Give me a dozen Dennis Hoppers and I’ll change the world I’ll stop up the leaks and roll over hatred
Give me a dozen Dennis Hoppers and I’ll give you back peace and freedom and madness and sex
Give me a dozen Dennis Hoppers and I’ll kill every cliche murder every stereotype and lift up the beating heart of hell for you to swallow
Give me a dozen Dennis Hoppers and I’ll whip this fucking planet into shape right after I have this little drink of mine.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— The internet makes death horrible and interesting at the same time. Dennis Hopper’s death on May 19th, 2010, makes for some amazing reading and shudders. I’ve always admired him as an actor and an artist. I’m glad he was able to achieve so much despite himself. From Night Tide to Blue Velvet to Land of the Dead, he’s been an inspiration to me. I’m saddened to read of his death.
If you are interested, there’s one guy in particlar, Matt Zoller Seitz, who has created a superb tribute to Hopper with clips from a lot of his great work as an actor and director. Museum of the Moving Image has a good collection of posts/info on Hopper. It’s where I found the Seitz vid and the pix at the heading of this post. Here’s Matt’s video:
I’ve been a big supporter of the Blender Foundation over the last few years. If you don’t know, Blender is a the FREE, open-s0urce 3D application that allows you to create 3D films, create games and build models (and more). Very much a tool that rivals applications like 3ds Max and Maya, Blender has benefited enormously from several feature film projects where teams from all over the world come together to create a feature-length animated film and at the same time upgrade Blender and add to the applications “real-world” functionality.
One of the things I love about the Blender Foundation is that they are true to their word. In a fund raising campaign last year, I paid about $60 toward their special DVD release of Sintel. In addition to the hi-res version of the film and dozens of Blender tutorials created during the filmming of Sintel, you also get all of the films assets for free. Unbelievable! And you know they raised their money in a very short time. I’ve been following the development of this film step by step. If you are interested check their blog.
“Sintel” is their most recent film project and the Blender Foundation has just released a short trailer of the film-in-progress. You can also download hi/low res versions here.
Phil Rice, one of machinima’s best filmmakers and promoter, is offering a free introductory course in using Moviestorm, Note: Phil’s got a bad cold this weekend so the Free course is post-poned to a new date: SATURDAY, JUNE 12th from 9:00AM to 10:30AM PST. If you haven’t signed up for the free intro head over to his website and follow the links as I think Phil is a terrific teacher. This course called “A Movie in an Hour” will be 90 minutes long and will feature about 60 minutes of Phil taking your through Moviestorm step by step on his desktop. They’ll be a 30 minute Q&A at the end of the session.
Phil is also offering a second more focused course called “Camera Mastery” which will take place on June 26th (Saturday) at 9:00 AM Pacific/5:00 GMT and will cover how to use the Moviestorm camera in depth. Again, he’ll be screen casting from his desktop and will conduct a Q&A at the end of the session. There are also giveaways and extras for those who sign up. The price of the course is $25. I signed up last week and the process of paying via Paypal is easy and simple.
Looking forward to learning Moviestorm from Phil. He’s created some excellent films in Moviestorm and was part of the original group to adopt Moviestorm as a machinima tool.
If you want to learn Moviestorm (and machinima production in general) you should check Mr. Rice’s guided lessons.
Ricky Grove (aka Richard Grove, "gToon") is an actor, sound effects editor, writer, machinima filmmaker and bookstore clerk all rolled into one. He lives in Los Angeles with his partner, author Lisa Morton, in an apartment filled with books, Hong Kong DVD's and Halloween Antiques. Oh, and there are two swell cats; Roxie and Sylvia.
Current News
Here's what's going on with me this week
-Expo submissions closing this week. A lot of work to do for the Screening Team
-Adobe Soundbooth CS5 review up
-Attending Disney press preview of their new film "Tangled" on Wednesday
