Dolphins are known to engage in complex play behaviour, which includes such things as producing stable underwater toroidal air-core vortex rings or “bubble rings”. There are two main methods of bubble ring production: rapid puffing of a burst of air into the water and allowing it to rise to the surface, forming a ring; or swimming repeatedly in a circle and then stopping to inject air into the helical vortex currents thus formed. The dolphin will often then examine its creation visually and with sonar. They also appear to enjoy biting the vortex-rings they’ve created, so that they burst into many separate normal bubbles and then rise quickly to the surface. Certain whales are also known to produce bubble rings, or even bubble-nets for the purpose of foraging. Many dolphin species are also known for playing by riding in waves, whether natural waves near the shoreline in a method akin to human “body-surfing”, or within the waves induced by the bow of a moving boat in a behavior known as bow-riding.
The wikipedia article about the intelligence of dolphins and whales is a fascinating read. While sleeping, dolphins appear to rest only one side of the brain at a time. This is sometimes given as an explanation to their exceptionally large brain size. Their brains (1500-1700 grams) are actually heavier than human brains (1300-1400 grams) and the wrinkles in them are of near equivalent complexity.
I’ve seen dolphins underwater once near the Eilat Dolphin Reed in the Red Sea. One of them came all the way to a nearby sandy tourist beach obviously seeking human contact for his or her amusement only. A delighted child ran to the dolphin and whatever they were doing, it was most obviously some sort of playful social interaction for both parties.
More recently, researchers at the Sea Life Park in Hawaii have been testing dolphins through an underwater touchscreen attached to a computer. There are no food rewards, so the dolphins use the touchscreen solely for intellectual stimulation. The scientists found that the dolphins weren’t particularly interested in abstractions, such as geometric patterns or artificial sounds. But they were very excited about touching the screen if it resulted in their seeing videos of other dolphins or hearing dolphin sounds. The next step will be to let dolphins choose video or audio sequences and then try to analyze why they’re making those decisions.
I can confirm this behaviour in humans as well. Even without any experiments, I know that people are much more interested in seeing other people and hearing human sounds compared to seeing geometric patterns or artificial sounds.
As computer games get increasingly photorealistic, it is sometimes difficult to discern between screenshots of modern games and actual photographs. Well, we are not there quite yet, but it is a fun conceptual idea to play around with. I formed a Flickr Group called Real Life Computer Game Scenery to have a little archive of images for “Real or Not?” comparison in the future.
While exploring photographs that might suit this definition, I quickly noticed that in real photographs there are often little “mistakes” that wouldn’t make it to a computer model. The random decay and debris is often almost too perfect in computer modelled scenes.
Please join and add a photograph or two if you happen to have anything in your archives that would be relevant to this group.
I usually don’t write negative reviews, but either it was the brain washing of the Vatican or perhaps Golden Compass is just a bad movie. The plot keywords made me salivate in anticipation, but as soon as the lights went out and the endless trailers and commercials had ended, I quickly found out that this particular film wasn’t my cup of tea. While Dakota Blue Richards as Lyra wasn’t exactly an untalented actress, she failed to breathe life to the synthetic, blue screened scenes. Nicole Kidman herself had slight troubles orientating to the invisible daemon friends who were all digitally added to the frames in the post, no doubt.
This is a problem I’ve seen in many, many films. I, Robot suffered from the same blue screen syndrome. So did Mirrormask by the way. (On the other hand, I did like Beowulf quite a bit… perhaps it was because it didn’t mix live action with CGI, who knows)
It is hard for an actor or an actress to imagine that they are talking to a 4 meter tall polar bear when they are actually just talking to a giant chroma key wall or, even worse, to the microphone in a tiny little voiceover booth.
Before I forget it, let me just mention that my favorite performance in Golden Compass was Sam Elliot as Mr. Scoresby.
Technology aside, I wasn’t swept away by the plot either. It felt very much like a made-to-order saga with a little bit of myths and scandinavian names thrown in for good measure. The film is based on a book by Philip Pullman, one of England’s most outspoken atheists. There is a strong anti-christian (or anti-dogmatic, to be more precise) undertone in Pullman’s script. On the other hand the fascination with the ancient mythology seems very shallow and gimmicky in this context.
