sorry for not posting for so long - not much to do until the US release got closer - i’ll post more info this month and also track some of the happenings on other fan sites.

for now, please keep checking the sunshindna.com site or the searchlight site (both in links above).  i’ll do a quick edit to my ‘animated fan poster’ of the viewing room (it’s linked in a previous post).

if you are a Boyle/Sunshine/scifi fan please comment here or in the fan forum!

seasons change after all! 

porn groove celtic
funk native american
cult trailer
pop-folk house
euro-house acid
merengue big band
christian rap soundtrack
christian rap vocal
rave celtic
acid punk soundtrack
folk-rock grunge
dance hall bebob
drum&bass hard rock
comedy club
trailer progressive rock
power ballad eurodance
euro-house dance hall
rave reggae
industrial pop-folk
psychedelic rock grunge
new age dance hall
heavy metal instrumental pop
revival space
funk other
slow jam cabaret
house cabaret
heavy metal fusion
country hard rock
folk-rock musical
drum solo showtunes
cabaret terror
euro-techno classic rock
slow jam comedy
house hard rock
oldies goa
latin techno-industrial
big band fusion
metal primus
soul revival
hard rock sound clip

porn groove celtic
funk native american
cult trailer
pop-folk house
euro-house acid
merengue big band
christian rap soundtrack
christian rap vocal
rave celtic
acid punk soundtrack
folk-rock grunge
dance hall bebob
drum&bass hard rock
comedy club
trailer progressive rock
power ballad eurodance
euro-house dance hall
rave reggae
industrial pop-folk
psychedelic rock grunge
new age dance hall
heavy metal instrumental pop
revival space
funk other
slow jam cabaret
house cabaret
heavy metal fusion
country hard rock
folk-rock musical
drum solo showtunes
cabaret terror
euro-techno classic rock
slow jam comedy
house hard rock
oldies goa
latin techno-industrial
big band fusion
metal primus
soul revival
hard rock sound clip

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Science/2007/04/19/nasa_to_release_3d_images_of_the_sun/

these are going to be coming from the STEREO (love the acronym) satellite.  nice!

sorry - i have been a reticent fan blogger these days - actually very busy with day work and a bicycle fabrication project for Make Magazine’s “Maker’s Faire” in the Bay Area next month…

i have been tracking the very positive and very negative reviews, am more spoiled than i would like to be but still excited about SUNSHINE!  if you would like to comment on my posts or your POV on the movie there is plenty of space on this blog

more soon! 

nice interview with Alwin Kucher, BSC for Sunshine, on the ARRI site from last year, it highlights a special lens the SUNSHINE film crew used to get certain wide angle shots:

http://www.arri.de/news/newsletter/articles/0406/up8r.html

i also think this article, which came out last april but never got much visibility (it was several google pages down in my searches) was the first to more accurately describe the size of the ’stellar bomb’….

trying to correct image bending is a big deal in photography, it looks like they found what they wanted - when i watch SUNSHINE for the third or fourth time looking at all the wide shots with this 8R lens in mind will be a fun little task

enjoy the article!

i used the UK poster as a letterbox to frame this ‘animated fan poster’ (so named since it’s not interactive) - it’s my absolute favorite image (so far) from SUNSHINE:  a  satori (?) moment in the observation room on icarus II, animated with a public domain NASA video clip from the SOHO orbiting observatory.  click here to launch a new browser window:

http://www.spiraltime.com/sol/

i don’t claim to be a great animator (this is kind of rough) but hope you like it - i’ll tweak this fan ’afp’ a bit and create one or two more fan “artifacts” while biding my time for SUNSHINE to be released in the u.s.  i feel somewhat spoiled with the details online now, but those have also made the story more immersive - in that it’s still inferred and just taking place in my head - until i see it

enjoy the “afp” and let me know what you think!

