I would also say is one of the greatest film festivals on the planet for several reasons...

There is no promotion or sales or marketing or hype, it's a celebration to the art of cinematography, which is never lauded enough. So it is people who gather specifically because they are passionate about this singular artform. And these wonderful people who have devoted their lives to the discipline get to be celebrated, and so true legends gather once a year in this small town of Lodz. Nearly every great living cinematographer was there. These are people who you wouldn't know by name but if I tell you that here is the guy who defined the photography of Amelie and this is the man who photographed No Country for Old Men and this was the DP for Terence Malick on this film and this here is the person who worked with Godard and Melville and Chris Marker... I will write more on it later as it was one of the best weeks of my filmmaking life.

While I was there i decided to make a film in Polish in Warsaw with the help of a cinematographer I met there named Anka Malatynska. So off we went, and made a film.

And then I got back, and went right into helping Dan-ah Kim make her first music video for the lovely and amazing Asobi Seksu.

Way back when I started making videos I sent emails to managers of bands I loved and none wrote back. Until four years later, Asobi Seksu got in touch. I came up with an idea and it didn't fly. Dan-ah came up with an idea of how to merge illustration and the band's performance, everyone fell in love with it, so I was like "okay, you're a director now".



We had a ridiculously small budget and a deadline that I honestly did not think we were going to make. We abandoned many ideas and ambitions due to practicality, that most heinous enemy of the imagination while filmmaking. But we did manage to hand animate in camera 3397 individual frames in three days, eschewing any computer compositing.

And I must say that I've become embittered a little making videos but working with James and Yuki was awesome. They even came out to Dan-ah's opening, which was especially sweet and gracious.

For Dan-ah I couldn't be prouder. I think it's a really incredible first video, especially when I look back at my own or think of others. And I got to see a look in her eyes when we finished at 5am that I know I've carried before. Given we started working on this the day after she opened her show at Giant Robot... And the day after we finished a twenty hour day she flew to Sundance to be with the crew she worked on the movie Cold Souls with.

And she puts up with me...

And Dan-ah wonders why she's a little tired these days? Again, I am very proud and want to know what she is eating.

Prisencolinensinainciusol

For winter blues it doesn't get much better than this bit of Italian funk disco rap from 1973 featuring an actor from La Dolce Vita named Adriano Celentano. I have no idea where or whence it came from.

Viral Marketers: 0 Guitar Heroes: 1

So yesterday there was this buzz for about two hours before everyone realized that the incredible bicycling Guitar Hero video was of course a piece of viral marketing that used a lot of complicated CGI to make something look like an organic, fan made effort. There was the fake youtube account of a guy who worked at McDonald's, but sadly, of course, it wasn't real.

Here's a great bit on The Daily Show about Asians and Hispanics now being the new future American minority.



Which to me means that we're going to have an Asian themed comedy variety sketch show soon, our own version of In Living Color, which of course instead of flygirls will have bgirls or kids doing DDR between sketches... But I nominate this guy to be its first performer. Not only is his call out on viral marketing awesome, his other videos are hilarious, too.



And here's the marketers clip if you missed it...



I think the cynicism around viral marketing is that it often takes a great idea that could be an amazing advertisement in its own right and purports it to be something else. And when you try and make something look hand made and ingenious and a testament to humanity's ability to do very odd, wonderful things, and its revealed at the end it was a marketing company's concept that relied on a lot of gimmicks in computers to pull off, well of course that diminishes what people want from a viral video which is something that wasn't made with a budget by experienced production teams. It's why I don't really look at youtube any longer, whereas I used to check it once a day.

But hey there's my happy ending, I just found Freddie Law's youtube videos which are far better than any marketer could ever make, and his awesome website. Which shows you how to make the best Eddie Murphy pumpkin for next year.

Oh and here's another great video by him made when he was a teenager or something...



Picture courtesy of My Mom is a Fob.

We're all Americans now

It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

Above picture from FlySi's flickr account, celebrations near my neighborhood.

