Ein Film, der keine Gefangenen macht Deaden liefert, was er verspricht: einen unerbittlichen, kompromisslosen Rachefilm, der in seiner Brutalität und Intensität keine Grenzen kennt. Regisseur Christian Viel und Hauptdarsteller John Fallon schaffen ein Werk, das bewusst an Klassiker des Genres erinnert, gleichzeitig aber eigene Akzente setzt. Mit einer Laufzeit von gut 70 Minuten und einem Fokus auf rohe Emotionen und extreme Gewalt lässt der Film keinen…
3.318 pictures were used in this video. Shot entirely in Shanghai, China. Jewelz' track was produced by Pete Tong's Bedroom Bedlam and can be bought on beatport.com. Watch or download the full length version here! The images were taken with a Nikon D50 and batch processed with Photoshop later on.
Jiajia and I have been in Tianjin on a business trip. Tianjin is about one hour away from Beijing and has not that much too see. Well, it's a business city like Shanghai. When we drove back to Shanghai in a sleeping train, we met a foreigner from Canada in the cabinet next to us - I guess him and me were the only foreigners on…
While looking through some older posts of mine, I realized that even some chinese people wrote comments. Why? Because I live in Shanghai and sometimes I write something in chinese characters, just for fun of it mostly. So I just realized, in order to gain a broader audience, why not add more chinese in future posts? Thanks to UTF-8 the encoding of different language characters is…
Song of the moment: Zucchero - Come Back The Sun. 'Small town Romeo, kicking cans down the street Coca Cola van broke down in the heat The girls in colored dresses They seem to laugh as they run - yeah But they dream of only sweet caresses Come Back The Sun We will be like children Come Back The Sun Make us into children The black…
So, a 300mm lens is finally mine. Actually, it's a 70mm - 300mm lens from Tamron. Now my Nikon D50 can take pictures of things faaar away! The lens was quite cheap, just a bit more than 1000 kuai is what I had to pay. I also bought an Kenko circular polar filter which gives me the ability to remove or enhance reflections and also influence…
Quite a surprise, the price of the 8 gigabyte model of Apple's iPhone dropped a whopping 125 dollars since the last time we asked! Back in December we were running around in that big electronics store at the Hong Kong plaza and back then the price was almost 650 dollars. Now the 16 GB version is available for 690 dollar and thus the 8 GB version…
No Country For Old Men was this year's winner at the academy awards, telling the story of an aged cop in a Texas that is getting more and more violent and out of control. Of course, it showed again the mistakes of normal people and how these mistakes can cost them their lives, as featured before in Fargo. The Coens really like to show us how…
When Ben commented to my last post about the pictures from the movie John Rabe, I just headed over to YouTube to see if anything had been released there - officially or not. Sadly, I found no trailer - but a little report! DW, Deutsche Welle, was on the set reporting and seemed to have been allowed to capture some stuff with their cameras. Now the…
And just when you thought it was over a new story hits the internet! So one of the girls Edison Chen (陈冠希) bedded, Gillian Chung, has been banned from the Beijing Olympics 2008. Gillian Chung was supposed to perform during the the opening ceremony of the big show. Now she has been kicked out due to the scandal... Too bad! That reminds me, when do the…
Most of my friends know what I've been doing during the last three months: working with the VFX team on the german movie John Rabe. Sadly, no trailer has been officially released yet so I don't really have anything to show. But! 'Majestic Film Verleih', the company who will bring the movie to german cinemas this year (or so I hope) released 8 official press pictures.
