I've been working on edition of a Malayalam short film in the last few weeks, and I still can't get over the actors' performances. The entire film is sort of a psychological drama set entirely around a table in a dark room lit by a central oil lamp and small oil lanterns set around the table. Which means, everyone is sitting all the time, sometimes speaking, so all the acting is limited pretty much to voice modulation, facial expressions, and gestures.
And eyes.
One actor in particular, Sreeram Menon (his IMDB is here, though out of his two feature film roles only one is mentioned), really stands out with his acting, even when---especially when---not speaking. And it's not even about facial expression; he can have totally blank face and still capture your attention with really minute eye movements.
It's something we've been vaguely aware of during the shooting, but which really stood out when we actually got to see the footage afterwards.
As we're heading towards picture lock on the film, I'm really looking forward to colour grading; the footage shot on Alexa has spectacular depth to it and I wonder how far we can take it.
On another front, I've been working with Masami Kanazawa on editing her short film, The Phantom of Durian, and grading was close to 90% of the work here. We've finally settled on a coolish grade with slight grain resembling the aesthetic of some modern Korean movies. Let me know what you think about it, trailer below:
On the Shopify App Store, I've gone pretty deep into review research in the past week, optimizing some aspect of my analytical dashboard for it. It's actually pretty interesting.
The lowest reviewed category of apps on the Shopify App Store is Dropshipping, with the median slightly above 4.5. The category has 501 apps as of the time of writing, so it is pretty competitive. The stores which leave app reviews in this category seem to be particularly impatient, which might be understandable---these apps are really mission critical for dropshipping stores and can be the make-it-or-break-it type; smallest mistakes or inconsistencies here can lead to catastrophic results for the merchant.
A bit more in-depth look at the stats is in the video below:
The scraper and display dashboard are all pretty early stage now and I am not at all sure if my server will not blow up if more than one user accesses it at the same time (the amount of data in my DBs is massive and as of now I didn't particularly optimized it for multitenancy). This being said, if you'd like some sort of access to take a peek at stats, lmk, I'd love some additional input!
Ah, last but not least. You know Shotdeck? The repository of film stills for DoPs and colorists? The one started by the DoP of Joker? Yes, that's the one! I keep sending polite emails to their CTO highlighting potential avenues of further development, adding a P.S. to each mentioning that he should hire me because I'm not the best, but still good. If by pure chance you were already about to send them a polite email highlighting potential avenues of further development, it would be very funny if you would add a P.S. mentioning that they should hire me because I'm not the best, but still good. What a coincidence would that be!
Also, for some bizzarre reason they still don't have Father Ted in their repository and are ignoring my repeated requests, I need as many people to submit it through their 'suggest a title' form as possible.
Cheers!
Raf