I’ll give Golden Compass two stars out of five. Ahh, I’m looking forward to I am Legend to also give two stars only. This will equalize my ratings scale nicely and make it look more like a gaussian curve instead of a baseball cap with every other movie getting three and a half or four stars…
Well, I finally made it to redrum last night. To warm up for a night out, we doped up with some cava (Conde de Haro) and a nourishing meal at Grotesk. The tuna pastrami appetizer at Grotesk was excellent, by the way. Grotesk is a fancy fine dining place with relatively high prices on the menu, so I was surprised to see a high profile biker gang complete with emblems over there enjoying the creations of the chefs. It greatly enhanced the already eclectic atmosphere of the restaurant.
After a quick taxi ride, we ended up at Redrum, the club with allegedly best sound system around. Well, after last night I can confirm that the sound system is indeed unbelievable. It is built by Funktion One and combined with the unique interior the music sounded totally out of this world. Maybe I’m just used to the el cheapo systems at other clubs or maybe it was the Cava, but the acoustics in the wood paneled club sounded practically studio quality to me. You could easily chat with your friends without shouting and still hear the music with vibrant clarity. The bass was superbly satisfying as well. I think there are at least 6 or 7 layers of acoustic material on the walls.
If you are visiting Helsinki and dance music is your thing, I highly recommend redrum for the acoustic experience alone. Sometimes they host rock concerts as well.
The director also considered the story of Sunshine as an appropriate counterintuitive approach for the contemporary issue of global warming, with the death of the sun being a threat. Originally, Sunshine was scripted to begin with a voiceover talking about how parents tell their children not to look into the sun, but once told, the children would be compelled to look. Boyle described the sun as a godly personality in the film, creating a psychological dimension for the astronauts due to its scale and power. The director also described the film’s villain as based on light, explaining, “That’s quite a challenge because the way you generate fear in cinema is darkness.” The director also sought to have the characters experience a psychological journey in which each person is worn mentally, physically, and existentially and is experiencing doubt in their faiths.
I like to get a little dose of science fiction every now and then to keep the subconsciousness nourished with far-out ideas. Sunshine was just what the doctor ordered as far as the science part of the movie is concerned. In the movie a “Q-Ball” , the nucleus of a supersymmetric particle, gets itself lodged in the Sun. The hypothetical Q ball eats through normal matter, ripping apart the Sun’s neutrons and protons and converting them into supersymmetric particles. The Earth’s last and only hope? Why, to launch and detonate a gigantic nuclear bomb to fix the problem, of course!
Well, science aside, I think the film makers did a pretty good job with many other aspects of the film. The art direction and visual effects in general were well made. More importantly, they were also original and refreshing, which is not an easy task to accomplish in this day and age.
I found it particularly inspiring that the sun was treated as a god-like entity much like the ancient egyptian Sun God Ra and the aztec god Huitzilopochtli. As a matter of fact, sun has been worshipped for all of recorded history.
My personal prediction is that the Sun God is about to get quite angry while us mere mortals are thinning the ozone layer which is protecting us from his angry UVB eye.
This is the soundtrack to a consumer made iPod commercial that made it big time. It’s being remade in hi-def by TBWA for broadcast use.
Consumers creating commercials “is part of this brave new world we live in,” said Lee Clow, chairman and chief creative officer at TBWA Worldwide, based in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Playa del Rey.
“It’s an exciting new format for brands to communicate with their audiences,” Mr. Clow said. “People’s relationship with a brand is becoming a dialog, not a monolog.”
Check out the YouTube video that caught the eye of the ad agency.
The Oscar-winning actor spent months on a remote Fijian island for his new movie Cast Away and far from being an idyllic experience it proved to be something of a nightmare for the 44-year old star.
Not only did he have to lose 55lb in weight for the role and spend weeks up to his neck in water, the shoot almost turned to tragedy when he caught a serious infection.
“Just before we left the island I had a little sore on my knee and something got inside there. We left Fiji on the Friday and by the Sunday my leg was twice its normal size,” explains Hanks, looking more than a little relieved to be in the urban surrounds of London.
“I had to go to the doctors and I thought I was going to get it cleaned and some antibiotics to take. The next thing I know there were five doctors running around in a panic trying to figure out what was inside my leg.
“I underwent surgery that night and was out for three weeks. We had to shut down the movie. I was very close to blood poisoning, which can kill you. If I’d really been a castaway on that island, doctors told me I would have been dead in five weeks.”
I really liked Cast Away, but I don’t think Tom Hanks did a very good job with his method acting a.k.a. losing weight for the role. He had a full year to do it. He had a special “Weight loss trainer” that is credited at the end.
