Music, Movies and Independent Films

July 30, 2008

In this exclusive interview, Todd Cericola, owner of Clocktower Pictures, talks about his movie studio, about music in movies and about the independent productions world.

Manuel Marino: When did you start your movie studio and how did you have the idea?

Todd Cericola: Clocktower Pictures was started in February of 2008. We are a new company in the Philadelphia area that specializes in independent film. We started it after working on a t.v. sitcom pilot called “Two One Five.” Myself, and my two partners Keelen Monahan and Matt Tomko had all been working individually on producing, directing, and writing and decided to put our efforts into one basket by opening up what would eventually become Clocktower.

How much is difficult to manage a movie studio?

I don’t know that it’s as difficult as it is fun. We are all doing something that we throughly enjoy doing. There is a strong workload, especially since we are a new company, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. We are a very hands on company working directly with our actors on a one on one basis. We try to cater to all of their needs as well as our own.

I’m a music composer, so the question is natural, how much music is important in the production?

As a musician myself, I think that music is one of the most important thing in a film. If you’re trying to paint a picture to set up a scene, background music is key to setting a mood. A good song will always have the scene set perfectly and you may not even notice it in the background, but when you have a bad song you, as the filmgoer, will always notice the mistake of choice.

What is your latest production? Can you tell us something about it?

Right now we are working on a few things. We are working on a feature film called “Describing the Moon,” about a guy in his mid-twenties struggling with trying to please his friends and complete his life’s goal of becoming a script writer. It’s a fantastic script that’s really dialogue driven, and very funny. We will be finishing up auditions for that next weekend, and should begin filming in October. Two One Five is a big priority as well, we are shopping around to try and sell and make an entire season. As well as entering short film and television festivals to get the name out. The entire episode is up on our website for free viewing at Clocktower Pictures. We are also looking into opening up a second branch of the company under the banner Clocktower Music helping to produce local artists and independent musicians. So we have a lot going on.

How we can define an independent movie and why it’s important that indies are supported in their work?

I think independent film is a very important thing because it brings out more creativity in people. When you’re writing without cause and shooting without big budget you’re working harder at making something the way you see it, so you’re getting the original vision of what you’re going for. It’s like an artists painting, you want to express your own ideas in your own way, not someone else. Too many hands in the cookie jar is never a good thing.

Do you think internet can help indies?

I think the internet is a great advantage for people in any area of creative arts. You can reach out to millions of people at the single click of a button for your company, your movie, your art, your music anything you want. I think with the advent of facebook, myspace, mandy, craigslist, and countless others we’re living in an age where getting yourself out to the masses of people is just that much easier, and that much better.

How do you see the future of movie production?

As far as movie production in general goes, I see it bulking up even more. Budget’s for production are getting larger by what seems daily, actors are making more and more money, and the intake is getting outrageous. On a smaller scale, Philadelphia is getting its own studio soon which has already scene production in the city jump up ten fold.

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Creating Clouds

July 23, 2008

Frank Kane job is very particular… he creates clouds! He can do it through his C++ library for real-time sky and 3D cloud rendering, used worldwide by scores of games and visual simulation applications on the Windows platform.

Its name is SilverLining.

Creating Clouds

Manuel Marino: Your sky and clouds library is impressive :)

Frank Kane: Thanks! SilverLining is a software library that allows real-time computer graphics developers to physically simulate the rendering of the sky, clouds, precipitation, and astronomical objects. You can specify any time at any location for pretty much any weather conditions, and SilverLining will draw what the sky would look like quickly enough for games and flight simulators.

Can we say that creating clouds is a form of Art?

It’s funny, because I didn’t go into this project thinking of it as a form of art at all – in fact it was quite the opposite and based on pure science; we went through almost a century worth of academic research into how light scatters through the atmosphere and clouds, the nature of precipitation, computing the location of the sun, moon, stars… stuff like that – and SilverLining was just meant to be a real-time implementation of the raw physics behind what makes the sky look the way it does.

However, a few months ago, I found myself standing inside New York’s Museum of Modern Art looking at an interactive art exhibit that featured SilverLining as part of it, running on a flat-panel display (this was Jonathan Harris’s and Sep Kemvar’s “I Want You To Want Me” piece. So there’s my sky rendering software, on display in the same building that houses works by Picasso and countless other other Art greats. It was surreal. So yes, Art and technology very much can live together.

Did you receive many requests of your library from game developers?

Yes, many game developers use SilverLining, and it’s even been ported to the XBox. But, we have just as many, if not more customers, in the visual simulation industry or “serious games” – people who create simulators for the military, for example – and also from broadcast video customers. A few people are working on using SilverLining for TV weather reports.

What do you think about the indie scene?

Well, I got my start as an independent game developer myself, so it’s a great way to people to learn and demonstrate that they have the skills and the drive to create something great and something big, if they do want to move on to larger projects. The growth of casual games and things like XBox Live have made it possible for indie game developers to carve out their own niche again, which is great. The world needs more people who are as passionate about their work as indie developers are.

What do you think about how internet became in 2008? What do you think about its future?

