Speaking of oral histories, Alex French and Howie Kahn over at Grantland put together an excellent history of how 90s indie cult classic Swingers came together. Almost all the major crew are interviewed: Jon Favreau, Ron Livington, Vince Vaughn and Doug Liman. The story where a pre-Bourne Doug Liman sneaks around state troopers illegally shooting a highway scene is a highlight.
Like many others who grew up hanging out in arcades in the 90s, Street Fighter 2 was a fixture, a game you agonized, fought, and obsessed over. I’ve got an indelible teenage memory of finally beating the game with E. Honda in the arcades. So naturally I can’t help but highly recommend this Polygon long read compiled by Matt Leone. Some really incredible, revealing interviews charting the game’s history.
And for web designers/developers there’s a special treat with that intro. It’s not only a clever recreation of the SF2 title screen, but there’s some smart HTML5 canvas and CSS treatment as well.
Designer Brandon Kowitz:
It feels great to launch fast. But launching also makes future changes much harder. So if you can invest a little energy to learn early, and then fix problems before launch, it ends up saving you a tremendous amount of time later. It also reduces the risk that you’ll launch something truly bad and get stuck backpedaling for weeks.
So replace the startup dogma of “launch early and often” with “learn early and often.” For me, it opened my mind to all the different kinds of ways startups can learn, and how valuable user research can be to the core mission of any startup.
Superannuation over at Kotaku compiles data on what the realistic costs of a AAA game, which is almost never publicly discussed. The results are pretty shocking: $27 million for Beyond: Two Souls, $68 million for Watch Dogs, five to ten million for just the marketing on Dead Space 2. No wonder we’re seeing such a small budget indie resurgence lately; there’s no way to compete with budgets this high.
I loved reading this look back where the Indiewire staff examine how each of Soderbergh’s films hold up today. The post is admittedly almost a year old (I stumbled on a link to it on a recent post) but still entirely relevant; the only film not yet covered on this piece was Side Effects, his latest and potentially last.
jQuery creator and Khan Academy dean John Resig was a recent guest on the Shop Talk web design/development show. It’s a solid, smart listen. Pay special attention around the 46 minute mark, where John and usual hosts Chris and Dave discuss the lack of women in the web development community.
David Chen, the host of the Slashfilmcast, has been venturing lately into video essays, especially for year end recaps from the best in film. They’ve been fairly well done, but this compilation of director Edgar Wright’s (Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) closeup work is standout. Pay attention to the discussion between Chen and Wright as the shots play out; I learned a lot.
Designer Jeff Archibald:
If you’re working 60 hours a week, something has broken down organizationally. You are doing two people’s jobs. You aren’t telling your boss you’re overworked (or maybe he/she doesn’t care). You are probably a pinch point, a bottleneck. You are far less productive. You are frantically swimming against the current, just trying to keep your head above water.
These signs? They are not the signs of a healthy business or work environment.
I admittedly had a period much earlier in my career where I started falling into the “macho crazy hours” trap. That productivity was measured in time and late nights in the office. But then you wake up; perhaps a launch doesn’t go according to schedule, or there’s a management shakeup in the office. You start realizing you haven’t seen your significant other much or hung out with friends like you use to. That’s when you realize having a healthy work environment with happy employees working sane hours (with rare exceptions from time to time, but the key word is exceptions) is critical to your well being.
Work hard and show pride in your work, but realize there’s a limit.
The immensely talented Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) recently starred in the Cold Comes The Night. Hurricane Sandy temporarily halted Cold’s production, and Cranston created a contest in the downtime: the film’s production assistants would create a script, and if he liked it, he’d star in it. The result is Writer’s Block. It’s moody, abstract and has its flaws, but there’s something very fun about watching Cranston game for work in what’s basically a student film with no budget.
The New Yorker’s film critic Richard Brody writes about how film criticism has evolved and fragmented as more critics turn to the internet for distribution. It’s a bit all over the place, in some ways a companion piece to what Manohla Dargis wrote originally in the NYT. But a few statements rang true, most notably how new online critics are shaping and influencing critical thought:
Ultimately, the question that Dargis poses is to herself, her editors, and other critics and journalists: namely, what, in the current diverse but fragmented world of movie viewing, are critics for, and what should they—should we—be doing? The Internet offers a wondrous diversity and quality of critical voices—and because many of the critics writing online aren’t constrained by the same editorial policies that narrowly define review-worthy releases, they’re distinguished as well by the wide spectrum of movies they cover. Maybe the readers of mainstream publications aren’t keeping up with the best of online film criticism, but the critics in mainstream publications are certainly doing so. Their influence may often be subterranean, but it’s also often strong and crucial.