There was a lot of press about the weight loss and Mr. Hanks got completely bored with endless questions about it in interviews. Just to give a little perspective to Tom Hanks’ 55 pound loss, Christian Bale lost a third of his normal body weight (63 pounds) for his role in The Machinist. Tom Hanks had gained extra weight for the first part of the movie and I think that he simply returned back to slightly below his normal weight.
Although method acting doesn’t usually refer to physical alterations in an actor’s apperance, weight loss and gaining for a role is often seen as a measurement of actor’s commitment to the role. Sadly, sometimes things go a bit wrong when people commit themselves too deeply. Requiem For A Dream star Jared Leto was diagnosed with gout after losing weight for a film role.
Body weight is one of those things that you can’t yet fix in the post.
I just read an interesting story about the new generation of wiretapping technology that FBI is using in the USA. Coincidentally, three of the last Hollywood blockbuster movies I’ve seen (Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0 and Ocean’s 13) have all dealt with the general themes of “individual versus the surveillance system” and “we can see your every move at the hidden command center”. I also saw Wim Wenders’ “The Land of Plenty” which was about a Vietnam war veteran who had become more or less obsessed with surveillance.
I remember seeing scenes in Hollywood movies portraying the Echelon as early as 1994 (”Clear and Present Danger”), but recently it has become the most trendy plot element that you can have. The usual way to weave it into an action film plot is to have the protagonist somehow fool the system and simply outsmart the government agents at the hidden command center by switching the sim card in a phone or hiding behind a balloon seller at a busy railway station.
Bourne Ultimatum went completely over the top with the surveillance theme though. All I can remember about the plot was that the same scene was basically acted out in slightly different variations about 5 or 6 times. During the end credits they played the theme song by Moby.
Well, I guess my point is that not only the script writers, but also the audience in this seemingly less secure world have become fascinated with wiretapping and remote sensing. Whether it’s good entertainment or not, I can’t say. But I do know that during insecure times, horror films repeatedly become a more popular genre. A society based on the remote surveillance and monitoring of the potential threats in the neighbourhood is indeed a bit horrific.
David Keith McCallum, Jr. (born September 19, 1933) is a prolific Scottish actor and the son of concertmaster violinist David McCallum, Sr.. He is best known for his role as Illya Kuryakin, a Russian-born secret agent, on the popular 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E..
Although McCallum subsequently became a familiar face on television, he was never able to achieve the same level of popular success as he had done with his role as Kuryakin. His best-known roles were in Sapphire and Steel (opposite Joanna Lumley), as the lead in a 1970s remake of The Invisible Man, and as Judas Iscariot in The Greatest Story Ever Told.
In the 1960s, McCallum recorded some albums for Capitol Records with producer David Axelrod, such as Music: A Bit More of Me (1966) and Music: It’s Happening Now! (1967). The most well known of his pieces today is arguably The Edge, which was sampled by Dr. Dre as the intro and riff to the track The Next Episode. There is some controversy over what role McCallum actually played in these recordings, as he did not sing on the tracks (they are instrumentals), nor did he write them.
DJ Majestic Mood played a really nice set a few weeks ago at Palmenhaus. I asked him about a particularly interesting tune and it turned out to be from a weird 60’s album conducted by none other than David McCallum.
I wrote a draft for this entry earlier, but decided to postpone publishing it due to..uhm.. some eBay bidding activity. I am now the proud owner of both of his 60’s vinyl albums. I can’t wait to get back home to listen to them.
As a quick update to our Balkan tour, we’ve succesfully visited Budapest, Ljubljana, Split and the Island of Hvar. On the last night at the island we met an interesting character. He was a local island man, who had studied archeology and came up with the concept of “herbal tourism”. In a word, he was a herbalist. He graciously gave us a whole bunch of wild herbs which he had been collecting earlier that day with a group of Swiss tourists. Sadly, we had to leave for Split and we didn’t have a chance to interview him in more detailed manner. Split was a superb experience as well. Our accommodation was right next to Jupiter’s temple in the Diolectian palace, which is the most active and well preserved site of it’s kind in the world. It is part of the Unesco world heritage program and so is a part of Graz, where we are lodging at the moment.