I had made plainly obvious my opinions these past few weeks. Yesterday I spent the day in Philadelphia getting out the vote, informing people of their voting rights, how to find polling places, registration rules for the city, and distributing materials for Obama. With a 53 year old woman we walked the subway lines of Philadelphia all day long until the polls closed. It's a great story, with great moments, and while right now I feel an elation I never have before - I am also exhuasted. So for another day, another year of volunteering for a president and the hope it brings to oneself and others. For everyone else, I hope you were like the rest of us dancing in the streets, and I truly mean dancing in the streets.

This is one of those moments in history you'll tell your children about - for all else, American overcame its greatest weakness and shame and for a brief moment realized the notion of all its hope as a possible actual reality. It's impossible to explain to those who have never felt a sense of being an outsider within America quite what that's like when it's an abstraction to them. I can only say today, that feeling for me is finally erased.

This is how voter fraud occurs: captured on video

This is one of the most important videos you could watch this entire election season. A West Virgina polling station allowd a citizen journalist to film the malfunctioning nature of the system that was producing erratic results in a computerized voting machine. An attempt to vote straight Democratic results in... A vote for John McCain. This is supposedly due to lack of calibration on the voting machine... So you're telling me that the iPhone is more accurate a device than your voting booth? You know, I'm one of those crazy people who believe the 2004 election was stolen to some degree. But I'm also one of those crazy people who thought that unregulated free market capitalism would someday lead to a crash, which I thought was just some upper middle class intellectual thing I believed in but would never come to pass. Well, pardon me for saying "fuck me". Be careful what you wish for.

Given polling and the latest news, some complacency has set in amongst voters, and this complacency usually hits the youngest the most. Make no mistake - even if Obama is tipped to win in sheer stastitics right now, the number of you who vote for him, the greater the turnout and local congressional and Senate races that can be overturned, will enable them to gain political capital to sweep through the necessary changes we deseperately require. Even if you're a California voter or a NY voter, getting down to vote for Obama does provide a clear rejection of the failed policies of the last eight years.

Get out the vote. Get out the vote so you can say 20 years from now that you took part in this historically fundamental election. That you'll be able to tell your children someday about the one small thing you could do in the year 2008 when America had become driven by fear and had lost its standing in the world and polarized. Hell, I even ask you do it if you're a McCain supporter. All of my time traveling the world has taught me many things, and one is paramount - a vote in America in terms of foreign policy is a vote that effects lives around the globe for better or worse.

Most incredible moment in the election thus far

I don't think there's much more you can add about the implosion of the McCain campaign - one need only just read news headlines. In recent days his campaign has taken a turn towards something far more worrying, as his rallies have become flashpoints for mob mentality with people yelling out "terrorist" and so on when Obama's name is invoked. Only this morning McCain's flacks were defending the stoking of this inflammatory rhetoric (which admittedly seems to mostly be done by Sarah Palin). In a hilarious bit of politicking this morning a McCain spokesperson somehow indicated it was Obama's fault this was happening.



McCain yesterday:


UPDATE: just as I was about to post this, news from Alaska that the state investigation has found that yes indeed Sarah Palin abused her power as Governor of Alaska in violation of law.

Well today we get McCain actually taking the microphone from attendants at his rally and explaining to them that no, Obama is not something to be afraid of as they have been sort of insinuating all week. He even says he's a decent man. It's an incredible moment of political theater. He earns a response of harsh boos and light applause. Finally the McCain that impressed people in 2000, the decent man who called George Bush out to his face on his slanderous campaigning, pulls back on the complete abyss of his candidacy. And it won't help him either way. It's such a strange defining moment for his entire erratic campaign, forced to play political hardball in a world that so desperately right now needs to reject what has gone before.

It's utterly stunning to me - I have to go off the deep end into personal opinion here entirely of my own so forgive me Giant Roboters - it seems that this election offers a subconscious referendum on race in America, because at this point just on sheer political point scoring and his lead in the polls being what it is the only way Obama can fail to earn the presidency now is if people in the booth cast their vote in ignorance perpetuated by innuendo and rumor that's meant to scare people about Obama. That's why the possibility of his loss is so potentially heartbreaking.

