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Station to Station: Artist Transforms Train Into Experimental Cross-Country Studio

Angela Watercutter — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:01:00 +0000

Doug Aitken’s Station to Station project will travel via a specially designed train seen in the rendering above. Image courtesy Doug Aitken

If there’s one thing experimental artist Doug Aitken knows how to do, it’s make a scene. He rolls with famous friends, projects cinematic experiences onto whole blocks of Manhattan, and generally makes big ideas happen. And now, he’s taking his act on the road. Or, well, actually the rails.

Aitken’s Station to Station: A Nomadic Happening tour will travel to 10 different locations by rail on a train the artist himself designed that is intended to be a “kinetic sculpture [that will] act as a cultural studio,” according to an announcement released today. The artist will curate a site-specific event at each of the Station to Station stops thanks to contributions from the likes of experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger, artist Liz Glynn, and digital media artist Aaron Koblin. The tour will also feature music from Charlotte Gainsbourg, Dirty Projectors, Twin Shadow, and Dan Deacon. It’s also getting some food consulting love from from Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters.

“This is a fast moving cultural journey, a constant search over the new horizons of our changing culture. Grounded in some basic questions—Who are we? Where are we going? And, at this moment, how can we express ourselves?—our intention is to create a modern cultural manifesto,” Aitken said in a statement. “For a short time, the most interesting place in the country will be a moving target.”

Interestingly, his experimental art train-hop is just the latest in a line of locomotive-powered tours. Mumford and Sons, along with Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, took a 14-car train from Oakland to New Orleans for six Railroad Revival Tour shows in 2011 — a trek that was captured in the documentary Big Easy Express. And taking a cue from a Grateful Dead-led train tour in the 1970s, EDM stalwart Skrillex and friends rolled through Canada on the Full Flex Express tour in 2012. Hopefully, however, Aitken’s journey will fare better than those two outings. The Railroad Revival had to cancel its 2012 Willie Nelson-headlined tour and the Full Flex Express’ 2013 tour never even left the station.

Aitken’s trek will hit the rails in September and along the way raise money through ticket sales and donations to support non-traditional programming at seven partner museums across the country in 2014. No word yet on what exactly each stop on the tour will entail, but considering Aitken is the one whose “Sleepwalkers” exhibit at New York’s MoMA in 2007 projected images over an entire city block, it should be—if nothing else—an experience.

“Station to Station hopes that this liquid platform will empower the artists to make work that could not be realized elsewhere,” the project’s executive producer Molly Logan said in a statement.

Station to Station begins in New York on September 6 and from there travels to Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, Santa Fe, Winslow (Arizona), Barstow (California), Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Secrets of a Trailer Guru: How This Guy Gets You to the Movies

Michael Salvador — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:00:00 +0000

You don’t know his name. But if you care about trailers you know his work: iconic previews for films like The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Tree of Life, and director Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest project, Only God Forgives, out July 19. Meet Mark Woollen. A video editor since high school—he was already cutting trailers for movies like Schindler’s List in his early twenties—Woollen now runs his own company in Santa Monica, California. It’s one of the go-to trailer boutiques for an elite group of Hollywood filmmakers that, in addition to Fincher, includes Spike Jonze, Terrence Malick, and the Coen brothers. And they all want what he’s selling: trailers that not only capture the spirit of their movies but get people talking. v

How’s the trailer industry changing?
When I began, trailers were not on the Internet. That’s changed dramatically over the past several years, especially with fan participation. We have instant critiques, for better or for worse. Everything has gotten faster.

Gotten faster—and better?
Those don’t always go together. The web has definitely opened up lots of opportunities for different types of pieces. I was in a meeting with a director a couple of years ago. We had cut something that was on the short side, and he made a crack about it feeling like a trailer for a trailer. It’s bizarre that a year later, that’s become an actual thing people are doing. But I’m not a fan of that phenomenon. Honestly, I will say that my best experiences as a moviegoer are when I go in knowing as little as possible about a movie. That’s so hard to do these days.

That’s fascinating coming from someone who cuts trailers for a living.
[Laughs.] Yes, it’s funny.

Do you watch trailers for movies you’re not working on?
You do it to stay current and see what the other guys are doing. But if there’s something I’m really interested in, I probably don’t watch as many.

If you’re involved early, what happens if you end up hating the final cut of the film?
That’s always the job. You come in hoping for the best. But I feel fortunate about the kinds of the things we work on—with certain directors you know it’s going to be a pretty good experience.