Jason Statham plays a farmer called Farmer (no joke) who has to go on a mission to save the world, after an evil sorcerer (Ray Liotta) decides to take over it. His son gets killed on the way along and his wife captured. There's also Burt Reynolds as some dumb king as well as men in suits who are supposed to be a warrior race called…
When we drove back from Wuzhen to Shanghai in January, we encountered the above posted police car. The first time it passed us by, I was like 'wtf?', that can't really be a police car. But then I noticed the siren on top of the car as well as the white licence plate - and got really angry that I didn't take a picture. But our…
Yesterday we took a day off from all that family-meeting-during-spring-festival business and took a almost two hour long walk on the famous Xi'An city wall. The Xi'An city wall surrounds completely the inner downtown area, which makes it a incredible 13.74 kilometers long. It was established in the year 582, which was the second year of the Sui dynasty and it was always repaired and kept…
Top topic among people in the wife's and mine age rank this spring festival: the stolen sex tape pictures from Hong Kong star Edison Chen, the Sexgate. So this dude is a famous singer slash actor, and bedded recently quite an impressive amount of chinese female stars (god knows how many before, the thieves probably didn't steal all his tapes, and he probably didn't film every…
"Dangerous" was probably the album I listened to the most as a young, dumb boy. And I absolutely loved Michael's great music videos on Mtv, too! I guess I'm one of the hardcore fans from him. Anyway, his last two or three albums were really bad, so I had almost forgotten about him. Well, his music, in the news he appeared more than enough, didn't he?…
My wife, my parents-in-law and myself had a nice little Mahjong session just now. Real chinese Mahjong is played with 136 tiles which contain about 30 different characters, so that each one is about four times to be found in the game. Sounds a lot like Poker, doesn't it? Wikipedia tells me that the game may have been invented 500 years before christ by a guy…
Die Handlung als Spiegel der Sensationsgier Die Idee hinter The Condemned ist simpel, aber effektiv: Ein skrupelloser TV-Produzent organisiert ein mörderisches Spektakel, bei dem zehn zum Tode verurteilte Straftäter:innen auf einer abgelegenen Insel ums Überleben kämpfen. Nur wer als letzte:r überlebt, erhält die Freiheit. Die Kämpfe, gefilmt von hunderten Kameras, werden live im Internet übertragen – Zuschauer:innen zahlen 50 Dollar, um das blutige „Spiel“ zu verfolgen.
Ein frischer Wind im Horror-Genre In einer Zeit, in der das Horror-Genre von unzähligen Remakes und Sequels dominiert wird, bietet The Return von Regisseur Asif Kapadia eine willkommene Abwechslung. Es ist ein Film, der nicht auf Schockeffekte und Jumpscares setzt, sondern auf subtilen Grusel, bedrückende Atmosphäre und eine unaufgeregte, aber dennoch faszinierende Erzählweise. Hier geht es nicht um Monster, sondern um die inneren Dämonen der Hauptfigur…
Ein Psychothriller vor der Kulisse einer rastlosen Metropole Regisseurin Shaohong Li inszeniert mit The Door einen intensiven, atmosphärisch dichten Thriller, der die Abwärtsspirale eines Mannes inmitten der gewaltigen, sich ständig wandelnden Kulisse von Chongqing – einer Stadt mit 32 Millionen Menschen – nachzeichnet. In bester Cronenberg-Manier verschwimmen hier Realität und Fantasie, während der Zuschauer Stück für Stück in die finsteren Gedankenwelten der Hauptfigur Jiang hineingezogen wird.
Yesterday was the first official day of the german festival here in Nanjing. The first act on the big stage, where I got an job as a camera man, was a chinese orchestra which performed german classic songs. Was nice. But then came the main event: The german-nationally famous electronic pop band called '2raumwohnung' and boy did they make the chinese people dance! The audience was…
Confusing headline? You should have seen me when I was standing in the fake forbidden palace! Hengdian World Studios is the name of the crazy movie studio that 'rebuild' the forbidden city for cinematic purposes. And not only Beijing, but they also copied some buildings from Xi'An, Hongkong, Guangzhou and other cities. I didn't know this, but quite a few big movie titles were completely or partly shot here: Gong Li's THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN, Zhen Kaige's horrible THE PROMISE and last but not least Zhang Yimou's latest drama THE CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER. And countless chinese TV series, as it seems.