It’ll be interesting to see what direction social apps go in the long run. Will the world continue to support a few big social “portals” like Facebook and MySpace, or will a more open, simpler solution take over? Will people stay glued to their iPhones watching people Twitter about what they are doing? I think at some point we’re going to see a big divide between people who are very attached to their technology 24/7 with mobile devices, and people who rebel against the whole thing and become something akin to Luddites. It’ll be interesting to watch.

What do you think about the future of technology in general?

It all hinges on our educational system and the value society places on technology. In the US, we’ve had a real problem with a lack of interest in technology and science in general, and an educational system that does not do a good job at all in math and science.

Fortunately, there are other countries where this is not the case, and unless we see some big reforms here in the US, fewer technological advances will come from here. Already, most good technical workers here come from other countries – and our country’s restrictions on immigration and work visas make it increasingly hard to hire them. Who knows, perhaps the growth of the indie scene will counteract that effect by creating more interest in software engineering within our own country. Right now, it’s just really hard to find good developers, and that limits what the industry is able to create.

What will you develop in the future, new libraries? New projects?

I still have a few plans for making SilverLining even better, so I think that will keep me busy for awhile. Beyond that, I have lots of ideas – some involving computer graphics and some not – so if SilverLining gets to a point where it’s about as good as it can get, well, we’ll see.

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The value of photographic prints

January 22, 2008

Stephan R. Lewis is a professional photographer. He accepted to share his knowledge with us, with this exclusive article.

The value of photographic prints

I have been in the photo industry trenches for a long time and have watched many things come and go in popularity.

When I say ‘trenches’ I mean not the glamour part of the industry that you see everyday on magazine covers, beautiful and famous people, but rather the nuts and bolts of mass producing press release photos of tired employees, photographs of products for advertising for small business, other time sensitive materials with a short shelf life, created for immediate usage with no value once the deadline has come and gone.

My actual primary concern at the beginning of my career was printing archival black and white photographs for exhibition and professional use, art prints designed to last 100+ years, so the disposable and transient nature of consumer photography amazed me.

Which brings me to the popularity of one-hour photo finishing of snapshots that existed until recently. Everything from birthday parties and Christmases, the latest vacation snaps and spontaneous party photos to out of focus and overexposed close-ups of newborn babies, dog noses and amateur porn.

Everyone seemed to be shooting like crazy and getting prints that ended up in a box or still in the envelope, if they (the prints) were lucky they were put in a photo album or even framed on the wall- or maybe just stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet.

110, 126 and 35mm cameras made it easy and affordable to make photos, fun, quick and relatively cheap. Then came APS, the last gasp of film as a consumer product, and now we have the most insidious of all- the camera built into your cell phone and all types of image capturing devices. These devices are so great because once you have bought one your ongoing expenses theoretically are nothing- but computer time!

A big part of my photo lab duties has always been restoring old photographs. Photographs from 1890, torn and or folded images from the 1950s, photographs that had Dad cut out in the 60s after a bad divorce and the kids want him reinserted in the 90s! I have worked on wallet sized prints that had in fact been in a wallet for 20 years until someone realized it was the ONLY print of that person and now they needed an 8×10 for the wall, for the memorial service… the oldest photograph I ever worked on was from 1849. Plenty of those images I have worked so hard to restore and make like new had started out as ‘happy snaps’ and ended up being the only or last or best photograph of someone beloved and, sadly, now departed.

Why? People forget – photographs are priceless, one-of-a kind records of a specific moment in time, a moment that will never occur again, a method of capturing and preserving memory that mankind has only had for about 160 years.

As small children we go through the family photo albums, laughing at the way people used to dress, marveling at how much someone looks like great-grandpa, examining vintage cars and houses, looking at things and people that no longer exist. History.

Now we have digital photography, images that might never leave the memory card, maybe get stashed in a folder on the desktop, turned into a slide show that can only be seen on that specific computer, at best uploaded to share with friends and family online. Where will these images be in 20 years?

Is the current advent of technology creating an attitude towards photography that is undermining its inherent value as a historical record, thoughtlessly making it too disposable and transient to be appreciated and preserved?

I photograph lots of special events, large groups, and school kids and sales of prints from these sessions are down markedly. After spending 30 minutes setting up a group shot and capturing it with my high-end digital camera, with the intent of selling true photographic prints designed to last 50 or more years, a Mom or kid next to me will hold up their camera phone and grab a shot and figure: “Got it!” and good enough. As a result, they don’t buy a thing.

Then they get home and maybe look at their quickie capture, email it to grandma and forget about it. Ultimately it may be saved under an incomprehensible filename or not at all, put on a hard drive that will inevitably crash, or uploaded to a website that ceases to exist in three years, or even worse- forgotten about altogether!

Let me tell you people- that camera phone image, that image on your computer screen is not a memory preserved for all time! As long as it is not PRINTED, a physical hard copy that can be whipped out years and years later, it only exists for the moment.

Do yourself a favor. Print that photograph and put it in a photo album so your kids, your grandkids, maybe even their children can see what you looked like on your myspace or Yahoo profile in 2008!

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