An Obama loss would be definitive proof that America does vote with its fears not its hopes. And here in this moment, McCain seems to have realized that despite all else, even to him and the damage it would do his campaign, he cannot further allow ignorance to reign in this campaign or let his supporters become consumed by a frightened, hateful pack mentality that wants to paint Obama as a foreign Other. Maybe he did it to salvage himself politically, but this single act is infuriating his hardcore base, the ones who think Sarah Palin is intelligent.

If the generation McCain is a part of - and I think from all accounts as a measure of a man he's not a kind, measured person, even by his own admission at times, one who had as I wrote here earlier displays some ignorant attitudes about racism - can recognize that those politics just aren't worth the cost in the world we're in today, then there is hope. It means that the politics of old can be transcended. Obama's high road - even at the loss of his own passionate rhetoric - is the road we must take for the rest of the election, hopefully. And today his opponent realized it, too.

I mean, look, today the Washington Post reports that American Capitalism may be finished. You know your annoying progressive friends who ride bicycles and have horn rimmed glasses who have been claiming with their grad school decrees that capitalism is a flawed system eventually doomed to failure, which has always seemed like an intellectual posture easy to say from the confines of upper middle class academia? Well we are literally in the week where those people may have just been right all along. That's how fucked up things are.

For breaking political videos you should always check the indispensible Talkingpointsmemo.com.

Katamari WTF? Nobi Nobi Boy

Katamari Damacy was a stunning bit of originality in the years dominated by the transition in gaming from two dimensions to three. It was designed by apathetic, game abhorring, playground designing and sculpture trained Keita Takahashi - who has developed a cult following. It's taken rather seriously by hardcore game lunatics, despite it being wonderfully immature. LittleBigPlanet in all its glory owes a debt to a certain sense to the game in that it somehow reconnects you to a childish sense of play - what Wii games are supposed to do but I find often don't.

Despite protestations he'd never work in games again, here's a trailer from the Tokyo Games Show for his new upcoming game Nobi Nobi Boy, and you really ought to judge for yourself. At least his eclectic sense in music hasn't changed.



Illustration drawn by Takahashi courtesy Indiecadewho have an interview with Takahashi here.

And for amazing Katamari goodness check out these T shirts from Panic designs which I found by bumping into the guy who makes them outside the GR store on Sawtelle one day.

And for old time's sake, the mind altering opening to Katamari Damacy.

I've got an extra LittleBigPlanet beta key for one of you

Somehow I got an extra key sent to me for the beta test of LittleBigPlanet. Whoever is first to drop a comment naming their favorite game thus far of 2008 gets it. I didn't get much time with the game yesterday but it is an absolute killer app for the Playstation 3. I've never seen my girlfriend so utterly immediately absorbed into a game and playing together is wonderful, fusing memories of playing old school platformers with one of the greatest most original bits of gaming art direction ever seen - it has a wonderful handmade aesthetic as if it were clobbered together from bits of imagination.

But the real trick with LittleBigPlanet is so paradigm shifting it's hard to explain if you don't experience it - the ability to immediately drop into cardboard and yarn constructions made around the world by other players of the game. In only a few weeks amateur construction gurus have made incredible things. What LittleBigPlanet does is streamline the discovery process, in effect making user generated content something that's easy and intuitive, so much so a child could - again the art direction fuses with this because it feels like something you make as an 8 year old with paper maiche and cardboard in your backyard. Imagine if the original Super Mario Bros had featured a dreamlike system for designing your own levels that could instantly be shared around the world and you could run through those levels with anyone who came to visit.

I'm thinking the game is an absolute precedent setting triumph.

LittleBigPlanet: if Michel Gondry and Rube Goldberg made a videogame

LittleBigPlanet is one of the most awaited games of the year, a Playstation 3 exclusive that looks on the surface like a simple Mario style jumping game with a brilliantly realized handmade aesthetic. But the game also affords players the chance to create their own worlds using simple intuitive physics tools and creator driven content so that one can make a playground of your dreams ad then share online with others. More to come on this incredible game, but right now if you hop over to this USAToday link you can get an access key to the beta test that will let you try it out some weeks before release. I'm sure I'll be writing more about this game as only a few minutes with it convinced me its one of the greatest games in years... But hop to it now to get that beta key!