Last sunday was the 'premiere': I had my very first driving lesson in Shanghai's Xuhui district, near Caobao road line one subway station. The license costs me about 4000 kuai and it will take 'at least' 3 months to get it, as the teacher said. No driving this christmas, too bad! Anyways, I had my Nokia N93i with me and decided spontaneously to document this driving…
This is a graphical view on the contents of the ZHU AND GOU DVD that I am currently producing. Regular users of the software will immediately recognize that I am using Apple's DVD Studio Pro to create my wedding movie DVD. Anyway, all the content is created and encoded, the only thing that we are still working on are the subtitles. There will be german, english…
I've been searching a lot around the net lately for a decent shopping system that is PHP/MySQL driven, and the best thing I found was osCommerce - so far. I noticed today that there is a new shopping CMS being developed at Intersprire which is called StoreSuite. The biggest problem is that it isn't finished yet. But from what I can read on their blog, it's…
You've created the Google Sitemaps file with one of the many available Wordpress plugins? You added it to your Google Webmaster Tools account? You added it to your robots.txt file? Good. I did that, too. But all that work, just for Google? Of course, Google is the mighty giant and most important, but now that you have gone through all the hardships creating it, why not…
After buying the Nintendo Wii the weekend before last, we headed back to the store on friday evening where we bought it, near line 2 station Dongchang road. We wanted a second Wii controller all week badly to play Wii Sports: Tennis and other games against each other, and the game store lady told us she would have new ones in last week. And she did!…
I wanted a Xbox 360. But then I saw that the prices for HDTV's didn't drop that much and that we probably weren't going to buy one anytime soon. No HDTV, no Xbox 360 necessary. I don't wanna play Halo 3 on a 21 inch screen TV. Who would? So I thought, this might be a good time to buy something to get rid of all…
I just had left my home to walk to Longyang road to grab a subway to go downtown for lunch with a friend, when a insane rainstorm started. In the last days it had rained here every once in a while, mostly for about 5 minutes. So I thought 'let's wait', which was a big mistake. 3 minutes later I was completely wet, from up to…
Lust, Caution is the new movie from Ang Lee. Most of the story seems to take place in 'occupied Shanghai', so I am guessing in the late 1930's? The story is about a 'ordinary' girl who has to make a dude fall in love with her, then kill him. That bitch! Just kidding, the story seems way more deep than my words could ever describe it... But that's what you would expect from a director who can turn cowboys gay, isn't it? Anyways, there are only very few shots of old Shanghai in the movie, it must be more difficult with each day and every new skyscraper to 'turn back time'. Most of the shots are pretty dark, which is clever, so the removing of the skyscraper-lights gets kinda easy... I know video editing, just believe me. Still, there are some day shots like in the image above. So check out the trailer if you're into Shanghai's history look. The trailer is, of course, available at apple.com in 25 different HD resolutions. Check it out.
German magazine "Spiegel" has published a list of 25 cities - ordered by the amount of skyscraper they have. It's a quite interesting list and it even has some surprises. Shanghai will, of course, sooner or later rise to No. 1 - don't worry! Here we go:
No. 1: Hongkong, China! 7422 skyscrapers.
No. 2: New York City, USA! 5445 skyscrapers.
No. 3: Singapore! 3503 skyscrapers. 4 million people.
So Tarantino's part of the Grindhouse series titled Death Proof finally reaches Germany. They are going to show Death Proof in cinemas first, and Rodriguez' part Planet Terror one or two months later. Since there are no Matinee-cinemas in Germany it makes kind of sense - you have to adjust to your audience, not the other way around. Anyway, german distributer Senator must have found a…
