18.January.1999
Mace Windu Theater
Gettin' Medieval
(world wide premiere)
This week, the New Venue brings you "Gettin' Medieval", the latest installment from the director of "Quentin Tarantino's Star Wars" and "Godzilla Versus Disco Lando".
Digital Filmmaker Evan Mather's work already holds a major cult following. By animating "Star Wars" action figures against sampled movie dialogue, Mather reconstructs (or is it "deconstructs"?) the "Star Wars Trilogy" for the web. This time, he pays homage to the forthcoming "Episode I" with the much coveted Mace Windu action figure, inspired by the new Samuel L. Jackson character.
Directed by
Evan Mather
Starring
Star Wars Action Figures
Stills from "Gettin' Medieval"
By day a landscape architect, by night, a guerrilla filmmaker, Evan Mather will unveil the next major installment in his own personal trilogy, "Kung Fu Kanobi's Big Adventure" next week, Jan 25th, on Evan's Star Wars Cinema. The New Venue is offering you a taste of this epic. Mace Windu Theater is a movie within the upcoming 7 1/2 minute digital flick.
New Venue:
What is the appeal of digital filmmaking?
Mather:
The speed. The cost. The flexibility. The immediacy. The ability to shoot some footage, and ten minutes later have someone in Australia commenting on it.
New Venue:
How do you take into account the constraints of the Internet?
Mather:
Right now the big limitation of the Internet is bandwidth. That's it. Eventually everyone will have cable modems and this won't be a problem. That's one of the good things about digital filmmaking: the flexibility to overcome these limitations with greater control over the final output.
For example, my movies are created at a much larger frame size (320x240) with more frames per second (15). When I get to the point where I want to put the movie on the Internet, I'm basically just shrinking the film and lowering the frame rate.
New Venue:
What technology did you use?
Mather:
Power Macintosh G3 (the machine comes with a video card), a SONY Video-8 camcorder, Adobe After Effects 3.1, Adobe Photoshop 4.0, and formZ/Renderzone 2.9... To capture the images, I use the "stop motion" feature of Adobe Premiere 5.1 which allows me to capture individual frames directly from the camcorder.
New Venue:
Why "Star Wars" figures?
Mather:
They work for scale.
New Venue:
Copyright on the web is a hot topic. Any concerns?
Mather:
The manner in which I use these things to create a short film is an original concept of which I can claim ownership. [Besides, I credit all original authors in my films' credits and on my web site.]
New Venue:
Where else can we see your work?
Mather:
http://www.jedinet.com/cinema
View this movie.
You can find out about other digital flicks in the New Venue Archives.
