We had a great live tweeting session last night with Mildred Pierce on DS106radio. Everyone seemed to be involved and enjoying it. A few things stood out to me. The first, as we have seen (heard actually) consistently in these … Continue reading →

Wow, the sound came out bad on that one! I should have done it over, but I ran out of time. I mention The Non-Designer’s Design Book as another source for learning about design. Vignelli was writing to designers in … Continue reading →

Blade Runner has some fascinating set design. It seems like most science fiction up to that time either presented a clean futuristic utopia or a primitive post-apocalyptic dystopia. In Blade Runner, it’s dirty, chaotic, run-down and overcrowded. The shiny and … Continue reading →

Someone’s gotta get this guy. Someone who knows the true value of a dutch oven. I grabbed his picture from the video with MPEG Streamclip and trimmed out the background in Photoshop. I googled for the border and the background … Continue reading →

The story on Touch of Evil is that the movie studio took Welles’ film, re-edited it and re-shot some scenes. When Welles saw what they had done, he wrote a letter, 58 pages long, explaining what needed to be done to … Continue reading →

In this file I will collate some of the evidence that has developed over the past few weeks, and list some of the questions that it raises. The cat appeared early on, but went unnoticed: I reported on the outsized … Continue reading →

For our final live tweet-along, we had a double feature of The Killers and Moon Grafitti. Some of the participants had read Hemingway’s story, and were caught off guard by how much Siodmak’s version differs. The filmed versions just use … Continue reading →

For this week’s dispatch, I made a video out of my Audacity window so you can see audio layering in action. Just like in Photoshop or GIMP, layering is where it’s at in Audacity. You can mute them and move … Continue reading →

We had another great live tweet session with James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity last night. Lead actors Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck also played the leads in the classic 1944 film. The number three actor in the film, Edward G. … Continue reading →

Tuesday night we had our second live tweet-along with ds106radio. The story was Dashiell Hammett’s classic, The Maltese Falcon, produced for Lux Radio Theater in 1943. I wondered how people would react to old time radio, with its 70 year … Continue reading →

We had a great live tweeting session listening to James M. Cain’s The Butterfly on Monday evening. The participating listeners enjoyed and/or were shocked by the story, but I think everyone appreciated the strength of the audio production. I think … Continue reading →

One of our examples of noir from week 1 was Sin City. The film is built directly from stories from Frank Miller’s series of Sin City graphic novels. Miller had been bringing a noir style to his work for a … Continue reading →

OK, so I jumped the gun with this one, but we need radio bumpers for noir106 radio. I wanted to work with the cat theme, so I downloaded John Johnston’s Postman’s Cat supercut (YT) and also that scene from Chinatown where … Continue reading →

I managed to get through about the first twenty minutes of Killer’s Kiss during my lunch break this afternoon. This shot jumped out at me right off the bat. Is he trying to tell himself something? Subtle, Stanley. I like … Continue reading →

A little bit about what’s going on this week. Something I forgot to mention – if anyone has questions or concerns and wants to meet with me over Google Hangouts or Skype, we can set up a time. Evenings are … Continue reading →

This is the city – dark, gray, shadows and light – and the sky, like a sci-fi nuclear explosion of easter egg colors. It was the colors of the sunrise that caught my attention. My iPhone didn’t do them justice, … Continue reading →

What you have done here is an abomination. @dkernohan @cogdog @RMoeJo — George Siemens (@gsiemens) January 20, 2015 I had seen these 2048 things, but it wasn’t until @dkernohan’s abomination that I attempted to play one. My first thought was … Continue reading →

There’s a writing assignment to do a Poem Made With Twilight Zone Episode Titles which comes from the ds106zone days. Since we’re doing Noir106 these days, I decided to give it a different twist and use episode titles from The Shadow. That’s … Continue reading →

One of the readings we assigned this week was How To Write Up Assignments Like a Blogging Champ, in which blogmaster Alan Levine describes in detail how to write up assignment posts. Everyone should read it. Click the links The … Continue reading →

Do they still have TV Guides? I haven’t looked at one since the 90s. The cable people I know all use the on-screen guides, and the rest of us out here in the wilderness are lucky if we can get … Continue reading →

Her mouth was a crimson velvet petal, Her hair was beaten from gun-metal. That couplet from The Wild Party always stuck with me. The contrast makes it striking, but the gun-metal metaphor is something else. Primarily it’s meant to describe color, … Continue reading →

Some thoughts on the mysterious email we received this week, and a couple thoughts on the character dossier assignment. Take a look at Amanda’s post, she came up with a good one. I also make reference to Out of the … Continue reading →

I don’t think I ever read The Postman Always Rings Twice before. I saw the 80s movie a long time ago, and the 40s film a few weeks ago, but didn’t notice the cat theme until I read it last … Continue reading →

http://brianmichaelbendis.tumblr.com/post/108623696007/brianbendis-powers-volume-3-script-by-brian I found this from Brian Michael Bendis my Tumblr this morning. Before he started doing all his superhero stuff, he used to do crime/noir tales using the same color scheme as Sin City. Some might remember that we used … Continue reading →

Just about everyone got off to a good start in Noir106. Quite a few people said they found the first week challenging, but they got through it. That’s good, because the intensity doesn’t let up. A big round of noirplause … Continue reading →

I like the examples of noir that people are coming up with. Some of it is what I expected, and some are off the wall (which I also expected). Paul Schrader, in his Notes on Film Noir, describes noir as a … Continue reading →

So CogDog informed me that auto-embedding has been a feature of WordPress for a while. I just accidentally discovered this while doing my last post. I guess there’s no excuse for not embedding now. Soundcloud offers two different embed codes, … Continue reading →

Burtis talked about this. I thought I’d spell it out with pictures. There are a number of ways to get media into WordPress. One that you DON’T want to do is just list the URL, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C_k7CxlvZ8 Readers could … Continue reading →

barely audible background music: Where by Spin Day, from the Free Music Archive Here’s a quick dispatch for Noir106. You might want to check out the Burtis Files as well. Most of us are on track, but a few haven’t … Continue reading →

Today begins our latest experiment in digital storytelling, Noir106. It’s ds106 with a noir twist, but it’s more than that too. We’re running three sections as one big group. It will be fascinating to see what kind of connections, collaborations … Continue reading →