How would you characterize your body of work?
I want to figure out the right language without sounding silly. Most of the movies we work on come out in the fall versus the summer. Whatever is the nice way to say what those types of movies are.

Like … Oscar winners?
Yeah. Those are the movies that I tend to be interested in—from the filmmaking. It’s a type of director-driven film. Dramas and a certain type of comedy. I’m interested in a Coen brothers comedy or a Spike Jonze comedy more so than a broader type.

These are films that are defined by their directors’ aesthetic approach and choices. Does that constrain the trailer-editing process—because you feel like you have to honor that?
It’s not about me putting my own imprint on the work. I’m handling their material, and it should reflect their work and represent that. That’s one of the exciting things. We work on up to 75 films a year in different stages. And so being able to get into the heads of the characters in the stories and the minds of the people who are putting these films together and live in that world for a while—it’s fun.

How does your process begin?
We come in at different stages, when there’s just a script or where they’re shooting and there are a lot of dailies or when there’s a finished film. When a film is fully done, you can make sure you’re getting the tone right and capture that vision. On the other hand, it’s fantastic to have the freedom of dailies for when you need a few more frames of this close-up or that shot. That’s why you sometimes see things in trailers that don’t end up in the movie.

Your most recognized trailers are defined by a single piece of music. Why?
Directors talk about how it’s all about casting for them—when they get the right actors, their jobs are easier. For us, that’s true of music. Sometimes 70, 80 percent of the job can be trying to find that perfect piece. Trailers are all about rhythm, pacing, and feeling. That’s why it’s important to always be listening to things. I go to South by Southwest every year, trying to build my bag of songs that I’m going to hold on to for the right moment. I’d had “Creep” on my iTunes for five or six years kind of kicking around before the Social Network trailer. You’re always looking for the right project to line things up with. And then when this project came along, I started to consider that song. There are a couple of qualities to it that I thought could do a lot for the trailer. It was a fantastic piece of music—the build, the message, the flavor. So that was one of the half dozen concepts I presented. We shot the beginning of the trailer—the Facebook stuff—in our offices and came up with that whole concept. It was something that got a good response. That’s how the piece came about. You find music in different places.

What else sets your work apart?
You won’t hear some of the familiar sounds or stylistic tricks. We’re always trying to reinvent things when we can. It should be about teasing and raising interest and asking provocative questions, not answering them.

How many people do you work with?
About 20—producers, editors, writers, graphic designers. I oversee how all the pieces come together creatively. But I’m actually in front of an Avid right now, going through my process of breaking down a film. I’ll watch the whole movie without sound, just looking for visuals—that little head turn, that glimpse, that spark of something. Then I’ll watch the movie just for dialog. I can get down to about 10 to 15 minutes and from there start crafting and making connections.

Did you always want to make trailers?
I started editing professionally right out of high school. When I was 19 I got a job doing trailers for Disney, with things like Beauty and the Beast. Then I got an opportunity to work at Universal. That was my big break because I got to do the trailer for Schindler’s List—when I only about 21, 22. That afforded me the opportunity to strike off on my own. I did that for several years, working from home on a handful of projects. Sometimes it feels like I’m still in my spare bedroom, just trying to figure things out.

A lot of people think trailers today give away too much.
I’d tend to agree. You probably have to ask: Why is that?

Why is that?
The studios want to have one weekend to capture the largest number of people. As I understand it, the data they get back is that people want to know more story—they want to know more before they make an investment. Now it may not be what you, me, or the readers of your magazine consider the right approach. But that’s what they’ve come to.

Do you reject the traditional three-act structure of trailers?
To a degree. You’re usually setting up a character and a situation—that can be an act I. And depending on the film you’re often setting up a conflict or obstacle—that can be an act II. But it’s all about the pace and style and the manner in which it’s handled. The worst feeling is when you get to the end of act II and feel like, “Here we are rounding the corner and then this is going to happen!” That’s kind of miserable.

Are there certain trailers over time that jump out at you as transformative or influential?
The easy ones to go to are any of the Kubrick trailers—they continue to be influential, inspiring. But for the most part, when we go back and look at a reference—we’ve done this a number of times—most old trailers are almost never, ever helpful. They have such a short life. You look at a trailer from even 10 years ago and it feels like things have evolved.

So looking back, would you cut Beauty and the Beast or Schindler’s List differently today?
For sure. I don’t know how they would play. Beauty and the Beast would probably be done more in the animated style of today—slicker, more crackle and pop. The trailer for Schindler’s is a fairly emotional piece, a fairly intense piece. I don’t know if it would be too heavy, if there would be a request for more story.

