Light Paintings By Janne Parviainen

Originally hailing from Helsinki, Finland, Janne Parviainen creates his “light painting photography” without the use of any post digital editing…everything is straight from the camera. Parviainen uses various light sources, ranging from colored strobes, flash lights, an assortment of light toys, or other tools especially engineered for light painting, with long exposure times to produce these awesome images.

“What interests me most in light painting is the ability to draw in three dimensional space and the possibility to alter the reality without post processing programs. I like to use in my photos different kind of figures such as skeletons and ghostly light creatures. By using these figures I can add more humane stories into my photos and alter the cultural learned feelings they cause in the viewer of the photo. I especially like to use the skeleton figure because of it’s strong pre-learned emotional concept and place it in totally different situations and emotional stages than in which it’s usually seen in popular culture.”

F**K YEAH CONCEPT ART →

Concept Art :: a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in movies, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design. This is a tumblr dedicated to concept art, with an emphasis on the skilled artists who created them.

http://fuckyeahconceptart.tumblr.com/

25 of the Best Short Films Online →

Short filmmaking has always been an understated component of cinema. It contains all of the magic, escapism, and even technicality that goes into making full length feature productions. In fact some may argue that it is even more difficult to master given the short amount of time that one has to work with to get all of the aspects of filmmaking into the right gear.

This list serves not only as a compiled source of recommendations that we hope helps to gain more attention and recognition to this compact pieces of brilliance but to also highlight some of the best short films ever created. Reasons being vary, from inspirational causes, new age inventiveness, boundary pushing material, or overall well rounded superb examples of filmmaking.

The same focus should be applied to short films as featured since they are comprised of the same foundation and our goal with hopefully at least a few of these is to prove the worth of short filmmaking and their potency to even stand up next to some of the greatest feature length films.

Follow the link to the article:

http://www.tasteofcinema.com/2014/25-of-the-best-short-films-you-can-watch-online/

The Rules of Film Noir

Film noir, in its classical sense, existed in Hollywood from the 1940s to the late 50s; at the time, though, film noir wasn't a term, and when these movies were referred to as a genre, it was as melodrama. Influenced by the novels of the “hard-boiled” crime fiction authors who gained popularity during the Great Depression, film noir is a profoundly modern genre, in that it is rooted, at its base, in existentialism. Hence, the term film noir is, not surprisingly, of French origin, and was indeed applied after the fact by the Gallic film critic Nino Frank.

The term was used to classify films which, in the main, used low-key lighting (rather than the evenly exposed 3-point lighting of classical Hollywood cinematography, film noir used harsh shadows and contrasts of black and white, an influence taken, in large part, from the German Expressionist cinema of the 20s and early 30s, e.g., The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Fritz Lang’s M) and which featured deeply cynical views of human nature.

Genres come and go, but 70 years after its birth, the “rules” of film noir have become part and parcel of the conventions of modern cinema. Why do filmmakers come back again and again to this bleak landscape? And why are these films still popular? And just what, precisely, are its rules — rules so skilfully subverted by modern directors? A documentary from the BBC, originally aired in 2009, seeks to answer just that, shining a light on the dark corners of film noir.