I’m typing this at the hotel lobby internet terminal while slightly intoxicated, so this will have to do for now. Resuming normal blog update schedule when I’m back in Finland in the beginning of July.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I picked up a rental DVD of Terry Gilliam’s latest creation Tideland. I knew that the film hadn’t been a commercial success, but that was nothing new as far as his works are concerned. I had enjoyed Brothers Grimm and come to think of it, every other movie by Terry Gilliam as well, so I decided to give it a shot. The movie is a roller coaster ride through the life and inner universe of a junkie’s daughter. It is rated R for “bizarre and disturbing” content and I can’t blame the rating people for that decision. It is disturbing and provocative, but at the end of the day, it is a kind of movie that sadly very seldom gets financing. It must have been obvious to even some of the financers that this might be a commercial flop around the premiere, but like many other Gilliam’s movies, I’m sure that it will recognized as a masterpiece in the years to come.
The plot is not very important and I don’t want to give it away. If interested, have a quick peek at the user comments at IMDB. According to director’s own words, this is a movie about the resilience of children. He has mentioned that many people will hate the film and many people will love the film. In the DVD version he notes that he is 64 years old now and it took this long for him to find his own inner child. He ends the intro by thanking the audience (three times in a row!) for watching this film and it makes all the difference if you watch this plea before watching the actual movie, which can be quite a shocking experience if viewed mentally unprepared.
I saw Pan’s Labyrinth and read The Life of Pi last year. Tideland has a rather similar concept. It is not only about resilience of children, but also about innocence, which seem to go hand in hand in this beautiful, magical and yet very unsettling work.
A few days ago I spotted a poster for Levi’s “Road trip from the Original” club tour featuring Felix Da Housecat. The poster was at a huge local store specializing in water pipes and hydrophonic cultivation systems. The original venue was a small artsy joint called Loft 16, but they had to relocate to a bigger space apparently because they had pre-sold too many tickets. The new venue turned out to be the prestigious Zeiss Planetarium right by one of Vienna’s landmarks, the giant ferris wheel at Prater.
His style has been classified with terms such as Neo-Electro and Left-Field House
Left-field house producers tend to ignore at least one major chapter of the traditional deep-house production playbook, whether doing away with the 4/4 rhythmic structure, the need for hand percussion, or the emphasis on the beat. If the deviation in the production can’t be pinned down to a specific quality, there remains something certifiably askew. There’s no single sound that typifies left-field house. It can be abstract and grimy like Theo Parrish, whose productions often favor low BPMs and samples from obscure jazz recordings, all the while retaining a pronounced 4/4 rhythm. It can come from house’s back door, through post-disco R&B and Italo disco influences, like Metro Area — a duo who regularly bypasses the relentless 4/4 thump completely. Or it can be equally experimental and contemporary like Herbert, whose concepts and methodologies (sampling sources that range from kitchen utensils to biological functions) occasionally overshadow his accomplishments.
Well, I’ve been a fan of the Housecat for several years now and I just knew that I couldn’t forgive myself if I let this opportunity pass. I wasn’t sure when he would start his set, so I showed up early at 11 pm. There was some trouble with the dryness of eyes at the home base, so I was clubbing solo this time. The location was very atmospheric (no pun intended) and there was even a spacious garden with beach chairs and all. I chit chatted with the locals and met someone who had cured his impending tinnitus with some type of ultra low frequency sound therapy. I decided to find out more about that even though I haven’t problems with tinnitus yet. As far as I could tell, I was the only person among about a thousand clubbers wearing ear plugs! The sound system was pumping a steady bass line at about at least 110 db, so it is practically certain that some of the speaker hugging crowd will have some high frequency hearing loss and/or tinnitus in the decades to come. Don’t lose the music, my friends.
After one or two Vodka Smirnoffs and an energetic show by the French Cassius, I decided to chill out the actual planetarium while waiting for the DJ set to start. According to their web site, the planetarium is one of the most advanced ones in the world (aren’t they all). I can’t remember if I’ve been to one earlier, but I found the huge revolving optical Zeiss “Universium” projector a very intriguing device by itself. The projected stars were visibly vibrating to the bass line of the music. I observed this interesting phenomen on the comfy seats for hours before returning to the main hall to find out that it had been invaded by literally hundreds of clubbers. There was no need for smoke machine since around here people will smoke their cancer butts just about anywhere no matter what the signs or laws dictate. They must have some sort of built-in reflex to avoid cigarette burns in other people and their clothes even in extremely crowded situations. Unfortunately there was almost no room to dance at all and dancing was mostly about maintaining your own 200 square centimeters of floor space with your feet while rhythmically shaking your hands at various directions to ward of the bottle wielding floor space invaders.