Warning! The following post is rather... 'rough' and makes multiple use of the s-word. And the d-word. Now you'll probably want to read it even more, huh? So this whole mess started almost a month ago, but I didn't want to write about it before it was over. Now my stomach is back in order, I can eat whatever I want whenever I want without having…
I went to the Shanghai Film Art Center on friday for accreditation, like I posted earlier. On saturday the horror started: I went first to the press conference in Pudong, where I managed to take some pictures of Michelle Rodriguez ('LOST') and Nathan Fillion ('FIREFLY', 'SERENITY'). Michelle Rodriguez told the journalists that she loved 'CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON' while Nathan Fillion stops zapping the television as…
Ein stilistisches Wagnis – Noir trifft auf Science-Fiction Mit Renaissance liefert Regisseur Christian Volckman ein kompromissloses und mutiges Werk, das die Grenzen zwischen Film, Animation und Kunst neu auslotet. Der in Schwarz-Weiß gehaltene Sci-Fi-Thriller kombiniert die Ästhetik des Film Noir mit futuristischem Cyberpunk-Flair, was nicht nur visuell beeindruckt, sondern das Publikum in eine Welt der totalen Überwachung und moralischen Ambivalenz führt. Die Story: Paris 2054 –…
Ein B-Movie, das nie abhebt The Roost – Angriff der Fledermäuse von Regisseur Ti West versucht, durch Retro-Charme und eine absichtlich trashige Präsentation einen B-Movie-Horror zu zelebrieren. Doch was auf dem Papier wie ein Hommage-Projekt mit nostalgischem Charme klingt, scheitert grandios an seiner eigenen Langatmigkeit, mangelndem Tempo und einer uninspirierten Umsetzung. Die Story: Ein müder Abklatsch Vier Freunde auf dem Weg zu einer „Halloween-Hochzeit“ haben einen…
Ein schockierendes Porträt toxischer Beziehungen In Kaliber 45 (Originaltitel: .45) wagt sich Milla Jovovich in die düsteren Abgründe einer destruktiven Beziehung und beweist, dass sie weit mehr als nur die Actionheldin aus Resident Evil oder das fünfte Element ist. Regisseur und Drehbuchautor Gary Lennon, hier zum ersten Mal auf dem Regiestuhl, erzählt ein schonungsloses Drama, das zwischen drastischem Realismus und schwarzhumoriger Leichtigkeit schwankt – ein riskanter…
Ein Trash-Fest der Zufälle und schlechten Entscheidungen Kraken: Tentacles of the Deep versucht, sich irgendwo zwischen Indiana Jones, Batman und dem Monster-Horror der 80er zu positionieren, stürzt dabei aber in die tiefsten Abgründe des Trash-Kinos. Was als Mischung aus Action, Abenteuer und Horror beworben wird, entpuppt sich als peinlicher Versuch, Spannung, Mythologie und CGI-Monster zu kombinieren – und scheitert in jeder Hinsicht. Die Story: Ein Rezept…
In the picture above you see that I eventually got a press card for the SIFF, the 10th Shanghai International Film Festival. But what a hussle! When I went to the Festival de Cannes two years ago, they asked me for a bunch of stuff that I had to submit there - by mail, printed out! It seemed much easier for the SIFF - from the…
That have been two damn long weeks since my last post. In the meantime I married (well, officially, with a party and stuff), traveled with 20 friends and family members to Xi'An to celebrate my wedding, after we had spend some days in Shanghai that is, then we flew from Xi'An to Beijing for some more sightseeing and partying. Sounds like fun? No, sir, sounds like…
Yes, my life is in little boxes at the moment. We're moving to our new apartment on saturday, and we managed to finish packing two days in advance. Thank god I have that german will to be best prepared. For a time I even wanted to put 'I'm not handicapped, I'm german!' into the header, but I guess that'd be too much. Anyways, the only things…
Uhoh. This is exactly what Safari looks like when you try to open Wikipedia or, in the past, blogger.com. Now this shows up when I try to open Twitter. I just wrote something on Twitter, then BAM! gone. Hope they're not blocking everybody's new web 2.0 darling now, too! They already killed myspace.com and are forcing everyone to go to myspace.com.cn...