Most of your material is so heavy. Aren’t you ever tempted to cut the next Iron Man 3 trailer?
[Laughs.] It doesn’t really appeal to me. And I don’t think I’m the best person for that. There are people—including people in this office—who really love those films and know what’s expected. I’d still rather watch Beasts of the Southern Wild.

But it would be an interesting experiment.
We have gotten calls over the years to see what our perspective would be on that type of film. So we have worked on some of those things. But it isn’t ultimately what they’re looking for.

Do you get sick of a movie in the process of making the trailer?
Oh yeah. There’s a long withdrawal process after you’ve been working on something for a while. You dislike even the smell of ice cream after too much.

What's the Best Trailer Ever? Film Maestros Weigh In, and You Can Too

rossP — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:00:00 +0000

We had to, of course—pick our favorite trailer of all time, that is. It wasn’t an easy decision. Besides the 150-plus trailers we analyzed for this story, we’ve seen thousands in our lifetime. Many stink; some are great. A few are even better than the movies they’re teasing. (Two recent examples? Previews for Cloud Atlas and that Zack Snyder talking-owl movie, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. You might even forget the bad reviews and see the films. Don’t.)

And that’s the thing: You can’t judge a trailer by its movie. Nobody loved the Star Wars prequels. But the trailer for Phantom Menace? “A phenomenon,” says Keith Johnston, author of Coming Soon: Film Trailers and the Selling of Hollywood Technology. “People flocked to cinemas in November 1998 to see that trailer—not the film it played in front of!” We asked Johnston, along with the rest of our academy of experts, what they’d pick as their best-evers. From there, we proposed a final 10.

And then…we had to decide. So we debated, considered, watched and rewatched. Psycho’s trailer is classic. But six and a half minutes, Hitch? That’s cheating. Horror films (The Shining, Texas Chainsaw) are too easy—they have built-in suspense. And artsier fare, like Wild Things and Little Children, impress more than they excite.

No, our winner is clear. When it came time to choose, we went with the best egg to ever hatch on the big screen: the original teaser for Alien. A masterpiece at under 2 minutes, it says so much with so little. Even the title cards create suspense. Put it next to any contemporary sci-fi trailer—After Earth, Star Trek—and it looks that much better. More than 30 years after it first startled audiences, it remains the perfect tease.

Think we’re wrong? Tell us which trailer tops your list in the form below, and vote on what you think is the best trailer of all time.

Xbox One Proves It: Don't Mess With Used Games

Chris Kohler — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 23:04:00 +0000

Crowds pack the Xbox booth at E3 2013. Photo: Casey Rodgers/Invision for Microsoft/AP Images

As you have surely already heard, Microsoft just finished up with maybe the most epic policy climbdown the videogame industry has ever witnessed.

After pitching the Xbox One as an all-digital platform in which games are installed to the hard drive and tied to an account, then spending almost one entire month vociferously defending its position to players and critics, it gave up on the whole damn thing this afternoon. Xbox game sharing, Microsoft now says, will work exactly as it does on your 360, for better or worse: You can trade and sell your discs but the “family sharing” plan for digital content and the ability to play games without the disc in the drive are gone.

Nearly lost in the Internet’s collective high-fiving over Microsoft’s stunning reversal was the fact that the official announcement contains probably the most hilarious passive-aggressive statement ever to show up on Xbox.com. “We imagined a new set of benefits such as easier roaming, family sharing, and new ways to try and buy games,” wrote Xbox executive Don Mattrick.

We dreamed such big dreams. We did it all for you. And you killed our dreams.

We’ve talked a lot here on Game|Life about used games, specifically the arguments over whether or not they do harm to the console game business or support it. Some game developers said that used games drive down sales of new ones.

Microsoft was not planning on outlawing used games entirely — you could sell them back to a “participating retailer.” But that’s not what we mean when we say “used games;” we mean the ability to sell them privately, lend them out or rent them.

It can be argued that such a system is a boon overall to the industry. Or that maybe everything cancels out and there is no effect in the end. An economic study of the market was inconclusive, saying that eliminating used games could cause overall sales to fall or rise depending on whether or not new game software was priced “optimally.”

Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski was the latest high-profile developer to weigh in. “You cannot have game and marketing budgets this high while also having used and rental games existing. The numbers do NOT work people,” he wrote on Twitter.