Well, soon after the Cassius act, they announced “DJ Felix da Housecat” and his instantly recognizable envelope twitching, aggressive and dirty Chicago house sound started flowing. I slowly worked my way closer to the DJ table over the course of an hour or so and finally saw the master of the wheels of steel himself. He was totally grooving to his own sonic creation in his little Pioneer/Apple branded techno altar and so was the crowd. I don’t know if it was the limited space or just the general politiness of austrians, but I didn’t see too much wild and out of control dancing. The club scene in Berlin for example is generally much wilder and expressive. The VJ work was stupendously dull and uncreative, but there were pleasant whiffs of herbal aroma in the air and the music was also pulsating and vibrating in a most enjoyable manner. I really like his style with the use of vocal samples and the seemingly endless variations with envelope modulations. There is no doubt in my mind that mixing music and sounds with this degree of proficiency is no less admirable than the work of master concert violinist for example.
Just listen to the “Buy Now For Sale” sample on his myspace page to get an idea what I am talking about. This is the kind of music that only works like it’s intended if you have the dynamics of a big sound system and a roomful of people jumping up and down to it. Isolated from it’s context, hearing it by itself on a small computer speaker it sounds like broken record player, but at the planetarium it felt like the universe itself was shaking.
I didn’t have the camera with me so I had to borrow the picture above from a Mysteryland 2005 gig. He is still wearing a similar t-shirt, shades and earphones and looked pretty much the same last night. He had a bright yellow helmet with a big number 3 on it as a type of an amulet or idol on the mixing table. A female member of the crowd had apparently placed blue panties on it and this caused much amusement among the technical crew and the DJ himself.
To conclude this slightly incoherent and rambling entry with even more irrelevant trivia, I’ll remind you about another type of musical event that is approaching with great inevitability. The Eurovision song contest is held in Helsinki on the 12th of May. For once they have managed to pull together a decent web site to showcase the host city. Check out www.helsinkihostcity.fi. I can’t comprehend why they haven’t been able to produce a tourism promotion web site of this quality before the excuse of this contest. Budgetary reasons perhaps. Anyway, two thumbs up for the creative use of photographs and soundtrack.
On Saturday the local audiovisual oasis for film addicts, über cool Alphaville, hosted an excellent 10 year anniversary party at the Gartenbau Kino. Unfortunately I’ve had a streak of bad luck and I’ve managed to break down both my iBook and the brand new ceramic inlay which I had inserted on my first molar about a year ago in Bangkok. I’m heading over to Hungary as a dental tourist to have the inlay fixed and hopefully get a new logic board for the iBook later this week.
Anyway, I missed some of the earlier shows at the party while I was arranging my travel schedule. I did make it to the gala premiere of Life in Loops which is a remix of fresh footage, music by Sofa Surfers and raw footage from another film called Megacities. I especially liked the New York hustler and crack dealer sequences and the dyestuff man in India:
Timo Novotny labels his new project an experimental music documentary film, in a remix of the celebrated film Megacities (1997), a visually refined essay on the hidden faces of several world “megacities” by leading Austrian documentarist Michael Glawogger. Novotny complements 30% of material taken straight from the film (and re-edited) with 70% as yet unseen footage in which he blends original shots unused by Glawogger with his own sequences (shot by Megacities cameraman Wolfgang Thaler) from Tokyo. Alongside the Japanese metropolis, Life in Loops takes us right into the atmosphere of Mexico City, New York, Moscow and Bombay. This electrifying combination of fascinating film images and an equally compelling soundtrack from Sofa Surfers sets us off on a stunning audiovisual adventure across the continents. The film also makes an original contribution to the discussion on new trends in documentary filmmaking.
After the premiere we headed to the pavillion in Stadtpark and bumped into two finns who were on a day trip from Budapest where they were studying to become hotel professionals. They had interesting stories to tell about their work. An older gentleman comes to the hotel with a different young lady several times a week and then visits the same hotel on a Sunday brunch with his family.
After midnight I ended up sitting almost next to one of my musical heroes, B. Fleischmann, while he was busy with his laptop mixing a new soundtrack to an old Buster Keaton movie. The movie was mostly about the american civil war and steam engines. The soundtrack was superbly minimalistic true to his inimitable style and he sipped a well deserved beer after the credits.
I’m off to Innsbruck next weekend. I’ll probably visit the Stubai Glacier to do some summer snowboarding to get some sun and shake off the bad vibes about stuff breaking down around (and in) me.
The all healing Summer is finally arriving and the sun is shining with it’s wondrous warmth and unrestrained luminosity. Take care, brothers and sisters… and remember to enjoy what life and mother earth have in store for you!
Smokey the Bear web site has an inspiring Museum section.
