Liam Keane » Film

The Treasure Heist

Liam Keane — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:28:02 +0000

Here’s a short film (~11min) that I made two years ago with some of my friends. I’m currently testing video uploading for a project I’m working on and so I’m putting this here. (By the way, youare.tv is awesome!) I, myself, do not appear in the film (as I was the camera operator and director) but you can see my friends Kevin McDonald, Taylor Wilkins, and Chris Rickman as they attempt to solve the mystery of a treasure map that one of them finds. If you watch it, don’t bother watching the credits (they’re super long). click below to play

Also note that we were using the in-camera microphone on a prosumer camcorder so the audio is pretty bad. I ripped this from a DVD (.vob), converted to .avi, and converted to .m4v so all the transcoding has likely affected the quality (it’s really hard to see the dark scenes whereas on the DVD it’s not that bad). Another disclaimer, the acting of the school staff is horrible but, as Taylor says, “What can you do?” Anyway, I really do like the story and am proud of what we made. If you’re wondering about the name “Paramont”, we came up with that for our production company during a separate project as a spoof of Paramount Pictures and since the crew was the same, we kept the name. We definitely had a lot of fun making this film which was, of course, the main point.

Plastic Soldiers

Liam Keane — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 06:40:00 +0000

While recently scanning over my blogroll, I clicked on a link to William Eubankâ€™s production company. The recently relaunched Darkshelf site looks great (Darkshelf.com was designed by Will Etling). The site is very shiny and while it takes a while to load, itâ€™s not too over the top. If accessible flash had been used it would be near perfect. Anyway, the site gets the job done and appears very professional. Darkshelf now bills itself as “An Imagination Collective™” and the site displays reels from Willâ€™s work as director and cinematographer and Matt Wessenâ€™s work as producer.

One reel caught my eye in particular; Plastic Soldiers is a (very) short WWII movie I worked on with Will and Matt about a year ago. When I say â€œworked onâ€, I donâ€™t mean anything glamorous or extremely vital to the production â€“ I was some sort of special effects technician / production assistant. Basically, I sat in a hole alongside a trench with Jesse Hoy where we operated the fog machine and the compressed air cannon. At other times, I operated squib-type devices or just ran errands. The project was particularly impressive as, aside from the material provided by the reenactors, Will had made everything himself: the pyrotechnic devices (PVC pipes, an air compressor, sprinkler valves), the fake blood (red food coloring, molasses, crushed strawberries), the trench (wood posts, planks), the falling debris (chunks of foam, baby powder), and all sorts of other things. The shoot was really fun and I learned a lot from it (like always wear sunscreen). I also met a bunch of interesting people including a few guys from Panavision Woodland Hills. The dailies looked great and the final version looks extremely cool. Check it out! [Watch "Plastic Soldiers" at Darkshelf.com]

The IMDB Top 250

Liam Keane — Sun, 04 Dec 2005 02:02:31 +0000

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is a website run by Amazon.com that catalogs information about films. Users are allowed to register and rate movies, giving 1-5 stars. The 250 most popular movies are kept in a list. The Wikipedia article on the list goes into more detail:

Only theatrical releases running longer than 60 minutes with over 1250 votes are considered; short subjects, documentaries, miniseries, direct-to-video and made-for-TV movies are ineligible… Another common criticism has been that it is merely a popularity contest and does not therefore reflect any objective knowledge about the history or art of movies… In practice, however, many of the movies atop critical yearly and historical best picture lists appear high on the Top 250 as well

Although many great movies are not included, the list is a ranking of the most popular movies. Many people have set a goal of watching the top 250 movies and today I am joining them. I intend to watch all of the 250 movies.

To track my progress, I am going to use twofifty.org, a website created for this task by Tim Broddin, a 22 year old student from Belgium. At the time of registering, I’d seen 60 out of the 250. At the time of your reading this, I’ve seen:

You can track my progress by visiting http://twofifty.org/user/Liam/ where you will see my list:

Apparently, I need to see The Godfather. I know for Film 46 I need to watch Blade Runner which I plan to do tonight (so by tomorrow my count should be at least 61). If you end up registering let me know — maybe we can have a friendly race to 250.

Updated on December 14th, 2005…
I’m continuing to use twofifty.org but have also started looking at other social networking sites that focus on movies. Here are a few:

MyFilmz — http://myfilmz.net/
“find new movies to watch, put your watching list online”
Ning powered Movie Reviews — http://movies.ning.com/
Part of the Ning social application playground
University of Minnesota’s MovieLens — http://movielens.umn.edu/
Uses collaborative filtering to generate movie recommendations
Listal — http://www.listal.com/
A web based DVD, music, game and book collection manager
liveplasma — http://www.liveplasma.com/
Music and movies discovery engine (reminds me of They Rule)
Flixster — http://flixster.com/
Lists what you want to see (kinda like 43 Things)

I’ve heard of these by reading some comments on digg and if you know of any others feel free to enlighten me. Listal looks pretty cool but it seems to only be listing things you own or want to buy. At this time, I think I’m going to give Flixster a spin.

Color Like No Other

Liam Keane — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 11:34:19 +0000

This is by far one of the coolest ads I’ve ever seen (watch it here). Sony released 250,000 Superballs down a street in San Fransisco. The visuals are amazing!

In an age when CGI is commonplace, this makes the commercial all the more extraordinary. Every single frame was shot over two days – with the main sequence involving a 23-man camera crew and only one chance to get it right.

An entire block was closed off and special compressed-air cannons shot the balls into the air, while earth moving equipment poured thousands down the street. Not that you’d know it from the finished product, but these balls can do some damage, so all the cars were props and crew members went so far as to having protective shields and crash helmets.”

To learn more about the making of the Bravia commercial, check out Sony’s behind the scenes page.

While doing some basic research, I noticed an odd coincidence. Superballs are made by Wham-O, a company headquartered in — of all places — San Fransisco. Sony chose the city for it’s hills but the coincidence does add something to the coolness of the commercial.

On a personal note, I also noticed that the commercial was made by Fallon London, which I am assuming is related to Fallon USA. I only noticed this because Fallon was the company behind BMW Films’ UnCapTheRide alternate reality game, which I played and completed (I had a 1:200 chance of winning a BMW Z4 and got to attend the endgame party in Las Vegas). Fallon is pretty darn cool.

And for those of you wondering how Sony cleaned up the quarter million bouncy balls, they had a series of large nets and numerous crewmembers with shovels. Stuff like this is why I want to make films.
Photo credit: © 2005 sepiatone, via flickr