Tag: Visual Effects
I was in Tokyo for 3½ days but spent too much of it figuring out how to get home in the middle of a hurricane. So no physical comedy report, but here’s a clever sight gag I think you’ll enjoy.
A minor post this one, just a curiosity, but I was pleased to see that Wired magazine, in a discussion of the 2010 dream-catching movie, Inception, discovered a connection with Buster Keaton’s innovative Sherlock, Jr. (1924) — enough of a connection that they did this short piece:
This one’s already gone viral, but I just found out about it from colleague, poet, and fellow world traveler Martie LaBare. In fact, I’d never heard the term flair bartending until a few minutes ago! Clearly I need to get out more instead of hiding at home, sad and lonely, staring into a bottle, nobody to talk to but my imaginary blog friends…
Here’s a curiosity for you from 1909, years before the Keystone Cops and then Arbuckle, Chaplin, Keaton, et. al. ushered us into the heyday of silent film comedy. Produced by Pathé in France under the title Pickpock ne Craint pas les Entraves (pickpockets fear no barriers), it was released in the U.S. under the title Slippery Jim, with English inter-titles.
This one has recently surfaced on Facebook and YouTube, but probably most of you haven’t seen it yet, so let’s add it to my early film collection, complete with all the background info.
Hey guys, imagine you lived in a city where every move you made was a death-defying Hollywood stunt. Well, if you think that might get you a little wet under the arms, then you need Rexona, the man’s deodorant. That’s what I learned from this funny enough commercial, Stunt City. It was filmed in Australia for a UK audience and won a Gold Lion at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival in 2005. Directed by Ivan Zacharias; visual effects by The Mill.
If the name Georges Méliès rings a bell at all, it probably makes you think of that wacky Trip to the Moon movie from the Dawn of Film that was okay in its time, but… that time was long ago. Yes, Méliès almost single-handedly invented special effects, pioneering such techniques as stop-action substitution, dissolves, multiple exposures, and time-lapse photography, in the process creating the science-fiction film genre, but nowadays his corny sense of humor, flimsy storytelling, and overuse of the same gimmicks make the work seem dated. In fact, it was out of fashion by the time the Keystone Cops came on the scene in 1912
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Workshops & Other Events
My first book (1976)
My book Clowns has long been out of print, but you can borrow it for two weeks at a time from the Internet Archive. More information is available here.
My second book (2015)
Visual and verbal humor for the cognitively and artistically curious! Available here.
“A book to treasure!”
—Bill Irwin