The campaign is the longest running public service campaign in history. Tv infomercials have a long tradition of using motion graphics and animation to convey their message. It is interesting to explore the various visual styles and approaches to the subject over the decades.
The flash intro of the site is a little spooky. As several horror movies have demonstrated to us, you can turn almost anything a little spooky by combining it with a children’s rhyme. The intro reminds me of Twin Peaks and the first poster of the museum reading “Death Rides The Forest”. Quite different from the 70’s Remember, there are babes in the forest poster. The new flash intro is a re-using a visual idea from a 1972 tv spot though.
The TV & Radio section of the museum has radio ads by celebrities and artists such B.B. King, Grateful Dead, Cheech & Chong and Dr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy). Ripe for sampling.
HAUS DER MUSIK is an interactive discovery museum located in the heart of Vienna’s first district nestled between St. Stephen’s Cathedral and the Vienna State Opera. A host of interactive installations playfully communicate openness to new things, understanding and enthusiasm in approaching music
HAUS DER MUSIK was awarded the Austrian Museum Prize for its innovative design and is located in the former Palais of Archduke Charles. You will find all 67 of its new inventions here. A total of 5,000 square meters has been set aside exclusively for areas dedicated to a wide array of approaches to music, and most of all, to the experience of music.
It is thanks to a private initiative that HAUS DER MUSIK was established at Sailerstätte 30 without public funding. Particular thanks goes to our partners from the business community who recognized that HAUS DER MUSIK represented a worthwhile investment. As per January 15, 2005 HAUS DER MUSIK is owned by Wien Holding.
How does it feel to beat a drum three meters in diameter, what do “notes” sung by vocal acrobats sing look like, what does Marvin Minsky have to say about the structure of the Brain Opera in comparison to the human brain, how does the Shepard-Scale continue on, seemingly for eternity, how does it feel to be applauded by the Vienna Philharmonic or to play the world’s largest electronic percussion instrument, the Rhythm Tree – these questions and more will whet your appetite to know, experiment and discover more about music. And this is exactly what HAUS DER MUSIK is all about.
I was really looking forward to the “Virtual Conductor” exhibit at Haus der Musik. It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t as responsive as it could have been. I’m not sure what kind of motion capture technology they are using, but obviously it wasn’t such a mainstream technology in 2001 as it is nowadays with Nintendo Wii and PS3.
All in all, Haus der Musik was a great experience. By coincidence, I’ve previously worked on exhibits dealing similar subjects such as Shepard’s scale and the treshold of hearing so some of the subject matter was familiar to me. There was a nice a mix of traditional museum content (eg. historical items), various artistic “chill out” spaces, physical instrument exhibits and computer based interactive touch screens. Some of them were quite sophisticated. My personal favorites were the ones which let you “compose” little musical works and the ones that were dealing with the pitch of sound.
It’s a huge space and you can easily spend several hours over there. They have a 50% Happy Hour discount on Tuesdays from 5 pm to 9 pm.
What is the common denominator for the Woodstock documentary, Michael Jackson’s Bad music video and The Departed? Why, Thelma Schoonmaker as the editor, of course! This lady has won 3 Oscars. She began her film career assisting an editor removing random frames from the classic films of Truffaut, Godard and Fellini in order to conform their length for the U.S. television broadcasts.
While giving one of her keynote addresses she has noted that she doesn’t feel like the computer based editing saves her any time cutting a film, it just allows her to experiment more. (She is using Lightworks instead of Final Cut Pro or Avid, by the way.)
Film editing is an invisible art. The rule of thumb is that the better the editing, the harder it is to observe. But… she obviously has the courage to break the rules and be truly innovative with her cuts. Her style is just phenomenal.
Works mainly as editor to Martin Scorsese, who tried to convince her to work for him for years. She was unable to work in Hollywood, however, because she couldn’t get into the union. When Scorcese called to ask her to work on Raging Bull (1980), she again demurred because of lack of union membership. However, she believes that Al Pacino got her into the union. To this day, she does not know what influence was used to gain her union membership.
Martin Scorsese introduced her to her husband, Michael Powell.
Her father worked for an oil company, so she was born in Algeria, but grew up in Aruba. She did not live in the United States until her teens.
She met Martin Scorsese during a summer program at New York University, where she was taking an editing course. As she had some professional experience editing movies for late night television, she was brought in to help student director Scorsese with problems on his film.
Honorary doctor of the School of Motion Picture, Television and Production Design in Helsinki, Finland.