AND….

if you are enjoying all things SUNSHINE please visit the SOHO gallery for some great celestial goodies -especially the movie clips of the sun:

http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/gallery/

for the UK fans - have a nice heliocentric weekend and go get some SUNSHINE for me!

lights out…

i went camping, worked at work, and also made a fun animated fan poster (AFP?) in Flash, which I’ll clean up and post here tomorrow…

if you are a major fan you may have been ’spoiled’ and not only know about the movie details, actors, etc.  but also the strong positive and negative opinions about it posted online… all i can say is that i do remember how ‘blade runner’ did well but not *spectactularly* at the box office many years ago.  while i’m not saying this movie couldn’t come out of nowhere to be a hit (e.g. crouching tiger).  and it may not be perfect… but i personally won’t mind putting my own anticipation to rest in film fan style when i finally do see this movie.

anyway, for this post i’m going to share info on two cool things ’sunshine’:

- sunshine opening>  in the UK now, elsewhere soon after - except for the US.  international release dates are posted on official and fan sites linked from this blog - please go see this movie if you like films by Danny Boyle and company, or if you like indie thrillers and scifi, of course…

- immersive diversions> the DNA Films and Searchlight online content team have posted a couple of new ’rooms’ in the virtual spaceship on the UK movie site(linked above):

- oxygen garden
- observation room

in the observation room, play the animation sequence ‘icarus build’ using the controller on the lounge seat - the music sounds like an underworld track (perhaps the short clip ‘mercury’ passing’ featured underworld in the background too, or john murphy created both from underworld sounds).  i love the animatics feel of this clip and that it’s included really to simply and quickly tell a future history story - how the bomb gets built.  it reminds me a lot of nasa videos used today to help the general public ‘envision’ a heroic and epic mission in a positive morale boosting way. 

good stuff!

elsewhere online, please check the variety of websites by dna films, searchlight and of course sunshine fans.  the fan site (link on right side of this page) has links to stories and also more media to download.  SUNSHINE gets more interesting every day…

my fan poster animation and release commentary tomorrow.  thanks for reading…

- spiraltime

well, it looks like those of us in the U.S will have lots of time before we see this… so for a quick update i thought i would drop some ’selecta’ science and share some songs i think of when i think of this movie… i’ll add more as they come to me this weekend (then on to other things SUNSHINE).

so here’s the start of my list of SUN SONGS:

1. sun king - the beatles (chill trippy harmonics and spanish nonsense, not heard often and not to be confused with ‘here comes the sun’ although that’s great too!).
2. higher than the sun - primal scream (remixes by andy weatherall [sabres of paradise] and alex patterson [the orb]).
3. supernova at the end of the universe - the orb (’supernova’ starts out with an appropriate space mission dialogue and sound effects then morphs through long distance explosions and l-r stereo phasing into a still fresh-n-crunchy  bassline… i used to mix two copies of this track back and forth… “transmitter injection burn”!).
4. irressistible force - the entire “it’s tomorrow already” album (if i were on a 3 year [or in a worst case scenario, 18 month or less) ride into the sun i would need this to listen to - very zen/organic/lush/hopeful with its alan watts/sun ra samples.and rounding out my top five…
5. everybody loves the sunshine - roy ayers (can you imagine an icarus flight team singalong of this as a cheer up attempt? ok, maybe its *too* happy for this movie but i love the visual)

that’s it for tonight, i have more on my mind but want to see what the peanut gallery provides… please drop your own recos here or in the sunshine fan forum… thanks for reading… goodnight!

————–

(saturday) i saw that the police have regrouped and on tour… and by some twist of fate i just heard a great remix of this song on six degrees radio:

1. when the world is running down you make the best of what’s still around - the police

————–
(sunday) yesterday i finally got around (over a year late) to buying ‘campfire headphase’ by Boards of Canda, another UK electronic group (very soundtrack-y thematic abstract glitch downtempo and …).  so while i was happily digesting this new set of tracks (note - must get on *vinyl*) one title jumped out enough to make me suspect SUNSHINE synchronicity at work:

1. satellite anthem icarus - boards of canada (a ?!? coincidence? # 3 track on the album, perfect mood music for the oxygen garden and observation deck imho.  i <3 this track - here BoC winds ocean sounds, layers of synth patterns around a structure of looped guitar tracks [MBV style guitar feedback is integral in many other tracks on "campfire headphase"])

if you’re not familiar with boards of canada, i recommend you try the albums ‘camphire headphase’, ‘music has the right to children’ and ‘geodaddi’, your music library will thank you.  BoC is (to me) plenty of entropy, chunky beats and exquisite layers of sound for your brain and heart.  my <3 for BoC runs very deep.

i think that’s a wrap for this weekend - i’m really looking forward to the SUNSHINE soundtrack after this music excursion - will i be one of those getting the soundtrack before the film hmmm?  tudo bem - a BoC themed bike ride to ocean beach (sf) is next on my sunday task list!

regards,

spiraltime

great article on the NY Times website (click via Digg) on this SUNSHINE-related topic:

http://digg.com/space/Dark_energy_an_invisible_undetectable_force

this is a very in depth article on dark energy and dark matter, which the SUNSHINE bomb is known to use… the article’s suggestion that we know a lot, but that we may be at the limit of what we know, is great. recommended reading!