For the sake of argument, let’s postulate that Bleszinski and his ilk are correct. Well, that doesn’t seem to have gotten them anywhere. Even if used games are taking money away from game developers, look what happens when you try to take the ability to share games away from players: They get really, really, really mad. So mad that the force of their combined rage explodes beyond even the boundaries of Internet messageboards. So mad that when they say they’re not going to buy an Xbox One and Microsoft can get stuffed forever, Microsoft actually believes it, and they actually cause a corporate goliath to engage in a lightning-quick, remarkably humbling turnaround of the policies that it had spent so much energy developing, explaining and defending.

Used games are killing sales of new ones? Looks more like used games were the only reason they were spending that much money in the first place: Pray tell, exactly how many new games will you sell if nobody buys the console?

Gamers are not per se opposed to restrictions on game ownership: Look at sales of games on Steam and iOS, both of which are extremely restrictive, even more so than Microsoft had proposed to be for Xbox One.

So you can, actually, mess with used games. But you have to do it the right way. These digital platforms feature greatly reduced prices for game software, which Microsoft was apparently not going to embrace.

So for players, the Xbox One tradeoff didn’t appear to be as good as what Steam et al offered. And Microsoft did not have the conviction that it was going to offer such a good tradeoff that taking used games off the table was worth doing after all.

Sometimes people have a plan, and sometimes they have no idea what they are doing. Had Microsoft driven full-steam ahead with Xbox One as pitched, confident that the tradeoff would prove to be worth it, that would have been one thing. But now it shows itself to be without a rudder, finger in the wind, hoping it’s being blown the right way. Perhaps it is.

One thing’s for sure: The next time a game developer wants to rant about the evils of used games, they may want to consider what happened when someone tried to take them away.

Precision and Pluck: Here's What It Takes to Fly the 787 at the Paris Air Show

Jason Paur — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:19:00 +0000

LE BOURGET, France — The Boeing 787 Dreamliner isn’t like the highly maneuverable, super-sleek planes demoing their skills at this week’s Paris Air Show. It’s big. It’s heavy. And it’s a passenger jet, after all. But that hasn’t stopped Boeing from showing off its newest airplane to the assembled masses in the tight confines of the Le Bourget airport. And while the flights aren’t as historically impressive as when Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston rolled a 707 for the crowds in Seattle back in 1955, it’s still an impressive flight routine for an airliner. So how are they doing it? We talked with the two pilots responsible for giving the plane geeks on the ground a good show.

The flight displays over Le Bourget have long been a showcase for some of the newest and most technologically advanced aircraft from around the world. From Cold War fighter jets to the Concorde, the aviation industry has used the show as its main stage. But because the Le Bourget airport — where the show takes place — is sandwiched between downtown Paris, and the massive Charles de Gaulle airport, the airspace is rather restrictive and demonstration pilots are basically limited to the area directly above the airport.

For the highly maneuverable fighter jets such as the Russian Sukoi SU-35 and Dassault Rafale that are also on hand this week, making the tight turns with afterburners thundering is part of showing off their capabilities. Flying an airliner with a 197-foot wingspan designed for long, efficient travel is another story.

“It’s not a fighter, but [the routine] shows off the airplane well,” says Boeing test pilot Mike Bryan. The challenge for Bryan and 787 chief pilot Randy Neville is to be able to demonstrate the airliner in such a tight space. “It’s really kind of hard to take a big airplane and keep it where you need to be,” Bryan adds. “It’s precise flying. It’s not just going at it and trying something out. You’re trying to hit very specific gates that allow you to fly very precisely.”

We had a chance to talk with Bryan and Neville about the preparation that went into the routine they’re flying over Le Bourget this week. The two are experienced test pilots, with backgrounds flying fighter jets. Bryan has previous experience flying in Paris as the demonstration pilot for the F-18 Super Hornet. Both pilots emphasized the precise nature of the airshow flying again and again. The flight display is something that took months to refine, beginning with more than 20 hours in a simulator where the exact route was first planned out, and several hours practicing the routine in a 787 over the Moses Lake airport in central Washington state.

“When we practice it over there, we overlay the [airshow] airspace, we draw it out over the Moses Lake airport and we stay within the same airspace we would in Paris,” Neville explains.

During normal flight test operations they simply take off from the Moses Lake airport and climb to a higher altitude before criss-crossing the sparsely populated parts of the state while performing the various test points. For the Paris Air Show practice, Neville says it was very different, and something they had to carefully plan with the airport and coordinate with the other air traffic.