On mornings like today, I wish there'd be no internet. Then I'd have no RSS feed reader, I wouldn't have a subscription to JoBlo.com's Arrow In The Head, and I wouldn't have seen a new post called 'Lost Boys 2 begins to hire'. They are seriously going to make a sequel now? After 20 years? Are they insane? Editor Eric Walkuski has this to say: 'I…
Es ist vorbei. Und es fängt an. Die Blog-WG wird geschlossen. Jakob Montrasio's Net startet durch. Hausmeister Jérôme hat uns alte WG-Mieter informiert, dass im Juni Schluss ist. Kann ich verstehen, ein Blick auf den RSS Feed der WG zeigt mir, dass in letzter Zeit nicht grade viel gebloggt wird. Auch ich habe immer weniger Zeit, um zu bloggen. Schade trotzdem. Es war eine schöne Zeit!…
It's over. And it begins. The Blog-WG gets shut down. Jakob Montrasio's Net goes full power. Janitor and landlord Jérôme told us old members, that we have until June to move out. I can easily understand that, looking at the Blog-WG's RSS feed indicated that nobody is blogging seriously anymore. I blogged less and less, too. It's a pity anyway. It was a beautiful time! I…
I always thought the worst taxi drivers are in Shanghai, but it seems that the ones in Chongqing are quite deadly, too. The video is of course taken from the chinese movie 门 - The Door, a very cool psycho horror flick that tells the story about a guy in Chongqing who goes nuts. Interesting, last year's smash hit CRAZY STONE is from Chongqing, too. Is…
So I just checked out the new 'Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer' trailer and guess what's in it: the Oriental Pearl TV Tower! Awesome, seems like Mission Impossible 3 did it's part in bringing more moviemakers to China. I wonder though, if the directors are going to show any clothes hanging around this time. Here are three screen captures, in case you don't believe…
I wanted to write something about this guy Justin since weeks. So he lives in San Francisco and he has a mobile web-cam that he never turns off. He is live 24 hours a day. On the internet. Via live-stream. On the domain justin.tv. I guess he hooked up his web-cam to his notebook which is hooked up to the net via UMTS or something. It's…
Funny. I just saw 'New AOL.com Beta Rips Off Yahoo! Home Page' on digg (but TechChrunch reported first) and it's so true! Seems like AOL is yet another Microsoft and can't figure out to make their own design, see Windows Live aka MSN and Google. Well, better a good copy then a horrible redesign, I guess. Like all the chinese Web 2.0 sites copy the abroad…
Austin Ramzy has posted something rather crazy on the TIME China-Blog, a new symbol that 'designates a product as one of China's top brands'. Click on the symbol to read the whole story...
So when I went to Lujiazui yesterday to take some new Pudong pictures for the ChinaNext competition, all of a sudden an idea flew to my head: Why not create a vertical panorama of the beautiful Jin Mao tower? So I took five images at full zoom and stitched them together in Photoshop CS3, which has a new and goddamn hard rocking Photomerging function. Do you like the result?
Since my guests always seem to like my spaghetti, I thought I'd post my recipe. Today my friend theshanghaieye from flickr came over and took pics while my wife and I were cooking, so you can see the progress with images.
Since people keep telling me that you can achieve better HDR results by taking images with different exposures, I performed a test for this. I was quite surprised by the result. But let's begin with the setup.
Zhouzhuang is supposed to be the most famous, or at least most beautiful water town in China. You may have never heard of it, but there is a chance that you have seen it already: It is used during the showdown of the third 'Mission: Impossible' movie with Tom Cruise. In the movie, the editors 'fake' the town to be in Shanghai, but that is not…
I guess most foreigners and / or english-speaking chinese know great Shanghai resource Shanghaiist from the Gothamist network. I always wondered why there is no Beijing version of that website, why there is no Beijingist. Now I know why, having been in the capitol of China for a couple of days. But let's not begin this entry with bitching about the missing nightlife and fun-areas in…
Regardingless to what you may have heard, Shanghai's Pudong area is kinda boring. Except for the first ten minutes, when you walk around with a open mouth wondering if you're on the set of a new SciFi movie. But after that, after seeing the Oriental pearl TV Tower and some other buildings, there is not much more. Yes, the area is cleaner than Puxi. Yes, Pudong…
I was talking with a friend about chinese tea when I remembered that I had one bud of a chinese flower left. Now this is no ordinary tea, this is something I have never seen outside of China. You put the bud into a big glass, then you add hot water. The next minutes you will stare at the glass as the bud is blooming all…
Here it is, the promised Nikon D50 HDR tutorial or 'How To Make A HDR Image Out Of A Single RAW file'. Do you want to make a image like the one above? Then read my tutorial and try for yourself. Now I didn't teach everything myself, I learned a lot from 'stuck in customs', but there are some things I do different. Let's get started.
Following the chinese tradition, we had a couple of wedding images taken yesterday. Funny, in China you have to shoot these pictures before and not during the wedding ceremony. They will give us three books, some framed images, invitations and whatnot for the money we pay them. Anyway, it was a long day, a long shoot, and after changing six times our energy was literally gone.
