TED talks have invaded this week. Don’t think I’m hearing an argument, though 🙂
K.M. Weiland continues her most common writing mistakes series with repetitive dialogue. She shows you how to recognize it and how to fix it. Post and podcast.
Talking Writing: Rich writers vs. the critics—and me, by Anna Coppola. My favourite bit: “. . . I hate that. Book sales and dollar signs convey nothing about what literature is or how it changes the lives of those who read. Yet, the industry’s tacit acceptance that financial success is the only thing that matters has created a whole lot of confusion about art. Meanwhile, out-of-touch critics are no help, as they rail against the kind of writing that gets people to buy books.”
Entanglement was originally written “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn,” but the song was rejected by the film makers who thought it was too raunchy for their teenage audience.
Undeterred, Imogen recorded the song for Sparks and filmed what is her most intimate video to date. #sparksfacts
Here’s what Imogen’s boyfriend, director Michael Lebor had to say about it:
“Andy Carne, the art director for the Sparks box set shot some beautiful stills for the front of the Entanglement single and so Imogen and I discussed shooting something that tied in with that.
The picture on the cover looked like a loving embrace, perhaps after a steamy moment and so I wanted to work back from that. The end frame in the video is as close as I could get to the angle and lighting of the still that Andy took.
Imogen has lovely, big floor to ceiling 10ft windows in the house and so I wanted to shoot just using the natural light that flooded in. I had recently been testing a camera (Sony FS700) that had excellent quality slow motion and because we didn’t have a huge amount of time, I thought this would be a great way of shooting a simple video in an emotional and beautiful way. Imogen has great bone structure, great skin and a model like figure so I knew that if we got the right light, the rest would fall into place.
It’s essentially a love story but I wanted it to be unclear as to whether it was imagined or not. The video starts with Imogen on her own and perhaps she is remembering a moment with her lover or waiting for him to arrive, either way, it’s ambiguous as to who this person is, if he is really there or if this happened in the past.
I wanted to build a narrative around the scene but because of time constraints and Imogen’s desire to keep it simple, we stayed within the confines of her bedroom and shot it in a few hours. It is difficult to sustain such a simple music video for five minutes, but that was the length of the song so we had to make it work.
It was a very intimate shoot and I didn’t want anyone else in the room, so it’s just me and Imogen. This of course created a challenge when I was needed for the scene. I used a tripod for those moments but an extra difficulty was that the camera only recorded 10 seconds of ‘super slow motion’ at a time. This meant that after every take I would have to jump up and run across the room to press ‘end record’ on the camera, not wearing very much…
One of my favourite moments in the video is when Imogen looks at the camera and she looks truly in love. It’s something that can’t be captured on a busy set, so it was a magical moment for me.”
And here’s the video (can you tell how much I love Imie?):
Treat the classroom, not the kids. ADHD, autism, and other conditions are not more prevalent in children, says Allen Frances in this Psychiatric Times article. The kids might just be misdiagnosed. My favourite quote: “It is shameful that simple immaturity due to being younger is now mislabelled as mental illness and mistreated with a pill.” In other words, being a kid isn’t a mental illness.
I think I have to declare this the week of TED. A fair amount of TED talk here. All excellent, as TED talks tend to be.
Just a bit of politics here. The Northern Gateway pipeline is that other pipeline, but it’s a Canadian thing, so some of you may not have heard. Here’s an interesting article about the lies that have been told in an attempt to push the project through.
Just to offer some balance, a post on meditation from one of the woo-pitchers Randi debunks. Actually, I don’t think Randi has an issue with meditation, or its potential benefits, just all the other stuff that tends to get glommed in with it.
TED talk from Colin Stokes. What are today’s movies teaching our kids? This kind of goes with the article on strong female characters from this past Tipsday. Hint strong doesn’t equal pew-pew-pew!
Jim C. Hines responds to a blog post entitled “The naive idiocy of teaching rapists not to rape.” Read to get the goods.
Always Looking Up 