Sunshine delayed…
http://www.darkhorizons.com/news07/070302j.php

i am confused… just when we’ve gotten 2.5 great trailers, new production stills and screening reports, an interactive ship tour, the date gets pushed back until… december? i am taking this with a hefty grain of salt for now.  if so perhaps i’ll have time to complete a special fan project before the opening. 

the thing is, i like this film very much, but just don’t want to know see it knowing *all* of it’s details and ruining some of the surprises and fun as a fan. make sense?  so maybe i’ll focus my time for this on that project - more to come on this blog soon.

by now anyone who’s seen the trailer will be associating the music in it with something they heard before…

the music is a remixed version of a track from the score of the Darren Oronofsky film, “Requiem for a Dream”.  it’s a brilliant piece of music and has a high degree of tension!  it also happened to have been re-used by the LOTR:TTT marketing team for *that* film’s trailer a few years ago.  something common in film marketing (reusing familiar scores, etc) but in this case it’s generated either really positive or really negative postings from fans.  i think that’s part of the buzz strategy and clever, and don’t care because the film music will be different anyway…

the actual film music should be coming from UK electronic band Underworld, in collaboration with film composer John Murphy.  Most people will know Underworld through their track “Born Slippy”, used at the end of another Boyle movie, “Trainspotting”.  John Murphy can be heard in the music of “Snatch”, “28 Days Later” and a lot of other films…

i went and looked up my Underworld CDs and one interesting thing I found was that not much electronic music works to build real emotional tension in the extreme way that the requiem for a dream track did.  so maybe they’re holding back with the actual film music to get it *just* right?  or it’s just another choice ’secret’.  one important thing to note about Underworld is that because they have actual voice in their music, it becomes a lot more empathetic/human than most electronic music.

so what will the actual music sound like?  IMHO its going to be a key part of the film, serving as a way to increase tension and pace (the film itself is not that long…) i think it will also reflect the ambient environment of the Icarus II (big, but also constricting, mazelike) and the fact that most of the time not much happens on the ship (probably that way up until the beginning of the story in the film). btw, previous ’epic journey’ space films, like kubrick’s 2001 and scott’s ‘alien’ both had breakthrough music and sound design.

for a clue to how the new music will sound, its good to listen to some of the lesser known artists the SUNSHINE website team has been working with so far.  one contributor, david dipre has a nice myspace page (with music) and his sound is indeed spacey (i mean ‘big’), slightly glitchy and bass sound… sorry i’m not describing this well - check his page at the link below.  my favorite track is ‘large’…

david dipre
http://www.myspace.com/daviddipre

Underworld on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underworld_%28band%29

John Murphy on IMDB
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0614373/

i listen to a lot of electronic music and have to admit i’m still wondering about SUNSHINE music.  i looked for the tensest (sp?) artists/tracks I could think of but no single track jumped out saying “pretend i’m the SUNSHINE trailer music”… if you listen to the trailer, what fan suggestions do you have for a different track?  please post here, i’m curious

these were some of the artists’ music i was looking through
- Underworld
- FSOL
- Ministry, RevCo
- MBM
- Orbital, Aphex Twin, Autechre
- Bjork (more on the atmospheric side)
- Scores for ‘Solaris’ and ‘Last Life in the Universe’ (wow, the last one fits SUNSHINE well!)

although it can be really tense, i didn’t initially listen to hi-speed stuff like Squarepusher (’Tomlib’ from Lost in Translation is heartbreaking though), hard techno… it could work too (but i don’t have time).

anyway, as a big music and film (and Boyle and Underworld) aficionado, i’ve had fun putting this all down.  thanks for reading!

so…. this fan blog is not affiliated in any way with the official movie site, the studio or other sites about the movie. all information i’m posting here is based on public knowledge and my commentary is based strictly on my own analyses and points of view. all images and content from the film shown here are the property of the filmmaker and studio.

so in the words of Ali G (no, not “West Side is da best”), at the pivotal moment in his film when he has to make a very, very difficult decision:

“KEEP IT REAL!”

hehe… thanks!