“You never leave the airfield boundary, you’re flying over the other runways,” the former F-22 Raptor test pilot says. “What it really emphasizes is how tight the pattern is. You’re flying completely within the confines of a normal airport because you’re constantly turning to maneuver inside of the [simulated Le Bourget] airspace.”

To keep everything so close, the routine is flown closer to the 787′s landing speed than to its cruise speed, with the flaps on the trailing edge of the wings in the down position. With the flaps downward, it can’t be stressed as much during the routine.

“The airplane has a 2g limit,” Neville says. “So you can’t turn very hard in the airplane. And that directly relates to the turn radius.” Neville and Bryan worked with flight test engineer Shawn Richardson to design a routine that would meet the space requirements, but still show off both the performance and look of the airplane.

“We want to show some of the key features of the airplane that make it unique in the industry,” Neville says. “That includes looking at the plan form of the airplane, whether it’s steep climbs or steep turns, and we want to show the wings when you get that nose-on view, and to me that’s kind of the signature feature.”

In the end the team came up with a routine that includes a dramatic, steep take-off and a series of turns of up to 60 degrees of bank that at 2g’s does a good job of flexing the composite wings showing off their unusually deep curve. It took more than 50 practice routines in the ground based simulator, and they flew 17 more routines in Moses Lake with Boeing photographers on the ground to help with the aesthetics of the flight from a crowd perspective.

During the roughly seven-and-a-half minute show performance, the Dreamliner crosses show center four times. The altitude ranges from just 500 feet above the ground to around 1,500 feet, keeping it well within sight of the crowd. And unlike the extremely loud Sukoi SU-35 fighter jet — which easily takes the prize as the most impressive flight display this week thanks to its thrust vectoring — the 787 is almost silent. Any sound it makes is drowned out by an Airbus A400 military transport that sits closer to the crowd, idling on the taxiway awaiting its turn to fly.

Both pilots admit flying in the show is fun. While any 787 can make the same maneuvers, Mike Bryan says it is a rare chance to actually link them together like this and so close to the ground.

“Whenever we fly a production, flight test, or experimental flight, we’re trying to fly precisely accurate — to do it right,” Bryan says. “We could pitch up, drop the gear, go to idle, turn around in one mile and land if you know what you’re doing. But we wouldn’t do that, that’s not the purpose of that kind of flying. Now we have a chance to show the plane has that kind of performance, and it’s actually fun to do.”

Xbox 180: Microsoft Fully Reverses Xbox One's DRM Policies

Ryan Rigney — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 21:24:00 +0000

Microsoft is abandoning its DRM policies for Xbox One, “as a result of feedback from the Xbox community.”
Image: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Xbox One will not require regular online check-ins or place restrictions on game lending, “as a result of feedback from the Xbox community,” Microsoft announced today.

The announcement is a complete reversal of the company’s previously-announced DRM policy for games on the Xbox One.

“After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One,” Xbox executive Don Mattrick wrote in a blog post, “you can play any disc based game without ever connecting online again. There is no 24 hour connection requirement and you can take your Xbox One anywhere you want and play your games, just like on Xbox 360.” Mattrick added that Xbox One would be region-free; any Xbox One disc would function in any Xbox One console.

Additionally, Mattrick wrote, players will be able to “trade-in, lend, resell, gift, and rent disc based games just like you do today. There will be no limitations to using and sharing games, it will work just as it does today on Xbox 360.”

This will come at a small cost — despite previous announcements, Xbox One will require that discs remain in the tray in order to play games, and players will be unable to share downloaded games. In other words, it’ll work exactly like the Xbox 360 — for better and for worse.

Before today’s announcement, things were looking bad for Microsoft. Scores of memes mocking the Xbox One were made. Public consumer polls put the PlayStation 4 ahead of the Xbox One by a wide margin. The Navy Times called the Xbox “a sin against all service members,” arguing that the console’s restrictive online policies were “a ‘showstopper’ for any service members who rely on their Xbox for off-duty diversions downrange, in the field, or at sea.”

The company had also planned a complicated license-transfer scheme that would allow Xbox One users to trade in games at approved retailers, but which would prevent them from simply allowing a friend to borrow the disc, also putting the kibosh on game rentals.

Capitalizing on online anger about Microsoft’s policies, Sony took E3 by storm with their announcement that the PlayStation 4 would use no similar DRM scheme. Sony even went so far as to publicly mock Microsoft’s complicated policies via its YouTube channel.