Atli Örvarsson’s Hansel & Gretel + Liquid Puppetry

January 17, 2013 | By

I think Famke is finished with the catwalk.

Just uploaded is a podcast interview with composer Atli Örvarsson,  known as a percussion whiz and his rhythmic breakthrough score Vantage Point (2008), although his knack for epic sounds was already evident in Babylon A.D. (2008).

Örvarsson’s latest work is Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters for Tommy Wirkola, director of the Nazi zombie film Dead Snow (2009), which was more fun in concept  and campaign slogan – “Einz! Zwei! Die!” – than actual execution. Hopefully Wirkola’s big Hollywood production will be tighter in the script department.

The film opens January 25, while the digital soundtrack album comes out Jan. 22. I’ve uploaded a review [M] of Örvarsson’s pretty solid action-supernatural score.

In my own backyard (still snow free, but roaming with fat bastard squirrels who should be sleeping and not stealing bird feeder fodder like the greedy rodents they are), I decided to make a short-short film to problem solve some aspects of the documentary currently branded BSV 1172. (I do have a proper name, but in case of changes, I’m sticking to the drier variant.)

The short-short actually came not from deliberate planning,  but while setting up a messed up tube camera to ‘correct’ green stains that were making it impossible to capture balanced colours. (See this video, around 3:00, for examples of the immutable stains.) While setting up the camera I noticed its other major flaw – distorted material at the lower frame edge – was kind of neat, so I drafted a shot list and constructed what’s essentially an editing exercise to figure out layering issues for BSV’s elaborate main title sequence.

Titled Liquid Puppetry, the short-short will likely clock in at just over 5 minutes, and will feature images entirely generated by a tube camera (‘Newvicon-o-vision-o-rama’) and boxy analogue gear. After axing a sequence, it runs smoother, and besides some lingering tweaking, the picture editing is almost done, leaving just a 5.1 mix for next week, after which it’ll be uploaded to Vimeo.

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Yup, it's a hippy-trippy-zippy-dippy thingy in wondrous Standard Def.

I’ve frame-grabbed some of the weird imagery (see above), and the publishing date for the short-short will be the last week of January.

In addition to the deleted footage available on YouTube, the finished short will be accompanied by a lengthy making-of blog at Big Head Amusements as to how the images were created, assembled, etc., plus some details on the sound mix which (hopefully) when piped through a 5.1 set-up, will annoy your neighbours, if not convince them half the building’s being dragged into a time vortex.

Coming next: a review of John Huston’s worst film – Phobia (1980) – although you can’t pay me to watch Annie (1982). The sun might come out tomorrow, but if it’s underscored with that goddamn song, someone’s going to get socked.

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Mark R. Hasan, Editor
KQEK.com ( Main Site / Mobile Site )

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